Acid2!
December 8th, 2006
This morning DBaron checked the reflow branch into the trunk. This is a pretty major step forward for the layout engine that will ship in Firefox3. In David’s words the goals of the reflow refactoring are:
* simplification of code
* fixing incremental reflow (”{inc}”) bugs
* fixing intrinsic sizing bugs
* allowing better integration of nsIBox and nsIFrame layout
* allowing easier implementation of new features like ‘inline-block’
This also means the current trunk passes Acid2:
This is the reference image:
And – here’s how Firefox2 fares:
Big congrats to David for all the hard work here – not to mention Bz for doing the reviews and a ton of other folks who helped test, review, setup tinderboxes, etc. In case you are wondering – he’s what marking a bug of this magnitude fixed looks like:
Welcome to Window Snyder!
September 6th, 2006
Window has joined MozCorp recently as our new “Chief Security Something” (that’s a working title 
). She’ll be the public voice of Mozilla Corporation on security issues and helping to drive our long-term security strategy.
As you can see from her background below at Microsoft, @stake, and Matansano, she is an amazing person and a great asset to Mozilla. We’ve been looking for someone with the right mix of technical ability, communication skills, and shared values with Mozilla for this role – and we are lucky to have Window on our side. She’s been an advocate for open and transparent security process – which is something we believe in deeply here at Mozilla. She’ll be working closely with everyone in the project, especially Dan, Chris, and Jesse, to continue to push our advantage on security and make sure we are doing the right thing for end users.
Welcome Window!
Window was most recently a principal, founder, and Chief Technology Officer at Matasano Security, a security services and product company based in New York City.
Prior to joining Matasano, Window was a senior security strategist at Microsoft in the Security Engineering and Communications organization. She managed the relationships between security consulting companies and the Microsoft product teams and the outreach strategy for security vendors and security researchers. Previously she was responsible for security sign-off for Windows XP SP2 and Windows Server 2003.
Prior to her time at Microsoft she was Director of Security Architecture at @stake and is co-author of Threat Modeling, a manual for understanding risk in applications.
New folks working with Mozilla!
August 23rd, 2006
TR Fullhart joined Monday as a full time member of the build team. TR has been doing build and release work for the last 5 years and sysadmin work for several years prior to that. He’s a top perl hacker and is fired up about being involved. We’re really excited to have his help supporting the build infrastructure for all the Mozilla projects. He’s around on IRC as trf. Welcome TR!
Matt Willis, whom you’ve definitely seen on irc as lilmatt, has been kicking butt on Calendar. He did the pinstripe theme, moved to toolkit based prefs, and done a lot of l10n and build work. We’ve brought him on under contract to make sure he has the time to continue to help out the Calendar team. Welcome Matt!
Lars Lohn, the author of sentry from bouncer and a hacker of mad proportions has also started working with us on contract to help out on addons.mozilla.org and other web tools projects. When he’s not hacking he’s playing the Oboe, riding his Harley, or working on his organic farm – hopefully not all at once. He’s around as Lars on irc. Welcome Lars!
Mozilla is a collection of people gathered together working towards a shared goal. It is really exciting to be able to pull talented folks from other domains into the Mozilla projects and make it possible for those already contributing to focus more time on the project.
Welcome to all!
Welcome to Brian Crowder!
August 18th, 2006
Brian started Monday at the Mozilla Corporation to help hack on Gecko. He’s first task will be to assist Brendan, Igor, and Blake with the JavaScript engine. Brian has used SpiderMonkey before during his work at Sony Online where we worked on everything from Untold Legends for PSP to EverQuest.
Brian’s got a history of working on large complex systems which will be invaluable as he digs into the guts of Gecko. Everyone has been really impressed with his technical depth and enthusiasm for the project.
You can find him on irc (crowder). Please swing by and say hello!
Asaf Romano now contributing full time!
August 10th, 2006
Mano, as he’s know on IRC, has been with the project for many years now – helping improve RTL issues, Mac support, and most the Firefox 2 tab overflow implementation. He’s starting today under contract with Mozilla Corporation to contribute to the project full time. Everyone who’s worked with Mano is super excited to have more of his time dedicated to the project. He’s going to jump right in and help us finish up FF2. Glad to have you here Mano!
Addons – now with more cowbell!
August 10th, 2006
If you’ve uses AddOns since Saturday afternoon, or just checked for extensions updates within any Mozilla app, you might have noticed that AddOns is much snappier. External monitoring indicates about a 4x speedup in page-load times.
Even more important this means we have much more capacity during release time to keep everything up and responsive. This is the CPU utilization of a system on the old cluster. Note on Thursday during the 1.5.0.6 release we hit near 100% CPU. The big drop on Saturday is when the switchover happened:
Here’s a server in the new cluster:
The speedup is a result of a new Caching and SSL/TCP accelerators sitting in front of the cluster.
Jeremy, Morgamic, and Matthew did the hard work to get the site up on the new cluster over the weekend. It leverages the sweat the Infra team has put in over the last 12 months to upgrade our core infrastructure. So there are lotsa folks to thank.
Why is this important? Extensions are one of the great things about Firefox. This makes it easier and more convenient for people to find and install extensions. It also means the browser experience is much improved whenever you check for extension updates. Like during a browser upgrade. It also means we can better keep pace with the rapidly growing user base and increased popularity of extensions.
The folks on the team are all too busy and bashful to brag about the kick-butt work they are doing – so I’m doing it for them .
Nice work!
Welcome to Justin Dolske!
August 9th, 2006
Justin starts today as an engineer working on Firefox. He has already come up to speed on parts of the codebase through his work on a few Firefox extensions and most recently by helping Myk with Microsummaries. In addition to the recent Firefox work, Justin brings with him a deep background in networking and security programming having worked for many years at Sun, F5, and UUNet. His deep background and passion for the project will enable him to contribute in many areas over the coming years. I’m really excited he could join us.
Please join me in welcoming Justin!
Welcome to Robert Sayre!
July 11th, 2006
Yesterday was Robert’s first day at the Mozilla Corporation. He has been contributing to Mozilla projects for some time now – many of you may already know Robert from his Feed handling contributions to both Thunderbird and Firefox. Most recently he implemented the core Feed Handling service behind the vastly improved feed support in Firefox 2.
We are very excited to have Robert as a full-time contributor – please join me in welcoming him!
False Alarm
June 30th, 2006
There were reports recently of a new security bug that affected both IE and Firefox involving the outerHTML property. Thanks to the hard work of Dan Veditz we’ve concluded (and Sans agrees) that this is not an issue in Firefox.
Uninstall Survey Data Viewer!
June 16th, 2006
Thanks to the hard work of Wil and the Ops Team there is now a viewer for the uninstall survey data. Have a look. Definitely lots of useful data in there.
For those curious the graphs are rendered via plotkit. The viewer app was our first use of CakePHP – which we’ll be using more of in future projects.
Nice work WIl!
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