Mark Finkle’s Weblog

Planning for the Toronto MozCamp continues. We decided to use the second day as a “Hands-on Workshop” day. The workshop will be split between development and testing tracks, choose the topic that interests you.

I’ll be working in the development workshop with other Mozilla developers, helping you work on tutorials or projects. We’ll have some tutorial XUL applications, extensions, and XPCOM components for people to hack on. Make sure you bring a laptop, if you want to work on the projects. If you want to build Firefox, XULRunner or binary XPCOM components - make sure your laptop is capable of building Mozilla. (check the prerequisites!)

The testing workshop will be covering topics on Mozilla testing processes, how we write unit tests, and how we automate testing of the Firefox UI (to name a few). Clint Talbert has more information on the testing workshop.

A bit of an event summary:

• It’s a 2-day event, September 15th and 16th at Seneca @ York
• It’s free to attend
• Session topics range from an overview of Mozilla technology to details on application, extension and web development - Day 1
• There will be hands-on workshops - Day 2
• Talk to other developers using Mozilla technology in their projects

Remember to sign up!

We are planning a developer event in Toronto for mid September. It will be a bit more formal than our previous Developer Days. It’s really more of a MozCamp than a Developer Day, but whatever. The plan is to create a schedule full of sessions covering Mozilla technology.

If you have never used Mozilla technology or just want to learn more about the different parts of the platform, this event is for you. Some of the things you can expect to be covered:

• What’s the overall structure of Mozilla’s platform?
• How can you build XUL-based applications or extensions?
• What’s the newest Web technologies appearing in Mozilla applications?
• How can you embed Gecko into a native application?
• Learn about how Mozilla handles localization, testing and cross platform issues (including mobile platforms)

Seneca College has graciously offered to host the event. We currently don’t have a fixed schedule. We could be making 2 session tracks. We might also be running the event for 2 days. If you’re interested in coming, sign up so we can get an idea of the turn out. Post suggestions for sessions as well. If you can’t make it to Toronto, where should we go next?

Fennec (Mobile Firefox) has reached milestone 6 (M6) last week and can be installed to a Nokia N8×0 for testing. Remember, we haven’t reach alpha yet, but we are getting close. M6 adds “tabs” to the browser UI, adds tel: and mailto: support and makes some much needed stability improvements.

We are adding more UI for M7 (August 19th) and are doing additional performance and stability work. Feel free to give Fennec M6 a try and please file bugs. Use bugzilla and the “Fennec” product category.

Install instructions
M6 Readme

We had a XULRunner Roadmap session at the Firefox Summit this year. Since the summit was limited to mainly Firefox community, I didn’t know how well a XULRunner session would be attended. However, the room was pretty full and we had a fair amount of XULRunner and Gecko embedding people in attendance.

I wanted to talk about what had been happening with XULRunner recently and what new things we could do in the short-term future (slides here). After a rocky start (XULRunner can be a touchy subject - let’s leave it at that), I think we ended up with some good action items:

• Look into creating a XULRunner incubator repository: Many patches related to XULRunner, and the platform in general, could be risky to other Mozilla products. Getting patches landed in a tree, unit tested and checked for performance regressions would be helpful in getting them landed on the real tree.
• Patch gardening: We have seen patches submitted by contributors not land quickly (for a variety of reasons) and then are forgotten when another opportunity opens. We need a way to find those patches without needing to clone Reed Loden.
• XULRunner security fix lifecycle: Firefox releases get security fixes until Mozilla decides to end-of-life a release. Some applications could stay on XULRunner longer than the corresponding Firefox release lifecycle, exposing the applications to security holes. Obviously, the quick answer here is for XULRunner applications to keep current.
• XULRunner localization: More specifically, language packs for the platform that could be shipped with XULRunner releases. This is an issue for Fennec too, so we might be able to get some good traction.
• Improved documentation: Some form of printed (or PDF) documentation and a complete doxygen-like reference list.
• Improved tool support: Some form of integration with existing IDEs to support Mozilla projects. Yes, Komodo has good support for this, but not everyone uses Komodo. Also, a simple command line scaffold generator, like that found in Rails, would be helpful for beginners.

There is already work underway in a few of these areas. If you want to find out more and start contributing, let me know. If you have more ideas, leave a comment. I’m looking for small, focused achievable ideas. I don’t want to boil the ocean.

The newest official XULRunner has been released. XULRunner 1.9.0.1 matches the Firefox 3.0.1 release.

Runtimes
SDKs
Source tarball

I’m hoping that we can add Maemo and Windows Mobile builds to our collection soon.

What a summit! Danger, drama and lots of Mozillians. The summit was really a full blown conference. I heard there were around 400 attendees. There were 3 days packed with sessions and breakouts. I had a blast talking to people I usually only ever interact with on IRC.

Surprisingly, I somehow ended up with a sizable to-do list as well:

• Work with MozDev group on FizzyPop
• Talk to a few people about an upcoming DevDay in Toronto
• Work with AMO on an a11y tool for AMO editors
• Talk to jresig about a possible jQuery for XUL idea
• Look into an incubator Hg repository for XULRunner
• More Prism work related to Maemo and Fennec

I’m sure I forgot an item or two. I barely had time to sit down and write notes. There was literally always something I could have been doing. Either a session I wanted to see or some brainstorming that could be done.

One of the things that impressed me was the fact that the bears, rock slide and power outage didn’t effect vibe. People took the problems in stride and went on with the business of the summit. The long bus ride and crazy flights didn’t dampen anyone spirits either. Everyone seemed upbeat.

Big thanks to Dan Portillo and crew for making the summit possible and for keeping it moving in the face of some pretty big obstacles.

I’d love for Mozilla to stage an event for the entire platform in the future. If the Firefox summit is any indication, a platform event would have massive attendance. That said, the Firefox summit has it’s place and wouldn’t be replaced by a platform event.

Firefox 3 had some big changes (and little changes) that caused some grief for extension developers wanting to update add-ons to the newest version. There were some deep architectural changes (Places bookmarking API), numerous security changes (same-origin on file:// and restricting chrome:// from content), and large UI/Theme changes (URLbar, XP/Vista/Linux/Mac themes). Needless to say, getting lots of new greatness in Firefox 3 (XULRunner 1.9) came at a high maintenance/refactor cost to extension developers.

The good news is you made it! Overall, I think Mozilla did a good job keeping developers updated on changes and, along with a great developer community, provided lots of help to developers who were having trouble updating extensions.

So, you might have heard that Firefox 3.1 is coming out soon, probably before the end of the year. Firefox 3.1 alphas could start showing up in less than 2 months. If you have been reading some other posts on Planet Mozilla or watching some of the checkins landing in the source tree, you might be aware that Firefox 3.1 will add some serious, ass-kicking features. Many of these features are web-content facing and are based on web specifications.

Will all of these serious, ass-kicking features mean that updating extensions will be a major pain-in-the-ass, again?! No! There appear to be no plans to make extensions developer lives miserable. The new features (did I mention they kick-ass?) are not being added in a disruptive manner. Most of them layer onto existing features and technologies.

Just to be clear: Firefox 3.1 will not require a major update for add-ons. In fact, I’d go out on a limb and say updating to Firefox 3.1 will be easy. We’ll make sure the are no surprises along the way.

Searching

Adobe has been creating a buzz lately with the announcement that Google and Yahoo will be using a specialized Flash player to allow indexing Flash content. This is appears to be big news for the Flash world, even though Google was scraping text content previously (and this still only applies to text content). Now, search engines (or at least Google and Yahoo) will have more context for the text.

I am left wondering if other search engine providers will get access to the proprietary, search-enabled Adobe Flash player? Also, even though some have stated that this new search capability puts Flash on the same level as HTML, I wonder how linkable the Flash search hits will be? Yes, I am referring to the Flash “Bookmark Problem”. Just because Google gives me a link to some text it found in a Flash application, can I jump directly to it? Without doing any special coding?

Distributing

While I am poking Adobe, I noticed that the new Adobe Reader 9 release will include Adobe AIR. Hmm, does Reader use AIR? or is this yet another attempt by a software vendor to stuff unwanted, unneeded software on my machine? Oh, I see. AIR is needed to run an AIR application to allow me to use the Acrobat.com website. I’m still calling shenanigans.

So, 33.5MB download (just download) for Reader 9. Goes up to 52.4MB if you choose to download the “eBay desktop” application too, and it’s checked by default. How about letting me skip the AIR download too? Didn’t we just go through this with Apple?

Fennec 0.4, the M4 milestone, wrapped up last week. There are install packages for those who want to see it running on their Nokia n800/n810 devices. We have some installation instructions and release notes.

Those of you who saw Aza’s UI demo / video and are eager to see that UI in action will have to wait. Milestone 4 doesn’t make any significant UI updates. We have been focusing on some of the underlying, platform work. The UI changes will come in future releases to be sure. Some new UI mockups are available.

Check out the Fennec requirements document for the breakdown of future work. Also, if you want to stay current on happenings with Fennec and Mozilla Mobile in general, sign up for the about:mobile newsletter!

Using eval() to decode JavaScript you downloaded from a remote website in your extension is just plain wrong. It’s not safe! Don’t do it!

Every now and then, an AMO reviewer will send me an email asking me to help an extension developer workaround the situation. Why? Because AMO will not allow add-ons that eva() JavaScript downloaded from a remote website to be moved out of the AMO sandbox. It’s not safe! Using eval() in an extension can give rogue JavaScript chrome privileges - the ability to do pretty much whatever it wants to the computer.

I finally made an MDC article with more details. The short version is:

• If you’re downloading JSON, use a real JSON decoder, not eval().
• If you’re downloading real JavaScript, use a JavaScript sandbox, not eval().