Mozilla – Page 2 – stark raving finkle

July 1, 2015January 26, 2020

Random Thoughts on Engineering Management

I have ended up managing people at the last three places I’ve worked, over the last 18 years. I can honestly say that only in the last few years have I really started to embrace the job of managing. Here’s a collection of thoughts and observations:

Growth: Ideas and Opinions and Failures

Expose your team to new ideas and help them create their own voice. When people get bored or feel they aren’t growing, they’ll look elsewhere. Give people time to explore new concepts, while trying to keep results and outcomes relevant to the project.

Opinions are not bad. A team without opinions is bad. Encourage people to develop opinions about everything. Encourage them to evolve their opinions as they gain new experiences.

“Good judgement comes from experience, and experience comes from bad judgement” – Frederick P. Brooks

Create an environment where differing viewpoints are welcomed, so people can learn multiple ways to approach a problem.

Failures are not bad. Failing means trying, and you want people who try to accomplish work that might be a little beyond their current reach. It’s how they grow. Your job is keeping the failures small, so they can learn from the failure, but not jeopardize the project.

Creating Paths: Technical versus Management

It’s important to have an opinion about the ways a management track is different than a technical track. Create a path for managers. Create a different path for technical leaders.

Management tracks have highly visible promotion paths. Organization structure changes, company-wide emails, and being included in more meetings and decision making. Technical track promotions are harder to notice if you don’t also increase the person’s responsibilities and decision making role.

Moving up either track means more responsibility and more accountability. Find ways to delegate decision making to leaders on the team. Make those leaders accountable for outcomes.

Train your engineers to be successful managers. There is a tradition in software development to use the most senior engineer to fill openings in management. This is wrong. Look for people that have a proclivity for working with people. Give those people management-like challenges and opportunities. Once they (and you) are confident in taking on management, promote them.

Snowflakes: Each Engineer is Different

Engineers, even great ones, have strengthens and weaknesses. As a manager, you need to learn these for each person on your team. People can be very strong at starting new projects, building something from nothing. Others can be great at finishing, making sure the work is ready to release. Some excel at user-facing code, others love writing back-end services. Leverage your team’s strengthens to efficiently ship products.

“A 1:1 is your chance to perform weekly preventive maintenance while also understanding the health of your team” – Michael Lopp (rands)

The better you know your team, the less likely you will create bored, passionless drones. Don’t treat engineers as fungible, swapable resources. Set them, and the team, up for success. Keep people engaged and passionate about the work.

Further Reading

The Role of a Senior Developer
On Being A Senior Engineer
Want to Know Difference Between a CTO and a VP of Engineering?
Thoughts on the Technical Track
The Update, The Vent, and The Disaster
Bored People Quit
Strong Opinions, Weakly Held

January 16, 2015

Firefox for Android: What’s New in v35

The latest release of Firefox for Android is filled with new features, designed to work with the way you use your mobile device.

Search

Search is the most common reason people use a browser on mobile devices. To help make it easier to search using Firefox, we created the standalone Search application. We have put the features of Firefox’s search system into an activity that can more easily be accessed. You no longer need to launch the full browser to start a search.

When you want to start a search, use the new Firefox Widget from the Android home screen, or use the “swipe up” gesture on the Android home button, which is available on devices with software home buttons.

Once started, just start typing your search. You’ll see your search history, and get search suggestions as you type.

The search results are displayed in the same activity, but tapping on any of the results will load the page in Firefox.

Your search history is shared between the Search and Firefox applications. You have access to the same search engines as in Firefox itself. Switching search engines is easy.

Sharing

Another cool feature is the Sharing overlay. This feature grew out of the desire to make Firefox work with the way you use mobile devices. Instead of forcing you to switch away from applications when sharing, Firefox gives you a simple overlay with some sharing actions, without leaving the current application.

You can add the link to your bookmarks or reading list. You can also send the link to a different device, via Firefox Sync. Once the action is complete, you’re back in the application. If you want to open the link, you can tap the Firefox logo to open the link in Firefox itself.

Synced Tabs

Firefox Sync makes it easy to access your Firefox data across your different devices, including getting to the browser tabs you have open elsewhere. We have a new Synced Tabs panel available in the Home page that lets you easily access open tabs on other devices, making it simple to pick up where you left off.

Long-tap an item to easily add a bookmark or share to another application. You can expand/collapse the device lists to manage the view. You can even long-tap a device and hide it so you won’t see it again!

Improved Error Pages

No one is happy when an error page appears, but in the latest version of Firefox the error pages try to be a bit more helpful. The page will look for WiFi problems and also allow you to quickly search for a problematic address.

July 24, 2014October 3, 2015

Firefox for Android: Collecting and Using Telemetry

Firefox 31 for Android is the first release where we collect telemetry data on user interactions. We created a simple “event” and “session” system, built on top of the current telemetry system that has been shipping in Firefox for many releases. The existing telemetry system is focused more on the platform features and tracking how various components are behaving in the wild. The new system is really focused on how people are interacting with the application itself.

Collecting Data

The basic system consists of two types of telemetry probes:

Events: A telemetry probe triggered when the users takes an action. Examples include tapping a menu, loading a URL, sharing content or saving content for later. An Event is also tagged with a Method (how was the Event triggered) and an optional Extra tag (extra context for the Event).
Sessions: A telemetry probe triggered when the application starts a short-lived scope or situation. Examples include showing a Home panel, opening the awesomebar or starting a reading viewer. Each Event is stamped with zero or more Sessions that were active when the Event was triggered.

We add the probes into any part of the application that we want to study, which is most of the application.

Visualizing Data

The raw telemetry data is processed into summaries, one for Events and one for Sessions. In order to visualize the telemetry data, we created a simple dashboard (source code). It’s built using a great little library called PivotTable.js, which makes it easy to slice and dice the summary data. The dashboard has several predefined tables so you can start digging into various aspects of the data quickly. You can drag and drop the fields into the column or row headers to reorganize the table. You can also add filters to any of the fields, even those not used in the row/column headers. It’s a pretty slick library.

Acting on Data

Now that we are collecting and studying the data, the goal is to find patterns that are unexpected or might warrant a closer inspection. Here are a few of the discoveries:

Page Reload: Even in our Nightly channel, people seem to be reloading the page quite a bit. Way more than we expected. It’s one of the Top 2 actions. Our current thinking includes several possibilities:

Page gets stuck during a load and a Reload gets it going again
Networking error of some kind, with a “Try again” button on the page. If the button does not solve the problem, a Reload might be attempted.
Weather or some other update-able page where a Reload show the current information.

We have started projects to explore the first two issues. The third issue might be fine as-is, or maybe we could add a feature to make updating pages easier? You can still see high uses of Reload (reload) on the dashboard.

Remove from Home Pages: The History, primarily, and Top Sites pages see high uses of Remove (home_remove) to delete browsing information from the Home pages. People do this a lot, again it’s one of the Top 2 actions. People will do this repeatably, over and over as well, clearing the entire list in a manual fashion. Firefox has a Clear History feature, but it must not be very discoverable. We also see people asking for easier ways of clearing history in our feedback too, but it wasn’t until we saw the telemetry data for us to understand how badly this was needed. This led us to add some features:

Since the History page was the predominant source of the Removes, we added a Clear History button right on the page itself.
We added a way to Clear History when quitting the application. This was a bit tricky since Android doesn’t really promote “Quitting” applications, but if a person wants to enable this feature, we add a Quit menu item to make the action explicit and in their control.
With so many people wanting to clear their browsing history, we assumed they didn’t know that Private Browsing existed. No history is saved when using Private Browsing, so we’re adding some contextual hinting about the feature.

These features are included in Nightly and Aurora versions of Firefox. Telemetry is showing a marked decrease in Remove usage, which is great. We hope to see the trend continue into Beta next week.

External URLs: People open a lot of URLs from external applications, like Twitter, into Firefox. This wasn’t totally unexpected, it’s a common pattern on Android, but the degree to which it happened versus opening the browser directly was somewhat unexpected. Close to 50% of the URLs loaded into Firefox are from external applications. Less so in Nightly, Aurora and Beta, but even those channels are almost 30%. We have started looking into ideas for making the process of opening URLs into Firefox a better experience.

Saving Images: An unexpected discovery was how often people save images from web content (web_save_image). We haven’t spent much time considering this one. We think we are doing the “right thing” with the images as far as Android conventions are concerned, but there might be new features waiting to be implemented here as well.

Take a look at the data. What patterns do you see?

Here is the obligatory UI heatmap, also available from the dashboard:

June 6, 2014

Firefox for Android: Casting videos and Roku support – Ready to test in Nightly

Firefox for Android Nightly builds now support casting HTML5 videos from a web page to a TV via a connected Roku streaming player. Using the system is simple, but it does require you to install a viewer application on your Roku device. Firefox support for the Roku viewer and the viewer itself are both currently pre-release. We’re excited to invite our Nightly channel users to help us test these new features, share feedback and file any bugs so we can continue to make improvements to performance and functionality.

Setup

To begin testing, first you’ll need to install the viewer application to your Roku. The viewer app, called Firefox for Roku Nightly, is currently a private channel. You can install it via this link: Firefox Nightly

Once installed, try loading this test page into your Firefox for Android Nightly browser: Casting Test

When Firefox has discovered your Roku, you should see the Media Control Bar with Cast and Play icons:

The Cast icon on the left of the video controls allows you to send the video to a device. You can also long-tap on the video to get the context menu, and cast from there too.

Hint: Make sure Firefox and the Roku are on the same Wifi network!

Once you have sent a video to a device, Firefox will display the Media Control Bar in the bottom of the application. This allows you to pause, play and close the video. You don’t need to stay on the original web page either. The Media Control Bar will stay visible as long as the video is playing, even as you change tabs or visit new web pages.

You’ll notice that Firefox displays an “active casting” indicator in the URL Bar when a video on the current web page is being cast to a device.

Limitations and Troubleshooting

Firefox currently limits casting HTML5 video in H264 format. This is one of the formats most easily handled by Roku streaming players. We are working on other formats too.

Some web sites hide or customize the HTML5 video controls and some override the long-tap menu too. This can make starting to cast difficult, but the simple fallback is to start playing the video in the web page. If the video is H264 and Firefox can find your Roku, a “ready to cast” indicator will appear in the URL Bar. Just tap on that to start casting the video to your Roku.

If Firefox does not display the casting icons, it might be having a problem discovering your Roku on the network. Make sure your Android device and the Roku are on the same Wifi network. You can load about:devices into Firefox to see what devices Firefox has discovered.

This is a pre-release of video casting support. We need your help to test the system. Please remember to share your feedback and file any bugs. Happy testing!

May 30, 2014

Firefox for Android: Your Feedback Matters!

Millions of people use Firefox for Android every day. It’s amazing to work on a product used by so many people. Unsurprisingly, some of those people send us feedback. We even have a simple system built into the application to make it easy to do. We have various systems to scan the feedback and look for trends. Sometimes, we even manually dig through the feedback for a given day. It takes time. There is a lot.

Your feedback is important and I thought I’d point out a few recent features and fixes that were directly influenced from feedback:

Help Menu
Some people have a hard time discovering features or were not aware Firefox supported some of the features they wanted. To make it easier to learn more about Firefox, we added a simple Help menu which directs you to SUMO, our online support system.

Managing Home Panels
Not everyone loves the Firefox Homepage (I do!), or more specifically, they don’t like some of the panels. We added a simple way for people to control the panels shown in Firefox’s Homepage. You can change the default panel. You can even hide all the panels. Use Settings > Customize > Home to get there.

Improve Top Sites
The Top Sites panel in the Homepage is used by many people. At the same time, other people find that the thumbnails can reveal a bit too much of their browsing to others. We recently added support for respecting sites that might not want to be snapshot into thumbnails. In those cases, the thumbnail is replaced with a favicon and a favicon-influenced background color. The Facebook and Twitter thumbnails show the effect below:

We also added the ability to remove thumbnails using the long-tap menu.

Manage Search Engines
People also like to be able to manage their search engines. They like to switch the default. They like to hide some of the built-in engines. They like to add new engines. We have a simple system for managing search engines. Use Settings > Customize > Search to get there.

Clear History
We have a lot of feedback from people who want to clear their browsing history quickly and easily. We are not sure if the Settings > Privacy > Clear private data method is too hard to find or too time consuming to use, but it’s apparent people need other methods. We added a quick access method at the bottom of the History panel in the Homepage.

We are also working on a Clear data on exit approach too.

Quickly Switch to a Newly Opened Tab
When you long-tap on a link in a webpage, you get a menu that allows you to Open in New Tab or Open in New Private Tab. Both of those open the new tab in the background. Feedback indicates the some people really want to switch to the new tab. We already show an Android toast to let you know the tab was opened. Now we add a button to the toast allowing you to quickly switch to the tab too.

Undo Closing a Tab
Closing tabs can be awkward for people. Sometimes the [x] is too easy to hit by mistake or swiping to close is unexpected. In any case, we added the ability to undo closing a tab. Again, we use a button toast.

Offer to Setup Sync from Tabs Tray
We feel that syncing your desktop and mobile browsing data makes browsing on mobile devices much easier. Figuring out how to setup the Sync feature in Firefox might not be obvious. We added a simple banner to the Homepage to let you know the feature exists. We also added a setup entry point in the Sync area of the Tabs Tray.

We’ll continue to make changes based on your feedback, so keep sending it to us. Thanks for using Firefox for Android!

January 20, 2014January 20, 2014

Firefox for Android: Page Load Performance

One of the common types of feedback we get about Firefox for Android is that it’s slow. Other browsers get the same feedback and it’s an ongoing struggle. I mean, is anything ever really fast enough?

We tend to separate performance into three categories: Startup, Page Load and UX Responsiveness. Lately, we have been focusing on the Page Load performance. We separate further into Objective (real timing) and Subjective (perceived timing). If something “feels” slow it can be just as bad as something that is measurably slow. We have a few testing frameworks that help us track objective and subjective performance. We also use Java, JavaScript and C++ profiling to look for slow code.

To start, we have been focusing on anything that is not directly part of the Gecko networking stack. This means we are looking at all the code that executes while Gecko is loading a page. In general, we want to reduce this code as much as possible. Some of the things we turned up include:

Writing extra and/or redundant page information to the history database
Saving session restore information too frequently
Looking up Android system proxy information was slow
Drawing unused view backgrounds
Animating the pageload spinner consumed a lot of CPU cycles
Extra messaging between the Java UI and Gecko
Opportunities for predictive networking hints

Some of these were small improvements, while others, like the proxy lookups, were significant for “desktop” pages. I’d like to expand on two of the improvements:

Predictive Networking Hints
Gecko networking has a feature called Speculative Connections, where it’s possible for the networking system to start opening TCP connections and even begin the SSL handshake, when needed. We use this feature when we have a pretty good idea that a connection might be opened. We now use the feature in three cases:

When a touch occurs on a link in web content, we speculatively connect to the HREF. Technically, we need to wait before really opening the link to make sure you didn’t really start panning the page or start a double-tap.
When starting to type a URL in the titlebar, we load the current set of search engines. We speculative connect to the default search engine, since it’s somewhat probable that you will perform a search.
When typing into the titlebar, Firefox tries to use domain autocompletion and searches your history for recent URLs. Both the current auto-completed URL and the top-most search result are speculatively connected.

Animating the Page Load Spinner
Firefox for Android has used the animated spinner as a page load indicator for a long time. We use the Android animation framework to “spin” an image. Keeping the spinner moving smoothly is pretty important for perceived performance. A stuck spinner doesn’t look good. Profiling showed a lot of time was being taken to keep the animation moving, so we did a test and removed it. Our performance testing frameworks showed a variety of improvements in both objective and perceived tests.

We decided to move to a progressbar, but not a real progressbar widget. We wanted to control the rendering. We did not want the same animation rendering issues to happen again. We also use only a handful of “trigger” points, since listening to true network progress is also time consuming. The result is an objective page load improvement the ranges from ~5% on multi-core, faster devices to ~20% on single-core, slower devices.

The progressbar is currently allowed to “stall” during a page load, which can be disconcerting to some people. We will experiment with ways to improve this too.

Install Firefox for Android Nightly and let us know what you think of the page load improvements.

October 17, 2013

GeckoView: Embedding Gecko in your Android Application

Firefox for Android is a great browser, bringing a modern HTML rendering engine to Android 2.2 and newer. One of the things we have been hoping to do for a long time now is make it possible for other Android applications to embed the Gecko rendering engine. Over the last few months we started a side project to make this possible. We call it GeckoView.

As mentioned in the project page, we don’t intend GeckoView to be a drop-in replacement for WebView. Internally, Gecko is very different from Webkit and trying to expose the same features using the same APIs just wouldn’t be scalable or maintainable. That said, we want it to feel Android-ish and you should be comfortable with using it in your applications.

We have started to build GeckoView as part of our nightly Firefox for Android builds. You can find the library ZIPs in our latest nightly FTP folder. We are in the process of improving the APIs used to embed GeckoView. The current API is very basic. Most of that work is happening in these bugs:

Bug 880119: Improve the API for GeckoView
Bug 880121: Add support for host application interfaces to GeckoView
Bug 880123: Add support for content callback interfaces to GeckoView

If you want to start playing around with GeckoView, you can try the demo application I have on Github. It links to some pre-built GeckoView libraries.

We’d love your feedback! We use the Firefox for Android mailing list to discuss status, issues and feedback.

Note: We’re having some Tech Talks at Mozilla’s London office on Monday (Oct 21). One of the topics is GeckoView. If you’re around or in town for Droidcon, please stop by.

September 26, 2013

We <3 Interns!

If Mozilla had secret weapons, I think our Interns would be included on the list. These hard working troops descend upon us during their school breaks and end up working on some of the hardest problems Mozilla has to offer. Our primary Intern “season” is wrapping up and I wanted to touch upon some of the work completed or in-progress.

Firefox for Android

Shilpan Bhagat: Shilpan ramped up quickly on Android UI work, tackling some of the tablet work for the new Home page in Firefox for Android, as well as, investigating and implementing some performance improvements. He also created a way to inject “pageactions” into the URLBar and an add-on API to go along with it. Shilpan then took pageactions and added unobtrusive support in Firefox for launching native Android apps registered to handle given page URIs. [presentation]
Shane Tully: Shane did some hard work getting the new Contacts API for webapps implemented on Android. In the process, he got to spend some time working through issues that come up with new API specs. He also picked up the work to get a GeckoView widget building and packaged, so Android applications can bundle the Gecko rendering engine instead of the system WebView. Shane really pushed the GeckoView project past a hurdle that now means we can start adding new features to the widget. [presentation]
Chris Kitching: Chris did the foundation work for supporting the new ActionBar when selecting text. He converted the Search Engine UI from XHTML to native Android. He also picked up work to enable ProGuard in Firefox for Android. This could yield >10% performance improvement in some areas. He had to write an automatic code generator that annotated parts of the code, allowing ProGuard to do its job. He stumbled into a problem with the Favicon system, which turned into a large rewrite – with significant improvements to behavior, performance and appearance. He persuaded me to install IntelliJ. [presentation]

Firefox for Metro

Jonathan Wilde: Jonathan was the front-end team on Firefox for Metro last year, writing the first UI nearly entirely by himself. He returned this year to continue working on the new browser, including work on the Findbar, combined Appbar and autocomplete UI and the hairy UI interactions that accompanied those features. He probably has more lines of code in the UI attributed to him than any other team member. He also worked with the UX team to prototype some cool ideas around new ways to save sites that preserve the user’s context with them, including Highlighting and Clipping. [presentation]

One of the things I like about the way Mozilla utilizes interns is that it shows them exactly what happens in real software development. They learn that code reviews can take a lot of time. Your feature might not make the desired release, or even get backed out at the last minute. They learn that large software projects are painful and carry a lot of legacy baggage, and you need to deal with it. I think it’s also a great way to learn how to communicate in a team environment. They also get to ship features in Firefox, and who doesn’t love shipping stuff?

Interns of 2013, we salute you!

September 25, 2013

Firefox for Android: Team Meetup, Brainstorming and Hacking

Last week, the Firefox for Android team, and some friends, had a team meetup at the Mozilla Toronto office. As is typical for Mozilla, the team is quite distributed so getting together, face to face, is refreshing. The agenda for the week was fairly simple: Brainstorm new feature ideas, discuss ways to make our workflow better, and provide some time for fun hacking.

We spent most of our time brainstorming, first at a high level, then we picked a few ideas/concepts to drill into. The high level list ended up with over 150 ideas. These ranged from blue-sky features, building on existing features, performance and UX improvements, and removing technical debt. Some of the areas where we had deeper discussions included:

Sharing: We talked about ways to improve the current Quick Share system by making it more context-aware, adding support for default providers and supporting Quick Share from more than the main menu. We also discussed adding support for more explicit sharing with integrated services. This would allow more control than Android’s Intent system supports by itself.
Cloud Services: We found that there are plenty of ways we can integrate with cloud services. Whether it’s a way to backup parts of your profile, pull external search results into the Awesomescreen, or use other services as a source for the Reading List. Lots of project ideas were created from this concept.
Focused UX: There were a lot of discussions around how specific types of users could benefit from new features. We ended up grouping some of these together around commonalities, which include: Privacy oriented features, parental control and child web-safety features, and hardening the application by reducing ways to corrupt the state and providing ways to rollback to a good state. While these ideas might fall into common groups, we decided that many of the details would benefit all users.

We also took some time to examine our workflow. We found some rough edges we intend to smooth out. We also ended up with a better understanding of our current, somewhat organic, workflow. Look for more write-ups from the team on this as we pull the information together. One technical outcome of the the discussions was a critical examination of our automated testing situation. We decided that we depend entirely too much on Robotium for testing our Java UI and non-UI code. Plans are underway to add some JUnit test support for the non-UI code.

The Android team is very committed to working with contributors and have been doing a great job attracting and mentoring code contributors. Last week they started discussing how to attract other types of contributors, focusing on bug triage as the next possible area. Desktop Firefox has had some great bug triage support from the community, so it seems like a natural candidate. Look for more information about that effort coming soon.

There was also some time for hacking on code. Some of the hacking was pure fun stuff. I saw a twitterbot and an IRCbot created. There was also a lot of discussion and hacking on add-on APIs that provide more integration hooks for add-on developers into the Java UI. Of course there is usually a fire that needs to be put out, and we had one this time as well. The front-end team quickly pulled together to implement a late-breaking design change to the new Home page. It’s been baking on Nightly for a few days now and will start getting uplifted to Aurora by the end of the week.

All in all, it was a great week. I’m looking forward to seeing what happens next!

July 27, 2013January 26, 2020

Patterns of Effective Teams

I have been lucky to build software products for a few different companies, each with a distinct culture. It’s help me form opinions about people, tools and processes that make teams effective at shipping software products.

Who makes up a software product team? Mileage may vary, but I like to include:

Developers
Testers
UX Designers
Project Managers
Product Managers
Support

Lots of companies organize people into functional groups: All the developers in a group, all the testers in a group, all the designers in a group… and so on. This doesn’t make it easy to ship software. It can create walls and make it harder to communicate. You also lose the “team” feeling, as well as the focus and drive that comes from that.

Product-centric teams seem to be more effective at shipping. These multidisciplinary teams embed members from the various groups on the team, all working together to create and ship a software product.

Over the years, I’ve seen productive teams using a few basic concepts. Some are process related, some can be aided by tools, but most deal with relationships between people:

Trust each other: Each member has a role, and members need to trust in each other’s ability to perform.
Talk to each other: Lots of open communication is important. The team is a safe place, so there are no stupid questions. Meet as a group often to discuss progress.
Support each other: You win and lose together. Help others, even if not asked directly.
Be passionate: The team needs to be passionate about succeeding and hungry to ship a great product. There will be rough spots on the way. There always are, but the team needs that passion to be able to power through.
Move as a single, focused group: Speed is important. Decisions, implementation, feedback – all need to happen ASAP. Distractions kill speed.
Plan work as a group and document the plan: If everyone is part of the planning, everyone is committed to the plan. Keeps the team focused.
Create a roadmap: You need a Big Picture too. What’s the vision and strategy? It helps set the tone for everything else.
Break work into small tasks and track the tasks: Small tasks are manageable and trackable. Small tasks are easy to scope and keeps the team focused. Watch out for scope creep.
Create milestones and track progress: Deadlines are a good thing, even if just internal. Forward progress is essential for shipping and milestones are great for tracking progress.
Adjust as needed: Don’t be afraid to adjust anything: schedule, milestones, tasks. You are collecting data every day. Use it to make informed decisions ASAP. Triage your work often.

I like to keep things lightweight. This includes tools and processes. Focus more on your product and the work at hand. Processes and tools can be distractions. The best ones are those that stay out of your way.

Update: Taras reminded me indirectly about the importance of passion, so I added it to the list.