jeudi 2 décembre 2010

Mozilla and Fosdem 2011

Par Tristan, jeudi 2 décembre 2010. en

The holiday season is upon us, which means that the Mozilla team is hard at work preparing our participation to FOSDEM! For those who live on a different planet (or just a continent other than Europe), FOSDEM is the Free and Open Source Software Developers' European Meeting. The event is as nice as it's a mouthful, and Mozilla has been participating to it since almost forever. I think my first FOSDEM was in 2002, but other European Mozillians were there the year before, while it was called OSDEM. Mozilla started having a developer room officially in 2003.

FOSDEM sign, hooked with duct tape!

FOSDEM entrance

So Mozilla will be at FOSDEM once again, for its 2011 edition, but in a slightly different format. Both FOSDEM and Mozilla have grown very significantly over the years, and we have increasingly been facing the following issues:

  1. It's becoming harder to accommodate the needs of the Mozillians with the resources of the FOSDEM team. We've been struggling with the size of the room, despite the huge efforts by the FOSDEM organizers to help.
  2. To be more productive, we need several rooms, but we don't want to steal them from other FLOSS projects
  3. Participating Mozillians have been facing a dilemma: either participating to the Mozilla dev room or attending the sessions led by other projects.
  4. Since the schedule is pretty packed, it's hard to make it appealing to contributors from other projects.

In order to solve these issues, we have decided to change the way Mozilla participates to FOSDEM. We'll still have a dev room, but the goal is to use it as an opportunity to engage with participants to the other FLOSS projects, while using the future Mozilla Camps Europe (like Barcelona and Prague?) and other local community events for the Mozilla communities to gather.

To this end, we are going to invest more in upcoming Mozilla contributor events and less in FOSDEM. We will only sponsor Mozillians giving talks at FOSDEM this year, as opposed to sponsoring all Mozillians like in previous years. This will enable us to focus our energy and financial resources on improving future Mozilla contributor events and ensuring that more of our contributors can participate in more events.

Those who want to give a talk in the Dev Room this year should get in touch with Brian King like every year before Friday, 15th January 2011 at: brian at mozdev dot org.

Should you have questions, please connect with William (william at mozilla dot com) - who has just posted on his blog too - or myself!

jeudi 4 novembre 2010

At the Drumbeat Festival in Barcelona

Par Tristan, jeudi 4 novembre 2010. en

Drumbeat Festival stickers]

Drumbeat stickers

This week, the Mozilla Drumbeat project is having its first international event in Barcelona: the Drumbeat Festival. Hackers[1], Wikipedians, Digital Librarians, teachers, and all sorts of people are gathering to discuss how to make the Web a more open and participatory place, as well as leveraging the Open Web, mass collaboration and open content to reinvent things like education.

Sveinn flexing his muscles!

Kaizendo.org volunteer during the science fair, demonstrating how to build customizable textbooks

A few links if you want to follow this amazing Drumbeat Festival:

Notes

[1] People who like to play with technology, not to be confused with "crackers" or "computer pirates".

un commentaire

mardi 28 septembre 2010

Welcome to Document Foundation and LibreOffice

Par Tristan, mardi 28 septembre 2010. en

So, it's now official: important and well-regarded members of the OpenOffice.org community are forking the project and have launched LibreOffice, under umbrella of the Document Foundation:

Our mission is to facilitate the evolution of the OpenOffice.org Community into a new open, independent, and meritocratic organizational structure within the next few months. An independent Foundation is a better match to the values of our contributors, users, and supporters, and will enable a more effective, efficient, transparent, and inclusive Community.

It is not a secret for anyone who has been watching the OpenOffice.org project for the past decade: its dependency on single commercial organization has slowed down the project and has been detrimental to the motivation of an otherwise very active and dedicated community. It's a pleasure to see the beginning of a new chapter for what is now LibreOffice.

This does not mean that Oracle (who took over Sun Microsystems) is not welcome anymore. As stated by the press release:

Oracle Corporation, owner of the OpenOffice.org trademark, is invited to become a member of the foundation and contribute to the development of the code.

I wish the best of luck to this new effort and wanted to congratulate the community members who have the courage to take the bull by the horns in order to lead the project towards a better future.

Edit: a few goo reads this section may be updated over time.

12 commentaires

vendredi 20 août 2010

Video+html5+Popcorn.js=hyper-video

Par Tristan, vendredi 20 août 2010. en

You may have seen that Brett Gaylor is joining Mozilla (see also Mark Surman's post). For those who don't know Brett, he's particularly famous for his "Open Source documentary" Rip! A remix Manifesto[1].

One may ask why Mozilla has hired a film director[2], but it actually makes a lot of sense thanks to Mozilla Drumbeat, as Brett is working on a Drumbeat project called Web made movies.

Now Brett has been a Mozilla community member for quite some time, contributing with the good folks at CDOT / Seneca College to create popcorn.js, "a JavaScript library for merging video with semantic data". I understand that this is a bit of a mouthful, but don't close your browser window just yet! Popcorn.js is what I would describe as "hyper-video" ("hyper" as in "hypertext"): the ability to leverage data from the video and link to it, Web style. Such data include:

  • location. Where on earth was this video sequence made? Then display it on an interactive map
  • subtitles. What is being said on the soundtrack. Display it as text, and offer to translate it into the foreign language of your choice using an online translation service
  • license. Under which license is this video sequence made available? (Copyright, Creative Commons, etc.)
  • person. Who's on the screen? If we know, then link to his/her Twitter and Flickr streams in real time
  • topic. What is being discussed? Then link to the corresponding article in Wikipedia and in the news.

Screenshot of the demo

Go and see for yourself the PopCorn.js demo (in case you're stuck with an older browser that is not capable of running the demo, here is a video of the demo).

I think this is a very significant step further for video on the Web, which was until now a very TV-like, passive and linear approach, now merged with the hypertext nature of the Web (its ability to link to things in other places), so that users can click on links in order to learn more. Of course, this is just a demo. Tons of things need to be done, but I see this as a very cool way to show what HTML5 and its video element, combined with the power of JavaScript and mash-ups.

Notes

[1] I can't say how strongly I recommend watching this movie, starting with its trailer.

[2] It's actually the second one, as Henrik Moltke, co-author of Good copy, bad copy, is already working at Mozilla... on Drumbeat!

4 commentaires

mercredi 28 juillet 2010

The Web has never been as exciting!

Par Tristan, mercredi 28 juillet 2010. en

(This is a quick translation of a post I wrote in French earlier today)

Firefox 4 Beta has just been released. It brings seed, a better UI tons on new things for extension developers (hmm, JetPack!) and Web developers.

In this post, I'll focus on the Web development part.

In my opinion, combining CSS3, new APIs (including WebGL) and HTML5 is enabling the Web as a development platform to make a huge leap forward. I have worked with the amazing Paul Rouget in order to have a video of his demos in order to share my excitement.

For those who have installed Firefox 4 Beta 2, a good PC with a decent discrete graphic card and have enabled Direct2D hardware acceleration, here are 3 spectacular demos:

  1. Video, CSS Transitions, @font-face and SVG filters
  2. Video, SVG Clip-path and CSS Transitions
  3. WebGL, video and Transforms

Paul Rouget during the demo movie

For those who are more in a hurry or want more details, please check the video and the article on Hacks.mozilla.org.

What you see on the screen is just a Web page, using standards that are being specified and implemented (HTML5, CSS3, SVG, WebGL, new APIs…). What I find fascinating is that by combining these technologies, one can do things that were deemed impossible even recently:

  • Native video with an Open and unencumbered coded (WebM)
  • Good fonts ( @font-face, WOFF)
  • Declarative Animations (using CSS3, and soon SVG/SMIL)
  • SVG Filters and Masks applied to HTML elements (Gaussian blur effect, a B&W filter on videos, a round-shaped video
  • 3D (the WebM video used at the end as a texture to a 3D rotating cube just floored me)
  • WebSockets, for a persistent bi-di communication between the server and the browser, used in this case to control remotely the presentation from an Android phone running a pre-Alpha version of Firefox for Android.
  • Drag & Drop, Indexed DB and local storage, the File API, Geolocation and device orientation and all the tech features I won't mention.

Of course, the Open Web still has to compete with proprietary approaches such as monopolistic AppStores or proprietary plug-ins. But it never has been has powerful and innovative as it is now, and that's what is making me excited!

2 commentaires

mardi 25 mai 2010

Firefox, add-ons and innovation

Par Tristan, mardi 25 mai 2010. en

Today, I was invited to give a talk in Paris about Mozilla and innovation, and Mozilla has received an award for being innovative (but also being a platform for innovation).

It was a great honor to receive such an award, with other organization on stage with me such as Touch Bionics, Archos, Pan-African e-Network, Aldebaran Robotics, Groupe SEB, The City of Helsinki and Dassault Systemes.

I was particularly amazed by the Pan-African e-Network (India helping Africa for Education using technology) and Aldebaran (amazing little robot which is ridiculously cute).

Aldebaran Nao Robot

As the person receiving the award in the name of Mozilla, I had to say a little speech about what we do at Mozilla, and how we do it.

The Mozilla development process has been explained many times in many places and languages by many people. This time, as the whole event is about innovation, I decided to focus on the way Mozilla does Open innovation (or Participative innovation).

Here is a quick recap of what I said to the audience (shamelessly stolen from the Labs team and Chris Beard). Slides are available in PDF format (2.6MB).

  • Mozilla, non-profit organization, builds products (including Firefox, 400 million users) and communities (that build/test/localize/promote the product and its add-ons, and also help users).
  • Our vision of the Internet is explained in our Manifesto. We "believe that openness, innovation, and opportunity are key to the continued health of the Internet".
  • Our development process is focused on building great products, with participation from thousands of people around the world.
  • With 75 languages and 3 platforms (leaving mobile on the side for now), each release is actually 225 versions of Firefox. Shipped simultaneously, aiming at 400 million users. This leaves very little room for crazy ideas that may damage the stability, security and ease of use of Firefox. Our development process is basically a funnel that makes sure that contributions are valuable for our users. But this limits innovation (don't worry, I'll explain next how we actually innovate, on a very large scale).

The Hourglass

  • Add-ons are a key ingredient for innovation at Mozilla. They enable an "hourglass"-shaped process, where we're building tons of exciting, useful and creative things, like an upside-down funnel going in many directions from a single point which is the product. Add-ons, with the help of the community and the Labs team become basically a gigantic virtual R&D lab:
    • We're making the barrier to entry is as low as possible so that it's easy to prototype ideas
    • Very little interference with release cycle. You don't have to wait for the next release of Firefox to collect feedback on your work.
    • It's very easy to share an add-on. Post it on your Web site, or even send it as an email.
    • Ability to serve the long tail of innovation. Your idea can be useful to 2 people on this planet. That's OK.
    • Best ideas that are useful to a majority of users while not degrading the user experience can be integrated into a future version of Firefox, sometimes after a rewrite.
  • Add-ons span a very broad space, from Firefox Sync to BetterPrivacy, including FlashBlock, OptimizeGoogle, and one of the least popular-yet-super-useful (for me at least) Thitan.
  • Mozilla Labs, key in fostering innovation, has 3 pieces:
    • Exploration (exploring strategic focus areas with product teams)
    • Incubation (of new products and services, regardless of whether or not they begun in Labs)
    • Support services (Concept series, Test Pilot, etc.)
  • Results of this approach:
    • Firefox is highly customizable and close to users' needs
    • Highly "generative[1]/hackable[2]" environment where many people are empowered to innovate
    • Building an Internet that benefits everyone.

In my speech, I dedicated the award (representing Hermes and Dyonisos, respectively Greek gods of invention and creativity, among many things) to contributors, supporters and users of Firefox and Mozilla technologies. Oh, and by the way, a quick poll from the audience — people working in the field of innovation — showed that roughly 80% of them were using Firefox.

Innovation award

Notes

[1] The notion of Generativity is taken from the highly-recommended The Future of the Internet book by Pr Jonathan Zittrain. It explains how PCs, combined with the Internet, are "generative" and enable people to invent the future.

[2] Hackable in the most noble sense, referring to ingenuity, not in the sense too often used by the press to refer to pirates and crackers.

8 commentaires

vendredi 21 mai 2010

Frogs, stability and performance

Par Tristan, vendredi 21 mai 2010. en

Frog, by Lawrence Whittemore, used under CC-BY-ND license

Frog, by Lawrence Whittemore, used under CC-BY-ND license

Can you picture a bright sunny Sunday, with kids organizing a frog race? The frogs progress by leaps and bounds. Sometimes the one on the left seems to be winning, sometimes it's the one on the right. Then the one in the middle makes a nice leap and becomes the leader, even if it seemed a second ago that it was lagging.

This is pretty much what's happening right now on the Web browser market. On one side, there is the Microsoft frog, making small and rare bounds. it's making progress, but it's still the last of the race. Then there is the smaller Firefox frog, who jumps more frequently. And finally, there is a new frog — Chrome — who challenges the former challenger. The competition becomes more interesting suddenly.

Of course, there is a limit to this metaphor. Competition in the browser space is not happening in a single dimension. There are several aspects to the competition:

  • User experience
  • Page load performance
  • JavaScript performance
  • Start-up time
  • Stability
  • Security
  • Innovation in features
  • Extensibility
  • Standards support
  • … and many others.

Anyway, the general idea carried by the frog race metaphor is valid: each release of a given browser can change the race configuration, as the newest browser can out-perform the other in one or more categories of the race.

The next leaps for Firefox? Stability and performance

Mozilla is working hard on two "leaps".

First, Firefox 3.6.4 will improve stability in a very significative way, with some performance gains. This version will look exactly like 3.6.*, but it will handle plug-ins (such as Flash, Quicktime and Java) in a separate process (only for Windows and Linux for now, Mac version to come). No changes in the user interface, but significant progress in terms of stability. The issue with current versions of Firefox is that when a plug-in crashes, it crashes Firefox at the same time. Let's say you're playing Farmville[1], which is a Flash app, then it crashes. The impression that you get is that Firefox crashed. It did, actually, but it was stable until Flash made it crash. The issue is that Mozilla has no way to make plug-ins more stable, as we don't have access to the source code. So starting with 3.6.4, plug-in crashes won't affect Firefox anymore[2]. This version is planned for June 2010, which is very soon.

Second — and most importantly — is Firefox 4. I encourage you to read Mike Beltzner's post about Firefox 4: fast, powerful, and empowering. I have also a PDF version of his slide deck (2.6MB).

To make a long story short, Firefox 4 will be:

  • Fast ("super-duper fast", to quote Mike)
  • Powerful: enabling new open, standard Web technologies (HTML5 and beyond!),
  • Empowering: putting users in full control of their browser, data, and Web experience.

Firefox 4 is scheduled for "whenever it's ready", and we plan to have it ready around the end of 2010 (that's somewhere between November 2010 and… early 2011)

Now I would like to focus on platform speed (I encourage the readers that are allergic to technical details to jump stright to the conclusion[3].)

We're working on several fronts here:

  1. New HTML 5 parser. This means a new generation parser really written to handle HTML 5. It will run in a separate thread so the the UI is more responsive. Its code will be cleaner and easier to maintain than our existing parser (which dates back to the early Mozilla days).
  2. New JavaScript engine, JaegerMonkey, combining Method-based tracing used by Webkit and JIT-tracing from our TraceMonkey engine. To make things even better, our garbage collector is also being significantly improved.
  3. Using the GPU to do a bunch of things such as video decoding and display, hardware compositing and scrolling, text rendering and drawing. This will take some serious load off the CPU so that the whole browser runs faster.
  4. Startup time. It's already much better on the Mac, and it will be improved on Windows. (See Dietrich's numerous performance updates.)
  5. ''Limiting disk I/O. As CPUs get faster and faster, disks do not make as much progress, especially on laptops on mobiles. So we're working on limiting disk I/O in a very significant way (we're aiming at cutting it in half for the main thread!). This will improve Firefox' responsiveness in a very significant way.
  6. Other optimizations, such as DOM performance (important for dynamic HTML), of which we'll talk more later.

So here is what Mozilla is already working on for the two important topics that are stability and performance. In future posts, I'll discuss the changes in terms of user interface, upcoming features, and new cool toys for Web and add-ons developers (new technologies and tools). In the meantime, if you want to get a taste of the future, please join us and test future versions of Firefox:

I can't predict which other "frog" is going to make another leap, and how large it will be. But be assured that the Firefox proverbial frog has a lot ready to deliver, and it will deliver very soon!

Notes

[1] Like 80 million people in the world.

[2] You'll have to reload the page that contains the crashing plug-in, of course. But Firefox and the other tabs won't be affected at all.

[3] In short, people were wondering if Firefox was a read panda or a fox, but now we're told it's actually a frog. ;-)

4 commentaires

vendredi 26 mars 2010

IE is being mean to developers, the song

Par Tristan, vendredi 26 mars 2010. en

Scott Ward, Ruby developer over at With.us has posted a couple of months ago a pretty cool song on YouTube: IE is Being Mean to Me. I am sure that most Web developers will concur with Scott's song.

Here is an excerpt of the lyrics:

I wrote the last line of JavaScript at 4:45
I wanted to see if my widget was ready to go live
I tested in Firefox, Safari, and Chrome
I even tried Opera, but then I… should've gone home
Cause IE is being mean to me… again!
IE is being mean to me… again.
(…)

IE is being mean to me, again
I tried JQuery, Moo Tools and Prototype
But IE still won't display my widget right
And have you experienced the horror
Of debugging in Internet Explorer
If you're an IE user and have no idea of what I just said
Would you please consider using Firefox instead
I'd like to say that I simply do not care,
But how can I ignore so much market share?
I have a reoccurring dream about compliance
But it always ends in Microsoft's defiance
And that's why IE is being mean to me… again!
If you're an IE user and have no idea of what I just said
Would you please consider using Firefox instead
Do it for Open Source, it's free as in speech
Do it for developers everywhere, but most of all…
Just do it for me!

5 commentaires

- page 4 de 30 -