Théo Chevalier

Mozilla: my implication, past, present and future

2012-08-17T22:23:26+02:00

I'll try to summarize recent Mozilla events, those I'll soon participate in, and my new areas of contribution.

MozFR Camp

Saturday 9th and Sunday 10th of June was held in Paris, at the Mozilla offices, the first weekend of work of the French-speaking community.
The objective of these two days was the reorganization of the community in various working groups, to address the departure of several longtime contributors. It was an opportunity for me, as for other new volunteers, to meet some people of our community. This allowed me to put a huge boost in my involvement with the Mozilla project as you will see in this article.
During the weekend of work, Pascal Chevrel (Web localization lead at Mozilla) has launched a call for the localization of Mozilla software in French (Firefox Desktop & Mobile, Thunderbird, SeaMonkey and Lightning). Although having no experience in the field of localization, I have offered my help and joined the team. I currently assume the translation with Benoit Leseul. Jean-Bernard Marcon (aka Goofy), literature teacher and longtime Mozilla contributor, re-read translations and open bugs on our Bugzilla, if necessary. I take this opportunity to thank him here for his work and his good advices. Thank you Goofy! Two months have passed, it's time for a quick balance.

Mozilla localization

I like localization, it is going well and better than I hoped. I have, in two months, made over 150 commits (Nightly, Aurora, Beta and combined). The majority of which were done between June and July because August was a pretty quiet month. The number of commits does not mean much here, a commit can range from simply changing the name of a string to the addition of dozens of strings. We will say that these months were a training for my first big amount of work that will be the translation of Firefox OS, in September (hopefully). I will try to keep a steady pace during the school year in order not to get overwhelmed, because it can happen very quickly.
It took me a few days to get used to the localization, how to identify common expressions, to adopt the style, conventions regarding special characters, etc. Then I also had to familiarize myself with the tools and procedures, but it went fairly quickly, since procedures are the same as to publish a change in the Firefox source code. And then we must say that the French-speaking community, very savvy about localization, helped me a lot.
Speaking of that, Pascal has recently taken a very useful project to localizers: The Transvision. The Transvision is a glossary that allows Mozilla localizers to compare their work to keep an overall coherence. It is even more than that, because it can detect some errors, find in which file such a chain is, and more! You can also fork it on Github to use it for your projects, report bugs or suggest patches :) Pascal has cleaned the code, fixed several bugs, continues to do so and began adding new features. He advances so fast that version 1.3 has been released today! You can read the changelog here, and find more information about Transvision here.

I'm a Mozilla Reps!

Since early August, I proudly joined the ranks of Mozilla Reps, and this involves several things. Firstly, I can now speak on behalf of Mozilla to communicate about our mission, participate in or organize events, order goodies, etc.. Then, I must in return do my best to recruit new contributors, defend our values and document all my activities.
I have already planned to hold and/or to attend three events for the next three months :) First of all, the MozCamp!

MozCamp Europe 2012

I am invited this year to MozCamp to be held on 8 and 9 September in Warsaw, Poland. This major event is intended to clarify the mission of Mozilla for all Mozillians, set the way together and we will follow up to teach things to each other . This year it will focus on Firefox (Desktop & Mobile), Firefox OS and grow Mozilla. It will be a very nice event where over 300 Mozillians, volunteers or paid staff, will attend conferences, workshops and exchange in a cheerful mood. I have already planned to attend the workshop by Tristan Nitot and Christian Heilmann, two giants of communication at Mozilla, which will teach us how to efficiently speak about Mozilla. Suffice to say we will be well-trained. There are plenty of other great workshops I would like to participate in, I hope they will all be retained and that I will have time to do everything!

The Mariott hotel and Fabryka in Warsaw

I would give more details on the event in September. And a lot of pictures! Meanwhile, an overview of the Marriott Hotel and the Fabryka where everything will occur.
The event is invitation-only, but you can see the Mozilla Wiki page if you want to know more.

Free Software Days in Lyon (JDLL 2012) & Toulouse (Le Capitole du Libre)

I will also stand in Lyon on Saturday 17 and Sunday, November 18 for Free Software Days, and in Toulouse the following weekend (Saturday 24 and Sunday, November 25) for Le Capitole du Libre. These are two big weekend of lectures and workshops on the open source world. Entry is completely free, so feel free to browse the events pages for more information:
- Free Software Days 2012 (JDLL 2012)
- Le Capitole du Libre 2012

First edition of "Le Capitole du Libre" in Toulouse
(Picture: Guillaume Paumier)

About Mozilla's presence at "Le Capitole du Libre", for the moment what is certain is that Paul Rouget will give a talk about Firefox. I'm trying to take care of the organization so that we have one or a few extra Mozillians and a booth to do support, talk about Mozilla projects (and make demos), distribute goodies (in general people love this part ;)), and why not convince some of them spend some time for Mozilla. I am confident it will be really fun!

You can regularly visit the Mozilla Reps event page to keep you informed of upcoming Mozilla events near you!

P.S: Thank you for the review, Frédéric Bourgeon!

Tip: Custom Keywords in Firefox

2012-07-09T14:16:44+02:00

Here's a not so well known Firefox handy trick that will save you some browsing time. Specifically, you will be able to type a keyword followed by a argument in the address bar and Firefox will show you to the right page.
This is Pascal Chevrel which made me discover this trick at the MozFR weekend, in June 2012 in Paris. (I will detail you this event in a new post this week.)

First, choose a site that you regularly visit and has one arguments in its URL .
For example, we will apply our trick to the site http://dictionary.reference.com. When seeking a definition, we realize that the search word is an argument of the address of the page (Here it is "software"):
http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/software
Admit it, it would be convenient to simply type "dict software" in the address bar, and Firefox opens that page alone, right? This is exactly what we will get him to do.

To begin, if it is not already the case, create a bookmark for this address (Click on the star in the address bar.)
By default your new bookmark will be in the unsorted bookmarks. To access: click the main menu of Firefox, then click "Bookmarks". In the left menu, click "Unsorted bookmarks". Go to the bottom of the page, your new bookmark is there, click it. A menu appeared below, click "More" menu. Now, in the "Keyword" field, add the word you have chosen for this shortcut. Here we use the word "dico".

Now you will have to change the "Location" field. Find the argument and replace it with "%S", like on the screenshot below.

Finally, open a new tab in Firefox and in the address bar simply type "dict umbrella" then press Enter.

Firefox will automatically open the page of the umbrella definition!

Of course, this is an example, it works for any other website. I use it myself every day by typing "bug xxxxxx" and Firefox shows me directly the page of the bug in Bugzilla. It saves me a lot of time when someone speaks to me a number of bug without giving link :)

Debrief Sud Web 2012

2012-06-03T08:32:10+02:00

For a first experience, Sud Web has been successful! These two days have been intense, dramatic, warm, but also very instructive for the student that I am. I finally could meet all these people I am regularly following on the internet, and just for that it was great!
In terms of organization, I think we could hardly do better. Seriously what, we were pampered upon arrival with a monstrous buffet, everything has been thought, stalled graph, the team went so far satisfy the most geeky of us by offering us a superb towel badged Sud Web at the Towel Day! Frankly, if that's not the class! And then as it was not enough, I even won a Balsamiq license.
Everything is done so that everyone spends a great time, isn't excluded. This is what could very easily have happened to me for example, because I knew no one! _{(And I'm pretty shy, but shhh!)} No, frankly, I'm searching, I have no complaints in these two days. Congratulations to all the staff!

The day of Friday, dedicated to conferences has been, in my view, marked by Bruce Lawson (Opera) and Nicolas Hoffmann's conferences. Both conferences came together on the theme of the Open Web. All lectures were informative, but I was pleasantly surprised by them. All told, there were so many interesting things that I could not handle everything here ...

Oh, IE6, how we loved you!

Bruce officiated at its conference in true rock star, electrifying the audience with shocking pictures, carefully selected quotes and statistics. He reminded us that we were happy with the release of IE6. In fact, he reminded that to those who have experienced that time, which is not my case :) I was really surprised to learn that it was released, IE6 was a success with the public and professionals, not only with the default installation on Windows, but also through the input of HTML 4.01, the CSS,. htc, ActiveX, etc.. There was therefore a rapid market monopoly by this illustrious browser because its rival Netscape stopped to innovate. Did you say monopoly? => Mass Adoption of IE6 technologies, and soon the sites were developed only for him. This explains the monoculture. It is at this point that Bruce made a link with the current situation and possible webkit monoculture.
Some indicators are there: the sites are developed by thinking only to webkit (Forgot the other prefixes when using experimental properties), applications are only available for a single browser, etc.. One does not think global.

A developer on three would support this monoculture, but they don't realize the impact it would have. This would improve their personal comfort, but would result in immediately stopping innovation for the Web, the past has already proven it. Bruce has reminded us the importance of not being selfish, to think "web" and not just to a particular rendering engine.

Open Web, the struggle continues

Nicolas Hoffman, as a lightning talk (5 minutes), just as determined and activist as Bruce Lawson, but without the rock star side, for his part, questioned the current prefixes system heavily used in production, too often misused as a source of monoculture. Monoculture that Bruce was talking about. He also passed a message to both alarmist (The Open Web is in danger!), and both comforting: the Web is universal, we all share its values, act! Nicolas concludes with a quote from Edmund Burke

"The only thing that allows evil to triumph is the inaction of good men."

These two speeches I have really warmed my heart, it makes a potato crazy to hear that!

CSS3 With a Safety Net

Later that day, Peter Gasston from Opera Software for its part in a very good (and fun too, slides worth a look) conference on the use of CSS3 in production. He made us aware, sometimes exaggerating, but it was efficient, that the "pixel-perfect" is utopian, and that only a bad designer tries to impose it to integrator. Such a designer works with you? "Don't tell him." Why? "Because you have to do cool stuff! ". This was the message hammered by Peter.

Then he argued that as long as it does not interfere with navigation, it's unnecessary to burden the site or losing a lot of time for obsolete browsers, we must rather seek to reward people using a modern updated browser. This is where the metaphor of the crescent comes into play in order to image the progressive enhancement:

Mozilla rocks!

Finally, how could I not talk about Mozilla? I had the honor to meet Jérémie Patonnier, David Bruant, Thomas Bassetto and Anthony Ricaud, not less! Jérémie replaced (with gusto!) a speaker sick at the last moment, and convinced us that it's important to document the open Web. Anthony, held a conference on the benefits to participate in an open-source project, and we can say that one is frying pans :)

In good troll, everyone took to his rank, beginning with Jérémie targeted when explaining Rubber duck debugging method. The humor was indeed present, but the subject remained no less serious, and Anthony has advanced strong arguments, such as train to use the latest technologies, make themselves known, learn new skills, etc..
To summarize, guys were super nice, available, packed with humor and aren't big-headed, how not to love them?

Community meal

Great time, I'm not bored for one second, a convivial evening where everyone was available to discuss. It has been discussed many and varied things, such as possible Mozilla Code of Conduct, integration, DevTools, the balance of the day with the staff, etc.. It was also commented at length on the rumor of the day with Karl Dubost, namely the possible acquisition of Facebook by Opera Software. A good initiative to continue, it can actually close the day, and go around any topic.

"L'élaboratoire" (Workshops)

The next day, at Epitech Toulouse, I started by being at the Mozilla booth with Anthony and Jérémie, where many goodies were available. (I was desperate for months of finding a simple Firefox sticker, I was largely filled: p) It was cool to discuss development of Firefox, and open web with people who came to the booth.
By late morning, I attended the Open Web Group workshop, where it was decided the future of the site http://openweb.eu.org . There was a strong commitment to this great project, and this push will bear fruit to motivate everyone ...

it's official: I leave my retirement and I'm doing @ openwebgroup here now immediately for the next 6 months.
- Stephane Deschamps (notabene @) June 2, 2012

In the afternoon, I attended the workshop led by Karl and Anthony on improving the debugging tools in browsers, which reads in part:

Very interesting, I learned stuff along the way.
Finally I ended the day with the MDN workshop with and David and Jérémie, for an introduction to the documentation. I'll try to start one of these days, now that I have seen the possible fields of action, and I know it's not at all necessary to be an expert on a something to document it.

You can find the slides and videos of conferences & workshops on Lanyrd , and photos of the two days on the Flickr album.
One more thing to say: strongly we go again!

Telemetry enabled by default on Firefox Nightly and Aurora

2012-05-04T05:40:17+02:00

I'll tell you about a feature of Firefox that I'm working on, and which may seem trivial to some, or uninteresting, but which in reality is incredibly useful: sending performance data, also called telemetry. First, as this feature is rather unknown and is not actually visible to the user: telemetry, what is it? If we refer to Wikipedia,

"Telemetry is a technology that allows the remote measurement and logging information of interest to the system designer or operator. "

And in the case of Firefox that means sending data regarding the performance, the hardware configuration of the machine, memory consumption, responsiveness, and the features usage frequency.

This feature is and will remain, manually enabled by the user in Firefox, and Firefox Beta. That must remain the user to choose, it's an essential point. However, regarding development versions, Firefox Nightly and Firefox Aurora, we consider that users of these versions may be treated differently, and therefore have this option enabled by default. But rest assured it is not, and will never be about imposing anything to the users: it is obviously possible to disable it in all cases by simply unchecking "Send performance reports" tab Advanced options for Firefox.

Indeed, in the development releases, the telemetry will be active in creating a new profile, as well as for current users who have not yet made any choice about it. Again, we have taken every precaution to respect the choice of users. For example the people who had previously refused, will keep it off, and preferences for development versions and version "general public" will be independent, that is to say it will be possible, for example, on the same profile, to activate it when using Nightly, and disable it when using Firefox. In addition, we want users to be aware of this up automatic delivery, so we have put in place:
- First, an explanatory message permanently available in the "About Firefox" dialog. It is already present for several months, while the feature is not yet enabled by default (This was my very first commit in Firefox!)
- Second, an informative banner that appears at the top of the screen when activated by default will become effective.
- Third, again an informative message, on the download page for development releases.
- Finally, a FAQ for the press, and a ticket on the official Mozilla blog announcing the change, will be published.

My patch is complete, functional, and waiting for the final review. It also wait the end of discussions taking place right now with Mitchell Baker, Mozilla CEO to get the green light. I hope, as well as many other developers, to have the green light, because the performance data is crucial in the Firefox development, and we sorely lack. The current activation rate is only about 2%, this is really not enough. My patch will logically significantly increase this mass of data on development versions, and it will be useful at several levels:
- The precise rate of adoption / use of a feature allows to know the impact of a patch, and so be able to assess its usefulness, to set a priority between patches. A patch for a feature used by a majority of users will be addressed as a priority, but other factors must be taken into account.
- It will be easier to find slowdowns in Firefox, and then correct them. Same for memory leaks (Memshrink), and overall software responsiveness, including start-up time (Snappy)
- The hardware incompatibilities can also be detected earlier in the development process. Indeed, the ecosystem of hardware configuration is such that Mozilla can't test everything, so you need a large amount of data to find incompatible configurations.

Telemetry is something really valuable for the software development, provides significant improvements, and fast in Firefox. And do not overlook the user, his privacy, and choices. It was also quite complicated, and I would come back later in a new ticket. Anyway, if you want to do something free, useful, and immediate to Firefox, I strongly encourage you to first enable the telemetry!

Get involved in Firefox

2012-04-03T08:16:44+02:00

Firefox is an open-source software developed by the nonprofit foundation, Mozilla: a global community of contributors. Mozilla defends the free and open Internet, where the user is in control of his data, what it does and his choices. Firefox is one of many projects that Mozilla created to reach this goal, and its development is a reflection of that goal. So you can also participate, and that is the purpose of this paper: to show you that it's easy to be useful, without necessarily having technical skills.

Even if you didn't know anything about programming, there are many alternatives to make yourself useful to millions of users. Here is a partial list of possible implications:
- Test experimental versions
- Report bugs
I recommend first talking on Mozillazine Forums where many Firefox testers go each day. Explain the problem clearly, with steps to reproduce (STR). Once the bug is confirmed, you can report it on Bugzilla.
- Participate in the drafting of the help and answers to user questions on SUMO ( SUMO )
- Write or translate the documentation on the Mozilla Developer Network (MDN)
- Contribute to the translation of Mozilla applications
(For questions regarding the documentation, or translation, feel free to ask on #devmo.)
- Comment, submit your ideas
- Promote Firefox on your blog/website , or talk about it!
- Simply, try Firefox.

We saw some implications for everyone, but if you can develop in one of the following languages: XUL, CSS, Javascript, C, or C++, you can contribute directly to Firefox in Bugzilla. Bugzilla is the Mozilla bug tracker, navigate within it and understand the bug solving process is not always easy at first, and this is normal, but developers are here to help and correct you. All will tell you that making mistakes improves yourself. The community is very forgiving in general, and is always ready to help. Just get started!
Oh by the way, I talk about "bugs" in this paper, but at Mozilla, the term "bug" is not only limited to malfunctions. A bug is an open ticket on Bugzilla which shall be attached a patch (Change in the source code) which will provide new functionality, improvment, delete something, or, indeed, correct a malfunction, a crash, a crack, etc..

Johnathan Nightingale, Director of Firefox Engineering, produced a video explaining how to handle Bugzilla:

Then you can read the documentation to take control of the Firefox source code.
This page is a good start, it includes explanations of the tools, programming style, source code hierarchy, how to develop a patch, get a review of it, and then build Firefox, etc.. As a beginner, for your first bug, it is advisable to choose a simple bug. A bug list (not exhaustive, of course) is available here . The first bug is mentored, it means a developer has been appointed to help you and guide you in solving this bug. His irc nickname (or email address) is written after "Mentor =" on the WhiteBoard of the bug. Feel free to ping him on irc to discuss the bug. Of course you can get yourself a bug that suits you, or request an easy bug on precise language on #developers channel.

Now that everything is coordinated, you will be able to develop and attach patches to your bug. Thereafter, you may be induced to build your own Firefox to test your patches. Do not worry, it's not that complicated, everything is explained on MDN. When you encounter problems or have questions, there will always be someone on irc.mozilla channels #developers , #firefox who can help you promptly. Problems, it's inevitable, you're going to meet some of them... But you mustn't shut yourself up in your corner and hang on! Ask questions, get help :) Because, let's not forget, that primarily what a community is made for!

Well, I hope that my article made you want to get involved in one way or another, or sparks your interest on the subject. If you have questions you can of course leave a message here on my Twitter, or come chat on irc #developers channel (Nickname: tchevalier)

Firefox Sync

2012-01-07T20:00:00+01:00

Did you know that you can save all your bookmarks, passwords, history, open tabs, themes, settings, and soon even add-ons in Firefox? This feature was first developed as an add-on, and then been implemented in Firefox 4.

Firefox Sync can be useful at several levels, first of all if you are mobile surfer, you will find interesting to have all your data constantly following you on your laptop or smartphone, especially more on mobile, type passwords can be tedious.
Firefox Sync also allows you to not lose your data. I have often encountered cases where friends had their Firefox profile wiped out by mistake and wanted to find their bookmarks, passwords... and I felt bad they do not know Sync and its potential. And it is the purpose of this paper: let you know that this feature is transparent in everyday life, but can save your life. Firefox Sync ensures you never lose your data, even if your computer is inaccessible, you can enter your key synchronization and retrieve all the data on any device (provided you have synchronized your profile a second device to retrieve the key, or to have the key stored in a different place. The print can be a good solution.).
Also, you do not have to sync all your data, you can choose what to sync between all your devices and what to keep only on your computer! Everything is configurable at any time in the Sync tab of the Firefox options.

Want to try? Nothing could be simpler, just follow the steps found on this page: https://support.mozilla.com/kb/how-do-i-set-up-firefox-sync
Once you have created your Sync account on your computer, you can add to Firefox as many devices you want, simply by following steps outlined here: http://support.mozilla.org/kb/add-a-device-to-firefox-sync

To ensure maximum security and privacy, all data sent to the Mozilla servers are encrypted before being sent, and only your Firefox can decrypt them.

Firefox Sync works fine, and continues to be improved, with support notament Add-ons and the synchronization of the icons of your bookmarks.

The Add-ons synchronization feature is already present in Firefox Beta , and will available for all March 13, 2012 in Firefox 11. Try it and you can't do without!