May 2013
2 posts
2 tags
New Coding Stewards Mailing List
As part of the Grow Mozilla effort, the coding stewards have been working to grow our coding community. Our main focus has been to increase the number of contributions to the core mozilla-central codebase, which includes making it easier for newcomers to get started, as well as keeping existing contributors engaged. Recent work has been focused on things like mentored bugs and recognizing...
5 tags
Dominant Favicon Color, Revisited on Android
Almost two years, I experimented with using the dominant color of a favicon to give a small icon a colorful background. And over the past week, I wrote some patches to incorporate this design into Firefox for Android!
The simple algorithm I wrote long ago was done in JS with canvas, but to use this in our native Android UI, it’s simplest to just do it in Java. Luckily, we already had a...
April 2013
1 post
4 tags
Building the Firefox for Android Community
Last week I attended a community building meetup in Toronto, where I had the opportunity to meet with individuals who are driving volunteer participation across different areas of the Mozilla project. Together we discussed the things our teams are doing to engage volunteers, and we brainstormed ways that we can continue to grow Mozilla. These discussions gave me lots of ideas about what we can do...
February 2013
1 post
4 tags
Hacking Firefox OS Apps with Github Pages
While planning a workshop for Dare2BDigital, a technology conference for young women, Lukas and I were looking for an easy way for girls to edit and test their own Firefox OS apps. We were trying to think of where we could host these apps when we decided to try using Github pages.
I’d never actually made a Github page before, but I learned it’s as easy as making a magically named...
November 2012
1 post
3 tags
Bugzilla 101
While helping new contributors start hacking on Firefox for Android and Firefox OS, I’ve realized that getting comfortable with Bugzilla is a really important part of getting ramped up. Over the years, people have come up with various tips, tricks and tools for making Bugzilla easier to use, and I thought it would be helpful to gather those into one handy blog post! To start, if you’ve...
October 2012
1 post
3 tags
Challenges Getting Started with Gaia
This past week, a few members of Firefox team were asked to help out with the big pile of bugs blocking the initial release of Gaia, the Boot to Gecko user interface. I’m no stranger to jumping into a new project, so I figured this would be a fun opportunity to do something different for a few months. I ran into some problems getting my Gaia development environment set up, and I wanted to...
September 2012
2 posts
2 tags
How I manage my bugmail with gmail
It seems like most developers at Mozilla have their own optimized bugmail workflow, but today a conversation on IRC inspired me to share mine.
I created a set of gmail filters to group my bugmail into buckets of varying importance. Although gmail doesn’t support filtering based on email headers, I found that string matches do a pretty good job (since most people don’t write things...
4 tags
Recap of Mobile Add-ons Session at MozCamp EU
This past weekend I attended MozCamp EU in Warsaw, and it was really energizing to see so many awesome Mozilla contributors come together. The theme of this MozCamp was “Mobilize Mozilla”, and I co-hosted a session about developing add-ons for Firefox for Android.
In the first part of this session, we walked through the basics of developing a simple restartless add-on. After that, we...
June 2012
1 post
5 tags
Text Selection in Fennec Native
I finally landed basic support for text selection in Fennec Native, and you can check it out in the latest Nightly build! Similarly to how text selection worked in XUL Fennec, you can long tap on some text to start a selection, and use draggable handles to change the selection area. A single tap inside the selection area will copy the selected text to your clipboard, and a single tap outside the...
April 2012
1 post
6 tags
WatchThis past week the Firefox front-end team had a work week in Toronto, and had the chance to give a lightning talk about the new Fennec Native UI. This talk is geared towards developers who are already familiar with working on desktop Firefox, but it will give anyone a quick overview of how our mobile front-end is built. I also made the slides available, since they include some links.
Update:...
March 2012
1 post
4 tags
I'm on the mobile team!
For the past few months, I’ve been spending most of my time helping the mobile team with the Fennec NativeUI rewrite, and a few weeks ago I officially became a member of the mobile front-end team. Although working on a native Android app has been painful different, I’ve found my desktop browser knowledge to be really useful, especially when working on Fennec features that I also helped...
July 2011
1 post
4 tags
Larger Site Icons
Recent mock-ups for the home tab, new tab, awesome bar and full screen mode all call for larger site icons. Although I wrote some code to expand a 16x16 favicon using the icon’s dominant color, a larger icon specified by the site would really be ideal.
The HTML5 spec for link type “icon” describes a sizes attribute, which enables web authors to specify multiple icon sizes. I was...
June 2011
1 post
4 tags
Dominant Favicon Color
Most websites only provide a 16x16px favicon, but what can we do if we want a larger icon to represent a site? Faaborg had an idea to use the dominant color of this favicon to color the background of a box surrounding the icon. Yesterday I used the canvas API to prototype this idea for a new tab page, and it turned out pretty well!
I generalized my dominant color function a bit and posted it in...
May 2011
1 post
4 tags
Managing Your Relationship with Sites
This post is co-written by Margaret Lebovic and Sid Stamm. This article is cross-posted on Sid’s blog.
As the web becomes more and more complex (and AWESOME), it’s important that you can manage your relationship with the variety of sites out there. Sure, Firefox 4 has a Page Info dialog that lets you control what a web page is allowed to do, including whether you want to let it...
April 2011
2 posts
3 tags
Identity Block Uplift
In tomorrow’s Nightly build, you will notice the site identity block is sleeker looking than it was before! And it’s extra sexy if you encounter a popup notification!
Shout-out to Stephen, Frank, and Dão for working on this with me.
3 tags
Do Not Track is more discoverable!
If you get on the new Aurora channel, you will see that the Do Not Track preference is no longer buried under Advanced preferences. Now it’s located at the top of the Privacy pane, so it’s easier to find and easier to let advertisers know that you don’t want to be tracked!
March 2011
1 post
1 tag
New Blog!
Following in Paul’s footsteps, I’ve decided to set up a blog on tumblr. I’ve been wanting to do a better job of sharing the things I’m working on, and I plan to use this blog to do exactly that. Look forward to lots of sweet screenshots of Firefox 5 features and beyond!
February 2011
1 post
3 tags
Lifehacker: First Glimpse at Firefox 5’s New Looks... →
September 2010
1 post
2 tags
A Month at Mozilla
It’s only been a month since I joined Mozilla as a full time employee, but it feels like it’s been much longer. Joining the Firefox team late in the Firefox 4 development cycle meant diving into a pile of blockers, so I had to get up to speed right away. By the end of my first week, I was the assignee on five blockers, wrote a few patches, and even broke the tree! I...
August 2009
2 posts
4 tags
New about:me Page for Firefox!
This summer I created an experimental prototype of an about:me page for Firefox, and I am proud to announce that it is now available for download as an add-on on addons.mozilla.org! The goal of the about:me page is to give you a more interesting view of statistics about your browser usage, providing a fun way to see personalized patterns in your interactions with Firefox. The current version...
5 tags
Making Firefox Feel Faster
I recently finished work on a sprint to improve perceived performance in Firefox. Unlike code improvements that actually make the browser faster, perceived performance improvements make the browser feel faster. There is currently a long list of brainstormed ideas for these improvements, but Alex Faaborg identified improving mouse wheel behavior in Windows as a quick way to make the browser appear...
