DougT’s Blog

I created a patch that allows people to change the default buffer sizes that our networking layer uses when loading content from the web.  The hope here is not so much to get this patch into the tree (it would be nice, but the patch isn’t ready for primetime), but rather to ask you to take a look at the build with this feature, tweak the values, and send me some feedback.  Be sure to take a look at the comments in the bug, specifically concerns about a balance between user perceived performance and clock time performance.  Simply taking the values that result in the fastest page loading (clock time) may not be the right values for human beings watching the content be loaded.

Here are the builds.  (these are experimental builds).

To change the values, edit all.js:

pref("network.default.buffer.size", 16384);
pref("network.default.buffer.count",32);

The defaults in Firefox are 4096 and 16 respectfully. You probably can change these values via about:config (and the patch doesn’t prevent you), but that may be bad.

I added a new attribute on the MouseEvent to expose the amount of pressure is being applied to a touch screen.

The video shows me pressing a pen then my finger on the touch screen.  The value on screen is a number between 0 and 1; zero indicating no pressure and one indicating alot of pressure.  Sorry about the quality.

You could imagine building a web painting application that varies the thickness of a line based on how hard you press, or the Fennec browser app could vary the speed of the scroll based on how hard the user presses on the scroll area.

Before this makes it into the project, there are a bunch of unanswered questions in the bug.  Mostly questions relate to how we expose this property in the DOM, and how to gather this pressure information from the platforms.

Chris Blizzard has a great summary of our last embedding meetup.  It details the direction we are taking with “how to embed mozilla in your application”.

We are having our next meet up on May 8 and 9. If you are interested in participating, please rsvp with blizzard.

Mitchell Baker spoke at Web2.0 yesterday.

Some of the highlights that I wrote down when I watched it (paraphrased):

“For most people the mobile web should be irrelevant…. there is only one web.”

Exactly. Wap is long dead, long live the web. (if you are still shipping wap content, the world is no longer flat, rejoice!) The point is that I as a user should be able to go to “wellsfargo.com” from any device/pc/whatever without having to think about adding “mobile.” or “m.” before the domain. It also means that as a web developer, I do not have to worry about a different protocol and a completely different way of building things.

“Firefox is the best and most effective platform for getting to that one web.”

Arguably, the application stack that Firefox is built on is the best platform for the web and the brand is second to none.

“We are building firefox for Mobile to spark innovation and excitement.”

Face it folks, innovation in mobile has not taken off as it did with the PC.. yet. There are many great ideas but going to market is really hard. Getting “on deck” or “in catalog” is many times a non-starter. Worse, operators basically have a chokehold on direct-to-consumer. Guessing here, but if these chokeholds were in place during 80s, the PC would not have taken off. (Sure there was “certification” programs that Microsoft had for boxed software, but developers did not have to participate to ship software).

“We need an open web based development platform to do this. We view Firefox as this platform.”

Mitchell, for the win!

My Stuff Search - Use Case

Mitchell also had a great use case of her usage of Firefox on the desktop. She routinely searches for “wheat free”, and the Awesome Bar searches her own history and bookmarks (as apposed to searching the web). Her need when she is mobile, is to access this exact content from her phone. Yeah, that feature must happen.

It was good to see Mitchell talking about Mobile. Our Mobile project is ramping up very quickly and we are making lots of progress. Now is a time to get involved! Please check out http://wiki.mozilla.org/Mobile and see where you can help!

John Slater put together a logo called “Powered by Mozilla”. The idea here is to show your users that the same rendering widget that is used in the Mozilla products — Firefox, and Thunderbird — is also used in your product. Check out this post.

There are bunch of questions about around this effort and getting feedback is crucial to making the successful. Here some the questions at come to my mind:
Administration and review. How does a software developer get this icon. What does the actual process look like? I would hope that this is not very complicated in any way and it also has to respect the nature of many closed source commercial vendors that cannot discuss anything about their product before it is released without a nondisclosure agreement. I would love it if if you could just go to a webpage type in a little bit of information such as who the person or company that is this being granted the use of the logo, agree that it can be revoked, press a button, and then be able to directly download the logos. I’m really hoping that an application review by human is not required. Is a require a review required in order to protect such a trademark?

In the post there is a mention of lineage. I guess it relates to how much source code was used from Mozilla in making this embedded application. For example, if I just used NSPR, could I use this logo? We need to carve out what pieces of the Mozilla stack or required to ship as part of “Powered By Mozilla”. I would argue that you must use most of the application stack — you couldn’t just use the JavaScript library and use this logo in your app.

Furthermore, how fragmented can this embedded application be? Suppose I hated SVG and I thought the web was better off without it. I rolled my own browser and used the entire Mozilla stack, but I disabled as SVG. Would that qualify for this program? I would hope not. We don’t need a fragmented web.

It shouldn’t be this program’s business to verify, review, or think about quality issues in the applications that use the logo. Yes we all want better software, I’m just not sure that this program can or should be used as a stick to get better software. It’s way too subjective, you risk the good ole boy system, and no one has time to QA a stream of products that may be applying to this program.

[sbox-CHINOOK_ARMEL: ~] > uname -a
Linux dougt-ubuntu 2.6.22-14-generic #1 SMP Tue Feb 12 07:42:25 UTC 2008 arm GNU/Linux
[sbox-CHINOOK_ARMEL: ~] > history | awk ‘{a[$2]++}END{for(i in a){print a[i] ” ” i}}’ | sort -rn | head
163 cd
99 make
67 ls
39 gcc
38 scp
14 pkg-config
8 history
7 vi
6 pushd
5 rm

for the emacs fanboys, I run emacs outside of scratchbox.

At my local market, Starbucks and Pete’s have the most shelf space. But, look what I found on the bottom shelf:

Mmmm.

Today is 3-21.  Happy World Down Syndrome Day. The goal of World Down Syndrome Day is to continue creating awareness about Down syndrome and promote acceptance of diversity.

Sadly, not 50 years ago in the US, people commonly threw they children away into institutions.  A heartfelt documentation about these institutions and about “the loss of a sister” is “Where’s Molly”.  Although, Molly didn’t not have Down syndrome, the point remains: for too long, many people with disabilities have been ostracized, demonized, and dehumanized.  Thankfully, things are very much different today, yet there is a ways to go.

Maria Shriver once said that the “Special Olympics is trying to do is break down stereotypes that still exist for people”.   Stares, terribly offensive language, and an educationally system setup for failure exists and stands in the way to total integration and acceptance. Through events like today, and events like the Buddy Walk, the hope is that we raise awareness regarding people with Down syndrome in our communities.

I also like to point out that there is a Lifetime movie coming out on April 12th based on the book A Memory Keeper’s Daughter. Same idea, don’t toss your children away.  Here is the Lifetime’s webpage about the program.  Not sure if it is going to be as good as the book.

My experience with children with disabilities is that they do teach us “typical folk” so much more than we can teach them.  So, next time you see someone with Down syndrome, say Hi.  You might just find a teacher.

Venky has uploaded some alternate designs for Mobile Firefox:

He is experimenting with the Firefox icon. In alternative designs the icon was translucent. He felt that this caused some confusion (e.g. you would see links behind the translucent firefox icon). Instead, a partially exposed Firefox icon sits at the bottom of the screen. When you press on the logo, we activate a menu:

What do you think?

Get involved today! Here is how:

1) Feel free to post your thoughts on what maters most to you. You can leave a comment here, or over on the wiki.
2) Take a look at our feature list. We are putting together a road map and prioritizing this list. Your input would be helpful.
3) You can upload mock ups to the wiki.
4) If you are a xul hacker, take a look at some of the XUL Runner mock ups. Specifically, take a look at this one.
5) Join our weekly meeting.