Towards Better Browser Storage 2009-04-21 15:26:18 As Web applications become more powerful and useful, the need has arisen for them to be able to store structured information in the user’s browser. This is the problem that the W3C’s Web Storage specification has set out to solve.
At the moment, the specification aims to expose a particular implementation of SQL to web pages. Vladimir Vuki?evi? has written about flaws in this approach. Among them are:
While a lot of server-side developers already know SQL, it’s actually quite low-level and not very easy to use. This goes against the grain of the Web as a platform, which is something that should be as easy to develop for as possible.
There’s no useful core SQL standard, and as a result the specification effectively says “do what SQLite does”. Because “what SQLite does” isn’t well-defined and can change in future versions of SQLite, it effectively means tying all browsers to a particular implementation, and any security vulnerabi
Bespin Community Update; VCS in action, searching, debugging UI and markers, settings, and themes 2009-04-16 16:52:59
Above you will see Kevin Dangoor showing of the fruits of his labor on VCS integration with Bespin. His screencast shows how you can fire up Bespin, tie into your VCS, and start coding. This is an exciting step for us.
You will notice that at one point Kevin doesn’t notice that he hasn’t saved his file before he tries to talk to the VCS. Since the video we have added an indicator that shows you if the file that you are editing hasn’t been saved yet. Long term, we are keen to have the collaboration feature where the files are constantly being saved back to the cloud, and the flow changes where “commit” is the new “save”. We will see.
Julian has added support for searching within a file and has partially implemented the search design:
Ben has also added hooks to the gutter which means that you will see that it is now dynamic. You can set a debugmode and add breakpoints, but we don’t have a backend for the debugger quite yet. Chris Jay has Read more:Community
Firefox New Tab: Visual Update 2009-04-13 17:15:17 All has been quiet on the new tab front for the last couple of weeks. We’ve been up to two things in the process of getting the new tab ready for potential uplift into Firefox. The first is we’ve been working on an overview of how the add-on was designed including performance and security. If you’ve ever wanted to get a guided tour of how something like the new tab is implemented, check it out. The second thing we’ve been working on is finding a visual style that blends in with Firefox.
Inspired by the horizontal styling of the thumbnails in Chris Stone’s answer to the call for participation, we’ve got some new designs that incorporate the learnings from the last 36 revisions while finally making it feel much more Firefox-y. Unfortunately, we haven’t implemented the new style yet so for the time being, it’s see only.
By using a horizontal thumbnail clipped from the top of a page, we are capturing the site’s logo and masthead &mdas
Taskfox Prototype: Ubiquity in Firefox 2009-04-08 13:26:00 As a user experience exploration, Ubiquity has been incredibly successful. Over a million downloads have highlighted the need for the web to be connected more tightly with by the power of task-based interfaces. Due to the passion of users, the user tutorial has been translated into ten languages. Similarly, the thousands of commands written for Ubiquity illustrate a latent desire to be able to write tiny amounts of code that enhance the web in fundamental ways.
We are currently working on bringing some of that power to Firefox. See the link for the goals and non-goals for Taskfox, which is what we call the Firefox feature inspired by Ubiquity. You can see some static mockups on the mockups page of the project wiki. Static mockups only get you so far, however. To really get a sense of how something feels, you need to touch it and see it in motion.
Prototype
Some thoughts:
* The main thing we haven’t prototyped is the interaction of the awesome bar results and the Taskfox commands
Bespin Community Update; Outline View, iPhone Preview, Python Support, and Defragging 2009-04-03 03:01:05 Joe Walker and Kevin Dangoor of the Developer Tools Lab joined Ben and myself for a busy few days to go heads down on working out some good direction for Bespin and our group in general. We are pretty excited for the coming months, and we all remarked at how fantastic our Bespin community is growing already. Joe and Kevin are heads down finishing up initial versions of production-ready collaborative editing and VCS integration respectively, but while we wait a touch more for that, we have seen some pretty fun and exciting things. Let’s show you:
Structured Outline View
Malte has built on his work involving rich parsers using Web Workers and taken it from the interesting function viewer to a full structured outline view that shows you your classes, methods, and subscribers.
What is particularly exciting about this is that Malte has written the functionality in a way that can be extended for the library of your choice, or the way that you write code. For example, he has code to un Read more:Community
Labs Update - March 2009 2009-04-01 12:09:01
March 2009
Concept Series
We are currently collecting feedback on a proposed web-based collaboration tool/space for the Concept Series. Learn more and join the discussion over on the discussion forum.
Design Challenge - Spring 09
More than 40 ideas from around the world were submitted to our inaugural Design Challenge. Thirty participants were selected to join the tutoring & mentoring phase. Check out our awesome tutorials, recorded and available here.
Experiments
Personas
Labs is expanding its experiment in personalization by launching the newest version of Personas with a cleaner, friendlier look, and hundreds of new designs. With the support and imagination of the Labs community, Personas has evolved through a set of iterations but remained focused on three key concepts:
1. It shouldn’t be hard to make your browser a little more fun and personal.
2. You should be able to personalize your entire online experience with lots of great designs.
3. The artist in
Developer Tools Presentation and Open Session 2009-03-31 11:00:06
Tomorrow, Dion and I are giving a talk at O’Reilly’s Web 2.0 Expo conference in San Francisco at the Moscone Center: “Web Developer Tools: How to Be Productive Building for the Web” (Wed. Apr 1, 10:50 am). While normally Web 2.0 Expo costs money to attend, our session is free; all you need do is register for the free web2Open program. As part of our session we’ll be releasing something small; we’d love to see you there and get your feedback.
Following the presentation, we’ll be hosting a web2Open session at 12:40 pm–also in Moscone–to host a discussion about the state of Developer Tools for the Open Web and explore their future. If you’ve an interest in the subject and find yourself in town, won’t you drop in?
NOTE: I cross-posted this to my blog; please use the comment thread over there.
Personas Expands Opportunities to Personalize 2009-03-31 10:30:59 Personas for Firefox is a prototype extension that adds lightweight dynamic theming to the browser.
Today, we are launching a major expansion of the Personas experiment, which includes more dependable functionality, a cleaner look, an expanded gallery of artistic designs, and a much easier way to contribute.
Here’s a video that was put together by Rainer Cvillink that shows off some of the new designs with folks around Mozilla talking about what they like about Personas:
Getting Started with Personas from Mozilla Labs on Vimeo.
Progress
Since we began work on the Personas experiment, the project has evolved with the support and creativity of the Mozilla community. We have been able to accomplish the following key milestones:
1. smoother integration into the chrome, including styling for the Find toolbar;
2. an expanded gallery of over 500 persona designs, including art from independent and established artists;
3. ability to create a “custom” persona locally either
Weave 0.3 Released 2009-03-30 18:49:31 Weave Sync is a prototype that encrypts and securely synchronizes the Firefox experience across multiple browsers, so that your desktop, laptop and mobile phone can all work together. It is part of the Weave project, which aims to integrate services more closely with the browser.
Major Features
What is Weave Sync all about? In short, Weave Sync lets you securely take your Firefox experience with you to all your Firefox browsers — including our mobile browser, codenamed Fennec. It currently supports continuous synchronization of your bookmarks, browsing history, saved passwords and tabs. For example:
Get the same results on the Smart Location Bar on each of your Firefox browsers, so you can get to your favorite sites with just a few keystrokes
Continue what you were doing: have the ability to open any tab you have open on any of your Firefox browsers
Keep the same list of bookmarks on all of your Firefox browsers
Easily sign in to all your favorite sites using your saved pass
Firefox New Tab: Latest Iteration & Next Steps 2009-03-27 14:28:42 Over the last couple of weeks, we’ve been iterating on the idea & design of what a Firefox new tab could look like. All told, we’ve now gone through 36 different versions of the page, with thousands of particpants helping test and provide daily feedback & new ideas.
In this latest iteration, we’ve continued to refine the concept taking into account all of the feedback we’ve received in comments, blogs, IRC conversations, and hallway talks.
The Latest Edition
The main feature we’re exploring in this iteration is in-line search for the sites you search often.
If one of your main uses of a site is to perform a search (e.g., Technorati, Wikipedia, or Twitter) then the new tab page should help you perform that search more quickly and efficiently. Instead of first navigating to the site and then performing the search, you can search instantly without the need to install a search provider (or even for a site to provide one).
We’ve implemented
A New Memory Tool for the Web 2009-03-23 18:03:44
They say Marc Andreessen, co-founder of Netscape and co-author of the Mosaic browser, once said:
[An operating system] is just a bag of drivers.
People have been fantasizing about the web as application platform for as long as we’ve had it. Nearly a decade later, we’re really just getting started at realizing this vision–of truly reproducing the power of traditional operating system APIs inside of the browsers.
While some have had this vision of browser-as-application-runtime since the beginning, most of us have traditionally viewed the browser as a web page renderer. It’s only been in the past few years that some have begun to push hard on changing this status quo. Google stands out in this group both with the creation of boundary-pushing “desktop-quality” applications like Gmail and in describing Google Chrome as an application run-time, not a page viewer. [1]
Here in the Mozilla Developer Tools Lab, we’ve been pondering the various gaps
Firefox New Tab Page: Cognitive Shield 2009-03-23 14:37:56 We’ve been iterating quickly over the last couple of weeks to define a potential new tab screen for Firefox.
The feedback for the last major iteration was largely positive, and it seems like we are on the right track. But we ran into a paradox.
We believe that the new tab screen should have two main functions: (A) To show you the sites you are most likely to be interested in going to, and (B) to not distract you. That’s the paradox: by design success is when the pages we show are maximally interesting/distracting, but an explicit goal is to not interrupt your flow.
This iteration focuses on solving that paradox by proposing a solution that we’ve dubbed “the cognitive shield”.
The Cognitive Shield
No matter where we put the links to your most visited sites (and their latest news), it always seemed to be a distraction, based upon our own perception and the feedback from thousands of testers. Given that the bulk of those testers are multi-tasking-adept early
Mozilla Labs Meetup - Thursday 3/26 2009-03-23 12:54:50 It’s time once again for Labs Night, our monthly meetup to discuss Labs projects, your projects, and the Open Web. Our February session will be next Thursday, 3/26, 6pm at Mozilla’s office - 1981 Landings Drive, bldg K in Mountain View, California.
As always, we will hear progress updates on various active Labs projects and would love to hear from you! Get involved with a Labs project. Get feedback on your own projects. There will be plenty of opportunity for discussion and hacking. And of course, pizza :)
Bespin Community Update; Tabs, Editor Component, Syntax Checker, Quick Open, and more 2009-03-18 11:44:40 Work seems to be accelerating on the Bespin project. You think that there may be a lull after launch, but the opposite has happened thanks to the great contributors that have dived in heads first to the young project.
A fair amount has happened, so I thought I would write up the news:
Tab Support
Believe it or not, but the editor was cheeky when it came to tabs. Ben reworked the model so tabs will work with a special “tabmode”, where you can decide if you like to code with true tab characters, or if you prefer converting to spaces. As always, “tabsize” defines how many spaces a tab takes up. This is actually a big change and if you are developing on top of Bespin you need to be aware that there is a new CursorManager that handles some of the heavy lifting for you. Ben wrote all about it and how we found a performance bug with it on stage!
Reusable Editor Component
We have seen a bunch of people embedding the editor component itself, and we haven’t made tha Read more:Community
Firefox New Tab: Next Iteration 2009-03-16 22:08:29 Since releasing an experimental new tab page for Firefox a week ago, we’ve got a lot of great feedback.
For the past week we’ve been using the feedback as a springboard for designing the next iteration. If you’d like to watch the design iterations as they happen, follow #mozconcept on Twitter.
Current Design
We’ve done away with the thumbnails as they just didn’t seem to be providing large amounts of value. As we played with different methods of taking screenshots, we discovered that it was the top-left corner that was most distinctive in identification because it generally contains the site’s logo. We have a much stronger association with a site’s logo or favicon than with the low information-density thumbnail of the page itself.
We’ve also turned the contextual actions into an actionable sentence. Previously, the actions were large, separated buttons. The actionable sentence connects the actions into a cohesive whole. Further, we now
What makes a good developer platform? 2009-03-13 19:18:45 I’m Nick Nguyen, the Add-ons Lead at Mozilla. The add-ons team has been working closely with Labs on how extension development could be better and we’re approaching this problem from multiple angles, in terms of both improving the experience of the existing platform as well as nurturing new extension developers.
In the spirit of welcoming new developers to our ranks, consider this question: if you’re a potential extension developer but for whatever reason haven’t gotten around to creating the Next Great Extension, we’d like to know what we can do to help.
Check out the survey we’ve created and let us know what you like and don’t like about those platforms. We’ll use this feedback to guide our thinking around how we can make development easier, more fun, and more rewarding.
New Developers Survey
In true Mozilla fashion, we’ll share our findings with you here on the Labs blog, and we look forward to hearing your thoughts.
Nick
Weave M5 Development Milestone 2009-03-12 21:24:47 Weave Sync is a prototype that encrypts and securely synchronizes the Firefox experience across multiple browsers, so that your desktop, laptop, and mobile phone can all work together. It is part of the Weave project, which aims to integrate services more closely with the browser.
M5 Development Milestone
We’re proud to announce the release of the next development milestone of Weave Sync on the road towards the upcoming 0.3 release
Major Features
What is Weave Sync all about? In short, Weave Sync lets you securely take your Firefox experience with you to all your Firefox browsers — including our mobile browser, codenamed Fennec. It currently supports continuous synchronization of your bookmarks, browsing history, saved passwords and tabs. For example:
Get the same results on the Smart Location Bar on each of your Firefox browsers, so you can get to your favorite sites with just a few keystrokes
Continue what you were doing: have the ability to open any tab you have open
Ubiquity internationalization blogging roundup 2009-03-10 13:36:15 There has been a lot of good discussion lately about the problem of internationalizing Ubiquity’s command-line interface. Because the CLI has notions about natural-language grammar embedded in it, localizing the interface to another language is not just a matter of substituting strings. It will require more effort, but also potentially offers more reward.
A lot of the discussion has been taking place on personal weblogs, which makes it a bit hard to follow what’s been going on. To counteract that, here’s a round-up of important articles that have been written so far.
Describing the general problem:
The Tower of Babel, by Jono
Localizing Ubiquity: an Open Letter to Linguists, by Mitcho
Language-specific articles:
Thinking Ubiquity in Portugese, by Felipe
Focus on Japanese, by Mitcho
Thinking Ubiquity in Italian, by Flod
Proposals for partial solutions:
Writing Commands with Semantic Roles, by Mitcho
Overlord Verbs: a Proposal, by Jono
Verb-final languages: An a
Installing Weave and Fennec on a Nokia N810 2009-03-09 18:09:10 We’ve posted a tutorial explaining how to install and set up Weave — and Fennec — on an N810 (Nokia’s mobile internet tablet) and get it ready to sync. If you happen to have an N810, please give it a try and help us test Weave.
– Jono, on behalf of the Weave development team
Announcing the Mozilla 2009 Design Challenge: SxSW Edition 2009-03-09 13:23:16 Ever made a website that requires a file to be uploaded? Then you know how much that file upload control sucks.
This sucks.
Why does it suck? Because there’s no drag-and-drop; Flash or server-side hacking is required to provide any kind of progress indication; you can’t upload multiple files; if you know what you want to attach you have to navigate there again with the OS file picker; you can’t even enter a path into the widget because of security issues; and the list goes on. Ideally, the browser should make it painless to get files from the desktop to the cloud.
There has to be an easier way. Here are two ways for you to make a difference:
Post an idea anywhere and Tweet its URL to mozconcept any time before the party (see below). The idea can be a mock-up, a prototype, some words, a napkin sketch, a video, anything.
Join the Mozilla Labs team at SxSW as we discuss ideas and mock-ups to replace or augment Firefox’s current built-in file uploader. Come tak
New Tab Page: Proposed design principles and prototype 2009-03-05 10:10:31 Every time you open a new tab, you are opening it to go somewhere. Sometimes it’s to do a search. Sometimes it’s to type in a new URL. Sometimes it’s to check an address you just selected. The only thing you are guaranteed to not want is a blank page.
From the feedback from the last two rounds of new tab concepts, we know that the page needs to load instantly (even a small wait breaks user experience); that it shouldn’t be visually distracting; and that it should be a launch point into your daily activities. One level higher, the distilled design themes were:
No configuration. Never force the user to set up or fidget with a feature before they use it.
Streamlined. New tabs are opened to start a new task or navigation. If we have a good idea of what that task is (like mapping an address selected on the last tab) or where you want to go, we should help you do that quickly and efficiently.
Polite. The page must be instant load, shouldn’t be distracting, or ever get
Bespin Update: 0.1.4 released, community contributions, and Ben & Dion coming to London next week 2009-03-04 13:57:38 Time flies when you are having fun, and the Bespin team seems to be having a lot!
We just deployed version 0.1.4 to bespin.mozilla.com, and this release has a lot of changes.
The biggest infrastructure reboot is the fact that we are now using Dojo to power Bespin, and this major contribution was lead by Roberto Saccon. Major thanks to Pete Higgins, Dojo lead, to giving it all a once over and making sure that Bespin looks and runs as “Dojo-y” as possible.
Roberto went on to fix a bunch of bugs and issues, and is now working on a much better syntax highlighter.
Jay Bird and Julian Vierect kindly made the editor nicer. You can now indent and un-indent as you would imagine (with TAB), and I added the notion of a setting autoindent that when on (by running set autoindent on in the command line) will keep track of your indent level when you hit RETURN.
Extension points; Config and Commands
We really want to offer great extension points, and we got a bit of the way there in this r Read more:Community
Weave M4 Development Milestone 2009-03-03 17:30:16 Weave is a Mozilla Labs experiment to explore opportunities for the Web browser to broker richer experiences while increasing user control over their data and personal information.
The focus of development so far has been on enabling Weave Sync to encrypt and securely synchronize the Firefox experience across multiple browsers, and more specifically between the desktop and mobile devices.
M4 Development Milestone
This is an early developer release of the Weave client, for testing purposes only, and one of many planned development milestones toward the next major update expected later this year. This development milestone is being made available for testing purposes only and is intended to solicit wider testing and feedback from the broader Mozilla community.
What’s New in M4?
Preliminary support for Fennec for all data types, i.e. bookmarks, history, tabs, and saved passwords.
Redesigned sync protocol and server architecture.
Client optimization to improve CPU and memory efficie
Design Challenge submission deadline - March 1st 2009-02-26 15:47:21 The submission deadline for the Design Challenge Spring 2009 is right around the corner! All ideas must be submitted to the forums by Sunday, March 1st. Now is the time for all interested students to help us answer the question: “What would a browser look like if the Web was all there was? No windows, no unnecessary trappings. Just the Web.”
All you need to get started is a mockup! Share your great idea in the forums - a sketch, wireframe, polished graphic or video. Within the next two weeks we will identify the most promising ideas and invite their creators to participate in a mentoring program where we’ll work together to refine ideas & mockups into interactive prototypes. Check below to see a list of the institutions who are currently involved.
Get all the details about participation here. More questions? Contact us at conceptseries@mozilla.com.
Schools that have signed on so far:
Carnegie Mellon University (USA)
Parsons School for Design (USA)
University of Mi
Labs Update - February 2009 2009-02-26 12:50:38
February 2009
Concept Series
We are currently collecting feedback on a proposed web-based collaboration tool/space for the Concept Series. Learn more and join the discussion over on the discussion forum.
Design Challenge
The application deadline for the inaugural Design Challenge is right around the corner! Initial ideas & mockups must be submitted to the forums by Sunday, March 1st. Further details on applying are available in the discussion forum.
Experiments
Weave
In preparation for the release of the next milestone leading up to the 0.3 release on March 2nd the newly updated server-side components of Weave have been migrated to a new server cluster on real hardware, dramatically increasing speed and availability. If you’re interested in helping test the next release, please register now to receive an invitation within the next few days.
Ubiquity
Another update to Ubiquity was released this week, with many bug fixes. Release notes can be found here. More details about
Fennec Tab-Sync UI Update 2009-02-23 15:07:37 The latest version of Weave now syncs your open tabs — and it can sync them between Firefox on the desktop and Fennec on a pocket-sized gadget.
“Syncing tabs”, by the way, doesn’t mean that we force all your browser instances to have the same set of tabs open. That’s not what anybody wants! Instead, it means that every browser has the ability to access the tabs that are open on other synced browsers, and to locally open copies of those tabs.
Here’s how it looks on Fennec. Keep in mind that this UI is a work in progress, and I’m well aware that it needs work, polish, and testing. But I’d like to let you see how it’s coming along and get your feedback on it.
On the left sidebar of Fennec, where your tabs appear, is a new Weave button. (This assumes that everyone recognizes “Rectangular Celtic knot” to mean “see my tabs from other computers”. Not a good assumption, so consider this a placeholder.)
Click
Thanks for the Bespin contributions; Eclipse, XWiki, and more 2009-02-18 02:01:00 There’s nothing that humbles you quite like when you see people build on your work. Although a week hasn’t gone by since we introduced the Bespin project to the wider community, we have already seen contributions that have gone beyond our expectations.
Boris Bokowski, of the Eclipse community says it best:
Within a few days, 30,000 people logged into their public server, 400 people joined their discussion group, about 50 bugs were filed, several of them with patches, and many articles, blogs and even a Wikipedia entry were written.
We wanted to highlight Boris himself. Along with Simon Kaegi, he managed to accomplish something we think is very cool indeed, and all in a couple of days. He took Eclipse and paired it with Bespin. What does that mean? He took a headless Eclipse, implemented the Bespin Server API and went above and beyond the API to get data from Eclipse back to Bespin.
Take a look at the integration in action:
Here Eclipse is sending back errors and warnings
Ubiquity 0.1.6 and Release Scheduling 2009-02-17 16:58:08 As we’ve mentioned before, Ubiquity 0.2 has fairly broad, visionary goals that won’t be fully satisfied for some time. So we’re going to be pushing its changes to the 0.1 line at more regular intervals as we continue to develop it.
By “pushing its changes” we mean that we’ll effectively be disguising our work-in-progress 0.2 as a 0.1.x release. For instance, Ubiquity 0.1.5, which we released about a month ago, is essentially the same thing as 0.2pre7; similarly, Ubiquity 0.1.6 will basically be the same thing as 0.2pre13, only with our more experimental features—such as locked-down feeds and python feeds—disabled by default and unadvertised on Ubiquity’s front page.
There’s a couple reasons for this:
Ensuring that the general public is using the same codebase as testers and developers means that our code gets to be used by “the real world” more quickly, and means we’ll know about bugs closer to the time tha
Mozilla Labs Meetup - Thursday 2/26 2009-02-17 14:28:35 It’s time once again for Labs Night, our monthly meetup to discuss Labs projects, your projects, and the Open Web. Our February session will be next Thursday, 2/26, 6pm at Mozilla’s office - 1981 Landings Drive, bldg K in Mountain View, California.
We are excited to welcome Edwin Khodabakchian, developer of Feedly, a Firefox extension which weaves twitter and Google Reader into a magazine like experience. Edwin will be giving an overview of Feedly Streets, a integration framework/micro service bus they have built inside Firefox to simplify the development and maintenance of real-time mashups. He will be discussing some of the key Streets concepts, as well as the list of integrated services - Google Reader, search, Gmail, twitter, etc. Edwin will also be talking about how Streets can simplify the development of Ubiquity commands.
As always, we will hear progress updates on various active Labs projects and would love to hear from you! Get involved with a Labs project. Get feedbac
Redesigning the Labs website: we need you 2009-02-13 08:19:49 Mozilla Labs was created to give the community a safe and welcoming place to develop, research, talk about, and play with new and crazy ideas. Labs is all about creativity, community, experimentation and collaboration, and we’re striving to build a world-class showcase of open innovation for the Web.
Since its inception, Labs has helped further establish Mozilla as a leading source of Web innovation, and now it’s time to step it up to the next level. As a growing community, we’ve started dozens of experiments since Labs first came together, but we want to start thousands. We’ve grown to thousands of participants, but we’d like to welcome tens of thousands more.
Thousands of ideas, projects, and experiments being developed and refined by a community over a hundred thousand strong. We know what an ambitious vision this is, but we also know that it is both vital, and possible.
To achieve this, Labs must undergo a major evolution of its own, and one of the Read more:Website
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