Bespin 0.4.2, a Short Roadmap, and a Test Swarm 2009-08-28 12:51:05 A couple of items to report this week from the Developer Tool’s group here in the labs: First, we released Bespin 0.4.2 code-named “H. E. Pennypacker” over at http://bespin.mozilla.com. H. E. Pennypacker is a bug-fix release focused on patching issues in our still-fairly-new collaboration engine. More details on the release are available on my blog.
Short-term Bespin Roadmap
We’re busily working away on firming up longer-term plans for Bespin, but for those of you curious about our shorter-term plans, we recently published a roadmap through the end of September. Please take a look and let us know what you think.
Test Swarm!
On Wednesday, John Resig on our team pushed out an alpha release of his most recent labor of love, Test Swarm. The project allows developers all over the world to contribute their browser to a swarm that continuously tests code. This allows projects like jQuery to run tests on a large variety of browser / operating system combinations withou
Weave 0.6 Released 2009-08-27 15:35:23 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, as well as form-field history and preferences. 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
If you use Personas,
Mozilla Labs Meetup – Thursday, August 27th 2009-08-24 14:11:54 After a brief hiatus, we are back again for another edition of Labs Night, our monthly meetup to discuss Labs projects, your projects and the Open Web. Our August session will be this Thursday, 8/27 6-9 pm at the (still) new Mozilla HQ – 650 Castro Street, Suite 300 in downtown Mountain View. The event is open to everyone, so if you are in the area feel free to stop by.
Our featured speaker this week is Li Gong, Chairman and CEO of Mozilla Online, the Beijing based subsidiary of the Mozilla Corporation. Li will be talking about a wide variety of topics related to firefox, the mozilla community and the open web in China.
We will also hear what a lot of the Mozilla Labs projects have been working on, in 5 minute lightning talk style presentations. We’ll have a few slots open for other lightning talks as well, so if you are working on a cool project, this is a great opportunity to show and tell.
And if that’s not enough, we’ll also be providing pizza. Please RSVP by commenting o
Announcing the Jetpack Contest and a Pre Release 2009-08-20 17:19:24 Jetpack is an experiment in using open Web technologies to enhance the browser, with the goal of allowing anyone who can build a Web site to participate in making the Web a better place to work, communicate and play.
We are currently hard at work on Jetpack 0.5 which will have a number of great new features, from the ability to handle streaming audio, to being able to play the music already on your computer, to a much improved Twitter library. This is in addition to a whole slew of bug fixes. You can see exactly what’s changed here.
If you’re impatient, you can download the beta of Jetpack 0.5.
The Contest
In preparation for the release we are launching a Jetpack contest. For making the coolest or most interesting Jetpack, we are offering a brand new netbook (the ASUS Eee PC 1000HE). For the runner-up, we’ll send you a big package of Mozilla swag. Special kudos for Jetpacks that use the latest features in Jetpack 0.5.
The contest starts today, the 20th of August and
Welcome to the new Labs website! 2009-08-18 12:03:31 A while back, the Labs team decided that it was time to update the look and feel of our web presence. We took advantage of that work to also do a full upgrade to the back-end of the site. Today we’re proud and excited to launch the end result of that project.
The team involved with design, development, and testing work has been stellar, and includes: Sean Martell, Neil Lee, Ryan Doherty, Stephen Donner, Krupa Raj, and Raymond Etornam. This site is wholly their creation and they’ve all been a fantastic (and fun) to work with.
The site itself is constructed on a straightforward WordPress Multi-User installation, with two custom themes designed by Sean and developed by Neil and Ryan. All content and customization for each project site can be edited via the WordPress UI, making updating and maintaining the site significantly easier.
There are bound to be some rough edges and issues here and there. If you find any problems with the site, please file a bug. Any questions or Read more:Website
What’s up with Weave? 2009-08-18 12:01:49 As we work towards the 0.6 release (and eventually 1.0), I wanted to share more details on what we are working on.
I am going to do this by grouping the work we are doing into four distinct categories.
* Performance improvements
We are concentrating very hard on initial sync performance. Initial sync is important for both new users as well as when you set up Weave Sync on new devices. We are working on a few different ideas to help improve initial sync performance.
- WEP 102 is an attempt to allow “Weave to decide what subset of data to pull from the server and how to continue fetching the rest of the data later.”
- WEP 105 aims to create an importance metric so we can come up with a meaningful subset of data.
While these two are more near term, we are also exploring some ideas that are a little farther out. For example:
- WEP 101 describes a proxy service that can perform encryption/decryption routines on a user’s behalf which might be particularly useful on phones,
Bespin 0.4: Stop, Collaborate and Code! 2009-08-18 11:59:11 Bespin is back with a brand new invention! *
Something grabbed a hold of us and wanted to make the coding experience more social. Our initial prototype had the notion of collaborating on code artifacts a la SubEthaEdit.
We have worked with many remote teams during our coding careers and trying to do code reviews and pair programming has always been painful. Since Bespin’s all about coding in the cloud, how about using the cloud to make it a little easier?
Putting collaboration into production takes a lot of work. If you are hacking on code with a group of people, you are very chatty, so we had to rewrite the collaboration server to deal with this.
Joe Walker has done the bulk of the work, and has posted about the implementation and how to use it
Using Collaboration
As part of collaboration we need to notion of connections between people and access control. A few new commands give you access to this information:
follow/unfollow: allow you to decide whose shared projects you want
Become a Test Pilot! 2009-08-12 11:27:33 Today, we are announcing that our Test Pilot platform is opening with the release of the first Test Pilot add-on for Firefox 3.5. We are looking for Firefox users of all levels of skill and all levels of technical knowledge to help improve Firefox and Labs experiments.
If you are interested in helping Mozilla make your Web experience better, join the Test Pilot team now!
How test pilots help
Test Pilot is an opt-in program that everyone on the Web can join to improve the Web experience by conducting or participating in usability related tests.
When you install the Test Pilot add-on, you will automatically become a Test pilot, and you will receive the notice for upcoming tests. You will have the option to quit tests or leave the platform. If the test requires you to install a new feature or product, the platform will ask for your permission. At the end of these experiments, you can choose whether or not to submit your test data.
As a test pilot, you will not only be able to try out t
Personas Gallery Welcomes Its 20,000th Design 2009-08-03 15:50:05 Approximately ten weeks ago, the Personas gallery welcomed its 10,000th design. Today, we’re happy to announce that that the gallery has since doubled in size.
The Personas experiment launched on March 31st to give you easy-to-style, easy-to-share “skins” for your Firefox browser. The results have been inspiring. Since the launch, Personas has been downloaded by nearly 7 million people, who have now have access to designs from over 10,000 artists.
With the support of the Personas community, we continue to make it easier for artists to create new designs and have them be discovered. We developed step-by-step templates for creating designs, raised awareness of the preview functionality, and offered links to free, online tools that anyone can use to create great looking art for the browser. We also implemented a “movers and shakers” category on our homepage, which features the three fastest growing designs over the past 24 hours, and developed a dashboard
Weave 0.5 Released 2009-07-29 16:04:06 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 password
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
Introducing Bespin 2009-02-12 20:44:38 As we strive to evolve the Open Web as a robust platform for application development, we believe in the potential for web-based code editors to increase developer productivity, enable compelling user experiences, and promote the use of open standards.
Today we’re launching Bespin as a project within our Developer Tools Lab to focus on this exploration.
Just as Mozilla enables massive innovation by making Firefox open on many levels, we hope to do the same with Bespin by developing an extensible framework for Open Web development. We’re particularly excited by the prospect of empowering Web developers to hack on the editor itself and make it their own.
Overview
Bespin proposes an open extensible web-based framework for code editing that aims to increase developer productivity, enable compelling user experiences, and promote the use of open standards.
Based upon discussions with hundreds of developers, and our own experience developing for the Open Web, we’ve come up w
Ubiquity’s Python Feed Plugin 2009-02-10 16:56:51 A few weeks ago I wrote about Ubiquity Feed Plugins, which are basically just a way of separating the user interface of subscribing to a new feature from the implementation of the feature itself.
As I’ve written about before, one of the things I’ve missed about the Mozilla development environment is its support for the Python programming language. Aside from being humane and having a great community, it has functionality that could complement the Mozilla platform quite nicely. So we’ve whipped up a quick proof-of-concept Python Feed Plugin for Ubiquity to explore this possibility.
Here’s a really simple command feed written in Python:
def cmd_sample_python_command(ubiquity):
ubiquity.displayMessage('Hello from Python %s.' % sys.version)
cmd_sample_python_command.preview = 'a sample python command!'
For anyone who knows Python and has read the Ubiquity Author Tutorial, this should be fairly self-explanatory. The ubiquity argument is just passed in t
Concept Series: Phones and OSs 2009-02-06 17:11:27 Since the launch of the Mozilla Labs’ Concept Series, we’ve had hundreds of people join in a shared exploration of design directions for Firefox, the Mozilla project, and the Web as a whole.
Responding to the call for participation, Billy May has been taking a look at what a phone might look like in this context. What would the ultimate web phone look like? What would give it Mozilla DNA? He’s put up an interesting throw-away “Open Web Concept Phone” as a Blackberry meets interactive OLED keyboard.
Open Web Concept Phone by Billy May
In a similar vein, Adaptive Path’s contribution to the Concept Series, Aurora, explores what a Mozilla phone and OS might look like; taking the concept of Mozilla Lab’s Weave to the extreme, letting the Web be the unifying agent between computer, mobile, and wall-sized interactions.
Aurora Concept by Adaptive Path
While Mozilla doesn’t have plans to produce an OS or phone hardware at the moment — this
Weave Client API Documentation 2009-02-06 13:36:31 We talk a lot about Ubiquity being easy to extend, what with the ease of writing your own commands and so on. But did you know that Weave is also built to be extended?
Weave isn’t limited to just syncing those types of data — cookies, history, tabs, etc. — which have support built-in. It has a client API which allows new sync engines to be written and plugged in. A sync engine implements some logic for reading, writing, and updating a data type; the Weave core handles the networking, encryption, and synchronization algorithm.
We’ve recently written up a Wiki page of Weave client API documentation, which explains how to write and install a new sync engine. We hope that having this API documented will inspire the community to experiment with extending Weave to synchronize new data types.
Ubiquity Parser Documentation 2009-02-06 13:08:51 We’ve just added a page of documentation about the Ubiquity parser to the Mozilla wiki. It explains the algorithms used, with lots of examples and links to particular functions in the source code. It will be of interest to anyone who wants to hack on the command-line interface of Ubiquity, to try out new features or to make the parser smarter.
There are still a few TODOs where we need to fill in some details, but we hope what’s there will be useful to someone. Let us know if there’s a particular feature/class/function that you’d like to see further documented or explained.
Major Ubiquity Update 2009-01-14 12:41:02 We are proud to announce Ubiquity 0.1.5. Since the last major update, Ubiquity has gained a sleeker look and a smarter, more stable core. Ubiquity has also gained the ability to be skinned: anyone who knows how to write standards-complaint CSS can now create and share a custom Ubiquity skin.
Beautiful: Ubiquity has a new look that increases its visual simplicity and lays the groundwork for full keyboard access.
Skinnable: Anyone can now give Ubiquity a new look. It’s as simple as a little bit of CSS. That’s how the new look was created! Once you’ve created a skin, it’s easy to share it with the world: you can subscribe to skins just like you can subscribe to commands.
Speed: Ubiquity is now much snappier.
Stability: This is the most reliable Ubiquity yet, with much of its internals refactored.
Relevancy: Ubiquity now makes it easier to issue the commands you want. It remembers the commands you use — using the same technology that powers the Awesome Bar
Snowl 0.2 2009-01-12 14:47:54 We’re pleased to announce Snowl 0.2. This version of the messaging-in-the-browser experiment builds on the first release with an updated river view, a new stream view for keeping track of messages in a sidebar while you do other things, the ability to send tweets, and support for multiple Twitter accounts.
Highlights
The updated river view now shows a single column of messages by default, groups them by time, and includes preview images and excerpts:
The stream view is a new way of tracking messages that opens in a sidebar and shows incoming messages as they are received. It’s a simpler, more compact window into the flow of incoming information that you can leave open at the side of your browser and glance at occasionally for the latest updates:
You can now send tweets by pressing the write message button in any view:
And you can both send and receive Tweets from multiple accounts. Just subscribe to each account, and their messages will show up in all views. Whe
Labs Update - December 2008 2008-12-29 17:01:20
December 2008 Edition
Concept Series
University of Michigan Design Jam
The University of Michigan’s School of Information held their third Design Jam as part of the Concept Series. This session took ideas generated at the two previous Design Jams and had students work together in small teams to develop and refine detailed mockups.
Campus Outreach
In early January we’ll be launching a Concept Series Design Challenge that will provide new opportunities for students to exercise and refine their skills in user interface and user experience design. As part of the Challenge, students will be invited to participate in a new tutoring and mentorship program that we’re developing to increase the effectiveness and scale of the Labs effort. More details on the Design Challenge will be posted soon, the first round will be focused on the question: “What would a windowless browser look like?”.
If your school is interested in participating, please contact us at conc
Mozilla Labs Meetup - Thursday 12/18 2008-12-12 13:44:12 It’s time for another Monthly Meetup. This month’s Labs Night will be next Thursday, December 18th, 6pm at Mozilla’s office - 1981 Landings Drive, bldg K in Mountain View, California.
Last month’s meetup with the Seedcamp teams was awesome, thanks so much to all who attended. Next week - the final meetup of 2008! - we will hear progress updates on various active Labs projects. If anyone is up for sharing we would love to hear from you! As always, there will be plenty of opportunity for discussion and hacking. And of course, pizza :)
If you are in the Bay Area we’d love to see you next week! Please RSVP here so we know how many to expect. Thanks!
about:labs, issue 1 2008-11-12 19:28:01 Welcome to the first issue of about:labs, a new weekly newsletter that showcases innovation across the Mozilla community. In the coming weeks we’ll adopt the same infrastructure as the popular about:mozilla newsletter.
Concepts of the Week
Here’s some ideas we’ve found that have sparked thoughts in our minds from the Concept Series and across the Web; we hope they inspire you, too.
Please do join us and contribute your own thoughts, mock-ups, or prototypes. We’ll be highlighting new concepts each week.
Herdict Web is an upcoming project that aims to make diagnosing network accessibility problems a lot easier.
Web of Trust is a Firefox extension that aims to warn you before you enter a risky website through a social web-of-trust model.
Maxview of Browser History is an interesting mock-up of visual browser history.
Adaptive HTML Rendering Lens is a fascinating proposal for new Firefox functionality.
Ubiquity Update
The Ubiquity team is currently working on Ubi
Mozilla Labs in Tokyo: Firefox Developer Conference 2008-11-10 09:27:45 Firefox Developers Conference 2008 Tokyo is just around the corner. It’s just a week away — on the 16th of November, from 10:30am until 7pm at Belle Salle Jimbocho. Just like Firefox itself, the conference is free. We’ll have an after party so we can all chat more informally.
To highlight a couple Labs-related projects that are on the schedule: Jay Sullivan, VP of Mobile, will be doing a keynote on Mobile Firefox and the challenges we face in creating the “One Web”. Aza Raskin, Head of User Experience for Labs, will do a secondary keynote on Ubiquity and how to connect the web with language. Later in the day, Dan Mills, lead developer for Weave, will talk about creating a seamless user experience across all devices. There’s a bunch of other great topics and panels, too. You can see a full list here.
We hope to see you soon!
Mozilla Labs Meetup - Wednesday 11/12 2008-11-07 21:45:24 It’s time for another Monthly Meetup. This month’s Labs Night will be next Wednesday, November 12th, 6pm at Mozilla’s office - 1981 Landings Drive, bldg K in Mountain View, California.
We are super excited about this session. The teams from Seedcamp are spending the week in Silicon Valley and will be joining us on Wednesday evening. Several Mozilla folks will be giving lightning talks - Dion Almaer will be discussing the Ajax revolution and how it dovetails with UX; Jono DiCarlo will give an update on Mozilla Labs projects; and David Ascher and the Thunderbird team will discuss their latest UI experiments. We’ll also have time for discussion, hacking, and of course, pizza :).
If you are in the Bay Area we’d love to see you next week! Please RSVP in the comments so we know how many to expect. Thanks!
Concept Series Design Jams at University of Michigan 2008-10-30 16:20:25 In September a group of HCI students at the University of Michigan’s School of Information began a series of design jams focused on the future of the browser. These awesome events aim to contribute ideas to the Concept Series. When we launched the series we put out a call for “industry, higher education and people from around the world to get involved and share their ideas and expertise as we collectively explore and design future directions for the Web”. These students are doing just that.
Headed by Liz Blankenship, a current Masters student in the HCI program, the first satellite Labs night encouraged brainstorming around how to create a better browser. The students divided into four groups - Tabs, History, Automation, and Web Apps - and discussed use cases present in each. Check out a complete wrap up of the event on the Student Organization for Computer-Human Interaction website. The second event, held in October, took ideas generated at the first session and expa
Mozilla Labs in Berlin: Hack Days 2008-10-16 11:32:21 Announcing three great opportunities to hang out and hack with Mozilla Labs! As part of the Labs whistle-stop tour through Europe, we will be hosting Hack Days at c-base in Berlin. These sessions will be super informal and totally flexible - join for any part of the day to code, ask questions, or just hang out. Meet the leads for high-profile future-of-the-web experiments including Weave, Ubiquity, Geode, and Personas.
Lightening presentations every two hours on Labs projects. Open slots for anyone else who wants to do a lightening presentation on their own project.
Showcase presentations for projects people have been working on during the Hack day
Workshops for web best practices
Previews of new content features in Firefox 3.1 (SVG Transforms!)
Workshops and tutorials for making Ubiquity commands
Competitions around story boarding new concepts, creating Ubiquity commands, and Geode-enabled sites
Schedule:
Tuesday 10/21
3-7:00pm Mozilla Labs Hack Day 1 at c-base
Weave in the afternoo
Developer Tools and the Open Web 2008-10-13 12:18:34 Today we’re announcing the formation of a new group that will focus on the research and development of developer tools for the open Web.
We believe that there’s tremendous opportunity for innovation in tools that increase developer productivity, enable compelling user experiences, and promote the use of open standards.
We’re also excited to announce that Dion Almaer and Ben Galbraith, co-founders of Ajaxian, the Ajax Experience, and long-time supporters of the open Web, have joined Mozilla full-time to lead this newly formed Developer Tools Lab.
We’re just getting started, so please stay tuned for further details and information on getting involved.
Everything is on the table, from services to software, and we’re looking forward to working with Web developers from around the world to create, experiment and play with new ideas!
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