Working towards true user agency through a distributed web.
We implemented session restore in Firefox 2, thirteen years ago . This was back when we used CVS, automated tests weren't yet required, and everything we did was uphill both ways... in snow. Tab unloading was a feature I really wanted, but it was lower priority, and discussions with our design team always went into the sarlaac pit of heuristics - when is the right time to unload the tab, without…
Hey Portland, this one is going to burn a little. While the global perception of Portland is of a liberal weirdo wonderland, some of our city's beloved bars and world-renowned products and brands are part of the Trump support network in the Pacific Northwest. Meet Gordon Sondland, who donated $1,000,000 for Donald Trump inauguration parties , and has received the ambassadorship to the EU. Read…
I'm on the developer relations team at Mozilla. The "devrel" role has many parts, but generally means communicating to developers about web technologies important to Mozilla and our mission , and being an advocate for developers in our product development process. I spent 2017 on typical developer relations activities - coding, writing, speaking - but entirely in UTC+5 and higher timezones. I'd…
I've got a Firefox profile with 1691 tabs. I started trying to write down why, but gave up for now. It was becoming an overly long exploration of product design and the future of the web. It's Friday. Let's keep things simple. As you would expect, Firefox handled this profile quite poorly for a long time. I got used to multi-minute startup time, waiting 15-30 seconds for tabs from external apps to…
This post is part of the Augmented City series. The first post is introduced A-Frame as a tool for creating 3D content for the web. The second post introduced VR on the web . These were prep posts for the event attendees. This post is about the design and goals for the first event , and how it went. We brought a group of developers and designers together for a day to explore how a city can be…
Hello! This guide is written for the Augmented City AR/VR lab in Singapore on July 15th 2017, but might be helpful for anyone looking to jump into A-Frame. The first post is introduced A-Frame as a tool for creating 3D content for the web. This post introduces VR on the web. The next and final post in the Augmented City prep series will be about AR on the web. A post shared by rockintosh…
Hello! This guide is written for the Augmented City AR/VR lab in Singapore on July 15th 2017, but might be helpful for anyone looking to jump into A-Frame. This first post will orient you to A-Frame itself, and the couple following will focus on VR and AR. Enjoy! A post shared by rockintosh (@rockintosh) on Jun 9, 2017 at 8:52pm PDT Augmented City The Augmented City event is an all-day workshop…
Seven years after attending my first FOSSAsia in Ho Chi Min City, I was able to join again this year! The difference is amazing - the conference has grown to be one of the largest open source events in Asia, with more than 200 speakers over three days across 13 tracks and now hosted in Singapore. The conference is entirely open source and volunteer-run, which is really neat. Kudos to the…
I had the pleasure of being involved in a bunch of different activities at Mozfest this year. What is Mozfest? From the website: MozFest is an annual celebration of the open Internet movement. It's where passionate technologists, educators, and makers come together to explore the future of the open Web. Sounds pretty cool... but what does an "annual celebration" of web exploration actually look…
Project SensorWeb is an experiment from the Connected Devices group at Mozilla in open publishing of environmental data. I am excited about this experiment because we've had some serious air quality discoveries in Portland recently - our air is possibly the worst in the USA , and bad enough that mega-activists like Erin Brockovich are getting involved . A couple of weeks ago, Eddie and Evan from…
Last month I spent a week working on IoT projects with a group of 40 researchers, designers and coders... in Anstruther, a small fishing village in Scotland. Not a high-tech hub, but that was the point. We immersed ourselves in a small community with limited connectivity and interesting weather (and fantastic F&C ) in order to explore how they use technology and how ubiquitous physical computing…
Web IDE has gone though some twists and turns as a feature in Firefox, but one thing has remained constant for me: When I launch an app, I always want to debug it. Having to repeatedly wait and hit the wrench button has always bothered me. During a development session I may do this hundreds of times. So I wrote a small Firefox add-on that changes the functionality of the "play" button in Web IDE…
I love Pocket and I love Firefox . But two things were driving me batty about the Pocket feature built into Firefox: The design of the popup experience when you save a page to Pocket is... unfortunate. It stays up far too long, and it doesn't go away when you switch tabs. Yeah, it stays open for a given URL even when you're on a tab with a completely different URL! But regardless of whether you…
Atul Varma set up a quilt for MozCamp Asia 2012 which I thought was a fantastic tool for that type of event. It provided an engaging visualization, was collaboratively created, and allowed a quick and easy way to dive further into the details about the participating groups. I wanted to use it for a couple of projects, but the code was tied pretty closely to that specific content and layout. This…
Around 1,100 Mozillians will be in Portland next week. WELCOME! Here is a list of things I recommend that you see, do, eat and drink and some handy tips. I've focused on places that are in or near downtown, though included some spots worth going out of your way for. That said, downtown is not Portland. Well, obviously it's part of it, duh. But it's not overly representative of the Portland you've…