January 2008

You are currently browsing the monthly archive for January 2008.

giving in

January 28, 2008 in General | 2 comments

I finally gave in and signed up for a twitter account.

michael ventnor’s work

January 9, 2008 in Firefox, GNOME, Mozilla | No comments

It’s worth a post to point out the stuff that Michael Ventnor has been working on. He’s one of the guys actually doing the work on Firefox + Linux integration, as opposed to me who is just playing the part of vocal fanboy.

(I also hope that this post will encourage Michael to post regularly! No pressure, Michael!)

Mozilla Corporation’s CEO change

January 7, 2008 in Mozilla | 1 comment

I’m extremely excited that John Lilly is taking on the CEO title at Mozilla Corporation. (Note that I’m using “title” here instead of “role.” I, like Mitchell, believe that he’s already filling much of this role and now it’s time to make it official.) John came to Mozilla Corporation in a business development role and quickly grew into a COO role. As part of his COO role inside of the organization he’s proven that he understands our unique position in the industry, the change we’re trying to create and how we do things. (In a lot of ways the thing that makes Mozilla unique is not just what we do, but the way that we do it. It’s an important distinction.) In that role he’s clearly taken on a lot of what a CEO would normally do and this change in title makes that official.

Also, it’s clear that Mitchell is not leaving the project and not leaving the organization. There a lot of levers that she would be really good at pulling around larger issues that affect the future of the Internet – open standards, personal privacy on the internet, the rights of individuals who use these tools day to day – and she can have a large impact there. More than most of us. And I know that’s what she’s interested in doing and I’m glad that we’re going to give her the chance to execute on that. She has proven that people can create change through direct action and I hope that she’s able to take what she has learned here and now and apply it in different areas, while still keeping that work in the Mozilla family.

I think that it’s very important to understand this change in the context of the organization that we’re all a part of it. We’re a hybrid. Part open source project, part business, part non-profit. But we have a very specific mission that covers all of those moving parts: all the way from the Mozilla Foundation board, to the people who are actually employed by the Corporation, to individual contributors who work on this project because they love what we do and they want to be a part of it. We’re all taking part in that mission together.

One part of our project is The Mozilla Corporation. It’s built to take our ideas and values and turn them into action. Action in the form of a product: Firefox. John’s role will be to make sure that the part of the project thrives and grows and properly executes on the opportunities that are created as a result.

Mitchell will be growing into another kind of role, one to which I think that she is uniquely qualified. And one that the Mozilla project gives her a great platform to execute on. I’m lucky enough to have known Mitchell for nearly a decade, and I believe that we have grown into quite close friends. I know very few people who bring the kind of intelligence and fire to topics of personal interest and who are so good at creating actions in others at the same time. I’m hoping that she’s able to use the platform that we have and use it to create the kind of change that we all need as Internet users. No matter what the form.

I used the word “opportunity” above to describe part of John’s role at the Corporation. In that context I’m talking about the kinds of things that you might expect in a business context. The chance to build a revenue stream to support the mission, create relationships that create more leverage for Firefox and open standards. The kinds of things that the Mozilla Corporation does today.

But there are larger opportunities in front of the Mozilla project as a whole, not just those for the Corporation that I listed above. I think that John should be very jealous of what Mitchell has in front of her because she’s going to get to work on the larger questions. For example: What does it mean for users of the Internet when a very small group of people can create change for the benefit of everyone? What can it mean for the future of open standards, open source software and how open the Internet will be in the future? Is there a model here that others can execute on? How can we continue to protect the rights of users and the ability for companies and individuals to continue to innovate on top of the Open Web and the Internet? How can we make sure that the very platform of the Internet also continues to grow and learn and doesn’t get locked up on top of a proprietary implementation or standard that slows the extremely beneficial development we’ve seen to date? I think that these are the kinds of questions that Mitchell will be able to tackle and I hope that she does. If so, we’re all better off. Trust me. I’ve seen it happen before.

Firefox 3: rocking on Linux

January 2, 2008 in Design, Firefox, GNOME, Linux, Mozilla | 41 comments

A few people have been noticing how good our support on Linux has gotten during the Firefox 3 development cycle and I thought I would post to try and point out some of the good stuff that we have coming down the pipe.

Native Widget Support

Thanks to the awesome work of a pile of contributors, the native theme support on Linux has gotten much better. The guys doing this work include Ian Spence, Julien Rivaud, Michael Ventnor, Matthew Gregan, Teune van Steeg and Ian McKellar.

Mixed with the new native form controls that we have for all platforms coming up for Firefox 3, the results make the web so much more pleasant to use. Here’s an example of how much nicer forms will look with Firefox 3 on Linux:

Firefox 2 Firefox 3



Desktop and Icon Integration

The Tango guys have been doing a lot of work on building an icon set for Firefox 3. But they aren’t just making new icons. It’s more than that. It’s also making sure that we use the native icons wherever we can. You can see screenshots of the various themes in this arstechnica article and in an Icon sheet that Alex put together. The guys doing the heavy lifting for the Tango icons are Andreas Nilsson, Kalle Persson, Ulisse Perusin, Jakub Steiner, and Lapo Calamandrei. Michael Ventnor and Michael Monreal have been doing work to make sure that native Icons are used whenever it’s possible.

I made some images that show some differences between Firefox 2 and Firefox 3. I suggest that you look at the full image with notes for the Firefox 3 image. It will show you some of the more subtle things that the native theme code does today to create a really good experience.

Firefox 2

Firefox 3

We’ve started to explore deeper desktop integration as well. For example, we have a service that can connect to DBus and we listen for NetworkManager changes to determine when we should be online or offline. Since this is a service I’m pretty sure we can extend this to other places as well, including from XUL chrome and Firefox Extensions. (Maybe it’s time to move away from the horror of XRemote and move to a DBus service for activating a browser instance at last?) Robert also landed patches that he did when he was still at Novell to do proper startup notification.

Cairo and Pango are first class citizens (and then some!)

Way back in the day I did the original patches to start using Pango in Firefox as another font backend. Since then that work has been migrated into the core of the rendering engine and is used as the native font backend for Linux.

Cairo has gotten an even deeper integration into our engine. Vlad did a great post on the rendering infrastructure that’s coming in Firefox 3 and if you look you’ll notice that Cairo is our base rendering engine for all of our platforms. Vlad and other contributors did a lot of work to improve Cairo for Linux, Windows and the Mac. This is a great example of where we needed a library for all of our platforms and our investment to make sure it worked everywhere really benefitted Linux.

Other Platform Improvements

There are a staggering number of platform improvements coming in Firefox 3. In the area of memory use and performance we’re making good strides. One example that affects Linux is the use of Pixmap memory by Firefox. Federico originally wrote a patch that ditched pixmap memory from the image decoders. Stuart did a lot of work to get that into our tree and we now throw away pixmaps after 60 seconds or so. This should keep a good balance between performance and memory use and will improve the perceived memory consumption of the browser. (Note: this still needs to be ported to the GIF decoder – looking for someone awesome to volunteer to do it!)

Stuart has been doing a huge number of blog posts about the work that he’s been doing in looking at memory fragmentation. Part of mitigating fragmentation as an issue (we can’t eliminate it completely) is removing allocations entirely or moving allocations into their own pools. Stuart posted the results (including a pretty graph) of what it looks like when we remove 100,000 allocations from the startup path of the browser. We’ve also been looking at using per-document memory pools as a way to mitigate some of the effects of fragmentation. Connecting allocation pools to the lifetime of objects seems to be the right way to think about the problem, and documents have a well-known lifetime.

That’s just one area in which we’ve invested in Firefox 3’s platform. You should take the time to walk over and look at the list of new features we’ve got coming up in Firefox 3. You should go look at it. Right now. No, really, I’ll wait.

Did you look yet? No? No, really. I’m fine. I can wait. I have the time. Go look.

It’s an impressive list, isn’t it? I certainly thought so the first time that I looked at it.

Investing in GNOME

I thought it would be worth it to talk about some of the more general investments that the Mozilla Foundation has been making in GNOME. Mozilla has joined the GNOME Advisory Board (although we’re not listed on the web page for some reason) and we’ve been funding a fair bit of work on Accessibility. Behdad posted about it and it was mentioned in Frank’s overview of 2007 grants that were done. It amounts to around $150k in investments to date and we’re trying to figure out how to direct money along with GNOME on some more accessibility efforts as well. So we’ll continue to see investments from Mozilla to GNOME and hopefully see a closer relationship come together as we continue to work together on open source, open format issues and continue sharing technology.

Overall I think that things on Linux are pretty healthy. We’re going to be able to deliver a top-notch product on top of Linux, we’re working well with other projects and our technology works really well on the platform. What we’re going to deliver is better integrated, faster and smaller and brings all the work that we’re doing to improve the web to Linux and we’re doing it at parity with the other two major platforms. I’m very excited to see how people react to the new browser on Linux. I think they will be very happy with it.