The roads I take...

As Digital Preservation is part of the agenda of the US Library of Congress, they're doing a workshop on Software Preservation next week, and Mozilla was invited as an expert group. Otto de Voogd and myself are in the delegation going there (I'll be roughly in the Washington, DC, area from Saturday until June 2) for Mozilla - and the text below is a guest post by Otto with questions that we would like some feedback on so we can represent the Mozilla community as well as possible:

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On the 20th and 21st of May the Library of Congress holds a workshop on the topic of preserving software.
Otto de Voogd and Robert Kaiser will be representing Mozilla, putting forward our viewpoint as custodians of a codebase with a significant heritage and importance.

Many questions and thoughts arise. Here's an overview of ours; we look forward to feedback.


- Should archivists keep source codes or executables or both?

Executables and source code are both valuable. Executables are valuable because the source code is sometimes not available, or perhaps the build tools are not, and setting up a build environment for older code can be a difficult and complex thing.

Source is valuable to determine how a program works. It also makes it possible to reuse code and algorithms, especially, but not only, in the case of open source software.


- Preserving documentation.

Preserving documentation that goes with software, seems logical.
Would this need to go as far as preserving discussion threads and entries in bug trackers?


- Preserving environments/platforms.

It seems obvious that without preserving an environment in which the software can run, it is going to be impossible to experience the software.
Preserving such an environment should therefor be part of the software preservation effort.

To avoid the physical constraints imposed by preserving old hardware (which would be a preservation effort in its own right), a solution would be to build virtual machines and emulators.
As hardware capacity constantly grows, running virtual versions of older hardware should generally be feasible.

To fully recreate an environment we'd also need to preserve the operating systems and other software tools that the preserved software needs to run.
Those being software themselves would logical already be included in any software preservation effort.

Preserving documentation concerning environments, would also be required.
To build virtual machines and emulators it would be helpful for hardware makers to make technical specifications available. One could envision this to become a legal requirement at least for older hardware.

Can we imagine a world where web based emulators would allow an online digital library to serve users worldwide? Users who would be able to run old software in emulators running in their browsers...


- Is everything worth preserving, if not how does one go about selecting what is worth preserving?

Does one need to preserve every version of software, just the last version or all major releases? What about preserving software that has not spread widely. Would there be some threshold, or some other criteria?


- How does one index software and search the library?

There will be a need to gather meta data about software and the preservation of documentation as we already mentioned. This meta data and documentation could serve to populate an index enabling for instance the search for particular features.


- Can software preservation help in making code reusable?

If there are good ways to actually find relevant and useful code, this could lead to more reuse not only of actual code, but also of algorithms and concepts.
It may also become a valuable source for students who wish to learn about actual implementations of software solutions.

At the very least a minimum of meta data, such publication dates, copyright owners and licenses should be available to determine how certain code can be reused.
In particular for open source software we believe that software libraries should strive make it available without restrictions.


- Preserving data formats.

The software preservation effort should also include an effort to preserve data formats. Including technical descriptions of those formats and the tools to read, write and edit those formats.


- Can software preservation help in the discovery of prior art?

We believe it can, and as such preserving old code could be a great tool in preventing the repatenting of existing software concepts.

Of course we believe that software patents shouldn't exist in the first place, as software is already covered by copyrights, but at the very least prior art is a good avenue to prevent some of the worst abuse of software patents.


- How do copyrights affect software libraries?

A lot of software is licensed to be used on a particular piece of hardware or only available via subscription. How does this affect software libraries? Should there be exceptions like there are for traditional libraries?

In the life cycle of software, the commercially exploitable time is limited, likely anything older than 10 years no longer has any commercial value.
Maybe copyrights on software should be significantly reduced to something like 10 years, which is more than enough to cover the commercially exploitable timeframe of the software life cycle.

Such a limit would greatly enhance the work of software libraries, increasing availability and ease of access as well as removing a lot of the red tape involving requests for permission to keep copies.


- What about software as a service?

And what about software as a service, where neither the source code nor the executables are ever published? How can something like Gmail be preserved, when neither the service's code nor the environment is available to the public?


- Preserving "illegal" or cracked copies?

What if a copy of a piece of software comes from an illegal source? A cracked version with modifications maybe? They have value in themselves as they are a cultural expression.

What if such an illegal copy is the only copy still available? Would it make sense to preserve that too?

The OpenStreetMap project has launched an all-in-JavaScript map editor called "iD" this week:



While we at Mozilla know you can do a lot of good things in JS these days - after all, we're even launching our own phone OS building fully on HTML+JS, and we have been using more and more JS code to power key functionality in our browsers and other products over the years - it's great to see that complex things like editing maps can be done fully in JS and available for all platforms now, while previously it took proprietary and availability-limited technologies like Flash or Java to do the same thing.

Great work, OpenStreetMap guys!


(And yes, as a contributor to OpenStreetMap and even OSMF member, I am biased, but free and open map data on the web fits Mozilla philosophy pretty well anyhow...)

Im Rahmen der Linuxwochen Wien (Infos zum Veranstaltungsort sind auf deren Seiten verfügbar) findet am 4. Mai 2013 von 10 bis 15 Uhr ein Firefox OS App Workshop statt.

Gemeinsam mit zwei Kollegen aus München werden wir dort nach einer Einführung in Firefox OS und Open Web Apps direkt in die Materie starten und an unseren/euren eigenen Apps basteln - ganz gleich, ob ihr von einer bloßen Idee oder einer schon existenten Web-Anwendung startet.

Ihr könnt euch ab jetzt anmelden!

Weitere Informationen und Anmeldungs-Link auf der Linuxwochen-Seite!

It all started on March 31, 1998. Just a few days off from 15 years ago.

Netscape open-sourced the code to its "Communicator" Internet suite, using its own long-standing internal code name as a label for that project: Mozilla.

I always liked the sub-line of a lot of the marketing material for this time - under the Mozilla star/lizard logo and a huge-font "hack", the material said "This technology could fall into the right hands". And so it did, even if that took time. You can learn a lot about that time by watching the Code Rush movie, which is available under a Creative Commons license nowadays. And our "Chief Lizard Wrangler" and project leader Mitchell Baker also summarized a lot of the following history of Mozilla in a talk that was recorded a couple of years ago.

Just about a year later, in May 1999, so 14 years ago, I filed my first bug after I had downloaded one of the early experimental builds of the Mozilla suite, building on the brand-new Gecko rendering engine. This one and most I filed back then were rendering issues with that new engine, mostly with my pretty new and primitive first personal homepage I had set up on my university account. After some experiments with CSS-based theming of the Mozilla suite, I did some playing around with exchanging strings in the UI and translating them to German, just to see how this new "XUL" stuff worked. This ended up in my first contribution contact and me providing a first completely German-language build on January 1, 2000.

A few months after that, in May, I submitted my first patch to the Mozilla project, which was a website change, actually. But only weeks later, I created a bug and patch against the actual Mozilla code - in June of 2000, 13 years ago. And it would by far not be the last one, even though my contributions the that code were small for years, a fix for a UI file here, a build fix for L10n stuff there. My main contributions stayed in doing the German localization for the suite and in general L10n-related issues. Even when Firefox came along in 2004, I helped that 1.0 release with some localization-related issues, esp. around localized snippets for its Google-based and -hosted start page - and stayed with L10n for the full suite otherwise (while Kadir would do the German Firefox L10n). I wrote a post in 2007 about how I stumbled into my Mozilla career.

As Firefox became rapidly successful and took an increasingly large standing in the project and community, I stuck with the suite as I liked a more integrated experience of email and browser - and I liked the richer feature set that the suite had to offer (Firefox did cut out a lot of functionality in the beginning to be able to found its new, leaner and more consumer-friendly UI). When in March of 2005, it became clear that the suite was going into strict maintenance mode and be abandoned by the "official" Mozilla project, I joined the team that took over maintenance and development of that suite - once again using a long-standing internal code name for that: SeaMonkey. In all that project-forming process 8 years ago, I took over a lot of the organizational roles, so that the coders in our group could focus at the actual code, and eventually was credited as "project coordinator" within the project management group we call the "SeaMonkey Council".

When I founded my own business 7 years ago, in January of 2006, I was earning money in surprising ways, and trying to lead the SeaMonkey project into the future. We were just about to release SeaMonkey 1.0 and convince the first round of naysayers that we actually could have the suite running as a community project. In the next years, we did quite some interesting and good work on that software, and a lot of people were finally realizing that "we made it" when we could release a 2.0 version that was based on the same "new" toolkit that Firefox and Thunderbird were built upon, removing a lot of old, cruft code and replacing it with newer stuff, including the now common-place add-ons system and automated updates among a ton of other things. I would end up doing a number of the major porting jobs from Firefox to SeaMonkey, including the places-based history and bookmarks systems, the download manager (including a UI that was similar to the earlier suite style), and the OpenSearch system. With the Data Manager, I even contributed a completely new and (IMHO) pretty innovative component into SeaMonkey. In those times, I think I did more coding work (in JS, mostly) than ever before, perhaps with the exception of the PHP-based CBSM community and content management platform I had done before that.

The longer I was in the SeaMonkey project, the more I realized, though, that the innovation I would like to have seen around the suite wasn't really happening - all the innovation to the suite came from porting Firefox and Thunderbird features and/or code, and that often with significant delay. Not sure if anything other than the Data Manager actually was a genuine SeaMonkey innovation, and I only came up with that when trying to finally get some innovation going, back in 2010. I was more and more unsatisfied with the lack of progress and innovation and the incredible push-back we got on the mailing list on every try to actually do something new. In October of 2010, I took a flight to Mountain View, California, to meet up with Mitchell Baker and talk about the future of SeaMonkey - and I also mentioned how I wanted to be more on the front of innovation even though I seem to not manage to get the SeaMonkey community there. Not sure if it came out of this or was in the back of her head before, in one of those conversations I had with her, she asked me if I would like to work for Mozilla and Firefox. I said that this caught me by surprise but we should definitely keep that conversation going. Just after that I met then-Mozilla-CEO John Lilly, and he asked if Mitchell had offered me a job - just to make sure. As you can imagine, that got me thinking a lot more about that, and gave me the freedom to think outside SeaMonkey for my future. I was at the liberty to think about my personal priorities in more depth, and it became clear that the winds of change were clearly blowing through my life.

After some conversations with people at Mozilla, I decided I wanted to try a job there, and Chris Hofmann proposed my working on tracking crashes and stability, so I started contracting for Mozilla on the CrashKill team in February 2011, first half-time, finally full-time. So, 2 years ago, I opened a completely new chapter in my personal web story. Tracking crash statistics for our products - Firefox desktop, Firefox from Android, and now Firefox OS - and working with our employees and community to improve stability has turned out to be a more interesting job than I expected when I started. Knowing that my work actually helps thousands or even millions of people, who have a more stable Firefox because of what I do, is a quite high award. And I'm growing into a more managerial role, which is something I really appreciate. And I'm connected to all kinds of innovation going on at Mozilla: A lot of the new features landing (like new JIT compilers for JavaScript, WebRTC, etc.) need stability testing and we're tracking the crash reports from those, Firefox for Android needed a lot of stability work to become the best mobile browser out there - and with Firefox OS, I was even involved in how the crash reporting features and user experience flow were implemented. I'm also involved in a lot of strategic meetings on what we release and when - an interesting experience by itself.

Where this all will lead me in the future? No idea. I'm interested in moving to the USA and working there at least for some time - not just because it would make my day cycle sane and having most or all my meetings within the confines of the actual work days in the region I'm living in, but also because I learned to like a lot that country has to offer, from Country Music to Football and many other things (not to mention Louisiana-style Cajun cuisine). I'm also interested in working from an office with other Mozillians for a change, and in possibly becoming even more of a manager. Of course, I'd like to help moving the Mozilla mission forward where I can, openness, innovation and opportunities on the web are something I stand behind nowadays more than ever - and Firefox OS as well as associated technologies promise to really make a huge impact on the web of the future. I'm looking forward to quite exciting times!

Every six weeks, it's time for a new release of Firefox and SeaMonkey, and along with them, updates for my EarlyBlue and LCARStrek themes to match those Firefox and SeaMonkey releases. Of course, I personally am using them with the Nightly versions and try to keep them working with those, so they are usable with newer versions already, but only after I incorporate changes from the beta cycle, they're really fully up to date with the release versions.

That said, I kinda had my worries with the buttons of LCARStrek being not really discoverable unless you move your mouse over them, and also about the theme feeling "too orange", esp. after I reviewed some shots of LCARS screens in Star Trek series and once again saw both the shapes of buttons there, which are very discoverable, and also the amount of colors used there.

So I finally decided to something about it and added some gradual changes to LCARStrek 2.16, see e.g. the buttons, tab and scrollbars colors in those two screenshots (left is a Firefox release with 2.15, right is a Nightly with 2.16, that's why it also has an additional "Data Choices" tab):



The new colors are taken directly from video screenshots of the series, so they should be pretty "true to the original". Actually, I copied the colors for buttons and default buttons directly from buttons in those screen shots. Trying to apply the same color to more button-like elements, I also converted buttons to that color and a larger border radius similar to that of the fully-rounded buttons.

While I was at it, I also took the orange off the primary toolbars and replaced it with a gray color taken from some screen that I think I saw on Voyager shots. And I always wanted to get some more of the connected horizontal and vertical borders found usually in LCARS screens, but that needs to have enough elements to construct, so it's hard to do in a theme. I found a way to get this design into the SeaMonkey sidebar though - and also used that new button color for its headers which act similarly to buttons as well. See those two screenshots from LCARStrek 2.0 (left) and now 2.16 (right) on SeaMonkey (of course, some small non-theme-reated changes in SeaMonkey UI are visible as well, as the application itself saw some development since 2.0):



I hope I caught all the fine details that come along with far-reaching changes like esp. the one for the buttons, I've done a number of corrective changes along with this.
Still I had some time left and enough elements to play with to give SeaMonkey's profile switcher some real beauty in LCARS terms (you also see the different color for default buttons in there):



Unfortunately, this only applies to "Switch Profile…" from within a running SeaMonkey profile, as a theme like LCARStrek can only apply in that situation and not on the profile manager seen on application startup, where no profile and therefore no add-on or theme is loaded yet.

The new LCARStrek 2.16 version has been submitted to AMO, but is waiting for review now. Once that is granted, all users of this theme will see that updated look, and I hope they'll like it!

I probably will work on updating the look of more parts of this theme as time allows and I find things that should look differently.

I've always been a huge fan of the idea of rendering (browser) UI with the web rendering engine and write even the UI itself in a "webby" language. This idea AFAIK came up at Netscape somewhere in 1998 when the new Gecko engine for Mozilla was built. Unfortunately, HTML wasn't in a shape back then to be used for writing complex UI, and actually was quite far away from doing that 15 years ago. The basic concept looked good though, and so an intermittent technology was created to build a UI language on similar concepts, using as much of the JavaScript and CSS from HTML as possible and a markup document written in something like "HTML for UI", which ultimately became XUL ("XML UI Language").

Firefox on desktop, as well as Thunderbird, SeaMonkey, BlueGriffon and others are written using XUL for all their UI, and it's working great there. Actually, this is what even lured me into contributing to Mozilla in the first place - I saw that the UI was written in a way that I could understand back then, as someone who had played around with writing HTML, including some CSS and tiny bits of JS. I felt right at home when I saw that a button in the UI was a <button> in the markup, and that markup followed basically the same, albeit stricter (due to being XML), rules as the HTML I knew. Sure, the tag names were a bit different, but it's UI, and they were easy to understand.
Of course, another import aspect was that this UI would work on any platform you could build Gecko for, be it Windows, Mac and Linux, or even OS/2, Solaris, BeOS and others (including exotics such as AmigaOS). Of course, to fit really in with the host OSes, a number of specific tweaks were added esp. for the mainstream ones, but it works without them, just doesn't integrate as well. As soon as you can compile the Mozilla engine (which takes enough effort anyhow), you also get the full UI, which is a nice deal.
And, of course, the extension system we built over the years has largely been based upon the concepts of XUL, but I won't go into depth on this right here.

Even on mobile devices, Mozilla used that concept for a while. That was great for portability, as you had a working browser with all UI once you could get it to compile somewhere. Hell, I even ran SeaMonkey on a Nokia N810 (a 4.1" Internet tablet) - with the full UI! Of course, that UI was way too small and too overloaded for use on a touch screen, but, being XUL, it loaded and could be used if you managed to tap the correct points with the stylus.
So, for portability, including getting it to run on new devices, this XUL UI was great - and of course, some XUL UI was created that would work decently on those small touch-screen devices. I like the concepts and UI of our modern mobile Firefox browsers (both look similar, see below) better, but we had a usable, easily hackable, nicely extendable UI built with XUL. When Android became a larger deal on mobile, we could just use that and make it work on this system as well, and had something usable pretty fast.



All would have been perfect if it wasn't for one problem: If you render all your UI with the web renderer, it means that you need to load up this rendering engine in its full glory before you can paint any UI at all. And with the web becoming more powerful, what needs to be loaded for that became pretty large, and with loading from permanent storage into memory being pretty slow on those weakly powered mobile devices, it meant waiting times of multiple seconds (on some devices 15 seconds and more) - while the same "smartphone" devices were propagating more and more the concept of instantly launching apps.
Back in 1998, waiting several seconds for an application to start was common and it was OK for Netscape or Mozilla browsers to do the same, maybe display a "splash screen" while the user was waiting for that. Now, in the fast-living world of smart phones, the usage patterns as well as the expectations have changed enough that this waiting time is what instantly (no pun intended) your app is being shot down by users for that, and nobody but your strong supporters (which Mozilla fortunately has) will use it. Things needed to change. And they did.

Basically, there's two ways Mozilla had to make the browser UI start fast: Either write it in a way that it used the "native" toolkit of the hosting OS and not depend on the rendering engine to launch (so that can be loaded lazily in the background), or to have that "native" toolkit of the system be our rendering engine already!
Well, as funny as it sounds, we ended up doing both!

On Android, we did the former, write a "native" (i.e. Java) Android app, which is very fast to be displayed as all the Java/Dalvik framework is already loaded, and load Gecko in the background once the UI is up - while the user interacts with the UI to e.g. enter a site to call up, we have enough time for that so Gecko is ready to display the actual websites once it's needed.
Unfortunately, that "native" UI is not "webby" any more, Java is very different from HTML/XUL/CSS - though AFAIK we are using quite a bit of JS to driver things, so there's at least some pieces left that someone like me would still understand. Oh, and as my job nowadays is stability, Java exceptions crash the browser, while we don't have that problem with JavaScript, and the amount of crash reports rose up significantly with that UI rewrite (the team is doing a great job on fixing them, though, and we've become actually pretty good in stability there nowadays). To be fair, we also added support for the Flash plugin, which seems to be causing by far the most stability problems with this version. All that said, this new Firefox for Android is really fast, esp. on startup, and works incredibly well, it's getting cheered as the best browser for Android by many - compare that with the quite bad reputation that the XUL-based version had and you need to admit this was a good change - even if you happen to be me.

Well, and then there's this thing that I mentioned with the "native" toolkit of the system be our rendering engine, and then you can use web technologies for the mobile browser UI, right? That's what we're doing in Firefox OS!
On that system, the whole UI of everything you see on screen is rendered by Gecko. And not just that, Mozilla took the final step and didn't even do it with XUL, but used plain HTML this time, so that everything running on this system is made of pure web apps (sure, with some new WebAPIs thrown in). All that said, there's some things in UI design where HTML still needs to catch up to XUL, but those mobile apps are working really nicely already (still, mobile has less UI with less complexity and less need for cross-app consistency, so the particular weak spots I'm thinking of don't come to light that much).
What it comes down to for what I want to say here is that in Firefox OS, we indeed have a browser on mobile which has its UI completely rendered by the web rendering engine (again) - but this time, not done in XUL but in plain HTML!

And it looks pretty good, compare our "native" Android UI to our Firefox OS UI and you'll see that there are some similarities:



And, go ahead and try yourself, e.g. in the simulator, it even pretty much works the same!

Time to come to the reason I actually brought this up today: You might ask what happened with the XUL-based UI for mobile, which I said was nicely portable to different devices (and older builds of which I still have in use on my "real-Linux-powered" N900 and N9 phones)? Well, it's dead and gone. And even its source has been removed today from our mozilla-central repository. So, if you want a browser with a "webby" UI on mobile, your only chance from now on is Firefox OS. (That is, if nobody comes along and resurrects a XUL UI for alternative mobile platforms in some external project.)

All that said, I'm excited that the original idea of rendering the UI with the browser engine survives on mobile - and actually thrives and is being hugely extended to powering the whole system, in Firefox OS!

Being born on a 13th (just like my brother), I've always considered the number 13 as somewhat of a "lucky number" for myself. And today, it's been 13 years since I started contributing to Mozilla!

It's been an interesting ride for sure so far, as a localizer, theme designer, build patch contributor, project leader/coordinator/manager, even JS/XUL author, add-on and web app developer, and nowadays paid-by-Mozilla contributor in stability tracking - just to name a few of the main things.

In those 13 years, Mozilla has changed my life, and enabled me to make a living out of idealism. It's crazy and awesome at the same time, or, I guess, actually crazy awesome!

And now, we're looking forward to achieve great things in "the year 13" that's upcoming in just a few weeks, and where we'll be trying to deliver on the momentum we built in 2012 and even ship phones that make "the web is the platform" literally true with Firefox OS!

I'm excited to have been in this community for such a long time of thirteen years and to continue strong in being part of this great project - and looking forward to making things "moar awesome" in two-thousand-and-thirteen!

My stability tracking role at Mozilla recently has been slightly modified to be more tied in with release management, which brought some additional item onto my plate, a lot of that being some sorts of bug triage.

That also required me to rethink some other things I'm doing, and for that, I saw I couldn't make the time to do a weekly status update blog post any more. Also, the original incentive to start hose posts was that I considered myself funded by the community in the model I had some years ago and felt I need to report to the community what I'm doing for that - for almost two years now, I have been funded by Mozilla instead, and I'm accountable to my manager anyhow, and as we're restructuring how contractors are managed, I probably will have some more formalities there as well. All in all, the original incentives aren't there any more and the report have become pretty dull for some time anyhow, so I'm stopping them now.

I will do small posts more often on interesting things I work on and other thoughts I have - and I hope I even get to a larger post every now and then, but my time for stuff like that is very limited nowadays.

Of course, I'll also keep posting interesting snippets to Disapora*.

Here's a short summary of Mozilla-related work I've done in week 44/2012 (October 29 - November 4, 2012):

• CSI:Mozilla / CrashKill:
  Filed a bug on sending an identifier with app crashes in B2G.
  Also filed a Flash beta crash.
  Discussed release channels for B2G and Socorro requirements.
  And we needed another Socorro data backfill, unfortunately.
  Added highlighting of the latest minor version of every Flash branch to the Flash hang overview reports.
  Also adjusted the limit values for the "Are We Stable Yet?" dashboard and converted some style attributes to classes in my reports.
  Had a long discussion with bjacob on getting new fields into Socorro data. We should find a way to make it easy to get new fields added in a way that (at least custom) reports can be generated against them, without using the mess that "App Notes" are right now.
  Followed the recent Flash crash spike.
  Did more monitoring of tracking+ crash bugs for 17.
  As usual, watched new/rising crashes, caring that bugs are filed where needed, and made sure my custom reports keep working well.
• Web Apps:
  Fixed some glitches in the improvements to the Mandelbrot app, but there seems to still be an issue with appCache - on my otoro device, I don't see the main index.html getting refreshed and so the app stops working.
  I also did quite a few updates to Lantea Maps, but now the map tiles seem to not load when appCache is active. Somehow I have a feeling that our techniques for offline apps are not working as well as they should.
• Various Discussions/Topics:
  B2G testing, Marketplace URL and branding strategies, etc.

Due to my traveling to London for MozFest, I completely missed making this report public even though I had finished it up before. Will follow up with a report for last week soon.