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20. August 2017

Celebrating LCARS With One Last Theme Release

30 years ago, a lot of people were wondering what the new Star Trek: The Next Generation series would bring when it would debut in September 1987. The principal cast had been announced, as well as having a new Enterprise and even the pilot's title was known, but - as always with a new production - a lot of questions were open, just like today in 2017 with Star Trek Discovery, which is set to debut in September almost to the day on the 30th anniversary of The Next Generation.

Given that the story was set to play 100 years after the original and what was considered "futuristic" had significantly changed between the late 1960s and 1980s, the design language had to be significantly updated, including the labels and screens on the new Enterprise. Scenic art supervisor and technical consultant Michael Okuda, who had done starship computer displays for The Voyage Home, was hired to do those for the new series, and was instructed by series creator and show runner Gene Roddenberry that this futuristic ship should have "simple and clean" screens and not much animation (the latter probably also due to budget and technology constraints - the "screens" were built out of colored plexiglass with lights behind them).



With that, Okuda created a look that became known as "LCARS" (for Library Computer Access and Retrieval System (which actually was the computer system's name). Instead of the huge gray panels with big brightly-colored physical buttons in the original series, The Next Generation had touch-screen panels with dark background and flat-style buttons in pastel color tones. The flat design including the fonts and flat-design frames are very similar to quite a few designs we see on touch-friendly mobile apps 30 years later. Touch screens (and even cell phones and tablets) were pretty much unheard of and "future talk" when Mike Okuda created those designs, but he came to pretty similar design conclusions as those who design UIs for modern touch-screen devices (which is pretty awesome when you think of it).

I was always fascinated with that style of UI design even on non-touch displays (and am even more so now that I'm using touch screens daily), and so 18 years ago, when I did my first experiments with Mozilla's new browser-mail all-in-one package and realized that the UI was displayed with the same rendering engine and the same or very similar technologies as websites, I immediately did some CSS changes to see if I could apply LCARS-like styling to this software - and awesomeness ensued when I found out that it worked!

Image No. 23114

Over the years, I created a full LCARStrek theme from those experiments (first release, 0.1, was for Mozilla suite nightlies in late 2000), adapted it to Firefox (starting with LCRStrek 2.1 for Firefox 4), refined it and even made it work with large Firefox redesigns. But as you may have heard, huge changes are coming to Firefox add-ons, and full-blown themes in a manner of LCARStrek cannot be done in the new world as it stands right now, so I'm forced to stop developing this theme.

Image No. 23308

Given that LCARS has a huge anniversary this year, I want to end my work on this theme on a high instead of a too sad a note though, so right along the very awesome Star Trek Las Vegas convention, which just celebrated 30 years of The Next Generation, of course, I'm doing one last LCARStrek release this weekend, with special thanks to Mike Okuda, whose great designs made this theme possible in the first place (picture taken by myself at that convention just two weeks ago, where he was talking about the backlit LCARS panels that were dubbed "Okudagrams" by other crew members):
Image No. 23314

Live long and prosper!

Von KaiRo, um 00:21 | Tags: Firefox, LCARStrek, Mozilla, SeaMonkey, Star Trek, themes | 5 Kommentare | TrackBack: 0

14. März 2017

Final Round for My LCARStrek and EarlyBlue Themes

As you may have noted, Mozilla published a plan for a new themes system that doesn't fully cover my thoughts on the matter and ends up making themes that go as far as my LCARStrek theme impossible.

The only way I could still hold up this extent of theming is to spread it guerilla-style as userChrome.css mods, i.e. a long CSS sheet to be copied into people's userChromes.css manually. That would still allow the extent of theming, but be extremely inconvenient to distribute.

Because of that, I will stop development of my themes as soon as Firefox 57 hits Nightly and I can't use the LCARStrek theme myself any more (EarlyBlue, which is SeaMonkey-only, is something I just dragged along anyhow). Given the insecurity of even having releases and the small "market", I also will not continue them for SeaMonkey only, Firefox has been the only thing that really mattered any more there.

Also, explicit theming support for Firefox devtools is being removed from LCARStrek with the 2.49 release that I just submitted to AMO as it's extremely complicated to maintain and with the looming removal of full themes from Firefox, that amount of work is not worth my time any more. Because of this, there is a bit of a mixture of styles in some areas of devtools esp. in Firefox 52 (improving in newer versions) but that is outside of the control of a theme author. I tested that devtools are usable this way, contrast of icons in toolbars isn't optimal at times but visible enough so developers can work with them. To any LCARStrek users, sorry for the inconvenience, I would have put more work into this if the theming feature of this extent would not be removed.

Image No. 23308

This is a hard step for me as the first thing I experimented with when I downloaded my first Mozilla M5 build in 1999 was actually the theming files, and LCARStrek came out of that as a demonstration of how awesome this system of customization was and how far it could go. It achieve a look that really was out of this world, but I guess the new direction of Firefox is not compatible with a 24th century look. ;-)

It will also be hard for me go move back to the bland look of the default theme, esp. as it looks even more boring on Linux than on other platforms, but I have a few months to get used to the idea before I actually have to do this, and I will keep the themes going for that little while.

Somehow this fits well with the overall theme that MoCo and myself are at odds right now on a number of things, but you can be assured that I'm not gone from the community, as a matter of fact I have planned a few activities in Vienna in the next months, from WebVR workshops to conference appearances, and I'm just about to finish the Tech Speakers training and hope to be more active in that area in the future.

LLAP!

Von KaiRo, um 18:33 | Tags: EarlyBlue, Firefox, LCARStrek, Mozilla, SeaMonkey, themes | 2 Kommentare | TrackBack: 0

24. August 2015

Ending Development and Support for My Add-ons

This has been a long time coming, actually, and recent developments just put the final nail in the coffin.

I am ending all development and support for my "extension"-type add-ons effective immediately.

This affects (daily user numbers according to addons.mozilla.org):
If anyone is interested in taking over development and maintenance of any of those, please let me know and I'm happy to convert their repositories over to github for easier working with them, and and the new developer to their administration on AMO and/or move them over to you completely.

I will leave them listed on AMO for a little while so people who want to take over can take a look, but I will hide them from the site in the near future if nobody is interested.

The reasons for this step are multiple:

For one thing, I just don't have the time for updating their code or improving them. My job is stressful enough that my head is overflowing with Mozilla-related things all the time, and my employer is apparently not willing to give me any relief (in terms of hiring someone to supplement me) that would give me back sanity, so I need to remove some Mozilla- and software-related thing from my non-work time to gain back a little sanity so that I don't burn out.

I am also really sad that apparently nobody finds the time or energy to make decent managing and notification mechanisms available for UI code around the new-style web storage mechanisms like indexedDB, appCache, or ServiceWorkers caching, while we do have quite nice APIs there for long-standing things like cookies. For getting Tahoe Data Manager (which was my most interesting add-on) to work decently, I would have needed decent APIs there as well.

Then, my interest for experimenting with code has moved more and more away from the browser, which keeps changing around me all the time, and towards actual web development, where existing code doesn't get broken all the time and your code is more isolated. As a bonus, I can develop things that run on my (Firefox OS) phone and that I can show other people when I'm somewhere. And even there, I don't get as much time to dig into stuff as I would like to, see above.

And finally, and that's why this culminates right now, I disagree with some pieces of Mozilla's add-on strategies right now, and I don't want to be part of that as an add-on developer.
For one, I think add-on signing is a good idea in principle, but not enabling developers to test their code in any way in the same builds that users get is against everything I learned in terms of quality assurance. Then, requiring developers and other users of unbranded (or early pre-release) builds to turn off security for everything just to use/test one or two unsigned add-ons just feels plainly wrong to me (and don't tell me it can't be done otherwise, as I know there are perfectly good ways to solve this without undermining signing and preserving more safety). And I also fear that, while add-on signing brings a lot of pain to add-on developers and will make us lose some of them and their users, we will not reduce the malware/adware problem in the mid to long term, but rather make it worse, as they will resort to injecting binary DLLs into the Firefox process, which is the primary cause of startup crashes on updates, and I will have more grief in my actual job due to this, next to Firefox losing users that see those crashes.
And on the deprecation of "the permissive add-on model" as they call it in the post, I think that the Firefox UI being written in web (CSS/JS/HTML) or web-like (XUL) technologies and the ability to write add-ons that can use those to do anything in Firefox, including prototyping and inventing new functionality and UI paradigms, is the main thing that sets Firefox apart product-wise from all its competitors. If we take that away, there is no product reason for using Firefox over any other browser, the only reasons will be the philosophy behind Mozilla (which is what I'm signed up for anyhow)and the specific reflection of those in some internals of the browser, like respecting privacy and choice a little bit more than others - but most people consider that details, and it's hard to win them over with those. Don't get me wrong, I think that the WebExtensions API is a great idea (and it would be awesome to standardize some bits of it across browsers), and add-ons being sandboxed by default is long overdue. But we also would need to require less signing and review for add-ons that are confined to the safe APIs provided there, and I think we'd still, with heavy review, signing, and whatnot, need to allow people to go fully into the guts of Firefox, with full permissions, to provide the basis for the really ground-breaking add-ons that set us apart from the rest of the world. Even though almost all of the code of my add-ons ran within their own browser tab, they required a good reach into high-permission areas, which probably the new WebExtensions API will not allow that way. But I also do not even have the time to investigate how I could adapt my add-ons to any of this, so I decided to better pull the plug right now.

So, all in all, I probably have waited too long with this anyhow, mostly because I really like Tahoe Data Manager, but I just can't go on pretending that I will still develop or even maintain those add-ons.

Again, if anyone is interested in taking over, either fully or with a few patches here and there, please contact me and I'll help to make it happen.

(Note that this does not affect my language packs, dictionaries, or themes at this point, I'm continuing to maintain and develop them, at least for now.)

Von KaiRo, um 17:14 | Tags: Add-Ons, Data Manager, download manager, Firefox, Mandelbrot, Mozilla | 4 Kommentare | TrackBack: 0

19. Dezember 2013

LCARStrek and Australis

The latest version of my LCARStrek theme does not just support the latest SeaMonkey and Firefox releases. As I'm using it myself on Nightly, I'm trying to keep it working in an experimental way with that as well - and with that, a pretty huge challenge came up in the last weeks: A redesign of the Firefox interface code-named "Australis".

I blogged a month ago about how it may affect my customizations and I have dealt with those to a good degree by now, even though not yet even as drastically as I thought when writing that blog post. As always, more will follow. It took me some time until I switched over actually, as I wanted to keep using my theme, but it was naturally not compatible with such a huge redesign.

But after a lot of hours of my free time in the last few weeks, I have experimental support for Australis working in LCARStrek. The new changes living together with support for pre-Australis Firefox in the same theme require quite a few hacks to have a number of styles only apply on one side or the other. But then, I have been doing theme design for long enough (about 14 years now) that I know a few tricks and could use those - thankfully, there are a few changes in attributes set on the main toolbox, for example.

There's still a lot to be done in this area to fix some details (and I see a painting issue that is triggered in the submenus of the new main menu but is probably Linux-specific and connected to transparency used in the arrowpanel), but the main things seems to work decently now. See this screenshot:
Image No. 23159

Given that I'm using it every day, I hope starting now gives me enough experience with it that I can deliver a really decent theme when Australis finally will ship, probably with Firefox 29. :)

Von KaiRo, um 23:43 | Tags: Firefox, LCARStrek, Mozilla, themes | 1 Kommentar | TrackBack: 0

4. April 2013

15, 14, 13, 8, 7, 2 years ago, and the future? My Web Story

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! :)

Von KaiRo, um 00:13 | Tags: CrashKill, Firefox, future, history, L10n, Mozilla, SeaMonkey | 6 Kommentare | TrackBack: 0

18. Februar 2013

LCARStrek 2.16 Brings Updated Look

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):

Image No. 23116Image No. 23120

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):

Image No. 23114Image No. 23117

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):

Image No. 23119

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.

Von KaiRo, um 18:46 | Tags: Firefox, LCARStrek, Mozilla, SeaMonkey, themes | keine Kommentare | TrackBack: 0

17. Jänner 2013

"Webby" browser UI on mobile? It's FirefoxOS or nothing.

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! :)

Von KaiRo, um 17:23 | Tags: Android, Firefox, FirefoxOS, mobile, Mozilla, N810, N9, N900 | 1 Kommentar | TrackBack: 0

23. Mai 2012

Jetzt testen: Firefox Beta für Android-Telefone

Eines der größten Projekte, an denen Mozilla in den letzten Monaten intern gearbeitet hat, ist der völlig umgeschriebene Firefox für Android - nachdem frühere Versionen besonders auf Telefonen eher als langsam beim Start und großzügig im Speicherverbrauch auffielen, sind diese neuen Versionen jetzt extrem schnell beim Start, deutlich schlanker im Speicher, und unterstützen das Flash-Plugin.

Und jetzt sind sie als Beta zum Download verfügbar!

Wenn du Zugang zum Google Play Store hast, dann einfach von der offiziellen Beta-Download-Seite (oder direkt aus dem Store) installieren. Eine Bewertung im Store würde uns auch freuen, da viele der bisherigen Bewertungen von der alten, eher klobigen und langsamen Version kommen.

Wenn du keinen Google-Account verbunden hast oder aus anderen Gründen den Store nicht nutzt, die aktuellste Beta-Version vom FTP-Server holen, derzeit ist das 14.0b2 (aber ca. jede Woche kommt eine aktualisierte mit großteils Stabilitäts-Fixes).

Die neue Beta ist auf Telefone mit ARMv7-Prozessoren ausgerichtet, an einer Adaptierung für Tablets und an ARMv6-Unterstützung arbeiten wir noch.

Abstürze und Bugs bitte nach Möglichkeit an uns melden, mit dem eingebauten Crash-Reporter bzw. über Bugzilla.

Danke! :)

Von KaiRo, um 15:57 | Tags: Android, Fennec, Firefox, Mozilla | keine Kommentare | TrackBack: 0

14. März 2012

de: Nützliche Ressourcen für Mozilla-Übersetzer

Auf meinen Aufruf für neue Übersetzer haben sich ein paar Leute gemeldet, auch "alte Bekannte" haben gemeint, sie würden sich dafür interessieren, an der deutschen Thunderbird-, Firefox- oder SeaMonkey-Übersetzung mitzuhelfen.

Sebastian "Archeopteryx" hat im Thunderbird-Forum einen Beitrag mit wichtigen Ressourcen gepostet, ich will hier auf dem aufbauen und einen kleinen Überblick geben (teilweise 1:1 übernommen, teilweise von mir etwas mehr ausgeführt):

Wichtigste Regel:

Es gibt einige Werkzeuge, die man erste kennen lernen muss. Keine Angst, wir haben alle Fehler gemacht, nur daraus lernt man. Wir "anderen" beißen nicht, sondern helfen gerne!

Anfangs muss man eventuell etwas Software installieren, aber davon sollte man sich nicht abschrecken lassen, man kann auch jederzeit um Hilfe fragen oder falls etwas nicht verständlich ist.
  • Bugzilla ist die Seite, wo die meisten Entwicklungsentscheidungen und Fehlerberichte verwaltet werden.
    Berichte über die deutsche Übersetzung gehören dort in das "Produkt" "Mozilla Localizations" und dessen "Komponente" "de / German".
  • Localization Quick Start Guide - Einführung in die Mozilla-Übersetzungsarbeit mit vielen Links und Erklärungen verschiedener Werkzeuge und Begriffe.
    Da auch Webseiten-Übersetzungen usw. angesprochen werden, braucht man nicht alles davon, um ein Produkt wie Firefox, Thunderbird oder SeaMonkey zu übersetzen.
  • L10n Dashboard: Zeigt den Stand der Lokalisierung der verschiedenen Produkte an.
    Zeilen mit roter Farbe haben fehlende Texte, mit gelber nur (ev.) überflüssige, mit grüner haben sie alles übersetzt. Der "C"-Link in jeder Zeile zeigt an, welche "Strings", also Textstücke, wirklich fehlen oder überflüssig sind, sowie ev. Fehler und Warnungen.
  • Localization with Mercurial: Beschreibt, wie man die Texte für die Übersetzung runterlädt.
    Hier geht es um jenen Kern, der Leuten ohne Programmiererfahrung meist mal nicht ganz geheuer ist. Man gewöhnt sich aber dran und lernt Dinge, die man an vielen anderen Stellen auch brauchen kann (die meisten Open-Source-Projekte laufen auf ähnlicher Basis dazu). Wir arbeiten in der deutschen Übersetzung meist direkt mit den Textdateien, was manchmal komisch anmutet, aber sehr gut funktioniert.
  • Die "de"-Repositories: Central, Aurora, Beta
    Hier liegen die eigentlichen Übersetzungen, die 3 verschiedenen Repositories entsprechen den Firefox-Kanälen Nightly, Aurora und Beta (es gibt ein viertes für Release, das ist für uns Übersetzer aber belanglos, denn dort werden keine Änderungen mehr angenommen) - bei Thunderbird und SeaMonkey mögen die nicht ganz diese Namen haben, gelten aber äqulivalent, alle Produkte sind im gleichen Repository. Alle 6 Wochen, am Release-Tag, wird alles aus Aurora nach Beta übernommen, und für die englische Orginialversion auch Central nach Aurora. Wir versuchen auch für de Central und Aurora immer wieder zu synchronisieren, aber das passiert meist erst etwas später, für die meisten Übersetzer ist das aber eher wenig relevant. Die Hauptarbeit zur Übersetzung sollte auf Aurora passieren, denn da bleibt der Vergleich zu den "originalen" immer 6 Wochen lang konstant - wenn wir das aber übersetzt haben, versuchen wir, auch für Central mit deutschen Übersetzungen nachzuziehen, aber da kann sich ständig etwas ändern.
  • Patching a Localization und Creating a patch: Wie man die Änderungen in einer Datei speichert
    Wenn man (wie jeder, der mal "frisch" ins Team reinkommt), die Berechtigungen nicht hat, um direkt in Mercurial Änderungen einzuspielen, muss man diese Patch-Dateien erstellen und dann an einen "Bug" in Bugzilla als Attachment hochladen sowie einen, der schon im Team ist, um "Review" fragen (siehe Getting Reviews, von zweiterem Artikel verlinkt). Der zweitere Artikel stammt aus einer Serie, die für Änderungen am Programmcode von Firefox, Thunderbird und SeaMonkey auch gilt, für Übersetzungen läuft manches ähnlich, aber oft lockerer (kompilieren und testen ist nicht unbedingt vorher notwendig, und ähnliches).
  • L10n-checks und compare-locales: Zwei Werkzeuge (Skripts), um die Übersetzung auf Fehler zu übeprüfen (z.B. zweimal den gleichen Buchstaben für den Zugriff auf verschiedene Menüeinträge)
    Braucht man nicht unbedingt verwenden, aber sich hilfreich, um Probleme zu finden. Compare-locales ist exakt jenes Skript, das auch hinter dem "C"-Link im L10n-Dashboard (siehe oben) liegt, bringt also gegenüber dem nichts neues, man kann es aber auch gleich lokal verwenden, wenn man will, um am eigenen Computer zu kontrollieren, dass man "alles erwischt" hat.

An dieser Stelle möchte ich auch auf den IRC-Chat verweisen: In Channel #mozilla.de (am Server irc.mozilla.org) sind einige deutsche Community-Mitglieder, inklusive Übersetzern wie Archeopteryx, Topal, KaiRo (ich), chewey und andere sehr oft online und helfen bei Fragen zu diesen Themen gern weiter, so weit wir können (allerdings, bitte Geduld haben, wir haben das oft neben der Arbeit offen und sehen nicht ständig rein und können nicht immer antworten).

Und jeden Mittwoch um 21 Uhr ist in #deMeeting ein Treffen der ganzen deutschen Übersetzer-Gemeinschaft, in dem wir durchbesprechen, was es in der jeweiligen Woche an Neuigkeiten gibt bzw. wo wir uns koordinieren müssen. Wir freuen uns über interessierte Teilnehmer!

Damit hoffe ich, einige interessante Hinweise geboten zu haben und hoffe, dass einige "neue" Leute uns in Zukunft bei den Übersetzungen helfen! :)

Von KaiRo, um 22:20 | Tags: de, Firefox, L10n, Mozilla, SeaMonkey, Thunderbird | 1 Kommentar | TrackBack: 2

12. März 2012

de: Die nächste Generation?

Alex Ihrig, unser langzeitiger deutscher Thunderbird-Übersetzer, hat vor kurzem bekannt gegeben, dass wir einen neuen "Maintainer" für Thunderbird brauchen, also jemanden, der die Übersetzung übernimmt. Alex hat 9 Jahre lang gute Arbeit geleistet, der deutsche Thunderbird ist ein wichtiger Beitrag für Mozilla, und Alex hat auch in den gemeinsamen Bereichen einiges übersetzt, was uns alles geholfen hat. Ihm gebührt großer Dank dafür.

Trotzdem heißt die Nachricht, dass er das nicht weiter machen wird, dass wir neue Leute für die Thunderbird-Übersetzung suchen. Aber nicht nur dafür: Kadir hat für die Firefox-Übersetzung etwas wenig Zeit übrig, seit er hauptamtlich und in anderen Bereichen für Mozilla arbeitet, und auch meine Zeit für die SeaMonkey-Übersetzung ist in letzter Zeit extrem beschränkt. Wir wären beide froh, bei diesen Produkten auch Unterstützung von anderen zu bekommen, sodass wir in Zukunft die Arbeit nach Möglichkeit auch mal anderen Community-Mitgliedern übergeben können.

Wir haben diesen Arbeitsbereich viel Erfahrung gesammelt, es ist an der Zeit, die an andere weiter zu geben und selbst neue Projekte zu suchen, die wir aufarbeiten können. Man sollte nicht zu lange in einer Routine stecken, andere können sicher wieder weniger abgestumpft daran arbeiten und daher die Qualität hoffentlich auch weiter verbessern.

Also, wenn ihr das lest und Interesse daran, habt, die deutschsprachigen Mozilla-Produkte vorwärts zu bringen, wir freuen uns über Hilfe!
Die nötigen Qualifikationen sind nicht allzu schwierig - gute Deutschkenntnisse, keine Scheu, auch mal über Wortwahl zu diskutieren und Rechtschreibregeln nachzusehen, und nach Möglichkeit etwas Erfahrung mit Reintexteditoren (aber die kann man sich auch direkt am Beispiel aneignen). Und keine Angst, wir sind ja da, um euch zu helfen und in die Materie einzuführen.

Übersetzungsarbeit ist eine gute Chance, um im Mozilla-Projekt mitzuhelfen, auch wenn man vielleicht keine Ahnung vom Programmieren hat, und in diese großartige Gemeinschaft "hineinzuwachsen" - mach mit!

Von KaiRo, um 02:01 | Tags: de, Firefox, L10n, Mozilla, SeaMonkey, Thunderbird | 3 Kommentare | TrackBack: 1

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