The roads I take...

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!



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.



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):


Live long and prosper!

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.



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!

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):

• Jökulsárlón Download Manager (almost 500 daily users, source on hg.m.o)
• KaiRo.at Mandelbrot (roughly 1000 daily users, source on git-public.kairo.at)
• Tahoe Data Manager (slightly over 300 daily users, source on hg.m.o) - this is also a default part of SeaMonkey.

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.)

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:


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.

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!

Like many others, I've been thinking quite a bit these days about what went on last year and what will or might come up in 2012. (And I figure I should bring in a bit more from my overall personality into my future blog posts and mention or quote songs I have in my mind on a particular topic, so I'll start with that here).

One topic that has been with me throughout the year and will probably also continue to be with me is change. A lot of it started with my visit to Mozilla headquarters in Mountain View, CA, in October 2010, actually - I posted about my changing personal priorities back then. And I still remember driving my rental car up to Lake Tahoe, thinking about all those things and listening to the then-just-released Zac Brown Band album "You Get What You Give" and in particular the song "Let It Go", whose lyrics gave me the right mindset for what was I was going through and what 2011 would bring: "Save your strength for things that you can change, forget the ones you can't, you gotta let it go."

Following that, I started 2011 by transferring the vast majority of my responsibilities in SeaMonkey over to other people (we have built up a great team there over the last years, including awesome people like Callek, InvisibleSmiley, etc. - kudos to them to be able to take all that over in their free time) and get the ball rolling on making the project even more sustainable in the future (I hope we'll have news for you on that soon).

Instead, I followed another piece of advice from this song - "When the pony he comes ridin' by, you better sit your sweet ass on it" - and started contracting for Mozilla on the CrashKill team in February, first half-time, finally full-time. With that, my focus changed from SeaMonkey to Firefox and from project management to crash analysis.

For one thing, I ended up growing into that role better than I imagined at first, finding crash analysis more interesting than expected, for the other, this change ended up having more influence on my life than I had imagined. With the need to communicate a lot with different people in this job, from the CrashKill team via the Socorro team that works on the crash-stats server and which I'm coordinating with to various devs, engineering managers or release managers as the need arises in crash analysis.
Unfortunately with me being a "remotie" all communication needs to be online (or via phone) and is stripped down to the essentials needed for the job. Being a very social person, I'm missing the additional nuances that face-to-face communication would bring to the table, and more need for communication as part of the job makes that more obvious to me.
Then, the whole CrashKill team is based in Mountain View, the vast majority of the Socorro team spread across the US, and most engineering or release managers also based in Northern America, so most of that communication as well as all my meetings is happening during US working hours, which from my point of view in Europe is in the evening to night hours, which requires my work time to be mostly at the end of the day. I have been doing work at late hours in the years before, but there was not as much requirement of that before, while now I have to make at least the meetings, and should be available for more conversation on IRC at those times. Making evening appointments becomes quite difficult in that light.
And speaking of requirements, while I could basically completely make my own schedule before, I now should bring in 8 hours of work per day, and with doing that at the end of every day, I need to make all shopping and other private stuff in the afternoon, leaving me all day with "I still have a full work day to deliver today" in mind - until I achieve that and fall into bed. This causes its own share of subconscious stress.
And I'm doing all the work from my own private apartment, not getting out unless I go shopping or take my usual Monday and Tuesday evening off for some Karaoke.
So, I learned that working from home and remotely has its downsides, esp. for the kind of job I'm in there. This is one area I need to work on a lot in 2012 and find solutions that will be connected with another share of change I'm sure.

But not only my role and work life have changed - Mozilla went in a direction I had often spoken for and has changed to a rapid release cycle and started planning for that shortly after I started contracting. I commented in the planning phase and tried to help shape this process and always was convinced it was a good idea, even though we hit more road bumps than expected. I was heavily involved in coordinating to get crash-stats support rapid releases usefully and also laid out publicly how the new process can improve stability.
Mozilla also has revamped its mobile efforts completely - both with a completely new "native UI" version of Firefox for Android, which is in Aurora testing now and with a completely open mobile stack in the form of Boot To Gecko (B2G), a complete "operating system" based on the browser and open web standards (requiring new WebAPIs), which is also coming together piece by piece now.
And next to those changes, we're also working on changing how identity and logins work on the web and changing the current "silo"ed app store model by bringing open concepts for web apps and markets into the fold that easily allow decentralization and users really "owning" their apps.
In the middle of all that, Mozilla has restructured a bit, brought some previously split-off groups back into the common Mozilla fold, hired a lot of new people, lost (as employees but not as community members) a few high-profile ones who were looking for new challenges, worked on the MPL 2.0, founded exciting new initiatives like WebFWD and went stronger on marketing that we are a non-profit - clearly a lot of change happening everywhere, with the mission and the Manifesto standing unchanged and as clear as ever over all of it, though.

All this makes it clear that a lot of change has come in 2011, both to me and Mozilla, and that it's still only the seed for what's to come in the year(s) ahead. The winds of change are still blowing, and I'm excited for what they propel and which interesting experiences they drag in for all of us.

I found the following question being raised on German newsgroups, but I guess there's more people interested in this:

Short version:
If you're not using a Mac, switching from 8.0 to 8.0.1 doesn't really help, so we only offer that update for Macs, on all other, 8.0 is just as good, as long as it runs.

Long version:
8.0.1 fixes exactly two things over 8.0:
1) A crash with the newest version of Apple's Java plugin for Mac (the bug is in that new Java version from Apple, but we can work around it with a small patch on our side).
2) On Windows, we're blocking old versions of Roboform that cause 8.0 to crash on startup, we only allow newer versions that don't cause that crash. In case 8.0 is already running, i.e not crashing when starting Firefox, this update doesn't really help anything, and we're avoiding to send people an update when they have no benefit of it, so we don't disturb them. If 8.0 is installed but crashing on startup (because of old Roboform), we don't even get to where an update would be installed. The only thing that helps those people is to manually download 8.0.1 and install it freshly - and actually download a new Roboform version that works with it.
Because of that, 8.0.1 is being offered to all versions (starting with 4.0, incl: 8.0) on Mac OS, but on Windows or Linux only for 4.0-7.0.1, because it doesn't offer any benefit to all the others.

So, in the end, if you're installing a fresh version, 8.0.1 is the right choice, but you don't need to install an update where it's not being offered automatically.

I have mentioned a few times, mostly in newsgroup discussions, that I strongly believe that the rapid release model Firefox is following now has a good chance to improve stability.

Some people without a deeper knowledge of how our new process works have at times implied that releasing way more often must make the product more unstable and worse quality than the one or two year cycles we had before. Given my multi-year experience in release management of a Mozilla product (SeaMonkey) and along with that insight into Firefox release management of the last few versions up to and including Firefox 4, my comparison of those experiences with the new model point into the exact opposite direction: Stability and quality should actually improve the more we get used to this "train" model and also the more we near the prospected user volume on the different "channels".

"Traditional" Process

Let's first look at how things worked with the old process that we used so far, including for Firefox 4: New work landed in the code for more than a year with first having only nightly testers run it every day, later alpha/beta testers running snapshots created along the way that included fixes found in some internal QA in addition to the nightly testing, but that was it for the alphas and betas - and at the point where those got shipped, we already had land the next set of feature changes on top of the code shipped there. From the view of crash analysis, this meant that we had a smaller audience of nightly testers sending crash reports we could analyze and from that see the larger and more obvious regressions from daily changes. And then there was a larger audience of beta testers that sent more data, which allowed a look at what happened with somewhat more real-world usage, but as soon as we got some good data in on those betas, the code on nightly on the way to the next beta might already have changed significantly again. With that, the most grave issues could be addressed, but sometimes it was hard to see how relevant the data from even the current beta still was. This game went on until the final betas, with increasing urgency of getting things in that should still make the release at the last second, and of course us as well as testers seeing new regressions that needed to be fixed. The criteria for accepting things into the code was being tightened up a lot towards final release, but some new feature work or invasive changes could even still be rushed into the code almost to the last minute. And the pressure was high to "get this in now or wait at least another year until users get it", so even with release drivers tightening possible changes up, some of those could still be argued for. When we shipped the final release to the really larger user audience with more than a year of piled up feature work and fixes, we very soon, usually even directly on release day or the next day, already have a list of quite visible stability problems we needed to get fixed a couple of weeks out in a stability update.

I hope you can see from this description that while we managed to control stability reasonably, the process was far from ideal for providing a product with which we could be happy in terms of stability. So when planning went into improving the processes and becoming more agile and fit for delivering features more quickly than before, a lot of thinking also went into how to make the new process give us a better story of stabilization - and I think the solution holds up pretty well.

"Rapid" Process

So, what we're doing now is getting in feature work and invasive changes into the base code and to Nightly testers almost as before, with only the difference that every such change must have an easy off-switch or be easy enough to reverse the change ("back it out") otherwise. We also still analyze crash data for this and spot major regressions there.
But with going to a next level, there comes the first major change: Every six weeks we're taking a snapshot of this Nightly code and put it on what we now call "Aurora", test it internally, disable things that are absolutely broken (as we have the off-switch/backout possibility) as found by internal QA and send it out to a somewhat larger testing audience. In the next six weeks, we are collecting data from that, reacting to user feedback and crash analysis and bringing in rather small fixes to those problems only or disable further broken features when a fix would be too invasive. We deliver the result daily to that Aurora audience in updates, getting more testing and crash data to analyze, based on the very same snapshot of code, without any more new feature or invasive work to go into it - that continues only on Nightly, no place for that in Aurora.
After those six weeks, this already fixed and stabilized snapshot is going to yet another level, which we call "Beta", and which has even more testers it's being delivered to (while Aurora picks up a new snapshot from Nightly). When the snapshot comes into the Beta phase, we have already put in six weeks of exclusively stabilization and fixing, so it is good enough for what we in earlier times probably would have called a "release candidate". It is as ready as we know at this stage as it can be - but exposing it to an even wider audience, now going into the millions, and which uses it for more normal day-to-day production work, usually turns up another class of potential problems. To deal with those, we could go and disable even more code if needed, and can apply some more small fixes, including of course crash fixes, and we deliver those to Beta testers with roughly weekly updates. Due to this being the first time this code snapshot is being exposed to a public of millions, it's usually the first time we get enough data to see some crash patterns more clearly and can get those fixed. Once again, no new feature or invasive work going into those six weeks of Beta, only disabling of problematic changes, fixing problems found in feedback and of course stability/crashes.
Having spent another six weeks in Beta, twelve weeks or three months of only fixing and stabilizing after taking the snapshot from development, and being OKed by a go/no-go meeting of release drivers, we ship this code to hundreds of millions of users as our next Firefox release (while the other snapshot moves from Aurora to Beta and yet another one is taken from Nightly into Aurora). Of course, we keep analyzing crash reports even from the release users and are able to react to large issues we haven't found before to do a fast fixup release (which we shouldn't need after looking at all the Aurora and Beta data from essentially the same code) and to smaller issues in the next round of Beta etc. before they go to being the next release.

In all this, we always have only six weeks of new development work isolated in every such snapshot (or "version") and not more than a year like previously, so pinpointing a cause gets easier. Then, we less of a rush to get a feature into a specific version as there's another one coming just six weeks earlier, so things will only go into the code in a better thought-out state. Even more, we have switches of some way we can throw to disable problematic code and give developers six more weeks to get it into shape if needed. And over all that, we have roughly three months (twelve weeks) of pure fixing and stabilization period on every snapshot/version to get problems worked out, with different sizes of testing audiences.


Of course, there are still some kinks to be worked out and the transition is not easy for everyone. Next to other concerns we've heard of some people and which belong in different forums than this particular blog entry, we have not scaled up the audiences esp. on Aurora but also on Beta up to what we want yet and therefore are not seeing as much data on them yet as we'd like to (the top crash/hang issue on Beta is typically seen by less than one in every 1000 daily users). So, there are still ways we can and need to improve things here to make it work for stability even better.

Still, having smaller sets of changes per release, no rushed landings of features and built-in calm stabilization periods of that length are all working together to improve stability, in my eyes - as long as people send in their crash reports and we continue to analyze them, of course.