Mozilla Firefox Miscellaneous stuff

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By Martin Brinkmann on February 4, 2013 - ghacks

Mozilla improves Firefox’s Do Not Track feature (starting with current Nightly version  21)

If you are on the Internet, chance is that you are being tracked. Advertising companies, Internet services and even Internet Service Provider track users for a variety of purposes, but most often to profile users to increase advertising revenue or sell the data to companies that do.

While cookies are most often used for that purpose, and I’m using the term lightly so that it includes all different kinds of cookies, it is not the only option that companies have. Fingerprinting may be an option as well which tries to identify users based on factors such as their IP address, operating system, web browser and other data that is submitted automatically when connections are established.

The Do Not Track feature has been designed to give Internet users a say in the matter. It is not the most effective option though as it is not mandatory for companies to comply with it if it is set by the user. While several companies honor Do Not Track, others may choose to ignore it. It is therefore reasonable to say that even with Do Not Track enabled, users are getting tracked on the Internet.
Mozilla has improved the Do Not Track feature in its Firefox web browser starting with current Nightly versions (that is version 21 of it). When you open the tracking related settings – with a click on Firefox > Options > Privacy – you will notice that you can now switch between all three states right from the menu.



http://www.ghacks.net/2013/02/04/mozilla-improves-firefoxs-do-not-track-feature/

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Nick Summers - 24 February 2013 - thenextweb

Hands-on with Firefox OS: ZTE Open and Alcatel One Touch Fire

At Mobile World Congress in Barcelona today, Mozilla gave us a crucial first look at two smartphones running the upcoming Firefox OS platform – the ZTE Open and the Alcatel One Touch. It’s been known for a while that both OEMs were developing hardware for Mozilla’s latest venture, but today marks the first time that both firms have revealed specific devices to the public.

The confirmation of both handsets also follows the news that both Huawei and LG would be joining Alcatel and ZTE later this year as hardware partners for the new mobile platform.



http://thenextweb.com/gadgets/2013/02/24/hands-on-with-firefox-os-zte-open-and-alcatel-one-touch-fire/

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blog.mozilla.- 24 Feb 2013

Mozilla Unlocks the Power of the Web on Mobile with Firefox OS  (18 carriers supporting Firefox OS)

Mozilla is excited to share that today 18 operators at Mobile World Congress 2013 in Barcelona announced their commitment to Firefox OS, which will power the world’s first Open Web Devices.

These operators include: América Móvil, China Unicom, Deutsche Telekom, Etisalat, Hutchison Three Group, KDDI, KT, MegaFon, Qtel, SingTel, Smart, Sprint, Telecom Italia Group, Telefónica, Telenor, TMN and VimpelCom. Telstra is welcoming the Mozilla initiative as an opportunity to deliver an innovative mobile Web experience to their customers. The breadth of operators now backing Mozilla’s Firefox OS demonstrates significant industry support for a fully-adaptable, unconstrained mobile platform.The first wave of Firefox OS devices will be available to consumers in Brazil, Colombia, Hungary, Mexico, Montenegro, Poland, Serbia, Spain and Venezuela. Additional markets will be announced soon.

We are working with manufacturers Alcatel (TCL), Huawei, LG and ZTE to build the first Firefox OS devices, all powered by the Qualcomm Snapdragon™ chipset.

https://blog.mozilla.org/blog/2013/02/24/mozilla-unlocks-the-power-of-the-web-on-mobile-with-firefox-os/

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By Sean Michael Kerner   |    February 26, 2013

Mozilla Set to Revive Electrolysis for Firefox Process Threading

With all the hype today surrounding the FirefoxOS launch, it's important to note that Mozilla's mobile efforts may well have a positive impact on the desktop browser too.

Phones (Android or FirefoxOS) are resource constrained devices and as such Mozilla developers have done alot of great work to get the memory footprint and overall memory and process utilization to be highly optimized.

Now contrast that with my typical Firefox desktop experience, where on any given day, on any given OS (Linux, Mac or Windows) and Firefox is the top memory hog. I recently spoke with Brendan Eich, CTO of Mozilla and I asked him about that disconnect.“We have been moving carefully toward a multi-process model in Firefox and I think we have better memory usage at scale than other browser,” Eich said.

Eich explained that FirefoxOS is multi-process, much like Chrome but even moreso. There is a difference in how the core Gecko rendering engine is mapped into processes across the different platforms.

On the desktop, Firefox relies on XUL, which is something that is now set to evolve.  The way it will evolve is with the reborn version of the Electrolysis project which Mozilla first attempted in 2010 with Firefox 3.X. The core idea behind Electrolysis is to create a multi-process architecture, which is intended to be more efficient with system resources.

“One of the things that cause us some grief the first time around with Electrolysis was the belief that we could somehow wave a wand and all the add-ons could be replaced with Jetpacks,” Eich said.

Instead of just going after the process isolation model, Mozilla has also focussed on memory usage through the MemShrink project.

Whether or not full process isolation will come to Firefox or not, for me the bottom line is that Firefox on mobile in some way shape or form is helping to inform and push Mozilla into new paradigms that will ultimately improve the desktop too.

http://www.internetnews.com/blog/skerner/mozilla-set-to-revive-electrolysis-for-firefox-process-threading.html

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Mar 14 2013

Introducing Open Badges 1.0

Today we’re extremely proud to release Mozilla Open Badges 1.0, an exciting new online standard to recognize and verify learning. Open Badges makes it easy to…

    earn badges for skills you learn online and offline
    give recognition for things you teach
    show your badges in the places that matter.

This is a project we’ve been developing for the past two years, in partnership with the MacArthur Foundation. Why is it important? These days, we all learn things in a wide variety of ways, but there are few opportunities to gain formal recognition for these skills. Traditional certifications, like degrees and diplomas, still lack the granularity to show the skills people have — like writing skills for an engineer, or project management for someone with an arts degree.

Not only that, but there’s no way to take all those skills and show them off in one place, regardless of where you’ve earned them. Open Badges changes that. It takes digital badges to a new level and makes them more powerful, networked and credible.

More than 600 leading organizations are now using Open Badges to issue badges that count toward education, careers and lifelong learning. Together we believe this can shape the future of learning, and help unlock the full educational potential of the web.

Recognizes learning that matters. Open Badges’ free software allows any organization that meets the standard to begin issuing — and verifying — badges. Currently 600 organizations have issued 62,000 badges to 23,000 learners. A growing list of who is issuing badges is available here

https://blog.mozilla.org/blog/2013/03/14/open_badges/. .

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by Peter Bright - Mar 27 2013

Mozilla making the Web a gaming platform with Unreal 3 engine in a browser

High performance JavaScript and WebGL could put high-end games on the Web.

Mozilla wants the Web to be a platform that's fit for any purpose. That's why the company is investing in Firefox OS—to fight back against the proliferation of platform-specific smartphone apps—and it's why the company has been working on WebGL, in order to bring 3D graphics to the browser, Emscripten, a tool for compiling C++ applications into JavaScript, and asm.js, a high performance subset of JavaScript.

The organization doesn't just want simple games and apps in the browser, however. It wants the browser to be capable of delivering high-end gaming experiences. At GDC today, the company announced that it has been working with Epic Games to port the Unreal 3 engine to the Web.

Engineering teams at Mozilla and Epic ported Unreal Engine 3 to the Web.

With this, Mozilla believes that the Web can rival native performance, making it a viable platform not just for casual games, but AAA titles.

However, there's more to a game than JavaScript and WebGL. One problem with current WebGL applications (most tending to be proofs of concept rather than fully developed games) is that of load times. Even though traditional games have high-speed access to textures and models stored locally, on a hard disk or optical medium, their load times are significant.

Streaming a gigabyte of map data and texture from a Web server just to play a game is obviously a non-starter; you wouldn't be waiting 30 seconds for a level to load, you'd be waiting 30 minutes. As an example, BioShock Infinite, an Unreal 3-powered high-end title, takes about 17 GB on disk, the vast majority of which is game data. That's not something that you want to have to wait for mid-game.
The organization that's responsible for the development of OpenGL, WebGL, and other related specifications, the Khronos Group, has set its sights on this problem. It's early yet, but the group is planning to develop a common set of data formats for 3D models, textures, and other resources that 3D applications need, as well as a system for negotiating these resources.

http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2013/03/mozilla-making-the-web-a-gaming-platform-with-unreal-3-engine-in-a-browser/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+arstechnica%2Findex+%28Ars+Technica+-+All+content%29

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Mozllia Blog - 3 April 2013

Mozilla and Samsung Collaborate on Next Generation Web Browser Engine (Servo)

Mozilla’s mission is about advancing the Web as a platform for all. At Mozilla Research, we’re supporting this mission by experimenting with what’s next when it comes to the core technology powering the Web browser.

Servo is an attempt to rebuild the Web browser from the ground up on modern hardware, rethinking old assumptions along the way. This means addressing the causes of security vulnerabilities while designing a platform that can fully utilize the performance of tomorrow’s massively parallel hardware to enable new and richer experiences on the Web. To those ends, Servo is written in Rust, a new, safe systems language developed by Mozilla along with a growing community of enthusiasts.

We are now pleased to announce with Samsung that together we are bringing both the Rust programming language and Servo, the experimental web browser engine, to Android and ARM. This is an exciting step in the evolution of both projects that will allow us to start deeper research with Servo on mobile. Samsung has already contributed an ARM backend to Rust and the build infrastructure necessary to cross-compile to Android, along with many other improvements. You can try this now by downloading the code from Github, but it’s just the beginning.

In the coming year, we are racing to complete the first major revision of Rust – cleaning up, expanding and documenting the libraries, building out our tools to improve the user experience, and beefing up performance. At the same time, we will be putting more resources into Servo, trying to prove that we can build a fast web browser with pervasive parallelism, and in a safe, fun language. We, along with our friends at Samsung will be increasingly looking at opportunities on mobile platforms. Both of these efforts are still early stage projects and there’s a lot to do yet, so now is a good time to get involved.

To take a look at what we’re doing and contribute to the projects you can download and try the recently-released Rust 0.6 or check out the source for Rust and Servo on GitHub. Then come participate in the development process on the Rust (https://mail.mozilla.org/listinfo/rust-dev) and Servo (https://lists.mozilla.org/listinfo/dev-servo) mailing lists.

https://blog.mozilla.org/blog/2013/04/03/mozilla-and-samsung-collaborate-on-next-generation-web-browser-engine/

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Apr 9, 2013 — by benadida

Identity at Mozilla

New Persona Beta 2: Millions of Users Ready to Log In using Any Browser

Persona, Mozilla’s easy and safe way to log into your favorite websites, using any modern browser, is now in Beta 2. The goal of Persona is simple: we want to eliminate passwords on the Web. This release, packed with performance improvements and new features, brings us another big step closer to that goal. In particular, we’ve made it easy for users with existing Web accounts to log in without creating a new account or password. This brings secure login within two clicks for hundreds of millions of users worldwide, regardless of whether they’re on a desktop, tablet, or mobile phone.

We’ve recently seen a few notable sites implement Persona, including: Born This Way Foundation, Firebase and the Eclipse Foundation. These deployments highlight Persona’s simple implementation, ease of use, user-safety, and the fact that, because Persona is built by a non-profit, users – and only users – own and control their identity. Let’s show you Persona Beta 2 in action:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=KIFvKVJ6vk4

Identity Bridging

The most important feature of Persona Beta 2 is Identity Bridging, where users can log into Persona-supporting web sites with their existing accounts. We’re starting with yahoo.com. Try it now on our sample site 123done.org: click “Sign in”, enter your yahoo.com email address, and go!

Websites that use Persona benefit from this improvement immediately: hundreds of millions of Web users are now ready to log in with just a few clicks. Users have complete choice and a simple flow: click one login button and select your preferred email address. Identity Bridging kicks in dynamically based on the user’s chosen email address.

The technical details behind Identity Bridging are detailed on the Mozilla Hacks blog. You can also read a detailed Q&A with Lead Engineer Lloyd Hilaiel.

More Improvements

Twice as Fast. We know performance is important to every site, so we made our button and popup load twice as fast. We’re working on more improvements as we go.

Use your Existing Accounts. We’ve bridged yahoo.com, but of course we built an open system: any domain can now become a Persona Identity Provider so users can reuse their existing accounts on any site that uses Persona.

Built Into Firefox OS. We built in support for Firefox OS and made Persona much faster on all mobile devices. This gives Firefox OS apps an even better experience when using Persona.

http://identity.mozilla.com/post/47541633049/persona-beta-2

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From MozillaLabs (still a proof of concept)

TowTruck is a service for your website that makes it surprisingly easy to collaborate in real-time.

TowTruck is incredibly easy to set up on your site. All you need to do is include a couple lines of JavaScript and your site has TowTruck tools enabled.

When a user comes to your site, they'll be able to activate the TowTruck tool and send a link to a friend to start collaborating on the web site.

TowTruck has collaboration features like cursor-mirroring (allowing you to see your friend's cursor on the screen in real time), collaboratively editing forms and text, browsing through the site, and both text and real-time voice chat.

https://mozillalabs.com/en-US/towtruck/

Try it out here
https://towtruck.mozillalabs.com/

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Mozilla Services - 30 April 2013

Introducing Heka - Data Acquisition and Collection Made Easy

Heka simplifies the collection, analysis, and transportation of data across your cluster/server. Counting downloads, keeping track of downloads from Apache logfiles, reporting security issues is handled in a single unified program thats easy to install locally for development and on servers for deployment.

Features

Multiple Data Sources

    Data can be sent directly in via client libraries or using plug-ins that can read logfiles, handle statsd UDP input, or other custom data sources.

Unified Daemon

    Heka is capable of routing messages like logstash, aggregating counters and submitting them to other sources like statsd, and transporting log messages from various nodes like syslog.
Plugin Architecture

    In case existing plug-ins are insufficient, additional plug-ins may be written in Go or Lua (to run in the embedded Lua sandbox). Plug-ins can be utilized for input, decoding unstructured data, filtering, or as outputs.

Performance

    Written in Go, heka utilizes light-weight goroutines for fast, efficient message routing, and parallel plug-in operation that can utilize multi-core systems to move hundreds of thousands of messages per second while using a very modest amount of memory.

Usability

    A single static binary with a library module is all that’s needed to run heka locally, making it easy to develop with and deploy.

Common Uses

    Application performance metrics
    Server load, memory consumption, and other machine metrics
    Database, Cache server, and other daemon metrics
    Various statsd counters
    Log-file transportion and statsd counter generation

Getting Started

    Install hekad.
    Install one of the client libraries or use hekad directly as a message router for various types of messages and/or reading logfiles.
    Read the hekad documentation.

Support / Help

Heka developers can be reached via the services-dev mailing list or via IRC on the #heka channel of irc.mozilla.org.

http://heka-docs.readthedocs.org/en/latest/

[Just17]

I had a look today at some of the 'games' bits .......  and was reasonably impressed with the result, TBH -----  but I am not a gamer so that means little 

I took a tour of this
http://www.unrealengine.com/html5/

and lots more available here apparently

https://github.com/kripken/emscripten/wiki

The only negative is the download, as mentioned in the post above .......  for that 'tour' I got in excess of 50MBs, so a fast internet connection would be needed .......  and a VERY fat pipe for a full game 

Yet, it was interesting to see it work, in full screen from the Firefox browser.

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By Sean Michael Kerner   |    May 16, 2013

Mozilla Plans to Renumbers Open Source Firefox Security Updates

Ok, I know... the 'E' in Firefox ESR does not stand for 'Enterprise', but it should. The ESR - Extended Support Release is an effort to help organizations stay with a secure version of Firefox for longer period of times than the current fast track six-week release cycle of Firefox.

I rely on Firefox ESR and I recommend it to lots of people because it's a much safer version of Firefox to use with custom apps that sometimes - break - with the fast release cycle of Firefox.

The most recent Firefox mainline release is version 21, while the current Firefox ESR is 17. The next Firefox ESR is currently schedule to coincide with the Firefox 24 mainline release.

While the feature bits of the ESR only change every 7 Firefox mainline releases, the security fixes (and there are always security fixes) are backported for each ESR.

With Firefox 21, the new ESR security update was numbered Firefox ESR 17.0.6. A new bugzilla entry proposes that the numbering system be changed to make it easier to associate versions.

Mozilla developer Alex Keybl wrote:

"We'd like to use the second number in the ESR (and mainline Firefox) version number for planned security releases of a single Gecko version."

In that way the first security update for Firefox ESR 24 would be 24.1 and not 24.0.1. The same 'should' hold true for mainline Firefox releases as well. So if there is is a security update inside of the six week release train (which does happen, sometimes) the Firefox 24 security update would be Firefox 24.x instead of Firefox 24.0.x.

Seems like an obvious idea to me.

http://www.internetnews.com/blog/skerner/mozilla-plans-to-renumbers-open-source-firefox-security-updates.html