Back to white

After one day in black, this blog is returning to its normal colors.

Resist SOPA, HADOPI, Censorship…

Today, this blog is black.

Today is an international day of fighting against web censorship.

Against SOPA (in the US), Hadopi (in France), and all the bills that assume that freedom of expression and freedom of information can be cast aside whenever they come in the way of profit.

Learn more.

Call For Classrooms

(and Researchers, Professors, Teachers, Students …)

Mozilla is working with numerous educators, professors and researchers across the world, both to bring open-source, the open web and web technologies into the classroom, and to bring the contributions of students and their mentors to the world. You can be a part of this, and your field does not have to be Computer Science.

OS.File, step-by-step: The Schedule API

Summary

One of the key components of OS.File is the Schedule API, a tiny yet powerful JavaScript core designed to considerably simplify the development of asynchronous modules. In this post, we introduce the Schedule API.

Introduction

In a previous post, I introduced OS.File, a Mozilla Platform library designed make the life of developers easier and to help them produce high-performance, high-responsiveness file management routines.

In this post, I would like to concentrate on one of the core items of OS.File: the Schedule API. Note that the Schedule API is not limited to OS.File and is designed to be useful for all sorts of other modules.

Introducing JavaScript native file management

Summary

The Mozilla Platform keeps improving: JavaScript native file management is an undergoing work to provide a high-performance JavaScript-friendly API to manipulate the file system.

The Mozilla Platform, JavaScript and Files

The Mozilla Platform is the application development framework behind Firefox, Thunderbird, Instantbird, Camino, Songbird and a number of other applications.

While the performance-critical components of the Mozilla Platform are developed in C/C++, an increasing number of components and add-ons are implemented in pure JavaScript. While JavaScript cannot hope to match the speed or robustness of C++ yet (edit: at least not on all aspects), the richness and dynamism of the language permit the creation of extremely flexible and developer-friendly APIs, as well as quick prototyping and concise implementation of complex algorithms without the fear of memory errors and with features such as higher-level programming, asynchronous programming and now clean and efficient multi-threading. If you combine this with the impressive speed-ups experienced by JavaScript in the recent years, it is easy to understand why the language has become a key element in the current effort to make the Mozilla Platform and its add-ons faster and more responsive at all levels.

Stages chez Mozilla Paris… ou ailleurs

edit Nous sommes pleins jusqu’à Juin. Nous ne pouvons plus prendre de stagiaires sur Paris dont les stages commencent avant Juin.

Comme tous les ans, Mozilla propose des stages en informatique, orientés Développement, R&D ou Recherche. Selon le sujet, le stage peut vous emmener à Paris, aux États-Unis, au Canada, en Chine…

À propos de Mozilla

La Fondation Mozilla est une association à but non-lucratif, fondée pour encourager un Internet ouvert, innovant et participatif. Vous avez probablement entendu parler de Mozilla Firefox, le navigateur open-source qui a réintroduit sur le web les standards ouverts et la sécurité, ou de Mozilla Thunderbird, le client de messagerie multi-plateforme, open-source et extensible. Les activités de Mozilla ne s’arrêtent pas à ces deux produits et se prolongent à de nombreux projets pour le présent et l’avenir, tels que :

• Boot-to-Gecko, système d’exploitation totalement ouvert et construit par la communauté, pour les téléphones portables, tablettes et autres machines communicantes ;

• SpiderMonkey, une famille de Machines Virtuelles conçues pour l’analyse statique et dynamique, la compilation et l’exécution des langages web, en particulier JavaScript ;

• DeHydra et JSHydra, outils d’analyse statique pour les langages C++ et JavaScript ;

• Rust, un nouveau langage de programmation conçu pour le développement d’applications système parallèles sûres ;

• WebAPI, un ensemble d’outils qui permettent d’étendre les capacités des applications web au-delà de celles des applications traditionnelles, la sécurité et la confidentialité en plus ;

• Gecko, le moteur de rendu extensible et portable pour le HTML, le XML et les interfaces graphiques, qui a permis Firefox, Thunderbird et de nombreuses autres applications ;

• BrowserID, une technique innovante qui fournit aux utilisateurs et aux développeurs les outils cryptographiques pour assurer l’identification sur le web, sans compromettre la vie privée, la simplicité ou la sécurité ;

• les fonctionnalités Mozilla Services de gestion d’identité par le Cloud ;

• et d’autres encore…

À propos de vous

Mozilla proposes plusieurs stages dans ses installations à travers le monde sur de nombreux sujets.

Votre profil :

• vous voulez faire du web un endroit meilleur, sur lequel chacun peut naviguer et contribuer en toute sécurité, sans avoir à craindre pour sa sécurité ou sa vie privée ;
• vous souhaitez prendre part à un projet utilisé par plus de 33% de la population du web ;
• vous voulez que votre travail soit utile à tous et visible par tous ;
• vous avez de fortes compétences en Algorithmique et en Informatique ;
• vous avez de fortes compétences dans au moins l’un des domaines suivants :
• systèmes d’exploitation ;
• réseaux ;
• géométrie algorithmique ;
• compilation ;
• cryptographie ;
• analyse statique ;
• langages de programmation ;
• extraire des informations pertinentes à partir de données exotiques ;
• algorithmique distribuée ;
• le web en tant que plate-forme ;
• interactions avec les communautés du logiciel libre ;
• toute autre compétence qui, à votre avis, pourrait nous servir.
• sur certains sujets, un excellent niveau d’Anglais peut être indispensable ;
• les stages sont généralement prévus pour des étudiants M1 ou M2 mais si vous arrivez à nous impressionner par vos réalisations ou par vos connaissances, le diplôme n’est pas indispensable.

Si vous vous reconnaissez, nous vous invitons à nous contacter. En fonction du sujet, les stages peuvent vous emmener à Paris, Mountain View, San Francisco, Toronto, Taipei, ou d’autres lieux à travers le monde.

Les meilleurs stagiaires peuvent espérer un contrat freelance, un CDI ou/et une bourse de doctorat.

Pour nous contacter

Pour toute question, contactez :

• pour tout ce qui concerne les stages chez Mozilla, Julie Deroche (à mozilla.com, jderoche) – Mozilla Mountain View, College Recruiting ;
• pour les stages à Paris, David Rajchenbach-Teller (à mozilla.com, dteller) – Mozilla Paris, Développeur / Chercheur.

JavaScript, this static language (part 1)

tl;dr

JavaScript is a dynamic language. However, by borrowing a few pages from static languages – and a few existing tools – we can considerable improve reliability and maintainability.

« Writing one million lines of code of JavaScript is simply impossible »

(source: speaker in a recent open-source conference)

JavaScript is a dynamic language – a very dynamic one, in which programs can rewrite themselves, objects may lose or gain methods through side-effects on themselves on on their prototypes, and, more generally, nothing is fixed.

And dynamic languages are fun. They make writing code simple and fast. They are vastly more suited to prototyping than static languages. Dynamism also makes it possible to write extremely powerful tools that can perform JIT translation from other syntaxes, add missing features to existing classes and functions and more generally fully customize the experience of the developer.

Unfortunately, such dynamism comes with severe drawbacks. Safety-minded developers will tell you that, because of this dynamism, they simply cannot trust any snippet, as this snippet may behave in a manner that does not match its source code. They will conclude that you cannot write safe, or even modular, applications in JavaScript.

Many engineering-minded developers will also tell you that they simply cannot work in JavaScript, and they will not have much difficulty finding examples of situations in which the use of a dynamic language in a complex project can, effectively, kill the project. If you do not believe them, consider a large codebase, and the (rather common) case of a large transversal refactoring, for instance to replace an obsolete API by a newer one. Do this in Java (or, even better, in a more modern mostly-static language such as OCaml, Haskell, F# or Scala), and you can use the compiler to automatically and immediately spot any place where the API has not been updated, and will spot a number of errors that you may have made with the refactoring. Even better, if the API was designed to be safe-by-design, the compiler will automatically spot even complex errors that you may have done during refactoring, including calling functions/methods in the wrong order, or ownership errors. Do the same in JavaScript and, while your code will be written faster, you should expect to be hunting bugs weeks or even months later.

I know that the Python community has considerably suffered from such problems during version transitions. I am less familiar with the world of PHP, but I believe this is no accident that Facebook is progressively arming itself with PHP static analysis tools. I also believe that this is no accident that Google is now introducing a typed language as a candidate replacement for JavaScript.

That is because today is the turn of JavaScript, or if not today, surely tomorrow. I have seen applications consisting in hundreds of thousands of lines of JavaScript. And if just maintaining these applications is not difficult enough, the rapid release cycles of both  Mozilla and Chrome, mean that external and internal APIs are now changing every six weeks. This means breakage. And, more precisely, this means that we need new tools to help us predict breakages and help developers (both add-on developers and browser contributors) react before these breakages hit their users.

So let’s do something about it. Let’s make our JavaScript a strongly, statically typed language!

Or let’s do something a little smarter.

JavaScript, with discipline

At this point, I would like to ask readers to please kindly stop preparing tar and feathers for me. I realize fully that JavaScript is a dynamic language and that turning it into a static language will certainly result in something quite disagreeable to use. Something that is verbose, has lost most of the power of JavaScript, and gained no safety guarantees.

Trust me on this, there is a way to obtain the best of both worlds, without sacrificing anything. Before discussing the manner in which we can attain this, let us first set objectives that we can hope to achieve with a type-disciplined JavaScript.

Finding errors

The main benefit of strong, static typing, is that it helps find errors.

• Even the simplest analyses can find all syntax errors, all unbound variables, all variables bound several times and consequently almost all scoping errors, which can already save considerable time for developers. Such an analysis requires no human intervention from the developer besides, of course, fixing any error that has been thus detected. As a bonus, in most cases, the analysis can suggest fixes.
• Similarly trivial forms of analysis can also detect suspicious calls to break or continue, weird uses of switch(), suspicious calls to private fields of objects, as well as suspicious occurrences of eval – in my book, eval is always suspicious.
• Slightly more sophisticated analyses can find most occurrences of functions or methods invoked with the wrong number of arguments. Again, this is without human intervention. With type annotations/documentation, we can move from most occurrences to all occurrences.
• This same analysis, when applied to public APIs, can provide developers with more informations regarding how their code can be (mis)used.
• At the same level of complexity, analysis can find most erroneous access to fields/methods, suspicious array traversals, suspicious calls to iterators/generators, etc. Again, with type annotations/documentation, we can move from most to all.
• Going a little further in complexity, analysis can find fragile uses of this, uncaught exceptions, etc.

Types as documentation

Public APIs must be documented. This is true in any language, no matter where it stands on the static/dynamic scale. In static languages, one may observe how documentation generation tools insert type information, either from annotations provided by the user (as in Java/JavaDoc) or from type information inferred by the compiler (as in OCaml/OCamlDoc). But look at the documentation of Python, Erlang or JavaScript libraries and you will find the exact same information, either clearly labelled or hidden somewhere in the prose: every single value/function/method comes with a form of type signature, whether formal or informal.

In other words, type information is a critical piece of documentation. If JavaScript developers provide explicit type annotations along with their public APIs, they have simply advanced the documentation, not wasted time. Even better, if such type can be automatically inferred from the source code, this piece of documentation can be automatically written by the type-checker.

Types as QA metric

While disciples of type-checking tend to consider typing as something boolean, the truth is more subtle: it quite possible that one piece of code does not pass type-checking while the rest of the code does. Indeed, with advanced type systems that do not support decidable type inference, this is only to be expected.

The direct consequence is that type-checking can be seen as a spectrum of quality. A code can be seen as failing if the static checking phrase can detect evident errors, typically unbound values or out-of-scope break, continue, etc. Otherwise, every attempt to type a value that results in a type error is a hint of poor QA practice that can be reported to the developer. This yields a percentage of values that can be typed – obtain 100% and get a QA stamp of approval for this specific metric.

Typed JavaScript, in practice

Most of the previous paragraphs are already possible in practice, with existing tools. Indeed, I have personally experienced using JavaScript static type checking as a bug-finding tool and a QA metric. On the first day, this technique has helped me find both plenty of dead code and 750+ errors, with only a dozen false positives.

For this purpose, I have used Google’s Closure Compiler. This tool detects errors, supports a simple vocabulary for documentation/annotations, fails only if very clear errors are detected (typically syntax errors) and provides as metric a percentage of well-typed code. It does not accept JavaScript 1.7 yet, unfortunately, but this can certainly be added.

I also know of existing academic work to provide static type-checking for JavaScript, although I am unsure as to the maturity of such works.

Finally, Mozilla is currently working on a different type inference mechanism for JavaScript. While this mechanism is not primarily aimed at finding errors, my personal intuition is that it may be possible to repurpose it.

What’s next?

I hope that I have convinced you of the interest of investigating manners of introducing static, strong type-checking to JavaScript. In a second part, I will detail how and where I believe that this can be done in Mozilla.

First look at Google Dart

A few weeks ago, the browser and web development communities started wondering about this mysterious new web language that Google was about to unveil: Dart. Part of the interrogation was technical – what would that language look like? how would a new language justify its existence? what problems would it solve? – and part was more strategic – what was Google doing preparing a web language in secret? where the leaked memos that seemed to imply a web-standards-breaking stance something that Google would indeed pursue? was Google trying to solve web-related problems, Google-related problems or Oracle-related problems?

Now, Google has unveiled the specifications of Dart, as well as library documentation. Neither will be sufficient to answer all questions, but they give us an opportunity to look at some of the technical sides of the problem. As a programming language researcher/designer and a member of the web browser community, I just had to spend some quality time with the Dart specifications.

So, how’s Dart? Well, let’s look at it.

What Dart is

Dart is a programming language and a Virtual Machine. As a programming language, Dart positions itself somewhere in the scope between scripting/web development and application development. From the world of application development, Dart brings

• clean concurrency primitives that would feel at home in Scala, Clojure or Erlang – including a level of concurrent error reporting;
• a clean module mechanism, including a notion of privacy;
• a type system offering genericity, interfaces and classes;
• compilation and a virtual machine;
• a library of data structures;
• no eval();
• data structures that do not change shape with time.

From the world of scripting/web development, Dart brings:

• usability in any standards-compliant browser, without any plug-in (although it will work better in a plug-in and/or in Chrome);
• DOM access;
• emphasis on fast start-up;
• a liberal approach to typing (i.e. types are optional and the type system is incorrect, according to the specifications);
• dynamic errors;
• closures (which are actually not scripting/web development related, but until Java 8 lands or until Scala, F# or Haskell gain popularity, most developers will believe that they are).

Where Dart might help

Web development has a number of big problems. I have trolled written about some of them in previous posts, and Dart was definitely designed to help, at least a little.

Security

JavaScript is interpreted, can be written inline in html and supports eval(). By opposition, Dart code is compiled. Dart does not have eval() and Dart code is not written inline in html. Consequently, Dart itself offers a smaller attack surface for cross-site scripting.  Note that Dart can still be used as a component for a XSS targeting the document itself, and that using Dart does not prevent an attacker from using JavaScript to inject XSS in the page.

Safety and Code Hygiene

Out-of-the-box, JavaScript does not offer any static or hybrid typing. Dart offers (optional, hybrid) typing. This is a very useful tool for helping developers and developer groups find errors in their code quickly.

JavaScript offers prototype-based object-oriented programming, without explicit private methods/fields. By opposition, Dart offers modules, classes (with support for private methods/fields) and interfaces. Again, very useful for providing abstractions that do not leak [too much].

For historical reasons, JavaScript offers weird and error-prone scoping and will let developers get away without realizing that they are dereferencing undefined variables. Dart does away with this. Again, this is a good way to find errors quickly.

Libraries

Out-of-the-box, JavaScript does not provide data structures, or much in the way of libraries. By opposition, Dart provides a few data structures and libraries.

Exceptions

For a long time, JavaScript exceptions were not extensible. Eventually, it became possible to define new kinds of exceptions. However, JavaScript still doesn’t support matching the exception constructor, by opposition to what almost all other programming languages do. Dart makes no exception and allows matching upon the exception constructor. This makes exception-handling a little nicer and debugging exception traces a little more robust.

Concurrency

For a long time, JavaScript did not provide any form of concurrency primitive. Recent versions of JavaScript do offer Workers. Similarly, Dart offers Isolates, with a paradigm very similar to Workers. Where Workers are always concurrent, Isolates can also be made non-concurrent, for better performance at the expense of reactivity. Initialization and error-reporting are also a little different, but otherwise, Isolates and Workers are quite comparable.

Speed

Dart promises better speed than JavaScript. I cannot judge about it.

Niceties

Dart offers “string interpolation” to insert a value in a string. Nice but not life-altering. Also, out-of-the-box, JavaScript DOM access is quite verbose. By opposition, Dart provides syntactic sugar that makes it a little nicer.

Where Dart might hinder

Vendor control/adoption

The single biggest problem with Dart is, of course, its source. To get the VM in the browsers, Google will have to convince both developers and other browser vendors to either reimplement the VM by themselves or use a Google-issued VM. This is possible, but this will be difficult for Google.

The open vehicle for this is to convince developers to us Dart for server-side programming – where Dart will be competing with Java, Scala, C#, F#, Python, JavaScript, Erlang and even Google’s Go – and for client-side programming by getting through JavaScript – which will severely hinder performance, safety and security.

The vendor controlled vehicle will be to integrate the VM in Chrome and Android and encourage developers targeting the Chrome Market and Android Market to use Dart. Some speculate that this is a manner for Google to get rid of the Java dependency on the Android Market. In this case, of course, there will be little competition.

Libraries and documentation

JavaScript has a host of libraries and considerable documentation. I will admit that much of the documentation one may find around the web is not good (hint: use Mozilla’s documentation, it is the only reliable source I have found), but that is still infinitely more than what Dart can provide at the moment.

In other words, for the moment, Dart cannot take advantage of the special effects, the game-building libraries, the streaming libraries, etc. that have been developed for JavaScript. This, of course, is something that Google has the resources to change relatively fast, but, by experience, I can tell that many developers are averse to relearning.

Doing it without Dart

Security

We’re not going to get rid of XSS without some effort, even with Dart. However, making sure that JavaScript offers an attack surface no larger than Dart is easy: forbid eval() and forbid any inline JavaScript. It would be quite easy to add an option to HTML documents to ensure that this is the case. Note that this option remains necessary even if all the code is written in Dart, as Dart does not prevent from injecting JavaScript.

Code Hygiene

Out-of-the-box, JavaScript does not offer any support for static/hybrid typing. However, Google has demonstrated how to add static typing with the Google Closure Compiler and Mozilla has demonstrated how to add hybrid typing with Dynamic Type Inference. Both projects indicate that we can obtain something at least as good as Dart in JavaScript, without altering/reinventing the language.

Out-of-the-box, JavaScript does not offer modules. However, Mozilla has been offering a module system for JavaScript for years and new versions of the language are in the process of standardizing this.

Also, while classes and private fields are probably the least surprising techniques for application developers coming to the web, developers used to dynamic or functional languages know that closures and prototypes are essentially equivalent. So, this is essentially a matter of taste.

Finally, clean, lexical scoping will be welcomed by all developers who know what these words mean and quite a few others. Fortunately, it is also coming to JavaScript with recent versions of the language.

Concurrency

Isolates are nice. Workers are nice. Isolates are a little easier to set-up, so I would like to see an Isolate-like API for Workers. Other than that, they are essentially equivalent.

Speed

So far, Google has always managed to deliver on speed promises with V8, so I would tend to believe them. However, recent improvements in JavaScript analysis also promise to analyze away all the cases that can make JavaScript slower than Java, and I also tend to believe these promises. Consequently, I will venture no guess about it.

Libraries

It is a shame that JavaScript does not come with more libraries. However, many frameworks are available that implement standard data structures and more.

Exceptions

Dart exceptions are a little nicer than JavaScript exceptions, there no doubt about that. However, making JavaScript exceptions as good as Dart exceptions would be quite simple. The only difficulty is getting this improvement into the standard.

Niceties

String interpolations are nice to have, but not really life-altering. If necessary, they can trivially be implemented by a pre-processor. CoffeeScript might already do it, I’m not sure. Adding this to the JS standard might be tricky, for reasons of backwards compatibility, but there is not much to it.

Dart-style DOM access is nice, too. However, adding this to JavaScript would be quite trivial, in particular with next-generation DOM implementations such as dom.js.

The result

I admit that I am a little disappointed. When Dart was announced, I was hoping something truly evolutionary. So far, what I have found out is a nice language, certainly, but not much more. While Dart is definitely better in many aspects than today’s JavaScript, given the current evolution of JavaScript, none of these aspects is a deal-breaker. However, several aspects of Dart (in particular, typing and exceptions) indicate a good direction in which I believe JavaScript should evolve, and I hope that the presence of Dart can get JavaScript standardization moving faster.

If we consider I my opinion, there are three ways that Google can get Dart adopted on the web:

• make it the default choice for Android & Chrome development;
• provide a set of killer libraries for the web, that work on all browsers but are truly usable only with Dart (DirectX anyone? something Cocoa-style, perhaps?);
• spend Google-sized budgets on adoption (PR, marketing, GSoC, open-source projects, etc.).

Nevertheless, for the moment, I will keep far away from Dart and look hopefully at Scala-GWT, WebSharper or Ocsigen.

Helping Bugzilla Help Newcomers Help Mozilla Help Users

tl;dr

We can make Bugzilla more newbie-friendly.

edit Thanks for pointing me to mentored bugs, Josh!

The context

Earlier today, a discussion got me thinking about how we can lower the entry barriers for people who want to contribute to Mozilla in a technical or semi-technical way but do not know where to start – by “technical or semi-technical”, I have in mind developers, web developers, translators, and more generally people who need to commit some form of patch to any of the Mozilla subprojects.

There are many things that we can improve, but for this post, I would like to concentrate on Bugzilla tweaks that I believe could be useful. These tweaks come from a simple remark: for all contributors Bugzilla is, in fact, a form of contribution console. Unfortunately, for the moment, I see the following problems:

• Bugzilla doesn’t help newcomers find easy entry points;
• Bugzilla doesn’t guide newcomers towards their first patch;
• Bugzilla doesn’t help old-timers help newcomers.

So, let’s see how we could improve Bugzilla.

Making newcomers visible and encouraging old-timers to help them

I believe that the first thing we need to do is to make sure that newbies are more visible to old-timers. For this purpose, we can provide an account attribute “I’m a beginner, please be gentle”, which appears in the profile, ticked by default, and remains there until unticked. Every message, attachment or patch provided by a newbie is clearly labelled as such.

This label may come with a link to the wiki with suggestions for old-timers wanting to help the newbie.

Similarly, we can encourage old-timers to adopt a newbie. For this purpose, we can provide an account attribute “Adopt a newbie”, with a list of accounts. Every message, attachment or patch provided by an adopted newbie is automatically tracked by the adopter.

Note As far as I understand, these features are already essentially implemented. I’m just proposing a small tweak.

Having Bugzilla tell stories

Bugzilla is a nice place for reporting bugs and discussing how to solve it. I propose a simple tweak to make Bugzilla tell the story of a patch. Let me show you one possible manner of doing this:

Each of these link should help a newcomer on one step towards getting a patch submitted and accepted:

1. “Help me set up for contributing” points to some of the wiki pages we already have containing project-specific setup documentation. For Mozilla coding bugs, this explains how to build Mozilla. For localization bug, this explains how to setup whichever tools are required, etc. This is set up on a per-component basis.
2. “Help me contact the developers” points to the component-specific wiki page with all the contact information (IRC channel, forum, mailing-list, module owner e-mail address, etc.).
3. “Help me find project doc” points to the project-specific wiki page with all the documentation.
4. “Help me submit a contribution” points to a beginner-oriented wiki page with the information on submitting. For mozilla-central, for instance, beginners should be able to find the two lines that will let them export everything they have done as one hg patch.
5. “What’s next” points to a wiki page detailing the submission approval process, the various forums, IRC channels, etc. to which the contributor can participate.

This is for beginners. As you may have seen, there is another toolbar, designed for experienced developers/community members:

This toolbar is designed to keep track of activity on bugs that the user follows:

1. “Unconfirmed” lists the number of UNCO bugs followed by the user.
2. “In progress” lists the number of NEW bugs followed by the user.
3. “Review” lists the number of patches pending review in bugs followed by the user.
4. “Mentoring” lists the unread messages and patches submitted by newbies adopted by the user.

Clicking on each link points to a bugzilla search of the corresponding bugs.

Making easy bugs easy to discover

New contributors need to find good entry points. For this purpose, we have project-specific lists of good first bugs. However, at the moment, the lists I could find are both hard to discover and unmaintained. So, let’s integrate this in Bugzilla. As it turns out, it’s quite easydone already (and better than what I suggested initially).

I suggest adding two tags: “easy” and “average”. Every bug can be annotated as “easy” if a developer believes that it’s a good first bug or “average” if a developer believes that it’s a bug that requires some experience but no architectural overview.

Once this is done, we can link from all our wikis and contributor engagement pages to Bugzilla searches with all the “easy” and all the “average” bugs, both project-wide and by component.

Submission add-on

This one is more of a dream. I believe that, at some point, we could develop an add-on that can be installed directly fro the Bugzilla toolbar, and whose role is to provide a wizard to help users:

• install the appropriate source management tool;
• once the tool is installed, submit a patch for review.

Initially, this add-on covers only mozilla-central. Later, upgrades to this add-on and/or project-specific add-ons may be added for projects not covered by mozilla-central (typically projects hosted on github).

Inspiration: want to do better than (otherwise excellent) github “pull request”

Badges!

• First bug report tagged “new”? Earn a badge!
• First patch submitted? Earn a badge!
• First patch accepted? Earn a badge!
• Same thing for the marks of 10, 50, 100 …

Any thoughts?

Ok, this lists the tweaks that I can think of to improve newbie experience with contributions. What do you think? Any way we can make this better?

Good morning Mozilla!

It’s an exciting time for us Computer Scientists.

Three years ago, I was an academic researcher, studying the best manner to certify binaries uploaded to clouds and ensure their security. Less than three weeks ago, I was working at MLstate, leading the R&D team and striving to change the face of web programming languages and web security. Today, I am part of Mozilla, as a proud member of the Performance team, where we take steps, each day, to make Firefox, Thunderbird and the Mozilla platform faster and more responsive.

We, at Mozilla, have considerable work ahead of us. Because the web needs to be defended, kept open and compatible with privacy, and, on some of these fronts, only Mozilla stands.

An exciting time, indeed – and an exciting way of doing my part!

I will try and blog about ongoing developments as soon as I find a minute.

Edit It seems that I misredacted some of the announces that were sent. Just to clarify, I am not the leader of the Performance team. That person is Taras Glek.