Mozilla/Firefox: TenFourFox and Listening Devices
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TenFourFox FPR14b1 available (now with H.264 video)
I had originally plotted three main features for this release, but getting the urgent FPR13 SPR1 set me back a few days with confidence testing and rebuilds and I have business trips and some vacation time coming up, so I jettisoned the riskiest of the three features (a set of JavaScript updates and a ugly hack to get Github and other sites working fully again) and concentrated on the other two. I'll be looking at that again for FPR15, so more on that later.
Before we get to the marquee features, though, there are two changes which you may not immediately notice. The first is a mitigation for a long-standing issue where some malicious sites keep popping up authentication modals using HTTP Auth. Essentially you can't do anything with the window until the modal is dealt with, so the site just asks for your credentials over and over, ultimately making the browser useless (as a means to make you call their "support line" where they can then social engineer their way into your computer). The ultimate solution is to make such things tab-modal rather than window-modal, but that's involved and sort of out of scope, so we now implement a similar change to what current Firefox does where there is a cap of three Cancels. If you cancel three times, the malicious site is not allowed to issue any more requests until you reload it. No actual data is leaked, assuming you don't type anything in, but it can be a nasty denial of service and it would have succeeded in ruining your day on TenFourFox just as easily as any other Firefox derivative. That said, just avoid iffy sites, yes?
The second change is more fundamental. For Firefox 66 Mozilla briefly experimented with setting a frame rate cap on low-end devices. Surprise, surprise: all of our systems are low-end devices! In FPR13 and prior, TenFourFox would try to push as many frames to the compositor as possible, no matter what it was trying to do, to achieve a 60fps target or better. However, probably none of our computers with the possible exception of high-end G5s were probably achieving 60fps consistently on most modern websites, and the browser would flail trying to desperately keep up. Instead, by setting a cap and enforcing it with software v-sync, frames aren't pushed as often and the browser can do more layout and rendering work per frame. Mozilla selected a 30fps cap, so that's what I selected as an arbitrary first cut. Some sites are less smooth, but many sites now render faster to first paint, particularly pages that do a lot of DOM transforms because now the resulting visual changes are batched. This might seem like an obvious change to make but the numbers had never been proven until then.
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Sustainable smart home with the TXT
Mozilla started venturing into IoT recently. They are trying to advocate for better privacy and user freedom by promoting interoperability. These goals are unified in a proposal for a device API that is based on web protocols called “Web of Things”. It is developed in collaboration with smart home and “industry 4.0” manufacturers. This API isn’t necessarily implemented by each device directly, some devices are too low powered to provide a web server or are using other successful local mesh networks like Z-Wave or Zigbee. In these cases a gateway that is connected to the user’s local network would provide the web thing API.
The web thing API breaks physical devices down into three attributes: properties, actions and events. Properties as stateful values that can both be changed by the device and the user (I’ll often refer to the user as the client). A device can however declare a property as read-only or add input value restrictions. Actions let the user execute an action on the device that either isn’t stateful or affects multiple properties. Lastly, events are fired by the device to indicate a momentary effect that is not reflected in the state. Above that is a capabilities system, with which devices can indicate the semantics of their features. For example a light bulb can advertise itself as being a “Lamp”, it’s brightness property will be a “BrightnessProperty” and the power toggle will be an “OnOffProperty”. These allow clients to expose appropriate UIs and behaviors for devices. The protocol is available over HTTP(S) and optionally WebSockets for real-time communication of changes.
Mozilla is developing both a reference gateway to control devices using this protocol and reference implementations in multiple languages to build web things with. The “WebThing gateway” also has an adapter system to bridge other smart home protocols to the web of things data model.
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