Building Firefox for ALSA (non PulseAudio) Sound

I did the work to built my own Firefox primarily to fix a couple of serious regressions that couldn't be fixed any other way. I'll start with the one that's probably more common (at least, there are many people complaining about it in many different web forums): the fact that Firefox won't play sound on Linux machines that don't use PulseAudio.

There's a bug with a long discussion of the problem, Bug 1345661 - PulseAudio requirement breaks Firefox on ALSA-only systems; and the discussion in the bug links to another discussion of the Firefox/PulseAudio problem). Some comments in those discussions suggest that some near-future version of Firefox may restore ALSA sound for non-Pulse systems; but most of those comments are six months old, yet it's still not fixed in the version Mozilla is distributing now.

Let's kill kittens with native messaging (or, introducing OverbiteNX: if WebExtensions can't do it, we will)

WebExtensions (there is no XUL) took over with a thud seven months ago, which was felt as a great disturbance in the Force by most of us who wrote Firefox add-ons that, you know, actually did stuff. Many promises were made for APIs to allow us to do the stuff we did before. Some of these promises were kept and these APIs have actually been implemented, and credit where credit is due. But there are many that have not (that metabug is not exhaustive). More to the point, there are many for which people have offered to write code and are motivated to write code, but we have no parameters for what would be acceptable, possibly because any spec would end up stuck in a "boil the ocean" problem, possibly because it's low priority, or possibly because someone gave other someones the impression such an API would be acceptable and hasn't actually told them it isn't. The best way to get contribution is to allow people to scratch their own itches, but the urgency to overcome the (largely unintentional) institutional roadblocks has faded now that there is somewhat less outrage, and we are still left with a disordered collection of APIs that extends Firefox relatively little and a very slow road to do otherwise.

Or perhaps we don't have to actually rely on what's in Firefox to scratch our itch, at least in many cases. In a potentially strategically unwise decision, WebExtensions allows native code execution in the form of "native messaging" -- that is, you can write a native component, tell Firefox about it and who can talk to it, and then have that native component do what Firefox don't. At that point, the problem then becomes more one of packaging. If the functionality you require isn't primarily limited by the browser UI, then this might be a way around the La Brea triage tarpit.

Fixing Content Scripts on GitHub.com

Content scripts ordinarily reload for each new page visited but, on GitHub, they don’t. This is because links on GitHub mutate the DOM and use the history.pushState API instead of loading pages the standard way, which would create an entirely new DOM per page.

Read Ebooks Quicker With This Spritz-Like Fast Reading Command Line Software

Uniread aims at improving your reading speed by using a Spritz-like technique for fast reading. The application uses Node.js, runs on the command line, and it currently supports the EPUB ebook file format.

According to Spritzinc, when you read "the eye seeks a certain point within the word, which we call the optimal recognition point, or ORP. After your eyes find the ORP, your brain starts to process the meaning of the word that you're viewing".

They continue to mention that "when reading, only around 20% of your time is spent processing content. The remaining 80% is spent physically moving your eyes from word to word and scanning for the next ORP".

This is where the Spritz-like technique / software comes in. Using it, you can read the text without moving your eyes and thus, improve your reading speed (thanks to the 80% of time gained from not having to move your eyes and by increasing the speed at which words are being displayed on screen).

Linux Release Roundup: Curlew, Cantata & Google Chrome

Another week, another batch of welcome Linux app updates to round-up — and another one of these rather difficult post intros to write!

This week we’re taking in updates from a diverse range of apps: from a nifty media converter to a nimble music player, by way of a largely unknown web browser called “Google Chrome”.

Yes, that was an attempt at sarcasm.

Chrome 68 Beta: add to home screen, payment handler, page lifecycle

Unless otherwise noted, changes described below apply to the newest Chrome Beta channel release for Android, Chrome OS, Linux, macOS, and Windows. View a complete list of the features in Chrome 68 on ChromeStatus.com. Chrome 68 is beta as of June 7, 2018.

Chrome 68 Rolls Out In Beta Form

For those not satisfied by last week's Chrome 67 stable release, Chrome 68 is now available in beta form with the latest and greatest feature work.

@media, MathML, and Django 1.11: MDN Changelog for May 2018

What is Standup?

Standup is a system for capturing standup-style posts from individuals making it easier to see what's going on for teams and projects. It has an associated IRC bot standups for posting messages from IRC.

Paris, Munich, & Dresden: Help Us Give the Web a Voice!

In July, our Voice Assistant Team will be in France and Germany to explore trust and technology adoption. We’re particularly interested in how people use voice assistants and how people listen to content like Pocket and podcasts. We would like to learn more how you use technology and how a voice assistant or voice user interface (VUIs) could improve your Internet and open web experiences. We will be conducting a series of in-home interviews and participatory design sessions. No prior voice assistant experience needed!

More Common Voices

Today we are excited to announce that Common Voice, Mozilla’s initiative to crowdsource a large dataset of human voices for use in speech technology, is going multilingual! Thanks to the tremendous efforts from Mozilla’s communities and our deeply engaged language partners you can now donate your voice in German, French and Welsh, and we are working to launch 40+ more as we speak. But this is just the beginning. We want Common Voice to be a tool for any community to make speech technology available in their own language.

Parlez-vous Deutsch? Rhagor o Leisiau i Common Voice

We’re very proud to be announcing the next phase of the Common Voice project. It’s now available for contributors in three new languages, German, French and Welsh, with 40+ other languages on their way! But this is just the beginning. We want Common Voice to be a tool for any community to make speech technology available in their own language.

Speech interfaces are the next frontier for the Internet. Project Common Voice is our initiative to build a global corpus of open voice data to be used to train machine-learning algorithms to power the voice interfaces of the future. We believe these interfaces shouldn’t be controlled by a few companies as gatekeepers to voice-enabled services, and we want users to be understood consistently, in their own languages and accents.

As anyone who has studied the economics of the Internet knows, services chase money. And so it’s quite natural that developers and publishers seek to develop for the audience that will best reward their efforts. What we see as a consequence is an Internet that is heavily skewed towards English, in a world where English is only spoken by 20% of the global population, and only 5% natively. This is increasingly going to be an accessibility issue, as Wired noted last year, “Voice Is the Next Big Platform, Unless You Have an Accent”.

AreWeFastYet UI refresh

For a long time Mozilla’s JS team and others have been using https://arewefastyet.com to track the JS engine performance against various benchmarks.

Side View is the Firefox Feature I’ve Been Waiting For

Since its Quantum update I have to say that I’m loving Mozilla Firefox — but a promising new feature on the horizon could help me to love it even more!

It’s called Side View and it’s an experimental feature available to try, from today, as part of the Firefox Test Pilot program.

What’s that?

Firefox Test Pilot is an opt-in, participatory effort that allows wily Firefox users like you and me to help test new features as web extensions before they’re ready for wider dissemination.

Happy BMO Push Day!

Happy BMO Push Day!

Get All the Color, New Firefox Extension Announced

Remember when you were a kid and wanted to paint your room your favorite color? Or the first time you dyed your hair a different color and couldn’t wait to show all your friends (or at least, wanted to)? We feel that, too, and that’s why we put the new Color Extension in the mix of add-ons available for Firefox browser.

It’s A New Firefox Multi-tasking Extension: Side View

Introducing Side View! Side View is a Firefox extension that allows you to view two different browser tabs simultaneously in the same tab, within the same browser window.

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With Side View, you can compare news stories and informational material against one another. You can also read an article on one side, and compare quoted source material to the original on the other side.

And this is a really great use of Side View: Comparing revisions of documents and images to note changes and see if the new version looks and reads better than the old version. Version control—all in the same window!

Latest Firefox Test Pilot Experiments: Custom Color and Side View

Before we bring new features to Firefox, we give them a test run to make sure they’re right for our users. To help determine which features we add and how exactly they should work, we created the Test Pilot program.

Since the launch of Test Pilot, we have experimented with 16 different features, and three have graduated to live in Firefox full time: Activity Stream, Containers and Screenshots. Recently, Screenshots surpassed more than 100M+ screenshots since it launched. Thanks to active Firefox users who opt to take part in Test Pilot experiments.

This week, the Test Pilot team is continuing to evolve Firefox features with two new extensions that will offer users a more customizable and productive browsing experience.

Introducing Firefox Color and Side View

We’re excited to launch two new Test Pilot experiments that add power and style to Firefox.

Overscripted! Digging into JavaScript execution at scale

As champions of a healthy Internet, we at Mozilla have been increasingly concerned about the current advertisement-centric web content ecosystem. Web-based ad technologies continue to evolve increasingly sophisticated programmatic models for targeting individuals based on their demographic characteristics and interests. The financial underpinnings of the current system incentivise optimizing on engagement above all else. This, in turn, has evolved an insatiable appetite for data among advertisers aggressively iterating on models to drive human clicks.

Overscripted Web: a Mozilla Data Analysis Challenge

What happens while you are browsing the Web? Mozilla wants to invite data and computer scientists, students and interested communities to join the “Overscripted Web: a Data Analysis Challenge”, and help explore JavaScript running in browsers and what this means for users. We gathered a rich dataset and we are looking for exciting new observations, patterns and research findings that help to better understand the Web. We want to bring the winners to speak at MozFest, our annual festival for the open Internet held in London.

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Cryptojacking: websites using user’s computers to mine cryptocurrencies are mainly video streaming sites

Management books in review

I became a manager of a fantastic team in February.  My standard response to a new role is to read many books and talk to a lot of people who are have experience is this area so I have the background to be successful.