Moz/FF
Google for Slow Connections and Mozilla on Accessibility
Submitted by Roy Schestowitz on Saturday 27th of February 2021 08:33:44 PM Filed under


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Lyra: A New Very Low-Bitrate Codec for Speech Compression
Connecting to others online via voice and video calls is something that is increasingly a part of everyday life. The real-time communication frameworks, like WebRTC, that make this possible depend on efficient compression techniques, codecs, to encode (or decode) signals for transmission or storage. A vital part of media applications for decades, codecs allow bandwidth-hungry applications to efficiently transmit data, and have led to an expectation of high-quality communication anywhere at any time.
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To solve this problem, we have created Lyra, a high-quality, very low-bitrate speech codec that makes voice communication available even on the slowest networks. To do this, we’ve applied traditional codec techniques while leveraging advances in machine learning (ML) with models trained on thousands of hours of data to create a novel method for compressing and transmitting voice signals.
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Google's New Lyra Voice Codec + AV1 Aim For Video Chats Over 56kbps Modems In 2021
Google's AI team has announced "Lyra" as a very low bit-rate codec for speech compression designed for use-cases like WebRTC and other video chats... With a bit rate so low that when combined with the likes of the AV1 video codec could potentially allow video chats over 56kbps Internet connections.
Google engineers formally announced Lyra on Thursday as this new codec to challenge the likes of Opus. Lyra leverages machine learning to make it suitable for delivering extremely low bit-rate speech compression.
Google's Lyra announcement noted, "Lyra is currently designed to operate at 3kbps and listening tests show that Lyra outperforms any other codec at that bitrate and is compared favorably to Opus at 8kbps, thus achieving more than a 60% reduction in bandwidth. Lyra can be used wherever the bandwidth conditions are insufficient for higher-bitrates and existing low-bitrate codecs do not provide adequate quality."
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Mozilla Accessibility: 2021 Firefox Accessibility Roadmap Update [Ed: Mozilla is not consistent. It speaks of people with disabilities, but was eager to go on with DRM (EME) inside Firefox despite is being an attack on disabled people]
People with disabilities can experience huge benefits from technology but can also find it frustrating or worse, downright unusable. Mozilla’s Firefox accessibility team is committed to delivering products and services that are not just usable for people with disabilities, but a delight to use.
The Firefox accessibility (a11y) team will be spending much of 2021 re-building major pieces of our accessibility engine, the part of Firefox that powers screen readers and other assistive technologies.
While the current Firefox a11y engine has served us well for many years, new directions in browser architectures and operating systems coupled with the increasing complexity of the modern web means that some of Firefox’s venerable a11y engine needs a rebuild.
Browsers, including Firefox, once simple single process applications, have become complex multi-process systems that have to move lots of data between processes, which can cause performance slowdowns. In order to ensure the best performance and stability and to enable support for a growing, wider variety of accessibility tools in the future (such as Windows Narrator, Speech Recognition and Text Cursor Indicator), Firefox’s accessibility engine needs to be more robust and versatile. And where ATs used to spend significant resources ensuring a great experience across browsers, the dominance of one particular browser means less resources being committed to ensuring the ATs work well with Firefox. This changing landscape means that Firefox too must evolve significantly and that’s what we’re going to be doing in 2021.
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Mozilla: Rust, Firefox Logo, Nightly, Surveillance and VR/Hubs
Submitted by Roy Schestowitz on Friday 26th of February 2021 10:49:54 PM Filed under
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The Rust Programming Language Blog: Const generics MVP hits beta!
After more than 3 years since the original RFC for const generics was accepted, the first version of const generics is now available in the Rust beta channel! It will be available in the 1.51 release, which is expected to be released on March 25th, 2021. Const generics is one of the most highly anticipated features coming to Rust, and we're excited for people to start taking advantage of the increased power of the language following this addition.
Even if you don't know what const generics are (in which case, read on!), you've likely been benefitting from them: const generics are already employed in the Rust standard library to improve the ergonomics of arrays and diagnostics; more on that below.
With const generics hitting beta, let's take a quick look over what's actually being stabilized, what this means practically, and what's next.
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Remain Calm: the fox is still in the Firefox logo
If you’ve been on the internet this week, chances are you might have seen a meme or two about the Firefox logo.
And listen, that’s great news for us. Sure, it’s stressful to have hundreds of thousands of people shouting things like “justice for the fox” in all-caps in your mentions for three days straight, but ultimately that means people are thinking about the brand in a way they might not have for years.
People were up in arms because they thought we had scrubbed fox imagery from our browser. Rest easy knowing nothing could be further from the truth.
The logo causing all the stir is one we created a while ago with input from our users. Back in 2019, we updated the Firefox browser logo and added the parent brand logo as a new logo for our broader product portfolio that extends beyond the browser.
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django-querysetsequence 0.14 released!
django-querysetsequence 0.14 has been released with support for Django 3.2 (and Python 3.9). django-querysetsequence is a Django package for treating multiple QuerySet instances as a single QuerySet, this can be useful for treating similar models as a single model. The QuerySetSequence class supports much of the API available to QuerySet instances.
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Firefox Nightly: These Weeks in Firefox: Issue 88
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Will Kahn-Greene: Data Org Working Groups: retrospective (2020)
Data Org architects, builds, and maintains a data ingestion system and the ecosystem of pieces around it. It covers a swath of engineering and data science disciplines and problem domains. Many of us are generalists and have expertise and interests in multiple areas. Many projects cut across disciplines, problem domains, and organizational structures. Some projects, disciplines, and problem domains benefit from participation of other stakeholders who aren't in Data Org.
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Mozilla VR Blog: Behind-the-Scenes at Hubs Hack Week
Earlier this month, the Hubs team spent a week working on an internal hackathon. We figured that the start of a new year is a great time to get our roadmap in order, do some investigations about possible new features to explore this year, and bring in some fresh perspectives on what we could accomplish. Plus, we figured that it wouldn’t hurt to have a little fun doing it! Our first hack week was a huge success, and today we’re sharing what we worked on this month so you can get a “behind the scenes” peek at what it’s like to work on Hubs.
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Mozilla Leftovers
Submitted by Roy Schestowitz on Wednesday 24th of February 2021 11:02:44 PM Filed under
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Firefox 86 brings multiple Picture-in-Picture, “Total Cookie Protection”
In December 2019, Firefox introduced Picture-in-Picture mode—an additional overlay control on in-browser embedded videos that allows the user to detach the video from the browser. Once detached, the video has no window dressing whatsoever—no title bar, min/max/close, etc.
PiP mode allows users who tile their windows—automatically or manually—to watch said video while consuming a bare minimum of screen real estate.
Firefox 86 introduces the concept of multiple simultaneous Picture-in-Picture instances. Prior to build 86, hitting the PiP control on a second video would simply reattach the first video to its parent tab and detach the second. Now, you can have as many floating, detached video windows as you'd like—potentially turning any monitor into something reminiscent of a security DVR display.
The key thing to realize about multi-PiP is that the parent tabs must remain open—if you navigate away from the parent tab of an existing PiP window, the PiP window itself closes as well. Once I realized this, I had no difficulty surrounding my Firefox 86 window with five detached, simultaneously playing video windows.
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This Week in Glean: Boring Monitoring [Ed: Mozilla insists that it is not surveillance when they call it "data science" and "big data"]
Every Monday the Glean has its weekly Glean SDK meeting. This meeting is used for 2 main parts: First discussing the features and bugs the team is currently investigating or that were requested by outside stakeholders. And second bug triage & monitoring of data that Glean reports in the wild.
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It probably can! But it requires more work than throwing together a dashboard with graphs. It’s also not as easy to define thresholds on these changes and when to report them. There’s work underway that hopefully enables us to more quickly build up these dashboards for any product using the Glean SDK, which we can then also extend to do more reporting automated. The final goal should be that the product teams themselves are responsible for monitoring their data. -
William Lachance: Community @ Mozilla: People First, Open Source Second [Ed: Is this why Mozilla pays its CEO over 3 million dollars per year (quadruple the older sum) while sacking even its own people and spying on Firefox users (people)?]
It seems ridiculously naive in retrospect, but I can remember thinking at the time that the right amount of “open source” would solve all the problems. What can I say? It was the era of the Arab Spring, WikiLeaks had not yet become a scandal, Google still felt like something of a benevolent upstart, even Facebook’s mission of “making the world more connected” sounded great to me at the time. If we could just push more things out in the open, then the right solutions would become apparent and fixing the structural problems society was facing would become easy!
What a difference a decade makes. The events of the last few years have demonstrated (conclusively, in my view) that open systems aren’t necessarily a protector against abuse by governments, technology monopolies and ill-intentioned groups of individuals alike. Amazon, Google and Facebook are (still) some of the top contributors to key pieces of open source infrastructure but it’s now beyond any doubt that they’re also responsible for amplifying a very large share of the problems global society is experiencing.
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Mozilla: Code Review, Translations, and Tor Browser 10.0.12
Submitted by Roy Schestowitz on Wednesday 24th of February 2021 12:34:58 PM Filed under
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The Benefits Of Code Review For The Reviewer
Code Review is an essential part of the process of publishing code. We often talk about the benefits of code review for projects and for people writing the code. I want to talk about the benefits for the person actually reviewing the code.
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There is a feel good opportunity when doing good code reviews. Specifically, when the review helped to improve both the code and the developer. Nothing better than the last comment of a developer being happy of having the code merged and the feeling of improving skills.
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Introducing Fabiola Lopez
Please join us in welcoming Fabiola Lopez (Fabi) to the team. Fabi will be helping us with support content in English and Spanish, so you’ll see her in both locales.
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New Release: Tor Browser 10.0.12
Tor Browser 10.0.12 is now available from the Tor Browser download page and also from our distribution directory.
This version updates Desktop Firefox to 78.8.0esr and Android Firefox to 86.1.0. In addition, Tor Browser 10.0.12 updates NoScript to 11.2.2, Openssl to 1.1.1j, and Tor to 0.4.5.6. This version includes important security updates to Firefox for Desktop, and similar important security updates to Firefox for Android.
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Firefox 86 Brings Total Cookie Protection and Multi-PIP Feature
Submitted by arindam1989 on Wednesday 24th of February 2021 06:22:11 AM Filed under
Mozilla announced the latest release of Firefox 86 and it brings important features that make you more secure on the web.
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Firefox 87 Enters Beta with the Backspace Key Disabled as a “Back” Button
Submitted by Marius Nestor on Tuesday 23rd of February 2021 05:39:42 PM Filed under
While it doesn’t appear to include any major or important changes, Firefox 87 will apparently be the first update to the popular web browser used by default on numerous GNU/Linux distributions to disable the Backspace key from working as a “Back” button when you want to navigate back to the previous page.
This change was supposed to land in the Firefox 86 release that arrived earlier today, but, for some reason unknown to me, it didn’t happen, and it looks like Mozilla delayed it for Firefox 87. Mozilla recommends that you use the Alt + Left arrow keyboard shortcut instead.
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Firefox 86 Released with Multiple Picture-in-Picture Support by Default
Submitted by Marius Nestor on Tuesday 23rd of February 2021 09:49:18 AM Filed under
The biggest change in Firefox 86 was supposed to be the enablement of AV1 Image File Format (AVIF) support by default. AVIF is a powerful, royalty-free and open-source image file format designed to encode AV1 bitstreams in the HEIF (High Efficiency Image File Format) container.
While AVIF support was offered in during the beta testing, Firefox 86 doesn’t come with AVIF support enabled by default. However, you can enable it yourselves by setting the image.avif.enable option in about:config to true.
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Firefox Proton upcoming update - Half-integer spin
Submitted by Roy Schestowitz on Monday 22nd of February 2021 04:25:07 PM Filed under
Every few years, there's a new visual revamp in Firefox. First, we had the classic look, then Australis, then Quantum, which sort of gave us the old look but in a new guise, and now, Mozilla is aiming for yet another makeover called Proton. The UI refresh seems to be all the rage, except, I don't see why there's a need for one, but hey. Modern problems require modern solutions, or something.
I wanted to get an early glimpse of the change, mostly to see what I ought to expect. As you very well recall from me articles and rants, I found Australis abominable, Quantum okay, and now, I'm not sure why Firefox should be modified yet again. If by any measure we look at competition, say Chrome, what made it popular definitely isn't any series of UI changes, because largely, it hasn't changed much since inception. Not that Firefox should ape Chrome, far from it. But the sense of activity associated with visual polish doesn't necessarily translate into anything meaningful. Whether it does, well, we need to see. Early hands on, let's see.
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I don't see any major value in this revamp. On its own, the name Proton, while full of punchy sounds, is also tricky. Because it's associated with tons of other products - including but not limited to mail service, car manufacturer, gaming engine, and so on. Then, the tab redesign and the icon stripping from menus don't add any great value. I really don't understand - for the time being, that is - how this is going to contribute in any great way to the success of Firefox.
'Tis a painful realization for me, because I want Firefox to remain around, alive and relevant and fun, because at the moment, it's the only thing that makes the Internet still usable, especially on the mobile. A last bastion of semi-sanity in the great ocean of idiocracy. But then, that does not mean I blindly embrace whatever Mozilla has in its repertoire of daily surprises.
And at this point, I'm not sure how Mozilla can recapture some of the lost market share. Yes, the nerds are now all waking up, shouting privacy, but a) nerds are a tiny tiny minority these are the same nerds that help convert everyone to Chrome because JAVASCRIPT SPEED in the last few years. My view is, this should be Mozilla's one and only argument - privacy. Everything else is a game of attrition that it cannot win. Simple, innocent privacy and a calm, quiet browser that does not upend established usage patterns, the opposite of what Mozilla is occasionally doing.
Idiots don't care either way, and nerds deeply care about any change in their ecosystem. Revamping the UI is a lose-lose situation really, and a waste of resources. Privacy is going to be the next battlefield, and here Mozilla has a huge lead over its competitors. Hopefully, this is where the browser's future and focus will be. And trust me, you don't want to contemplate the Internet future without Firefox. Nerds, you've been warned.
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Mozilla: Outsourcing to Microsoft and Bringing in More People to the Board (Including ex-Microsoft)
Submitted by Roy Schestowitz on Thursday 18th of February 2021 06:45:43 PM Filed under
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Armen Zambrano: Making pip installations faster with wheel
Upon some investigation, I noticed that the package wheel was not being installed. After making some changes, I can now guarantee that our development environment installs it by default and it’s given us about 40–50% speed gain.
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Expanding Mozilla’s Boards
I’m delighted to share that the Mozilla Foundation and Corporation Boards are each welcoming a new member.
Wambui Kinya is Vice President of Partner Engineering at Andela, a Lagos-based global talent network that connects companies with vetted, remote engineers from Africa and other emerging markets. Andela’s vision is a world where the most talented people can build a career commensurate with their ability – not their race, gender, or geography. Wambui joins the Mozilla Foundation Board and you can read more from her, here, on why she is joining. Motivated by the intersection of Africa, technology and social impact, Wambui has led business development and technology delivery, digital technology implementation, and marketing enablement across Africa, the United States, Europe and South America. In 2020 she was selected as one of the “Top 30 Most Influential Women” by CIO East Africa.
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Why I’m Joining Mozilla’s Board of Directors
Like many of us I suspect, I have long been a fairly passive “end-user” of the internet. In my daily life, I’ve merrily skipped along it to simplify and accelerate my life, to be entertained, to connect with far-flung friends and family, and to navigate my daily life. In my career in Silicon Valley, I’ve happily used it as a trusty building block to help build many consumer technologies and brands – in roles leading turnarounds and transformations at market-creating companies like eBay, PayPal, Skype, Airbnb, and most recently as CEO of Willow Innovations Inc.
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Why I’m Joining Mozilla's Board of Directors - The Mozilla Blog
My introduction to Mozilla was when Firefox was first launched. I was starting my career as a software developer in Boston, MA at the time. My experience was Firefox was a far superior browser. I was also deeply fascinated by the notion that, as an open community, we could build and evolve a product for greater good.
You have probably deduced from this, that I am also old enough that growing up in my native country, Kenya, most of my formative years were under the policies of “poverty reduction programs” dictated and enforced by countries and institutions in the northern hemisphere. My firsthand experience of many of these programs was observing my mother, a phenomenal environmental engineer and academic, work tirelessly to try to convince donor organizations to be more inclusive of the communities they sought to serve and benefit.
This drive to have greater inclusion and representation was deepened over ten years of being a woman and person of color in technology in corporate America. I will spare you the heartache of recounting my experiences of being the first or the only one. But I must also acknowledge, I was fortunate enough to have leaders who wanted to help me succeed and grow. As my professional exposure became more global, I felt an urgency to have more representation and greater voice from Africa.
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This is why I have joined the Mozilla board. I am truly honored and look forward to contributing but also learning alongside you.
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Brave and Mozilla: uBlock, Mozilla Localization and More
Submitted by Roy Schestowitz on Friday 12th of February 2021 03:06:03 AM Filed under

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Brave browser adds native support for uBlock and Fanboy annoyances lists and social list - gHacks Tech News
Brave browser's built-in ad-blocker has been boosted by some additional options. The Chromium fork's Brave Shield now supports three popular privacy-friendly filter lists, namely uBlock Annoyances List, Fanboy Annoyances List and Fanboy Social List.
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Mozilla Localization (L10N): L10n Report: February 2021 Edition
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Hacks.Mozilla.Org: MDN localization update, February 2021
Previously on MDN, we allowed translators to localize document URL slugs as well as the document title and body content. This sounds good in principle, but has created a bunch of problems. It has resulted in situations where it is very difficult to keep document structures consistent.
If you want to change the structure or location of a set of documentation, it can be nearly impossible to verify that you’ve moved all of the localized versions along with the en-US versions — some of them will be under differently-named slugs both in the original and new locations, meaning that you’d have to spend time tracking them down, and time creating new parent pages with the correct slugs, etc.
As a knock-on effect, this has also resulted in a number of localized pages being orphaned (not being attached to any parent en-US pages), and a number of en-US pages being translated more than once (e.g. localized once under the existing en-US slug, and then again under a localized slug).
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Karl Dubost: Whiteboard Reactionaries
I simply and firmly disagree and throw my gauntlet at Bruce's face. Choose your weapons, time and witnesses.
The important part of this tweet is how Mike Taylor points out how the Sillycon Valley industry is a just a pack of die-hard stick-in-the-mud reactionaries who have promoted the whiteboard to the pinnacle of one's dull abilities to regurgitate the most devitalizing Kardashianesque answers to stackoverflow problems. Young programmers! Rise! In front of the whiteboard, just walk out. Refuse the tiranny of the past, the chalk of ignorance.
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