Firefox has a motion team?! Yes we do!

Motion may sometimes feel like an afterthought or worse yet “polish”. For the release of Firefox Quantum (one of our most significant releases to date), we wanted to ensure that motion was not a second class citizen and that it would play an important role in how users perceived performance in the browser. We (Amy & Eric) make up the UX side of the “motion team” for Firefox. We say this in air quotes because the motion team was essentially formed based on our shared belief that motion design is important in Firefox. With a major release planned, we thought this would be the perfect opportunity to have a team working on motion.

Firefox 61 new contributors

With the upcoming release of Firefox 61, we are pleased to welcome the 59 developers who contributed their first code change to Firefox in this release, 53 of whom were brand new volunteers!

QMO: Firefox 61 Beta 14 Testday Results

As you may already know, last Friday – June 15th – we held a new Testday event, for Firefox 61 Beta 14. Thank you all for helping us make Mozilla a better place!

IOActivityMonitor in Gecko

This is a first blog post of a series on Gecko, since I am doing a lot of C++ work in Firefox these days. My current focus is on adding tools in Firefox to try to detect what's going on when something goes rogue in the browser and starts to drain your battery life. We have many ideas on how to do this at the developer/user level, but in order to do it properly, we need to have accurate ways to measure what's going on when the browser runs. One thing is I/O activity. For instance, a WebExtension worker that performs a lot of disk writes is something we want to find out about, and we had nothing to track all I/O activities in Firefox, without running the profiler. When Firefox OS was developed, a small feature was added in the Gecko network lib, called NetworkActivityMonitor.

San Francisco Oxidation meeting notes

At last week’s Mozilla All Hands meeting in San Francisco we had an Oxidation meeting about the use of Rust in Firefox. It was low-key, being mostly about status and progress. The notes are here for those who are interested.

Riot Games' anti-cheat software for League also targets Linux users

This week Riot Games implemented a new anti-cheat software for the game that is meant to limit the number of players who use third-party programs while playing. Most of these programs help users cheat in-game, such as by inputting movement commands for a player to allow them to dodge enemy skillshots. Unfortunately for players who run Linux as their operating system, the new anti-cheat also targets it as a third-party program, preventing them from playing League. Many players took to Reddit and other forums to protest the change, even creating a petition for Riot to add Linux compatibility.

Riot Games New Anti-Cheat Could Wipe Out League of Legends Linux Player Base

​Riot Games has been working on a new anti-cheat system for League of Legends. There are reports that this update would make the game unplayable for Linux users, because it would make the game incompatible with virtual environments, something Linux users have to employ to play the game.

A small but nice update on Ashes of the Singularity: Escalation and Linux support

We've been waiting quite a while for any real news on the Linux port of Ashes of the Singularity: Escalation [Official Site]. While we still don't know when, we do know it's still happening.

Dead Cells, a 'RogueVania' now has a Beta available for Linux

Dead Cells mixes in elements of a Rogue-lite with a MetroidVania to create an interesting mix and it's now available on Linux with a Beta. I did notice in the comments of the previous article, that people were debating the choice of article title. I said it was a "rogue-lite metroidvania action-platformer", which was obviously a bit wrong. They've actually coined their own term for it, calling it a "RogueVania".

Mixed Reaction

After Github purchase, Microsoft remains a relatively untrusted open source player to some

What is GitHub?

GitHub is now the de facto home of open-source software. But Microsoft’s acquisition reignited a debate over the platform’s centrality. Microsoft assures users the service is safe under its stewardship, but many are wary. When Mr Ballmer spoke of developers, he had a specific sort in mind: those using Microsoft’s tools to build projects for Microsoft products. He once called open-source Linux a “cancer”, which would spread uncontrollably. In a sense, his words proved prophetic: today, open-source software is everywhere, from websites to financial markets to self-driving cars. Under Mr Nadella’s leadership, Microsoft has embraced open-source development. In buying GitHub it hopes to gain the trust of developers it once spurned. But some wonder if the change is complete, or if Microsoft will use its newly bought dominance of open-source hosting to push its own products. Alternatives to GitHub—some themselves open-source—wait in the wings. If it is not careful, Microsoft may find the developers it just paid so much to reach slipping from its grasp.

Free software is at risk in the EU -- take action now

Members of the European Parliament want to turn upload platforms like GitLab into "censorship machines" that require user-uploaded materials to be monitored and automatically filtered, a process which would prevent modified and reused code from being uploaded. This provision is covered under Article 13 of the Copyright Directive. If Article 13, embedded within the proposal, becomes official policy, it will be impossible for developers to build off of one another's code -- which is not only a blow to the collaborative development of free software, but a push against the basic freedoms of free software. Software isn't free unless it can be modified and shared. Article 13 will affect all users of free software -- as development of free software suffers, the quality and availability of updates, new features, and new programs will also suffer.

Open Source Industry Australia Says Zombie TPP Could Destroy Free Software Licensing

Without the ability to enforce compliance through the use of injunctions, open source licenses would once again be pointless. Although the OSIA is concerned about free software in Australia, the same logic would apply to any TPP-11 country. It would also impact other nations that joined the Pacific pact later, as the UK is considering (the UK government seems not to have heard of the gravity theory for trade). It would presumably apply to the US if it did indeed rejoin the pact, as has been mooted. In other words, the impact of this section on open source globally could be significant. It's worth remembering why this particular article is present in TPP. It grew out of concerns that nations like China and Russia were demanding access to source code as a pre-requisite of allowing Western software companies to operate in their countries. Article 14.17 was designed as a bulwark against such demands. It's unlikely that it was intended to destroy open source licensing too, although some spotted early on that this was a risk. And doubtless a few big software companies will be only too happy to see free software undermined in this way. Unfortunately, it's probably too much to hope that the Australian Senate Standing Committee on Foreign Affairs, Defence & Trade will care about or even understand this subtle software licensing issue. The fate of free software in Australia will therefore depend on whether TPP-11 comes into force, and if so, what judges think Article 14.17 means.