Mozilla Firefox

Después de una semana anunciado por Mozilla y muchos sitios en Internet, coincidiendo con el 10º Aniversario de Firefox, Mozilla ha introducido a su canal de actualizaciones Firefox Developer Edition, el primer navegador diseñado especialmente para ... [More] los desarrolladores web. Se trata de una edición enfocada a encontrar y tener fácilmente las herramientas para desarrolladores a la mano, en un ambiente propicio en aras de acelerar el desarrollo de aplicaciones. Su color azul me recuerda al Zorro Azul, una versión de Firefox con muchos complementos útiles en el desarrollo que por un tiempo estuvimos ofreciendo en Firefoxmanía hasta la ida de Gustavo. Más allá de la nueva elegante interfaz de usuario, se crearon herramientas innovadoras como Valence (anteriormente Adaptador de Herramientas de Firefox), un pre-instalado complemento que le permite depurar cualquier contenido de la web que se ejecute en Chrome para Android, Safari Mobile para iOS, y Firefox. También se ha añadido WebIDE, con el cual se podrá ejecutar y depurar aplicaciones Firefox OS directamente en tu navegador, utilizando un dispositivo con Firefox OS o el Simulador. Otras herramientas clave en su navegador incluyen Vista de Diseño Responsivo, Editor Web de Audio, Inspector de Página, Consola Web, depurador Java Script, Monitor de red y el Editor de estilo. Esta y otras versiones de Firefox pueden ejecutarlas al mismo tiempo porque utilizan perfiles diferentes. Algunas capturas de Firefox DE en ejecución. Gracias a un canal de comunicación que han creado, y a través de los comentarios y sugerencias que reciban de sus usuarios, en Mozilla irán iterando y evolucionando esta edición de Firefox. Pueden descargar Firefox Developer Edition o el zorro desde la sección Aurora de nuestra sección de Descargas. Allí debe elegir la versión que termina en developer. En lo particular me gustaría que del canal Release/Estable (recomendando a los usuarios) quiten muchas de estas herramientas que podemos encontrar ahora en Developer pues no todos los usuarios de Firefox somos desarrolladores y un gran por ciento no las utiliza para nada. Esto hará un Firefox más ligero al quitar código que pocas veces se necesita (no innecesario). ¿Qué opinan ustedes? Descargar Firefox Developer Edition ¡Feliz hacking! [Less]

I hesitantly post this, as I’m spending the evening looking at DALMOOC and hope to take part, but know I’m short on free time right now (what with a new baby and trying to buy a house) and starting the course late. This is either the first in a ... [More] series of blog posts about this course, or, we shall never talk about this again. The course encourages open and distributed publishing of work and assessments, which makes answering this first ‘warm-up’ task feel like more of a commitment to the course than I can really make. But here goes… Competency 0.1: Describe and navigate the distributed structure of DALMOOC, different ways to engage with peers and various technologies to manage and share personal learning. DALMOOC offers and encourages learning experiences that span many online products from many providers but which all connect back to a core curriculum hosted on the edX platform. This ranges from learning to use 3rd party tools and software to interacting with peers on commercial social media platforms like Twitter and Facebook. Learners can pick the tools and engagement best suited to them, including an option to follow just the core curriculum within edX if they prefer to do so. It actually feels a lot like how we work at Mozilla, which is overwhelming and disorientating at first but empowering in the long run. Writing this publically, however lazily, has forced me to engage with the task much more actively than I might have just sitting back and watching a lecture and answering a quiz. But I suspect that a fear of the web, and a lack of experience ‘working open’ would make this a terrifying experience for many people. The DALMOOC topic probably pre-selects for people with a higher than average disposition to work this way though, which helps. [Less]

A number of people at Mozilla are working on a wonderful privacy initiative called Polaris. This will include activities such as Mozilla hosting its own high-capacity Tor middle relays. But the part of Polaris I’m most interested in is Tracking ... [More] Protection, which is a Firefox feature that will make it trivial for users to avoid many forms of online tracking. This not only gives users better privacy; experiments have shown it also speeds up the loading of the median page by 20%! That’s an incredible combination. An experiment I decided to evaluate the effectiveness of Tracking Protection. To do this, I used Lightbeam, a Firefox extension designed specifically to record third-party tracking. On November 2nd, I used a trunk build of the mozilla-inbound repository and did the following steps. Start Firefox with a new profile. Install Lightbeam from addons.mozilla.org. Visit the following sites, but don’t interact with them at all: google.com techcrunch.com dictionary.com (which redirected to dictionary.reference.com) nytimes.com cnn.com Open Lightbeam in a tab, and go to the “List” view. I then repeated these steps, but before visiting the sites I added the following step. Open about:config and toggle privacy.trackingprotection.enabled to “true”. Results with Tracking Protection turned off The sites I visited directly are marked as “Visited”. All the third-party sites are marked as “Third Party”. Connected with 86 sites Type Website Sites Connected ---- ------- --------------- Visited google.com 3 Third Party gstatic.com 5 Visited techcrunch.com 25 Third Party aolcdn.com 1 Third Party wp.com 1 Third Party gravatar.com 1 Third Party wordpress.com 1 Third Party twitter.com 4 Third Party google-analytics.com 3 Third Party scorecardresearch.com 6 Third Party aol.com 1 Third Party questionmarket.com 1 Third Party grvcdn.com 1 Third Party korrelate.net 1 Third Party livefyre.com 1 Third Party gravity.com 1 Third Party facebook.net 1 Third Party adsonar.com 1 Third Party facebook.com 4 Third Party atwola.com 4 Third Party adtech.de 1 Third Party goviral-content.com 7 Third Party amgdgt.com 1 Third Party srvntrk.com 2 Third Party voicefive.com 1 Third Party bluekai.com 1 Third Party truste.com 2 Third Party advertising.com 2 Third Party youtube.com 1 Third Party ytimg.com 1 Third Party 5min.com 1 Third Party tacoda.net 1 Third Party adadvisor.net 2 Third Party dictionary.com 1 Visited reference.com 32 Third Party sfdict.com 1 Third Party amazon-adsystem.com 1 Third Party thesaurus.com 1 Third Party quantserve.com 1 Third Party googletagservices.com 1 Third Party googleadservices.com 1 Third Party googlesyndication.com 3 Third Party imrworldwide.com 3 Third Party doubleclick.net 5 Third Party legolas-media.com 1 Third Party googleusercontent.com 1 Third Party exponential.com 1 Third Party twimg.com 1 Third Party tribalfusion.com 2 Third Party technoratimedia.com 2 Third Party chango.com 1 Third Party adsrvr.org 1 Third Party exelator.com 1 Third Party adnxs.com 1 Third Party securepaths.com 1 Third Party casalemedia.com 2 Third Party pubmatic.com 1 Third Party contextweb.com 1 Third Party yahoo.com 1 Third Party openx.net 1 Third Party rubiconproject.com 2 Third Party adtechus.com 1 Third Party load.s3.amazonaws.com 1 Third Party fonts.googleapis.com 2 Visited nytimes.com 21 Third Party nyt.com 2 Third Party typekit.net 1 Third Party newrelic.com 1 Third Party moatads.com 2 Third Party krxd.net 2 Third Party dynamicyield.com 2 Third Party bizographics.com 1 Third Party rfihub.com 1 Third Party ru4.com 1 Third Party chartbeat.com 1 Third Party ixiaa.com 1 Third Party revsci.net 1 Third Party chartbeat.net 2 Third Party agkn.com 1 Visited cnn.com 14 Third Party turner.com 1 Third Party optimizely.com 1 Third Party ugdturner.com 1 Third Party akamaihd.net 1 Third Party visualrevenue.com 1 Third Party batpmturner.com 1 Results with Tracking Protection turned on Connected with 33 sites Visited google.com 3 Third Party google.com.au 0 Third Party gstatic.com 1 Visited techcrunch.com 12 Third Party aolcdn.com 1 Third Party wp.com 1 Third Party wordpress.com 1 Third Party gravatar.com 1 Third Party twitter.com 4 Third Party grvcdn.com 1 Third Party korrelate.net 1 Third Party livefyre.com 1 Third Party gravity.com 1 Third Party facebook.net 1 Third Party aol.com 1 Third Party facebook.com 3 Third Party dictionary.com 1 Visited reference.com 5 Third Party sfdict.com 1 Third Party thesaurus.com 1 Third Party googleusercontent.com 1 Third Party twimg.com 1 Visited nytimes.com 3 Third Party nyt.com 2 Third Party typekit.net 1 Third Party dynamicyield.com 2 Visited cnn.com 7 Third Party turner.com 1 Third Party optimizely.com 1 Third Party ugdturner.com 1 Third Party akamaihd.net 1 Third Party visualrevenue.com 1 Third Party truste.com 1  Discussion 86 site connections were reduced to 33. No wonder it’s a performance improvement as well as a privacy improvement. The only effect I could see on content was that some ads on some of the sites weren’t shown; all the primary site content was still present. google.com was the only site that didn’t trigger Tracking Protection (i.e. the shield icon didn’t appear in the address bar). The results are quite variable. When I repeated the experiment the number of third-party sites without Tracking Protection was sometimes as low as 55, and with Tracking Protection it was sometimes as low as 21. I’m not entirely sure what causes the variation. If you want to try this experiment yourself, note that Lightbeam was broken by a recent change. If you are using mozilla-inbound, revision db8ff9116376 is the one immediate preceding the breakage. Hopefully this will be fixed soon. I also found Lightbeam’s graph view to be unreliable. And note that the privacy.trackingprotection.enabled preference was recently renamed browser.polaris.enabled. [Update: that is not quite right; Monica Chew has clarified the preferences situation in the comments below.] Finally, Tracking Protection is under active development, and I’m not sure which version of Firefox it will ship in. In the meantime, if you want to try it out, get a copy of Nightly and follow these instructions. [Less]

The Learning Resource Directory (LRD) is a project (overview here) I’m leading to help organize and make discoverable all the information for learning about Mozilla and how to participate in our many projects. This post introduces the project ... [More] , explains the current working prototype and gives information about how to get involved. Why Mozilla needs a Learning Resource Directory Mozillians have created a sizeable knowledge base over the project’s 15+ year history. We have a significant number of resources documenting and teaching the tools, policies, processes and procedures necessary for contributing to Mozilla. Unfortunately for contributors, new and experienced alike, these resources are spread across a multitude of sources. These sources include websites, mailing-list archives, forums, blogs, social media, source code repositories, videos, and more. Some of these properties are hosted by Mozilla, others are not. Some are publicly available, others restricted to volunteers who have signed an NDA or are otherwise vouched and some are reserved for Mozilla paid staff. What these resources have in common is the absence of a central index or directory that links them all together and makes them easily discoverable. It’s this gap that we’re addressing with the LRD. As such, the goal of the Learning Resource Directory project is to provide an inclusive directory of all learning resources across Mozilla. The complete project plan, including timeline and KPIs is available here. Strategy and approach In order for directories of this sort to be successful, the information they provide needs to be: complete, current, relevant and contextual. In order to be complete and current, Mozillians not only need to have the ability to contribute freely to the directory, but they also need to feel a sense of ownership and empowerment to ensure they become an integral, active part of its curation. In order to be relevant and contextual, the data in the directory needs to be structured such that multiple views into the data can be created easily. That is, different learner types need different views of the directory. A new contributor who first requires basic competence of our essential communication tools presents a very different use case than an active contributor looking to branch out and work with a different team. Related projects Two related projects to the Learning Resource Directory are Webmaker’s Web Literacy Mapper and MDN’s Learning Area documentation plan. How the LRD differs from these projects is that the LRD is specifically about learning resources related to contributing to Mozilla and as such serves a different, if at times overlapping audience. There will certainly be some overlap between what MDN covers as part of their Learning Area plan and what the web literacy mapper covers. However, there is a lot to learn with regard to web literacy skills that has nothing to do with contributing to Mozilla. The same applies to developing web apps and other knowledge areas that MDN covers. Do you know of other related projects or efforts? Let me know! MozillaWiki as the platform Taking the requirements into consideration, MozillaWiki quickly came to mind as a possible platform for creating the index. Powered by Mediawiki, MozillaWiki is already set up in a way that anyone can participate in content generation and curation. This is demonstrated by a significant active contributor base (MozillaWiki has 600+ active daily users). And, the Semantic Mediawiki extension, already in use, provides a way to store and view data in a structured manner. A prototype So, I set about designing and implementing a prototype of the Learning Resource Directory. It’s far enough long that it’s now ready for people to take a look, try it out and provide feedback: https://wiki.mozilla.org/Learning_Resources Prototype of Learning Resource Directory homepage on MozillaWiki Prototype of Learning Resource entry creation form. Prototype of Learning Resource entry page/article. Wiki users can easily edit without needing to use wikitext by clicking ‘edit with form’ button. Attributes of a learning resource Each ‘learning resource’ has its own wiki page. Unlike regular wiki articles, these pages are created and edited in a guided way with a form. As such, any wiki user can create and edit learning resource pages without needing to know wikitext. Each learning resource has: Name: Name or title of the resource. Description: Short description explaining what the resource is. Link: Link to the resource. MozillaWiki page: Corresponding MozillaWiki page, if there is one. Often a resource will have a wiki page explaining more about the project and how to contribute to it. Learning Area (of interest): Each resource belongs to one of six learning areas of interest: Mozilla history and culture, Community Building Essential Tools Products and Projects Communication Channels Cross-functional Skills Access info: Is this resource available to the public, Mozillians-only, or Staff-only? Subject tags: This field is used to indicate corresponding functional, product and/or subject areas. Values are separated with commas. Web literacies: Which web literacies does the learning resource teach? Audience level: Novice, Intermediate and/or Advanced. Some resources will apply to multiple audiences. Contributor level: New, Casual, Active and/or Core. Some resources will apply to multiple contributor levels. Additional Details: a free-form field which can include information that doesn’t fit elsewhere Try editing an existing resource or creating a new one. Viewing data Storing learning resource data in this way allows us to create different views for the data. Rather than creating these views with a static list of links that needs to be manually updated, we can create them with semantic media queries. Here’s the beginnings of the learning resource index home page where resources are grouped by their learning area: https://wiki.mozilla.org/Learning_Resource_Index Prototype of learning resource index page. And here’s an example of how a team might use queries of the learning resource index to create topic and audience-specific information such as new webdev contributors: https://wiki.mozilla.org/User:Ckoehler/Demos/Webdev_Get_Involved. Prototype of team page with resources selectively display for a specific audience (in this case new webdev contributors). These examples may not look like much, but keep in mind that they are dynamically created based on which resources have been entered that match the given criteria. This means that as new resources are added, or old ones updated, these pages will be updated as well. Please get involved, and how! Try it out and give feedback The easiest way to get involved is to take a look at the learning resource index prototype,  edit some entries, create some new ones and then leave feedback in one of these places: on the bug on the talk page for the project or directly to me by irc or email Note: You’ll need to have a MozillaWiki account and be logged in to edit and create resources. You may request an account if you don’t have one already. If you’re feeling adventures, try and create some views using semantic mediawiki queries. I’m in the process of documenting how to do this here, or you can take a look at one of the demos, copy its code and experiment with modifying it. Guiding questions As you’re experimenting with the LRD and developing your feedback, please keep these questions in mind: Is it easy to create and edit entries such that many people across the project will get involved in helping to maintain the directory? If not, what could be made easier? Do the current fields make sense? Which fields are missing? Which are extraneous? How can pages for each learning resource be formatted for best readability? E.g., are the fields in the right order? Would a table layout be better? Some some fields have color-coding? How can pages presenting different views of the LRD be formatted for best readability? Join a community call Additionally, I’m hosting a set of community calls to gather input and organize volunteers. Here are the dates of the calls: Monday, 17 November at 8:00 PST (16:00 UTC) via IRC Tuesday, 18 November at 13:00 PST (21:00 UTC) via Vidyo Thursday, 20 November at 17:00 PST (Friday, 2:00 UTC) via Vidyo Tuesday, 25 November at 9:00 PST (17:00 UTC) via Vidyo Tuesday, 25 November at 12:00 PST (18:00 UTC) via IRC Connection details for Vidyo meetings: Vidyo Room: ckoehler, 9597 Via Telephone: +1 650 903 0800, x92 (or +1 800 707 2533, password 369). Then 99597. Press •1 to mute if you’re dialed in (creates audible beep). Direct room link, for guests:  https://v.mozilla.com/flex.html?roomdirect.html&key=Uc9zNxNaK26f Connection details for IRC meetings: #CBT on irc.mozilla.org webchat: http://chat.mibbit.com/?server=irc.mozilla.org&channel=#CBT Please join if you have comments, questions, general feedback or otherwise want to be involved!   [Less]

I recently got back from my first Mozilla Festival and I’ve been thinking about what I experienced there. There is too much to fit in one post, so I want to focus on the question that came up in Mitchell’s keynote: What does radical participation ... [More] look like? What was radical when Mozilla started is standard practice today (for example, Microsoft now runs open source communities). We can’t win by doing the same thing others are doing, so how can Mozilla invite people to participate in ways that no one else is able or willing to do? I have some thoughts about this and I’m interested in hearing what other people think. To get the conversation going, I’ll share one idea about what it would look like for Mozilla to have radical participation today. Staff as scaffolding In most areas of Mozilla, staff are directly doing the work and volunteers are involved with those teams to differing degrees. We have good metrics for coding and we can see that volunteers are committing around 40-50% of the patches. For a comparison with another volunteer-based organization, at the American Red Cross volunteers constitute about 90% of the workforce. The Red Cross staff are mostly supporting those volunteers rather than doing the work of responding to disasters themselves. We should measure the percentage of tasks done by volunteers across the whole project and set goals to get it closer to the example set by the Red Cross. Some areas, like SUMO and Location Services, are close to this today. Let’s take the knowledge they’re gaining and bring it to other teams to help them scale contributions. There will certainly be challenges doing this and it might not make sense for all teams. For instance, with the coding example above it might not be productive to have more volunteers submitting patches. This is an assumption that should be tested though. For example, Dietrich Ayala has had great results bringing in many students to help work on long-term features on the Firefox OS roadmap. Their work is removed from the day-to-day of staff developers shipping the next release, so he avoids the Mythical Man Month problem. Image from Ian Forrester We could use Dietrich’s model to support large groups focused on innovating in areas that will be relevant to us 2 or 3 years out, such as looking into how we can shape an open Internet of Things. We couldn’t hire 1,000 staff to focus on an Internet of Things research effort, but we could build a community of 1,000 volunteers to do that. Wikipedia says that there are about 1,000 employees of Microsoft Research. I’m assuming Microsoft wouldn’t be willing to close that department and replace their R&D efforts with volunteers. So having volunteers do more of the tasks with staff focused on supporting them feels to me like one part of radical participation. What do you think? What else could we be doing to get to a point of radical participation? [Less]

Here’s an example of unescaped & characters in a A HREF tag attribute. http://jsfiddle.net/32zbogfw/ It’s working fine. I know it might break XML and possibly XHTML but who uses that still? And I know an unescaped & in a href shows as ... [More] red in the View Source color highlighting. What can go wrong? Why is it important? Perhaps it used to be in 2009 but no longer the case. This all started because I was reviewing some that uses python urllib.urlencode(...) and inserts the results into a Django template with href="{{ result_of_that_urlencode }}" which would mean you get un-escaped & characters and then I tried to find how and why that is bad but couldn't find any examples of it. [Less]

One of the ways we facilitate improvement in development processes and the like at EventMobi is by having lunch and learns where someone will present on something interesting. Sometimes that's a cool technology they've used or a good ... [More] development practice they've discovered or have had experience with. To that end I gave a presentation on some of the lessons I've learnt on best practices while working in the Mozilla open-source community. Allthough many of these best practices may seem like no brainers to seasoned developers, I still hear way to many horror stories through the grapevine about software being built under seriously bad conditions. So, without further ado. Code Ownership One of the things I think Mozilla does really well is the idea of code ownership. This essentially means identifying those who have a level of knowledge about a particular area or module of code and thrusting upon them the responsibility to oversee it. From a practical point of view this means answering questions about the module that others have and also reviewing all of the changes that are being made to the module in order to ensure that they are sane and fit into the larger architecture of the module as a whole. Mozilla does this really well by having clear definitions of what code ownership means, who code owners are, and who in the owners absence, can make decisions about that module. The key part to this set up in my opinion is that it makes it clear what the requirements to become a code owner are and what their responsibilities are as a code owner. Too often I feel like, as with other things, if they aren't formalized they become subject to, well, subjectivity. And the details of code ownership and responsibility get lost in translation and hence, not enacted. Bottom line, formalizing your code ownership policies and processes are a foundation for success. Without that it becomes unclear even who to ask to review code, is it the person in the blame? Possibly. Maybe not. Maybe that person didn't make correct changes, or made changes under the guidance of someone else. Maybe the code your changing has never even had a true 'owner'. No one knows the big picture for that piece of code and so no one knows enough about it to make informed decisions. That's a problem. If a code owner had been designated when that code was written that would never have been an issue. Testing We all know testing is a must for any sane development process. What I've learned through Mozilla is that having an insane amount of tests is okay. And honestly, preferable to just enough. As just enough is hard to gauge. The more tests I have in general, the more confident I feel in my code. Having a gauntlet of tests for your code makes it that much stronger. Not only that, but it's important to be staying on top of tests. As a rule, not accepting code before it has a test and adding regression tests for bugs that are fixed. In exceptional cases code can merged without tests, but it should be tracked so that tests for it will be added later. Ten minutes spent writing a test now could save hours of developer time in the future tracking down bugs. Saying No This is one of my personal favourites. And especially relevant I think in companies which are, in my experience, more driven to say yes—in order to hit that extra profit margin, to please that extra customer, to do whatever—as opposed to open-source projects who are able to say no because most of the time they have no deadline. They're driven by desire to build that next cool thing, to build it well, and to do it in a sane way. From my experience working in Mozilla's and other open-source communities I've found it's important to say no when a feature isn't ready, when it's not good enough yet, when it needs an extra test, when it's not necessary, or when you just ain't got no time for that. I do think, however, that it's hard to say no sometimes while working under the constraints of a profit driven process. There is a healthy balance one can achieve though. We have to strive to achieve this zen like state. Managing Technical Debt One of the main ways I've seen this done is by ceating tickets for everything. See something off about the code? Log a ticket. See something in need of refactoring? Log a ticket. See something that needs a test? Log a ticket. Any kind of piece of work that you think needs to get done, any kind of open question that needs to be answered about the state of the code, log a ticket for it. Logging tickets for the problem gives it visibility and documents it somewhere. This enables a few things to happen. It enables communication about the state of your code base across your team and makes that information easily accessible as it's documented in your tracking system. It also puts the problems that are not necessarily bugs—your stinky, ugly, untested code, or otherwise—to be in your teams face all the time. It's not just getting swept under the rug and not being paid attention too. It forces your team to deal with it and be aware of it. The key part of this strategy then becomes managing all these tickets and attempting to understand what they are telling you. One of the ways you can do this is by doing regular triages. This means going through the open tickets and getting an idea of what state your code is in and prioritizing how to go about fixing it. This is key as it turns the information that your team has been generating into something actionable and something that you can learn from. [Less]

As part of my work with Mozilla around Web Literacy Map v2.0 I want to use the web to tell the story of the history of web literacy. It might seem obvious to start from the 1990s, but it’s worth saying that developments in new literacies pre-date ... [More] that decade. Check out Chapter 4 of my thesis for more detail on this. This is the first of a (proposed) series of posts leading up to my keynote at the Literacy Research Association conference in Miami at the beginning of December. Note: there’s lots of histories of the web itself. If you’re interested in that, just start with the relevant Wikipedia page. Here, I’m focusing on the discourse around the skills required to use the web. Books The easiest way to get started is to use a couple of Google tools. Here’s what we get when we plug web literacy as a search term into Google Books Ngram Viewer, focusing on books published between 1990 and today: Just to put that into context, here’s web literacy charted against information literacy, digital literacy, and media literacy: Web searches A Google Books search only gives us search terms from books - and then, of course, only those books that have been scanned by Google. Let’s have a look at Google Trends. This contains search queries by users entering terms into the Google search engine. These trends are constrained (unfortunately) to queries from 2004 onwards: Again, in context: Discussion So what do these graphs tell us? Well, not much by themselves, to be honest. It’s s shame that Google Trends only goes back as far as 2004 and, as far as I can ascertain, there’s no competitors to this product. Yahoo’s Clue service closed earlier this year, as have similar startups and services. So we only have Google’s view in this regard. I need to do some more research, but from the years I spent researching digital literacy, my feeling is that we can talk about three periods for web literacy. 1990-1999 ‘Web literacy’ was the term used by academics in the late 1990s to describe the differences between the page and the screen. There was a lot of discussion of hypertext. The focus was on understanding the similarities and differences between the page and the screen. There was a lot of excitement about the affordances of the web as a new medium and, in particular, the ways that stories could be told. It fit in well to postmodern descriptions of the world around us as being fractal and contingent. 2000-2009 In the first decade of the 21st century, 'web literacy’ programmes (some of which still exist) became common in educational institutions. These focused on basic web skills for staff and students. Many of these were wrapped up in wider 'information literacy’ or 'digital literacy’ programmes and included procedural skills as well as learning how to spot internet hoaxes. This would be termed 'Credibility’ on the Web Literacy Map v1.1 In the main, however, due to Marc Prensky’s (damaging) article on 'digital natives’ and 'digital immigrants’, there was a feeling that young people just grew up’ understanding this stuff so there’s was no particular need to teach it. This idea was demolished by a 2008 article in the British Journal of Educational Technology. 2010-onwards There’s been a shift in the last few years to understanding that literacy practices relating to the web constitute more than just: 1) reading and writing using different tools, and 2) spotting internet hoaxes. The web is something we carry around with us everywhere, accessed through devices we still call 'mobile phones’. The web mediates our lives. Most recently, due to the Snowden revelations, there’s been a realisation that that these devices aren’t neutral. They can shape the way we view the world, how we interact with one another, and the way others view us. The revelations showed us that our reliance on 'free’ services has led to corporate surveillance and government surveillance on a massive scale. Although 'web literacy’ is a term that’s still gaining traction, there’s a growing movement of people who feel that the skills and competencies required to read, write and participate on the web are something that need to be learned and taught. It’s into this world that we launched v1.1 of the Web Literacy Map. We hope to do even better and promote the Web Literacy Map as a platform with version 2.0. Comments? Questions? Direct them to [email protected] [Less]

MozFest encapsulates many of the crazy wonders of Mozilla and every year new ideas emerge, new projects are created and new communities come together. 2014 was a great year for Reps; not only have the Reps lead many of the maker parties in the ... [More] summer, but they are also pushing the Mozilla mission forward in every corner of the world. Having the Reps in London added expertise from all our communities We would have loved to invite everyone who has been doing wonderful things around the Webmaker projects, but unfortunately we had a limited number of invitations. In London we had a great mix of passionate Reps from all around the world making us so proud of this incredible community who will share their experiences with everyone who couldn’t attend this year. This year the Reps made a very significant contribution to MozFest! Not only did they facilitate many sessions, including one on community building, but they kept the show going in the background. Big kudos to Robby and all the MozFest helpers. On Sunday Reps literally saved the day! As the fox arrived with a bag full of 1000 phones the Reps (a.k.a Marcia’s flashing Gurus) spent Sunday flashing every phone ensuring that the participants of MozFest had the latest version. The Flashing Gurus in action   It is very humbling to see the energy, the kindness and the commitment of the Reps and we got a lot of recognition, from Mark and Mitchell on the main stage routing for Reps and wearing their Reps hoodies and from the Mozilla community and our friends. The Reps on the ground also inspired and were inspired by the other participants and brought all the local experiences to MozFest. It is this mix of hands-on work and diversity that opens the horizons for all of us who care about the web and think that this is a critical time to defend the open web and imagine a future where everyone can make active use of this tool for the good of everyone. We know that the Reps will take their experiences and ignite the Mozfesters in their communities to get together and imagine the world we want to live in. One great example is how our Reps in East Africa pioneered the first MozFest outside of London. This is an exciting model, where Reps and Mozillians take the lead and bring the Mozilla spirit to hundreds of people. And we know that more of this greatness will come in 2015! There are some amazing blog posts about Mozfest, from the personal experiences of everyone to great descriptions of the sessions, I recommend you check them out. Andre’s blog post is a great read to understand all the amazing things going on at MozFest and how the energy in Ravensbourne leads to so many new ideas. From other Reps we have great blog posts about their experience of MozFest: Andre Garzia: A free agent at MozFest Robby Sayles: Behind the scenes Manel Rhaiem: my first experience at MozFest Umesh Agarwal: Mozilla Festival 2014 One HUGE thanks to Ioana and Christos who were Chief Reps Wranglers and shined with professionalism, enthusiasm and made us all have a lot of fun. Also, pro tip, if you want to start a party, get some Reps to dance on stage [Less]

In this post you can find an overview about the work happened in the Firefox Automation team during week 37 and 38. Highlights After 7 months without a new release we finally were able to release mozdownload 1.12 with a couple of helpful enhancements ... [More] and fixes. We released Mozmill 2.0.7 and mozmill-automation 2.0.7 mainly for adding support of the v2 signed Firefox application bundles on OS X. Sadly we quickly had to follow-up with an appropriate 2.0.8 release for both tools, because a let change in the JS Engine caused a complete bustage of Mozmill. More details can be found in my appropriate blog post. We were even able to finally release Memchaser 0.6, which is fixing a couple of outstanding bugs and brought in the first changes to fully support Australis. One of our goals was to get the failure rate of Mozmill tests for release and beta candidate builds under 5%. To calculate that Cosmin wrote a little script, which pulls the test report data for a specific build from out dashboard and outputs the failure rate per executed testrun. We were totally happy to see that the failure rate for all Mozmill tests was around 0.027%! During the merge process for the Firefox 32 release Andrei has seen some test inconsistencies between our named branches in the Mozmill-Tests repository. Some changes were never backported, and only present on the default branch for a very long time. He fixed that and also updated our documentation for branch merges Something else worth for highlighting is also bug 1046645. Here our Mozmill tests found a case when Firefox does not correctly show the SSL status of a website if you navigate quickly enough. The fix for this regression caused by about:newtab made it even into the release notes Last but not least Andreea started planning our Automation Training day for Q3. So she wrote a blog post about this event on QMO. Individual Updates For more granular updates of each individual team member please visit our weekly team etherpad for week 37 and week 38. Meeting Details If you are interested in further details and discussions you might also want to have a look at the meeting agenda, the video recording, and notes from the Firefox Automation meetings of week 37 and week 38. [Less]