about:labs, issue 1 2008-11-12 19:28:01 Welcome to the first issue of about:labs, a new weekly newsletter that showcases innovation across the Mozilla community. In the coming weeks we’ll adopt the same infrastructure as the popular about:mozilla newsletter.
Concepts of the Week
Here’s some ideas we’ve found that have sparked thoughts in our minds from the Concept Series and across the Web; we hope they inspire you, too.
Please do join us and contribute your own thoughts, mock-ups, or prototypes. We’ll be highlighting new concepts each week.
Herdict Web is an upcoming project that aims to make diagnosing network accessibility problems a lot easier.
Web of Trust is a Firefox extension that aims to warn you before you enter a risky website through a social web-of-trust model.
Maxview of Browser History is an interesting mock-up of visual browser history.
Adaptive HTML Rendering Lens is a fascinating proposal for new Firefox functionality.
Ubiquity Update
The Ubiquity team is currently working on Ubi
Mozilla Labs in Tokyo: Firefox Developer Conference 2008-11-10 09:27:45 Firefox Developers Conference 2008 Tokyo is just around the corner. It’s just a week away — on the 16th of November, from 10:30am until 7pm at Belle Salle Jimbocho. Just like Firefox itself, the conference is free. We’ll have an after party so we can all chat more informally.
To highlight a couple Labs-related projects that are on the schedule: Jay Sullivan, VP of Mobile, will be doing a keynote on Mobile Firefox and the challenges we face in creating the “One Web”. Aza Raskin, Head of User Experience for Labs, will do a secondary keynote on Ubiquity and how to connect the web with language. Later in the day, Dan Mills, lead developer for Weave, will talk about creating a seamless user experience across all devices. There’s a bunch of other great topics and panels, too. You can see a full list here.
We hope to see you soon!
Mozilla Labs Meetup - Wednesday 11/12 2008-11-07 21:45:24 It’s time for another Monthly Meetup. This month’s Labs Night will be next Wednesday, November 12th, 6pm at Mozilla’s office - 1981 Landings Drive, bldg K in Mountain View, California.
We are super excited about this session. The teams from Seedcamp are spending the week in Silicon Valley and will be joining us on Wednesday evening. Several Mozilla folks will be giving lightning talks - Dion Almaer will be discussing the Ajax revolution and how it dovetails with UX; Jono DiCarlo will give an update on Mozilla Labs projects; and David Ascher and the Thunderbird team will discuss their latest UI experiments. We’ll also have time for discussion, hacking, and of course, pizza :).
If you are in the Bay Area we’d love to see you next week! Please RSVP in the comments so we know how many to expect. Thanks!
Concept Series Design Jams at University of Michigan 2008-10-30 16:20:25 In September a group of HCI students at the University of Michigan’s School of Information began a series of design jams focused on the future of the browser. These awesome events aim to contribute ideas to the Concept Series. When we launched the series we put out a call for “industry, higher education and people from around the world to get involved and share their ideas and expertise as we collectively explore and design future directions for the Web”. These students are doing just that.
Headed by Liz Blankenship, a current Masters student in the HCI program, the first satellite Labs night encouraged brainstorming around how to create a better browser. The students divided into four groups - Tabs, History, Automation, and Web Apps - and discussed use cases present in each. Check out a complete wrap up of the event on the Student Organization for Computer-Human Interaction website. The second event, held in October, took ideas generated at the first session and expa
Mozilla Labs in Berlin: Hack Days 2008-10-16 11:32:21 Announcing three great opportunities to hang out and hack with Mozilla Labs! As part of the Labs whistle-stop tour through Europe, we will be hosting Hack Days at c-base in Berlin. These sessions will be super informal and totally flexible - join for any part of the day to code, ask questions, or just hang out. Meet the leads for high-profile future-of-the-web experiments including Weave, Ubiquity, Geode, and Personas.
Lightening presentations every two hours on Labs projects. Open slots for anyone else who wants to do a lightening presentation on their own project.
Showcase presentations for projects people have been working on during the Hack day
Workshops for web best practices
Previews of new content features in Firefox 3.1 (SVG Transforms!)
Workshops and tutorials for making Ubiquity commands
Competitions around story boarding new concepts, creating Ubiquity commands, and Geode-enabled sites
Schedule:
Tuesday 10/21
3-7:00pm Mozilla Labs Hack Day 1 at c-base
Weave in the afternoo
Developer Tools and the Open Web 2008-10-13 12:18:34 Today we’re announcing the formation of a new group that will focus on the research and development of developer tools for the open Web.
We believe that there’s tremendous opportunity for innovation in tools that increase developer productivity, enable compelling user experiences, and promote the use of open standards.
We’re also excited to announce that Dion Almaer and Ben Galbraith, co-founders of Ajaxian, the Ajax Experience, and long-time supporters of the open Web, have joined Mozilla full-time to lead this newly formed Developer Tools Lab.
We’re just getting started, so please stay tuned for further details and information on getting involved.
Everything is on the table, from services to software, and we’re looking forward to working with Web developers from around the world to create, experiment and play with new ideas!
Introducing Geode 2008-10-07 13:14:07
Always know where you are.
You’ve arrived in a new city, a new continent, a new coffee shop. You don’t really know where you are, and are looking for a good place to eat. You pull out your laptop, fire up Firefox, and go to your favorite review site. It automatically deduces your location, and serves up some delicious suggestions a couple blocks away and plots directions there.
In order for this to be a possibility, your browser needs to know where you are.
To do this, future versions of Firefox plan on supporting the new W3C Geolocation Specification, which adds the native ability for Web sites to request, and you to optionally grant access to, your location. We’re still working out the specifics, but we’re hoping that location will be provided by one or more user selectable service providers and methods, e.g. GPS-based, WiFi-based, manual entry, etc. You’ll be able to play with this in the upcoming beta releases of Firefox 3.1, as well as alpha relea
Mozilla Labs Meetup - Thursday, 9/25 2008-09-17 13:20:02 It’s time for another Monthly Meetup. This month’s meetup will be next Thursday, September 25th, 6pm at Mozilla’s office - 1981 Landings Drive, bldg K in Mountain View, California.
Last month’s meetup in San Francisco was awesome! Turnout was great and discussion around Ubiquity was really exciting. Thanks to all who participated and thanks to our friends at Twitter for hosting. This month we want to hear from you! What is your big idea for the future of the Web? Do you have thoughts to add to the Concept Series? We are anxious to hear what inspires you! If you plan to join us and share, please take a moment to RSVP on this blog and let us know what to expect.
If you are in the Bay Area we’d love to see you next week! Please RSVP in the comments so we can order enough pizza. Thanks!
Introducing Ubiquity 2008-08-26 14:41:58 An experiment into connecting the Web with language.
It Doesn’t Have to be This Way
You’re writing an email to invite a friend to meet at a local San Francisco restaurant that neither of you has been to. You’d like to include a map. Today, this involves the disjointed tasks of message composition on a web-mail service, mapping the address on a map site, searching for reviews on the restaurant on a search engine, and finally copying all links into the message being composed. This familiar sequence is an awful lot of clicking, typing, searching, copying, and pasting in order to do a very simple task. And you haven’t even really sent a map or useful reviews—only links to them.
This kind of clunky, time-consuming interaction is common on the Web. Mashups help in some cases but they are static, require Web development skills, and are largely site-centric rather than user-centric.
It’s even worse on mobile devices, where limited capability and fidelity
New Tab Concepts 2008-08-25 15:24:19 The user experience for opening up a new tab in Firefox is somewhat lacking: you are greeted by an intimidating, blank canvas with no hint of what to do. Could Firefox be doing something better with it? The answer is almost certainly yes, but the question is what?
Initial Ideas & Mockups
To get the ball rolling, we are highlighting two early concepts.
The first is Aza Raskin’s Contextual New-Tab Actions, which is a look at using the power of context and contextual actions to enhance the browsing experience through a smarter new tab. Its main goals are to:
Simplify the common actions, like being on a page and needing to perform a look-up on some text. Right now you have to copy the text, open a new tab, go to a new web service, and paste it in. If the browser knows you’ve just selected an address and then opened a tab, it knows you’ll probably want to map it. Let’s give the user one-click access to mapping it.
Streamline your habits. If you always visit Tech
Monthly Labs Meetup - August 2008 - San Francisco 2008-08-25 14:19:15 It’s time for another Monthly Meetup. This month’s meetup will be Thursday, August 28th, 6pm at the Twitter office - 539 Bryant St. Suite 402, San Francisco.
There will be progress updates on the various active Labs projects as well as plenty of opportunity for discussion and hacking. And of course, pizza :)
If you are in the Bay Area we’d love to see you! Please take a moment to RSVP by commenting on this blog.
Announcing the Extend Firefox 3 Contest Winners 2008-08-21 13:50:19 Extend Firefox 3 has wrapped up and we’re very excited to announce the winners! We received well over 100 entries, representing hundreds of hours of hard work from people around the world.
This contest had an extraordinary group of judges of which we would like to thank, including Dr. Jun Murai, Toby Padilla, Gina Trapani, Brendan Eich, Mike Connor, Mike Beltzner and our sponsors, including Last.fm, ActiveState, and VMWare.
Many of these extensions are in their early stages of experimental development, however we have seen some powerful new tools and prototypes that we are excited to share. It was hard to determine the winners, but at last, here they are.
Best New Add-on
Grand Prize Winners (3)
Pencil by D??ng Thành An
GUI prototyping and diagramming that everyone can use.
The Pencil Project’s unique mission is to extend Firefox 3 to an opensource tool for making diagrams and GUI prototyping that everyone can use. Pencil makes uses of the SVG support in Firefox 3 to impleme Read more:Contest
Introducing Snowl 2008-08-06 12:49:29
An Experiment with Messaging in the Browser
Conversing (a.k.a. messaging) is a common online activity, and a number of desktop and web applications enable it. But with an increasing variety of protocols and providers, it’s getting harder and harder to keep track of all your conversations.
Could the web browser help you follow and participate in online discussions?
Snowl is an experiment to answer that question. It’s a prototype Firefox extension that integrates messaging into the browser based on a few key ideas:
It doesn’t matter where messages originate. They’re alike, whether they come from traditional email servers, RSS/Atom feeds, web discussion forums, social networks, or other sources.
Some messages are more important than others, and the best interface for actively reading important messages is different from the best one for casually browsing unimportant ones.
A search-based interface for message retrieval is more powerful and easier to use tha
Introducing the Concept Series; Call for Participation 2008-08-05 00:34:41 Laboratories are places where science and creativity meet to develop, research and explore new ideas. Mozilla Labs embraces this great tradition as a virtual lab where people come together online to create, experiment and play with Web innovations for the public benefit.
Today we’re calling on industry, higher education and people from around the world to get involved and share their ideas and expertise as we collectively explore and design future directions for the Web.
You don’t have to be a software engineer to get involved, and you don’t have to program. Everyone is welcome to participate. We’re particularly interested in engaging with designers who have not typically been involved with open source projects. And we’re biasing towards broad participation, not finished implementations.
We’re hoping to lower the barrier to participation by providing a forum for surfacing, sharing, and collaborating on new ideas and concepts. Our goal is to brin
Labs Conceptual Event this Wednesday in SF 2008-08-04 14:32:13 Join us in SoMA on Wednesday night for a special Labs event starting at 6:30pm.
363 Brannan Street
San Francisco, California 94107
We’ll be joining Adaptive Path at their offices to celebrate the launch of the Aurora concept video as part of the Labs Concept Series.
RSVP at http://upcoming.yahoo.com/event/943735/
Monthly Labs Meetup - July 2008 2008-07-18 17:55:14 It’s time for another Monthly Meetup. This month’s meetup will be next Thursday, July 24th, 6pm at Mozilla’s office - 1981 Landings Drive, bldg K in Mountain View, California.
There will be informal lightning talks and progress updates on the various active Labs projects as well as plenty of opportunity for discussion and hacking. We will be streaming the evening out to the Labs site.
If you are in the Bay Area we’d love to see you next week! Please take a moment to RSVP by commenting on this blog. We don’t want to run out of pizza again!
Major Update to Weave Prototype, 0.2 Development Milestone 2008-07-01 02:50:50
Weave is a Mozilla Labs’ project to develop a coherent framework and platform for deeply integrating online services with the browser. Our goals are to enhance the Firefox user experience, increase user control over their personal information, and provide new opportunities for developers to build innovative online experiences.
As a development milestone, 0.2 is a major update to the Weave client and server prototypes that significantly builds upon previous versions.
Major Updates and Features
Significant reworking of the installation and setup experience.
Support for major browser data types, including bookmarks, browsing history, cookies, saved passwords, saved form data, and tabs.
Intelligent scheduler for determining when to synchronize data between browser and server to improve performance.
RSA public/private keys and AES encryption of all user data on the client side through NSS, the crypto library used by Firefox.
End-to-end encryption, with initial support for secure sh
Next Generation Javascripting 2008-07-01 02:02:35 Computer programs lost something important when displaying a splash of color stopped being one line of code. To throw a phosphorescent splotch onto the display on the Apple II required simply “plot x,y”. That’s no longer true today. When the simplicity of the one-line plotter went away, so did the delight at being so effortlessly generative—in a visual way—on the computer. The Open web, as an authoring enabler, is a compelling move back towards that lost ease.
But even as Javascript—as well as the HTML elements it has access to— continues to mature, the general perception of what these technologies enable do not. It took the Web 2.0 revolution to dispel the view that Javascript and Dynamic HTML were mainly useful for form validation and making annoying websites. With Tamarin coming to Firefox and SquirrelFish coming to WebKit, we are ready to see the next wave of projects that again expand our understanding of what is possible on the Web.
Recently, there have
Weave Scheduled Downtime (6/30) 2008-06-30 16:53:44 In the next few hours we will be making changes to the primary server cluster for the Weave experimental prototype, as part of the rollout of the 0.2 update. These changes will cause the service to be offline or unstable until they are complete. Thanks for your patience, we will post an update when the changes are complete.
Weave Scheduled Downtime (6/24-6/25) 2008-06-24 11:26:27 The primary server cluster providing the back-end for the Weave experimental prototype will be mostly offline and largely unstable over the next 24 to 48 hours. We are migrating servers as well as preparing for the Weave 0.2 update. Thank you for your patience. More details soon.
Monthly Labs’ Meet Ups 2008-06-21 12:58:36 Starting this month we’re going to begin hosting regular monthly meetings to bring together people interested in learning more about and getting involved in Labs’ projects as we work to build and scale an innovation lab as a public resource.
Instead of launching this initiative with a grand plan, we’re going to start pretty informally and figure out the format as we go. And while we’ll start in the Bay Area, the hope is to quickly expand to other locales. As the open source mantra goes: “release early, release often”.
The first such meet up will be this coming Wednesday, June 25th at 6pm. The location will be Mozilla’s office at 1981 Landings Drive in Mountain View, California. There will be informal talks and progress updates on the various active Labs projects as well as plenty of opportunity for discussion and hacking. We’ll also try to stream the session out to the Labs site.
We hope to have much more to share following this ini
Re: Localization 2008-06-19 00:39:38 Lemme Try!Indonesian language...personas.propertiesCode:Default=StandarAbout=Tentang...failureMessage=Tidak bisa membuka Data Personas. Mohon periksa kembali koneksi ke Internet dan coba lagi.useRandomPersona.label=Memilih Secara Acak/Randompersonas.dtdCode:<!ENTITY personas_app_title "Personas untuk Firefox"><!ENTITY useDefaultPersona.label "Gunakan yang biasa"><!ENTITY useCustomPersona.label "Gunakan Header Lokal..."><!ENTITY aboutPersonas.label "Tentang...">Default can be "Standar" or "biasa" depends on the sentences. lol.Hope that helps.-Dennis S.
Re: How to set up server 2008-06-18 18:29:50 I already had an Apache WebDAV server set up, and I didn't have to change a thing to get it working. Which is absolutely beautiful. Just put your username in the e-mail address field.Just want to say to the devs, thanks. Encryption that keeps our data private even on your servers is outstanding, but the option to run your own server, well that's just beautiful.
FireFox/Thunderbird improvements 2008-06-18 17:34:13 Many Thanks for the fantastic Firefox 3.I would like to see as many of the following suggestions implemented into Firefox and Thunderbird as well as other Mozilla Products-An integrated core engine containing all mozilla product functionality separate from the discrete product interfaces. Update/Fix the core for one product updates/fixes all products.-ALL - Allow customisation of configuration for Java and any other aspect of Mozilla software resources, either system wide or for specific applications/situations e.g. allow control of buffers and other related behaviour.-ALL - Allow greater control of process/thread priority to reduce overheads(performance) on older machines to the point where Mozilla software does not hog all or most resources.-ALL - Improve control and configuration of Addins and Extensions such that they may be dynamically switched on or off based on user requirements, or available CPU and Memory resource. Older machines may be quickly overwhelmed by the volume of ani
Weave is broken 2008-06-18 09:17:49 I realise there is already a thread discussing this, however I'm very surprised that nobody official has commented and thought that perhaps this thread may catch their eye.It seems that for certainly members who have recently registered that Weave no longer works (it is not possible to log in), this has been the situation since late last week - and is perhaps linked to the LDAP server downtime.It's not a specific issue from one user, but a whole raft of users - look at the 'cannot log in' thread.You'll elicit some patience from me while you fix the bug if you tell me that you recognise it - if we're ignored then I'm just going to look elsewhere because it's obvious that it's never going to be fixed.
Re: User Registeration 'temporarily disabled'. 2008-06-18 09:07:53 I'm in the same boat as well. been using browser sync from google since it became live. are there invite possible or we have to wait for the sub to be opened again ?ThanksReal
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