Swarnava Sengupta's Blog » Mozilla

2 Years, Mozilla and Me

Swarnava Sengupta — Tue, 02 Apr 2013 04:52:16 +0000

Almost 2 years ago, I started contributing on Mozilla, previously i start testing software on Symantec and Kaspersky lab but those product are close source, so its kinda tough for me for handeling all open bugs, submitting bugs etc, i was submit almost 10-15 bugs during beta testing but i had never know the progress if the bugs were accepted, rejected or other! suddenly i go to Help>About Firefox windows to update my Firefox.

Sound Interesting? Get Involved!

That lines, changed my motto from close source to open source, I saw the contributer signup form and filled with QA and User support as area of interest, David Boswell contacted me and helped me a lot to get involved, he helped me to understand how mailing list, QA, SUMO, Bugzilla and other basic things work, and by step by step, i got a huge knowledge regarding Firefox, and Testing, Nowadays I write Knowledge base article about Firefox, and provide user support over twitter, facebook and support forum, also I participate on QA Testday and try to submit new bugs. Mozilla has changed my life, and I am start Loving Internet

Firefox OS Simulator – previewing version 3.0

Swarnava Sengupta — Wed, 13 Mar 2013 16:02:44 +0000

Three months ago we were proud to release the 1.0 version of the Firefox OS Simulator. We’ve made a lot of progress since, and version 2.0 came out about a month ago (latest official version). Now, moving forward, we’d like to present and introduce you to a preview of the upcoming 3.0 version!

We discussed whether we should talk about this new version yet, since it’s a bit rough around the edges, but we decided to give it a go for two reasons:

We’re Mozilla. We do things in the open, and we share our progress. Because we want you to know what’s going on and to be able to come along with us in the process
It gives you an unique opportunity to test it out, give feedback, contribute and much more before it’s released

New features in the preview

We’ve listened to the feedback and have tried to target the most common features being requested and well-needed. New features include:

Push to Device
Rotation simulation
Basic geolocation API simulation
Manifest validation
Stability fixes for installation and updates to apps
Newer versions of the Firefox rendering engine and Gaia (the UI for Firefox OS)

Push to Device

This means that if you have an existing device supporting Firefox OS, connected via USB, you will be able to push apps installed in the Firefox OS Simulator directly to that device.

Please note:

Remote debugging has to be enabled on the device, via
Settings > Device information > More Information > Developer > Remote debugging
On Linux (at least Ubuntu), you must create the file /etc/udev/rules.d/51-android.rules as root and then add a manufacturer-specific entry for the device as described by Android’s Setting up a Device for Development. Example for one of our test devices:entry:
SUBSYSTEM=="usb", ATTR{idVendor}==" 19d2", MODE="0666", GROUP="plugdev"
Not complete Windows support yet. Planned to make it into the final release.
Make sure you have the latest version of Firefox OS on your device (especially due to recent fixes like bug 842725)

Rotation simulation

There’s now a feature to rotate the simulator, get events and more, to adapt your contents to both portrait and landscape. Supports the mozorientationchange event.

Basic geolocation API simulation

The simulator now also supports geolocation, so you can test it in your app, and read out longitude and latitude values.

Coming soon: an enhancement that lets you specify the geolocation to provide!

Manifest validation

When you add an app to the Firefox OS Simulator, it also does a quick validation of your manifest file for errors and warnings, including problems that prevent installing the app in the Simulator, usage of APIs that the Simulator doesn’t yet simulate (not all APIs in there yet), and missing properties that are required by the Marketplace or devices.

Downloading the preview

We have all the versions of the Firefox OS Simulator on our FTP server, under its working name r2d2b2g. Here are the direct links to the installation files (installs as an extension in Firefox)

Once installed, it will be available in Firefox in the Tools > Web Developer menu:

Give us feedback!

Please let us know in the comments here or by filing a bug. Hopefully you will like the improvements and they will benefit you with developing apps!

Getting started with Firefox OS & building Open Web Apps

To get started, we have had a number of articles here on Mozilla Hacks previously:

Additionally we have some other resources:

Reposted From hacks.mozilla.org blogs

6 Things You Didn’t Know About Firefox OS

Swarnava Sengupta — Sun, 24 Feb 2013 07:59:09 +0000

Firefox OS is all over the tech news and for good reason: Mozilla’s finally given web developers the platform that they need to create apps the way they’ve been creating them for years — with CSS, HTML, and JavaScript. Firefox OS has been rapidly improving, adding features and APIs to provide device control and other standard mobile functionality. Much is not known about Firefox OS, however, and here are a few items you may find interesting!

The Firefox Marketplace is Open Source

Everyone knows that the components of Firefox OS are open source. Not many know this fact: the Firefox Marketplace is a Django-based application, code-named ‘zamboni’, used not only for the Marketplace but also for AMO (Add-Ons). Like Firefox OS’ gaia (the web-based operating system) zamboni is freely available on GitHub. This means that you could fork zamboni, update the design, and create your own store for HTML5 apps!

You Can Buy a Test Device

Everything Mozilla does is open so it is common knowledge that you can create your own Firefox OS build if you have a supported device. What many people may have missed is the announcement of a test device available for purchase from Geeksphone. While the Firefox OS Simulator does a good job of allowing users to test apps get the general gist of the platform, there’s nothing like having a comparative-hardware device to test with. Even if you don’t plan on creating your own Firefox OS apps, it’s still nice to have a test device around to test your own websites.

Loads of APIs are Being Implemented

For the skeptics who don’t believe the HTML5 spec provides enough device control: think again. Mozilla has been rolling out dozens of WebAPI features to allow access to all types of device APIs: Battery, Camera, Contacts, WebSMS, Storage, Vibration, Settings, Alarm, Browser, and many more. Each API is either planned, in development, or completed, and may be available on different types of devices (desktop, tablet, mobile). Bookmark the WebAPI chart to keep track of where each API is in its development stage!

Install Apps from Any Domain!

Mozilla doesn’t hold users hostage when it comes to installing new apps; instead of needing to jump over to the device’s app store app, Mozilla provides a JavaScript API for installing web apps from any allowed domains:

var manifestLocation = "http://areatweet.com/app.manifest"; // your domain here
var installRequest = navigator.mozApps.install(manifestLocation);

installRequest.onsuccess = function(data) {
    // App installed successfully!
};

installRequest.onerror = function(err) {
    // App couldn't be installed!
    console.log("Install error!");
};

It’s incredibly liberating to allow installation from outside an app store; no more tyranny, no more unnecessary proprietary crap.

Web Activities!

The amazing Mozilla Hack Blog recently introduced Web Activities: a system for adding context-specific controls within an app. The screen where a user would see a Web Activity would look like this:

Web Activities provide a system by which you can specify the desired input result and a callback based on the activity’s success and failure. Code for said activity and result could look like:

var pick = new MozActivity({
   name: "pick",
   data: {
       type: ["image/png", "image/jpg", "image/jpeg"]
    }
});

pick.onsuccess = function () { 
    // Create image and set the returned blob as the src
    var img = document.createElement("img");
    img.src = window.URL.createObjectURL(this.result.blob);
 
    // Present that image in your app
    var imagePresenter = document.querySelector("#image-presenter");
    imagePresenter.appendChild(img);
};
 
pick.onerror = function () { 
    // If an error occurred or the user canceled the activity
    alert("Can't view the image!");
};

Web Activities are relatively new so they’ll take a bit of playing around with to get the full picture of how they work and what role they can play for your app. Robert Nyman has created a Firefox OS Boilerplate App which shows how you can use these.

The Browser App is Created with… HTML, CSS, and JavaScript

All of Firefox OS’ native apps are written with basic HTML, CSS, and JavaScript — the same way you’ll be creating your own apps. Don’t believe me? Check out the source for yourself! Browsers are a complex beast to create but Firefox OS’ browser app shows that HTML, CSS, and JavaScript are ready for prime time device app performance!

There will no doubt be more information about Firefox OS on this blog. The tidbits above should give you an advantage over other developers, allowing you to get started with advanced APIs, stores, and more!

Reposted from David Walsh‘s blog

WebRTC makes Social API even more social

Swarnava Sengupta — Sat, 01 Dec 2012 09:59:43 +0000

WebRTC is a powerful new tool that enables web app developers to include real-time video calling and data sharing capabilities in their products. While many of us are excited about WebRTC because it will enable several cool gaming applications and improve the performance and availability of video conferencing apps, WebRTC is proving to be a great tool for social apps. Sometimes when you’re chatting with a friend, you just want to click on their name and see and talk with them in real-time. Imagine being able to do that without any glitches or hassles, and then while talking with them, easily share almost anything on your computer or device: vacation photos, memorable videos – or even just a link to a news story you thought they might be interested in – simply by dragging the item into your video chat window.

This has become a reality. We’ve created a demo that combines our Social API and WebRTC. You can talk and share in real-time, while chatting, as if your friend were in the same room. Take a look at the video above, where our Chief of Innovation, Todd Simpson, runs you through some of these cool future features.

getUserMedia allows a developer to capture the user’s camera and microphone data (with the user’s permission) easily. It was actually pretty complicated for a browser to capture camera or microphone data before getUserMedia. Expect to see browser apps that can capture and readily manipulate camera data (think Instagram) popping up as this new technology takes off.

PeerConnection enables the audio and video calling. It is secure, hassle-free, and peer-to-peer. This means you can expect high quality, low delay, encrypted calls from one WebRTC browser to another. This is also something that was incredibly difficult for a browser to do until now. Prior to WebRTC, video calling applications were either stand-alone, isolated apps (like Skype) or browser plug-ins which lacked the tight connection to the browser internals to guarantee a good quality call.

We share data in WebRTC using DataChannels, which Mozilla is the first to implement. DataChannels is a powerful component of WebRTC that can be used by itself or combined with an audio/video chat to send almost any data that the browser can access.

Please have a look at our demo video, which shows some of ways you can combine these WebRTC components. We currently support basic person-to-person video calling and data channels in Firefox Beta but it has to be turned on in about:config. Check out this post on Hacks if you’re interested in finding out how to do this and for more information about developing apps using WebRTC. As always Bug reports are highly appreciated. Please file them on Bugzilla under “Product:Core”, “Component:WebRTC”. We plan to add support for video conferencing apps, faster call connection, and additional audio/video options, so stay tuned for more on this.

We hope you’re as excited as we are to start seeing some of the awesomeness that WebRTC has to offer the Web.

- Maire Reavy, Product Lead, Firefox Platform Media

reposted from Mozilla Blog.

Firefox 17 launches with click-to-play plugin blocks for old Adobe Reader, Flash, and Silverlight

Swarnava Sengupta — Thu, 22 Nov 2012 12:45:07 +0000

The biggest addition in this release, in my opinion, is click-to-play plugins, announced back in October. In short, the addition means Mozilla will now prompt Firefox users on Windows with old versions of Adobe Reader, Adobe Flash, and Microsoft Silverlight (more will be added eventually).

Mozilla is essentially merging together the idea of click-to-play plugins (don’t load plugins until they’re clicked) with the concept of a blocklist (a list of addons and plugins that are disabled). As such, click-to-play blocklisted plugins consist of a list of plugins that Mozilla deems unsafe for its Firefox users. Instead of completely disabling what’s on the list, however, the company will prevent them from running when the page loads: you’ll have to click first.

Here’s how the feature looks:

The prompt tells you that the plugin is vulnerable and thus Firefox has stopped it from loading automatically. If there is an update available, you will be prompted to update the plugin, but you will still also be able to use it, if you want to, by clicking on the blocked grey box.

Additionally, if plugins are blocked on the currently-viewed Web page, Mozilla will feature a blue icon to the left of the address bar for more information. Here’s how the menu looks when opened up:

Although this feature is enabled by default, you can set it to work for all plugins, not just old ones, in the about:config preference “plugins.click_to_play” (set to true). While this is not an all-purpose plugin management system, it should still be useful as a prevention mechanism against drive-by attacks (such as urging users to click on a video link that is almost never what it claims to be or hiding in ads on a legitimate website) targeting plugins that are known to be vulnerable.

There are of course other Firefox 17 features worth noting; here’s the official changelog:

NEW: Click-to-play blocklisting implemented to prevent vulnerable plugin versions from running without the user’s permission.
CHANGED: Updated Awesome Bar experience with larger icons.
CHANGED: Mac OS X 10.5 is no longer supported.
DEVELOPER: JavaScript Maps and Sets are now iterable.
DEVELOPER: SVG FillPaint and StrokePaint implemented.
DEVELOPER: Improvements that make the Web Console, Debugger and Developer Toolbar faster and easier to use.
DEVELOPER: New Markup panel in the Page Inspector allows easy editing of the DOM.
HTML5: Sandbox attribute for iframes implemented, enabling increased security.
FIXED: Over twenty performance improvements, including fixes around the New Tab page.
FIXED: Pointer lock doesn’t work in web apps (769150).
FIXED: Page scrolling on sites with fixed headers (780345).

Apart from the usual performance improvements, and the sandboxing of iframes, the next most important thing is that support for OS X 10.5 Leopard has been dropped. If you’re still using the ancient OS X version, you can keep using Firefox 16, but that’s about it. This follows in Google Chrome’s footsteps, which did the same back in September.

If you’re a Web developer, you may want also to check out Firefox 17 for developers. Also, the Social API is out with the release of Firefox 17.

New version of Firefox complete with the Social API

Swarnava Sengupta — Wed, 21 Nov 2012 07:27:25 +0000

Today we are shipping a new version of Firefox complete with the Social API and a preview of our first integration with Facebook. The uptake during Beta was great and we got lots of feedback. We will be staging our promotion and marketing as we monitor adoption from our GA users and watch their feedback. You will see progressively more marketing activity over the coming months. We are also working with other providers, and will have multi-provider support in Firefox soon.

Getting this far has been a great team effort. Adding another open API to our platform, which will allow many players to innovate, is exciting. If you are like me, your behavior in the browser has evolved over the last few years – we spend a lot more time on certain tabs than we use to. Pinned tabs was a first expression of this. The Social API takes this a step further, and allows high usage sites to put relevant information closer to your fingertips. I hope we see email, news, and finance services implemented this way as well. Of course, as we get more partners, the requirements on the API will change, and the product will evolve.

Thanks to all the teams for the efforts in getting this feature to launch; it has been a great cross-group effort. We have a lot more work to do to make it successful, and will be working closely with our partners as they roll out services on the API. Having the API in Firefox is a great start, but the real success will come from services our users find truly compelling; the Facebook Messenger integration is excellent, and puts us on the right path.

You can check out the announcement on the Mozilla blog here.

https://blog.mozilla.org/blog/2012/11/20/firefox-introduces-new-social-api-and-previews-integration-with-facebook/

Congratulations team!

Firefox OS brand update. October 12 via Air Mozilla.

Swarnava Sengupta — Thu, 11 Oct 2012 03:58:49 +0000

Hello Mozillians:

Please join me for an update on the Firefox OS brand development process. We’ll be reviewing style explorations based on the selected brand platform, and asking for your input on cultural conflicts that might exist with any of the directions or their elements.

This will be a Mozillians-only session (not public) on Friday, October 12 at 8:30 am PDT/11:30 EDT/15:30 UTC in Mountain View (Ten Forward) or via AirMozilla. You can find your local time with this tool: http://www.timezoneconverter.com

If you’d like to attend please RSVP here: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/viewform?formkey=dHZTZkJ4V2NiMzNGd0pCYnlTTy1XQ1E6MQ

We’ll follow up shortly with participation instructions. If you’re unable to attend we’ll provide you with a recording of the session.

Many thanks.

Stub Installer in Firefox Nightly – Try it out, Give feedback, and Test it!

Swarnava Sengupta — Sun, 07 Oct 2012 04:06:06 +0000

Hi Everyone,

We need your help testing out the new Stub Installer for Mozilla Firefox on Nightly! The stub installer is a new installer for Firefox that aims to streamline the installation process for our end-users by allowing them download a very small executable, run it, and get all of the resources downloaded and installed immediately. With this feature, we will make the installation of Desktop Firefox builds faster and easier for Windows users.

Want to try out an early build of the feature? Here’s how you get started:

If it’s before October 8th, you’ll want to use this link to get a build of the stub installer
If it’s on or after October 8th, you’ll want to use this link to get a build of the stub installer

If you run into any immediate problems please report the bug here or email stub-feedback@mozilla.com. Note that this stub installer is still in testing and is currently English only.

If you would like to help test this feature in more depth, then try running of the test cases you see below. If you hit any problems, feel free to use the above links for reporting a bug and providing feedback. I would greatly appreciate the help in testing this feature! Feel free to email the email alias above if you have any questions.

Install Firefox with the default installation rules with admin privileges – Verify firefox is installed to the default installation directory (C:\Program Files\Mozilla Firefox for 32-bit, C:\Program Files\Mozilla Firefox for 64-bit) with the same contents from the old installer, the firefox.exe is signed (Use a diff program to compare contents of directories like windiff)

Do an export of the Firefox related 1) HKLM and 2) HKCU entries in regedit from an installer just before the stub installer. Do the same with the stub installer. Use windiff or another diff program to compare each set of 2 exports are the same.

Install Firefox with the stub installer. Then, start firefox up. Verify firefox starts up with no unexpected errors.

Using an installation of Firefox from the stub installer, crash firefox. Verify that breakpad appears. Then, submit the crash report. Verify that the crash report was sent to the crash stats server.

Install Firefox with the stub installer that is an old FF version. Then, update Firefox. Verify firefox updates to the latest version of the particular release channel.

Uninstall Firefox that was made using the stub installer. Verify that the installation directory is removed along with any start menu/desktop shortcut references including the pinned to taskbar shortcut.

After launching firefox built from the stub installer, quit it. Verify firefox shuts down with no process running in the background.

Open three new tabs in a launched firefox from the stub installer and load a website in each. Verify the content comes up for each tab.

Install Firefox with the stub installer. Then, launch firefox and install an add-on. Verify that the add-on was successfully installed and runs correctly in the context of Firefox.
Try installing firefox as a guest that does not have write permissions to the Program Files folder on Windows. Verify that the stub installer fails with an appropriate error saying that installation failed with an appropriate error message indicating why. (Should we be allowing limited user accounts to install into their user account directory?)
Try installing firefox without an internet connection. Verify that the stub installer fails with an appropriate error saying that the downloading phase failed due to not having an internet connection.
Conduct a custom installation of firefox by changing each default preference used for the installer to some alternative valid value (i.e. change the installation directory, don’t allow start menu shortcuts). Verify that firefox installs according to the custom installation prefs set by the user.
Try installing firefox as an admin while an antivirus is running (e.g. Norton) with default preferences on the antivirus. Verify that the stub installer installs firefox successfully with the antivirus not setting off red flags that something isn’t right.
Install firefox with the old installer. Then, pave-over install this installation with the stub installer. Verify that the stub installer successfully installs firefox with no weird behavior or unexpected issues.
Install firefox with the stub installer. Then, pave-over install this installation with an older installation. Verify that the older installation overwrites each piece of the stub installer, launching it shows no errors, and no unexpected errors is seen.
Install firefox with the stub installer. Then, pave-over install with a different version of the stub installer. Verify that the firefox installation is successful and can be launched, no issues seen in the resulting directory structure of the installation.
On an old build Firefox, install an add-on. Then, pave-over install this installation with the stub installer. Launch firefox. Verify that the add-on is still installed and operates as it’s expected to.
Test installation on Vista with UAC on/off. Test on Windows 7 with UAC at each level. Test with Windows 8 at each UAC level, but in particular with UAC off since UAC works differently on Windows 8 when it is off.
Check what happens when you try to download and run out of disk space
Turn off the download server the stub installer references. Try to install Firefox. Verify that the stub installer fails with an appropriate error saying that it could connect to the server.
Setup a HTTP proxy-based tool to capture incoming HTTP requests (e.g. fiddler). Try to install firefox. When the HTTP response is sent back, capture it and fuzz the response. Then, send it to the stub installer. Verify that the stub installer fails gracefully with no weird behavior or unexpected errors.
Start up the stub installer, start installation, and immediately lock the screen for a few minutes. Then, unlock the screen. Verify firefox still installs sucessfully with no unexpected errors.
Start up the stub installer, start installation, and immediately put the machine into hibernation for a few minutes. Take the machine out of hibernation. Verify that installation finishes successfully with no unexpected errors.
Start up the stub installer, start installation, and immediately put the machine into standby for a few minutes. Take the machine out of standby. Verify that installation finishes successfully with no unexpected errors.
Start two stub installers at the same time – this scenario may happen with an auto/manual-download
Experience of initiating the install from IE or Chrome, to make sure it hasn’t regressed since the normal installer

Blog post by Jason Smith, reposted from QMO.