A new semester, a new capstone project

This is the first week of a new semester at Michigan State University, and with that brings a new group of students who will be working on a senior capstone project with Mozilla.

This semester the students will be focusing on multitouch gestures within the browser. They’ll start out the semester by fixing a few good-first-bugs, then they’ll move on to adding some gestures to standalone image and video documents. The final step of the project will be to focus on improving our pinch-to-zoom for webpages in Firefox.

As the semester progresses, the students will be blogging their progress on their own blogs (I may crosspost them here from time to time):

Brandon Waterloo: http://brandonwaterloo.wordpress.com/
Raymond Heldt: http://heldtray.wordpress.com/
Bill de Araujo: http://spartanfire.wordpress.com/

Here’s to a great semester!

Mac OS X integration with Firefox

As I’ve been researching potential Spring 2013 capstone projects, I’ve been looking in to Firefox’ current OS X integration. This includes what parts need improving as well as are currently missing.

With the help of many people in the Mozilla community, I’ve received lots of feedback as to what could be improved. Below is the list of work needed that I have come across.

[P1]
    Accepting click events in the titlebar area

https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=647216


https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=625989

    Keychain support
    Lion Scrollbars
    Edge bounce and overscroll
    Fullscreen mode improvements (Now that Lion fullscreen has been implemented, what is still needed here? - Jared)
    Swipe/gesture support is buggy (bug 673675)
    Dock Download Progress

[P2]
    Lion resume support
    Auto-fill from Address Book
    Use the system provided spell checker
    Text autocorrection
    Built in word definition panels
    Investigate potential changes needed if sandboxed
    Dictation support
    Integration with Services (control click text selection in any cocoa app for a Services menu)

[P3]
    iCloud support (shared settings? document storage?)
    Spotlight (Bookmarks and History)
    Speech (control click text selection in any cocoa app for a Speech menu)
    Airplay (mirror firefox to your tv)
    Use system provided geolocation

[Untriaged]
    Applescript support
    Dragging content to and from Firefox to the OS/other applications within OS X (bug 591713)
    Double-tap to zoom (bug 688990)
    Look up gesture (bug 687026, depends on bug 301451)
    Improve focus ring style for urlbar & search field (bug 689012)
    Unfocused Firefox window needs dimmed text in tab titles and address bar (bug 688678)
    View menu item stays highlighted after resubmitting POST-form and pressing Cancel (bug 688412)
    [10.7] Character repeat on long button presses doesn't work (bug 686113)
    [10.7] panels with titlebars not receiving mouse clicks (bug 677545)
    [10.7] Hardware acceleration on: The corners at the bottom have no fade out effect / anti-aliasing (bug 675410)
    (awaiting QA) [10.7] Firefox 5.0.1 running on Mac OS10.7 returns a Error Code 502 Proxy Error when browsing Web sites (bug 674868)
    [10.7] Update Firefox Theme for Mac OS X 10.7 Lion (bug 667456)
    [10.7] Filepicker directory is not remembered (bug 654842)

Lion Compatibility Bug: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=636455

Source: UX team Mac OS integration list

Josh Aas proposed that the project focus on improving our multitouch/gesture support in Firefox. What gestures do you know of that could be improved/are missing?

I think multitouch/gesture support will be a good project is because the students should each be able to work on their own gestures, thus making the project parallelizable. As well the project is also not a binary success/failure (assuming the students are able to improve at least one gesture).

Status Update 9 of Reader Mode for desktop Firefox

This is the final week for the students working on the Reader Mode project for Firefox. The students will be presenting their final work on Friday to a panel of judges at Michigan State’s Design Day.

Reader mode now mostly works at prototype-level functionality. There is still some more work and lots more testing to do.

The team has asked for help with testing on Windows & Linux, as well as switching tabs. When a tab is switched to, the document is parsed for its readability score. We want to make sure that we don’t regress tab switching times as well as increase memory usage by the introduction of the feature.

I pushed their current patch to our Try servers so you can help test. When it is finished building, they should be available to download and play with here*. After downloading the build, go to about:config and set reader.enabled=true.

*Update: I have heard from at least one person that the Windows build isn’t working correctly.

Without further ado, here is the team’s project overview video.

The team also is planning on tweaking the size of the toolbar button so it doesn’t stretch the URL bar vertically. This is a subtle bug that you can see in the team’s project video.

Further work for Reader Mode will include moving the in-page adjustments to a toolbar at the top of the page, as well as adding a Sepia color mode.

The team updated the current work-in-progress patch on the meta bug.

Status Update 8 of Reader Mode for desktop Firefox

This post was guest authored by Matt Vorce, one of the students working on the reader-mode project.

This past week we continued to finish up some changes to our reader mode page. We are now working on moving some common files to toolkit so they can be referenced by desktop and mobile in the same location.

This will require us to convert the .js files to a .jsm. After doing that we will import the files as a resource.

As far as buttons go for reader mode we are only including the buttons for styling the page for the time being. We are also going to display the reader page in the current tab and not pursue an overlay/lightbox for the time being.

Here is a video of the current functionality (interaction workflow is not final):

The team updated the current work-in-progress patch on the meta bug.

Status Update 7 of Reader Mode for desktop Firefox

This post was guest authored by Michael Anderson, one of the students working on the reader-mode project.

This week the team got an alpha version of reader mode working.  After the page loads, a button will appear in the toolbar allowing you to open that page in reader mode, which is currently in a new tab.

Here is a video of that functionality (interaction workflow is not final):

Going forward, the team has decided to start expanding the functionality of the about reader page.  To start we will allow people to change their font, change text size, and have light, sepia, and dark modes for easier reading.  The buttons to change these settings will be done similar to how PDF.js is set up.

The team is currently in the process of getting all of this code on the meta bug.

Updated on 1 Nov to clarify that Sepia styling is planned as well. – Jared