Final In-content Preferences status update

(I’M PROBABLY JINXING MYSELF HERE… KNOCK ON WOOD!)

We are now a week away from the release of Firefox 38, and with it will finally come the release of in-content preferences. You can download Firefox Beta today to see what it will look like when it hits Release next week.

I want to give a huge thanks to all of the people who worked on the project. You all helped it get to the point where hundreds of millions of people will get to see a refreshed and modern preference experience.

Major thanks goes out to Stephen Horlander, Michael Maslaney, Madhava Enros, Gijs Kruitbosch, Blair McBride, Richard Marti, Tim Nguyen, Justin Dolske, Zhenshuo Fang, Dão Gottwald, Tim Taubert, Matthew Noorenberghe and a huge host of other people that have helped.

Known issues:
1) Dialogs opened in the Advanced pane don’t use the same tab-modal dialog implementation that can be found within the rest of the preferences. We hope to get this fixed in a future release very soon.
2) The design for focus rings within the preferences still has a refresh coming, but it won’t make Firefox 38. As with #1, we hope to get this in to a future release very soon.
3) If you have gone to about:config and set browser.search.showOneOffButtons to `false`, the Search pane of the preferences is broken. The fix for this didn’t make the 38.0 cut-off, but it will be fixed within the next few weeks following release. Going forward this preference will be removed, so now may be a good time to revert that preference back to `true`.

Other lower-impact known issues can be found on Bugzilla.

You can download Firefox Beta today to see what it will look like when it hits Release next week.

Status update – In-content Preferences, part 5

Firefox 38 has now merged to Aurora (Firefox Developer Edition) and we are a couple weeks into development of Firefox 39 on mozilla-central. At this point, bugs that are fixed on mozilla-central will need to be uplifted to mozilla-aurora to continue to ride the 38 train.

These are some of the 21 bugs that were fixed since the last update (1/31/2015):

• Bug 1008171 No focus for elements except textboxes (and buttons, on Windows and Linux) inside in-content preferences
• Bug 1025719 – openPreferences(panelName) doesn’t open the requested pane if about:preferences is in a yet-to-be-loaded tab
• Bug 1034296 – Action dropdown in Application pane does not open when session restored
• Bug 1037225 – Consider keeping browser.preferences.instantApply = false on Windows
• Bug 1044597 – in-content preferences: resized dialogs should not push buttons into overflow
• Bug 1047586 – Unable to interact with in-content preferences after changing minimum font size to a very large value
• Bug 1108302 – Menulists in the in-content preferences have too much padding at the start of their contents
• Bug 1111353 – No longer displayed check mark in in-content preferences if Text : white, Background : Black and Select “Never” in “Content” > “Colors…” > “Allow pages to choose their own colors, instead of my selections above”

Since the last update all of the P1-tracked bugs have been fixed. We are tracking the following P2 bugs:
Bug 1043612 – Persist the size of resizable in-content subdialogs
Bug 1136645 – InContent prefs – Make focusrings match the spec on Windows and Linux
Bug 1044600 – in-content preferences: empty dialogs after pressing backspace or the Back button

Bug 1044600 in the above list should be very close to getting fixed. It has landed and been backed out a couple times due to intermittent failures and leaks, but is making steady progress towards being fixed.

Gijs and I will be meeting up in less than two weeks in San Francisco to have a “hack week” focusing on the in-content preferences. We’ve gone through the list of bugs in the in-content preferences and put together a subset of 10 bugs that we’ll tackle during the week if they’re not fixed beforehand.

Big thanks go out to Ian Moody [:Kwan], Gijs, Yash Mehrotra, Richard Marti [:Paenglab], and Tim Nguyen [:ntim] for their help in fixing the 21 bugs.

An update on my mentoring program

Today is the start of the third week of the mentoring program.

Since the start of the program, four bugs have been marked fixed:

1. Bug 951695 – Consider renaming “Character Encoding” to “Text Encoding”
2. Bug 782623 – Name field in Meta tags often empty
3. Bug 1124271 – Clicking the reader mode button in an app tab opens reader mode in a new tab
4. Bug 1113761 – Devtools rounds sizes up way too aggressively (and not reflecting actual layout). e.g. rounding 100.01px up to 101px

Also, the following bugs are in progress and look like they should be ready for review soon:

5. Bug 1054276 – In the “media” view, the “save as” button saves images with the wrong extension
6. Bug 732688 – No Help button in the Page Info window

The bugs currently being worked on are:

7. Bug 1136526 – Move silhouetted versions of Firefox logo into browser/branding
8. Bug 736572 – pageinfo columns should have arrows showing which column is sorted and sort direction
9. Bug 418517 – Add “Select All” button to Page Info “Media” tab
10. Bug 967319 – Show a nodesList result with natural order

I was hoping to have 8-9 bugs fixed by this time, but I’m happy with four bugs fixed and two bugs being pretty close. Bug 967319 in the “being worked on” section is also close, but still needs work with tests before it can be ready for review.

Starting of my new mentoring program

Today starts the first day of the mentoring program that I announced in my previous blog post.

In good news, I was overwhelmed by the number of responses I received to the blog post. Within three days, 57 people sent me an email requesting to be a part of the program. This tells me there is a strong need for more guided programs like this. On the downside, it was very hard to select only four people from the group.

In the end, I ended up selecting five people to partake in this. They are from all over the world: India (2); Germany; and USA (2).

I have assigned the first bugs and work should proceed this week on getting a build working and finding their way through the Firefox developer ecosystem.

Firefox UI mentorship program

Update: Due to a large number of responses, I will be letting people know today, February 14th (instead of the previously mentioned February 13th).

Since I joined Mozilla I’ve been looking for ways to increase the opportunities for new people to get started working on the Firefox user interface.

I’m now ready to try something that I’ve been thinking about doing for a little while.

I’m looking for four people that I will mentor and help along as they fix bugs across the Firefox user interface. The first bug will be an easy one to get started with the codebase and comfortable building the browser, and they will increase in difficulty from there. At the end of the program you will be able to say that you’ve made some large contributions to Firefox. We will use JavaScript, CSS, and XUL (similar to HTML).

The project will be about six weeks long, starting February 16th and ending March 31st. During this time, I will be available to meet through video chat, IRC (text-based chat), and email.

If you are interested in working with me and have at least two to three years of classroom experience in Computer Science (or equivalent open source experience), please send an email to jaws+goodfirstmentee@mozilla.com along with:

• Your name
• A short 1-2 sentences about any open source experience you have
• And a rough estimate of how many hours per week you think you could dedicate towards the program.

I’ll let you know if you’ve been accepted by February 13th 14th. Thanks!