How to Enable Plugins on Mobile Firefox 1.0 Maemo

As most of you n900 users know now, plugins have been disabled by default due to quality issues on Mobile Firefox 1.0. The mobile team tried **really** hard to get it fixed in time for 1.0, but it just wasn’t possible. Instead, we’re treating it as an experimental feature that can be enabled for those very adventurous web browser-ers (and hopefully, bug filers *wink* ) out there. The following instructions are for those who think of themselves as such ( and, again, are those who like to file bugs on Bugzilla under Core:Plugins for Flash-related issues on Fennec *double-wink* ).

Here’s how to enable plugins on your profile for Mobile Firefox:

1. Type in “about:config” in the url bar and press enter. ( Screenshot )
2. Click on the button with the following text, “I’ll be careful, I promise!”
3. In the input field next to “Filter”, type in “plugin.disable” (without the quotation marks). ( Screenshot )
4. Tap on the row entry for “plugin.disable”
5. Press the Enter/Return key. ( Screenshot )
6. Close the browser and re-open it.

To disable, simply repeat the steps above.

One thing to note is the n900 is optimized for the h.263 codec standard. So, websites like Youtube, who use it, will play well on the device, but sites like Dailymotion and Vimeo, who don’t use it, will have a terrible time with video and/or audio playback. For those that want to watch videos on Youtube without tripping over any flash-related issues found on other sites, you can download the Youtube Enabler add-on for your video-on-mobile-device needs.

South Bay Area Tourism: Santa Cruz Mystery Spot

One line review: Worth a stop if it’s a short hop on your way to do other things in Santa Cruz.

The trip took 45 minutes around the SC Hills and through some criss-crossing roads after the entrance. The tour lasted 30-45 minutes around a wooden house up a slope that was worth the $5 we spent on ticket price. There were some pictures taken, a bumper sticker and a fun little day trip to SC. I’d suggest to anyone going there to plan out some other things to do in Santa Cruz because there’s definitely not enough content there to spend a full day on.

With that said, the tour was fun and definitely enjoyable as the tour guide tried her best to crack some well-timed and terribly lame (which made it better) humor to keep the audience interested during the lulls. We went up a steep slope and into a shack that was at the center of the magnetic powers of the area and then back down the slope. Past the made-for-children stories, there wasn’t much else to do other than take pictures with the oddity of surrounding area on your visual senses. Here’s some pics from the trip and with out cool bumper stickers (mine now resides on my work laptop…you know all appropriately and everything).

How to Install Mobile Firefox/Fennec Nightly Builds on Your Maemo Device

Thanks to the complexity of a project like Mobile Firefox/Fennec where there are multiple releases across multiple devices that essentially have their own branch, confusion of versioning will occur at odd times (i.e. when your code is between a RC2 and RC3). That’s certainly a problem for someone like myself, the QA lead for the project, where my e-mail inbox gets filled with people who want to, but can’t, try the close-to-be-released piece of software. They become confused, ansy and/or angry about why they can’t install the right builds. So, I’m here to alleviate and educate a bit for those people. Here’s a big blog post about the two ways to get the latest Mobile Firefox/Fennec Nightly Builds for Maemo-based devices.

If you don’t have one, then please disregard this post and go on with your hopefully merry day.

– Automatic Update Installation –

1. Open the built-in browser
2. Load http://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/mozilla.org/mobile/repos/trunk_multi/trunk_multi_nightly.install

This will load application catalog for the latest multi-locale trunk build of Mobile Firefox/Fennec and update your device daily with notifications (yellow-blinking sign next to your battery life indicator). If you would like to get a release that’s currently in development, you can also go back to http://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/mozilla.org/mobile/repos and click on VERSION_multi folder (i.e. 1.9.2_multi) and load the .install file in that folder at any time. If you do this, remember that you’ll stay on that branch and not be updated with the nightly builds of the next release that’s in development (i.e. 1.9.3).

– Manual Installation –

If automatic updates are not your style, you can also download and install .deb files of the latest nightly build as well. To do this, you’ll need to do the following:

1. Download and install rootsh. It’ll be in your application manager in the download section. If it’s not in your application manager, go to http://maemo.org/downloads/product/OS2008/rootsh/ and click on “Install Now”.
2. Download the latest xulrunner and fennec .deb files from this link: http://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/mozilla.org/firefox/nightly/latest-mobile-trunk/
3. Close your browser and open up “xterm” which will be in the “more” section of the application menu.
4. Enter in the command “cd MyDocs/.documents/”
5. Enter in “sudo gainroot”
6. Enter in “dpkg -i xulrunner….deb”
7. Enter in “dpkg -i fennec….deb”
8. Open Fennec

Just like automatic updates, can you get the latest nightly build for the current release in development manually as well. Simply repeat steps 3-8 using the following link: http://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/mozilla.org/firefox/nightly/latest-mobile-1.9.2/

Now, there’s another element. A couple of things (versioning and flash) have been updated over the past few weeks that might cause users to have problems with watching their favorite videos and opening Fennec with an old profile. For those that have used a version of Mobile Firefox/Fennec older than RC1 and have not cleared their profiles since then, please clear it out and uninstall your current version of Mobile Firefox/Fennec. The following steps will guide you in order to do this:

– Clear Your Profile –

1. Open up “xterm” which will be in the “more” section of the application menu.
2. Enter in the command “cd ~/.mozilla/” (Note: To enter the “~” character, press the blue arrow that points to the top right with the Sym/Ctrl button to open the character map for the device. In there, select the “~” key and press the space bar)
3. Enter in “rm -r fennec” which will delete your profile folder.

– Uninstall –

1. Open “App Manager” which will be in the “more” section of the application menu.
2. Click “Uninstall”
3. Remove “xulrunner” (may also be named “Mozilla Runtime”) and “Fennec” (may also be named “Firefox”)
4. Click on the title of the App Manager window, which will open a menu, and select Catalogs. If you have any catalogs with “Mozilla” in the title, click on them and click “Delete” to remove them.

I hope this was helpful!

Fennec Quality Update – The Team MOQA Effect

It’s been awhile since the last Fennec QA Update by Joel, so we felt that now was as good a time as any to provide another update. This is especially true as we’re getting closer to a final release with the Fennec 1.0 Beta 5 out the door now. Team MOQA has been really busy making Fennec the best mobile browser it can be over the past few months. With all the effort we’ve put in for quality execution on manual and automated testing, we knew the project was getting somewhere. But we had no idea how far until we started playing around with Bugzilla’s report charts tool. Here’s what we found:

Basically, we literally and figuratively went crazy in August and September with the number of bugs verified, but it opened up a whole bunch of usability issues in the project that started to bring the quality of the project around in October. The number of bugs fixed per week in the project before August was 7-8, but since August its gone up to 37-38. Now, this can be attributed to a whole bunch of things, but at the end of the day a person has to ask themselves if the overall quality of the project they’re working on has gotten better through their hard work. I think its safe to say that such a huge jump in bugs in a fixed state was attributed to developers having a larger number of bugs to work on that could be fixed…and that’s something we can hang our hats on.

With that said, we’re not done yet. Team MOQA has a couple more things up our sleeves that will really shore up some of the loose ends relating to quality and they’re coming hard and fast. So be ready for some hawtness with your Mozilla-powered mobile browsing in the near-future.

Things to Look For:
- WinMo Talos up and running soon
- Developing an extension to developer browser-chrome tests

Things Done:
- A robust system to move test and performance automation to any new platforms that crop up in the future (oh, and they will on the mobile front).
- xpcshell unit tests up and running
- We now have Release Test Tracking Pages for every release
- A String Guide (It’s a subgroup within the testrun) for localizers to find Fennec UI elements that correspond with the strings they localize in .dtd and .properties files within the mobile-browser source code.

Raw Stats (By Team MOQA since Joel Maher’s last Fennec QA Update on 6/30/09):
- 1092 bugs verified
- 276 bugs filed
- 64 Bugs filed in Testdays

Trying to Explain Mozilla as an Opportunity to High School Students

Thanks to the generosity of my Director and Manager, Tim Riley and Tony Chung respectively, as well as Jack Aiello, my High School Computer Science Teacher, I was able to present at the high school I graduated from, Independence High School about Mozilla and what it can offer students who are interested in pursuing a career on the Internet. Mozilla means a whole bunch of things to a lot of different people; but to me, it’s an opportunity… and that’s something I wanted the kids at my alma mater to understand. It’s an opportunity for them to gain skills; a way to provide community service and to make the internet better all on their own time and at their own homes. Here was the presentation I created and used:

What I saw was that there’s definitely interest. Jack Aiello and his students wanted to get involved and about 10-12 students (out of the 130-150 or so students I spoke to) personally came up to me after the presentation(s) to ask for specific tasks they could do to get started. It was an odd thing to see because they had been given the same information that those who plop into our newsgroups and irc channels get (and that usually turns out well).

I talked to Jack Aiello about this afterwards and the thing we took away from it was that our system doesn’t have a way for kids to show their accomplishments in the community via a college application. One of the options he mentioned was offering a signed certificate saying the kids performed a certain task that was assigned to them (for a certain person in the community) would probably be enough. On top of that, these kids needed mentors to help show them the ropes in a specific task and Mozilla definitely doesn’t have a system like that set up, but we do have all the aspects necessary to make it happen. There are people all throughout the Mozilla Community who own tasks/areas/groups/etc. that are well-versed in what they do and are always looking for help. The only thing that we need is a list of people who have an assignable and simple task to complete whether they’re in class or out of class.

Jack went all the way to offer class time for these kids to get some real tasks completed if I was willing to get those two things for him…and I think that’s very possible.

Some other Interesting Take-Aways:

A lot of them didn’t know about a bunch of different features on Firefox 3.5, but all were agreement that the reason that about 60% of each class used Firefox over other web browsers is due to a lot of reasons we already hear (add-ons, faster, free, highly customizable) and a few ones that we don’t normally hear (lots of updates are a good thing because they feel Firefox is always trying to better itself and security updates are made very quickly and often).

There were three times that I saw a lot of heads nod in understanding what I was talking about:
- When I showed them that Mozilla is an opportunity
- When I searched Bugzilla for the bug and patch that added Private Browsing to Firefox
- When I showed them how to (step-by-step) contact our Mozilla Community (specifically newsgroups and irc channels)

There were a couple ‘wow’ and ‘cool’ moments as well:
- Showing Personas for Firefox
- Showing the NY Times Ad made for Firefox 1.0 and explaining the ’static’ on the left page

Thoughts from a now, less, manlier man

A quick note before the entry: I did this because it was my first month off from school+work for a full month and wanted to do something fun that was anti-MBA. So, it was more of an experiment than anything else. Plus, beards are super awesome and deserve to be grown. I apologize for the lack of pictures.

A noticeable length was beginning to form with each strand and the “beard” was beginning to create it’s own little personality. What resulted was a number of quizzical, but pleasant looks from people checking out the “beard” for the first time. It was beginning to get rather itchy especially in 90 degree weather, but it wasn’t as bad as what other bearded and ex-bearded folk explained from their experiences. The one definite logistical positive out of this was not having to spend the time every other day in shaving my facial hair.

At this point, I had a couple of new things to think about that I never had to deal with before: hair growing over the lip, growing in ways that I didn’t expect and what was I going to do when I get one of those “3 on the top and 2 on the sides” haircuts I usually get?

The hairs got in the way while I ate or drank anything if I didn’t trim every other day, so that was a definite priority. This turned into a lot more work than I’m usually accustomed to. Even when I started doing small changes on one part of the beard, I felt the need to take care of the entire beard. An estimated time of 5 minutes ended up taking 15 minutes due to the nature of how my hair grows not only on top of my lips, but also around the jawline and on the neck. It just got kinda nasty after a day or two for that last week.

Past that, the human interaction aspects of how it affected my life started creeping in once it got filled out. It was more than often, the terrorist label came up between friends and family and people in general gave these deer-in-the-headlight stares until they heard me speak to them. It was a bit odd, but certainly not disheartening. Nevertheless, there was this major change in perception of my personality from people, who were at least acquaintances, based on something as arbitrary as facial hair.

In retrospect, my little experiment proved to me that perception continues to be a funny thing. It has a huge part in how we define the way we perform actions in our personal worlds and how others define the way they not only react to our actions, but also supplant those actions with their own personal world. In effect, they create a perception based on something that’s not completely fair, but very natural to the human psyche.

In the end, I’d still love to do it again, but only when I’m in a phase of my life that allows me to do such things with ease.

Here ye, Here ye!

Mozilla now has a new WebDevQA Emporer, Stephen Donner! This coronation is meant to be a celebration for the amazing growth in his WebDev QA Kingdom over the past 4 months. He’s gone from a single knight vanquishing bugs at a remarkable pace to bringing in six more valiant helpers in his quest to provide quality across all of Mozilla’s webpages! So, here we are. Let’s all help and bring forth the era of the WebDevQA Emporer!

As with any great Emporer, he needs an equally talented Empress. In this case, there was no one better suited than our very own Samuel Sidler! The service was held on Thursday, August 20, at 3pm. For a video of the event, check out:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XyWnxuOlYVc

I want to thank Raymond “Ray-Ray” Etornam for being the ebb to my flow on this little project, Brandon Sterne for taking video of the coronation and uploading it to Youtube and everyone else involved on getting this done.

What’s Next for Testdays?

What we’ve done so far over the past 3 months:
- 2,636 manual test cases run via litmus
- 150 Bugs created spanning multiple Mozilla related projects
- 8 MozMill Testscripts created
- 15 Website Test Reports collected
- An average of 39.3 Testday participants on IRC partaking in the day’s activities

I’m pretty proud of the work that’s been done so far by the Mozilla QA Community since we re-started Testdays on a bi-monthly basis. That’s a lot of results over a time when we were still trying to figure out how to use Testdays in the best way possible and squeeze the amount of participation with what we had at the time.

Of course, it’s still in its infancy as a lot of infrastructure is still in need of being built up ( i.e. standard test guides, indexing participants and their contributions over individual as well as multiple Testdays, QMO work, creating a persistent Testday personality, etc. ) as well as finding a way to spread the word to people who really do need these events to hone their skills and/or learn new ones ( i.e. currently discouraged workers, students [high school and college], those who are just interested in web QA work, those interested in the advocation of the quality of the internet’s content, etc. ). A lot of it is already in the process of being done, so expect us to get a lot better and a lot more efficient in the coming months as we continue to drive this to wherever it may go.

With all of that said, what would you like to see out of Testdays that you haven’t seen already? I’d love to hear anything, especially comments and concerns, about what the Mozilla Community has seen so far and would like/like not to see again!

A Belated Eureka

I recently attended the wedding of a family friend in which a number of conversations about Firefox-love-and-destroy-IE-completely came up. Now, at first I didn’t pay any attention to it as I thought it was just a form of congratulations on the new job, but looking back on it, the responses were more than that. A number of these people, many of whom I had seen only once or twice in my lifetime, raved on and on about it. The it they were talking about wasn’t the browser; it was the switch they had made. They were given the opportunity to choose their browser and make it better if they so wanted.

Now, this concept has been beaten half to death within the Mozilla community as well as those in the know about open source projects, but I don’t think the movement has fully scratched the surface of its potential to the rest of the world. You see, those wedding attendees weren’t just talking about a simple switch of their primary web browser. It was the fact that someone had built a system to give them the opportunity to make a change against a very inhumane state of affairs. They, nay, We wanted to be shown that something could be done to change the status quo…and it was. So, a little over 10 years later, where does it go from here? I have no idea, but I’d like to think that this is just the starting point.

What happens when you out-workflow the workflow?

There’s been a lot of new questions I’ve had to ask myself when its come to thinking of a way to change the workflow for the Mozilla QA team’s web portal, QMO. Namely, am I really doing this correctly? I mean this is the first time I’ve had to do anything of the sort, especially creating mock ups and work-flow diagrams.

With that said, it’s been incredibly fun and its something I really enjoy doing, but that in no way means that I’m any good at it… and that’s scary. Not because a lot of people are going to be seeing the results of this project, but because I care about the ideals of the company and want its culture and ways of doing things to be spread throughout the rest of the world. Unfortunately, to truly believe in that means to truly want the best results to be put out there. And to have the best results come out of this project means to have the most experienced and most creative people/team working on it. From that line of logic, well, we don’t want to mess this up by out-workflowing the workflow. Making the darn thing too simple might backfire and either force the user to think that there isn’t enough stuff that goes around here or get lost after starting their experience with MozQA.

Here, take the Get Involved Section for example:

https://wiki.mozilla.org/QA/Community/QMO_Discoverability/Get_Involved

It’s meant as a simple, easy-to-understand workflow that gets the user to be a part of the MozQA Community, but will it be obvious to the user? Is there too much information on the Get Involved page? Do I need a foxkeh or two? Now, multiply this over a couple sets of audiences and this smorgasbord of UX complexity just shouts its prominence from the rooftops.

Oh well, at least I’ll know how to use it.