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Firefox Test Pilot

testpilot.firefox.com

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Re: Firefox Test Pilot

#71

Post by ianbicking »

Aldo_MX wrote: post #39
callahad wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can adjust what events trigger an email at https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/userprefs.cgi?tab=email

Leaving the cynicism and hyperbole aside, what bothers me are not the e-mails, but the double-sided stance of Firefox as a project, in feature-parity bugs we get the draconian speech of "oh no, we must follow the standards strictly, it doesn't matter if every other browser work fine and it doesn't matter if you already spent your time to develop a patch", but in the outside world we get the announcement of support fo…

There's a lot of people at Mozilla, and they talk fairly freely, so the result is an inconsistent message. Not everything you see is a stance, much of it is people trying to figure things out and communicate the decisions-of-the-moment.

As far as web compatibility and standards, the inconsistency is part of Mozilla. Is Firefox a tool for open web standards advocacy? Some in Mozilla feel that way. Do we just want Firefox to render things well? There's a whole team for that too (https://wiki.mozilla.org/Compatibility). And of course there's Bugzilla, which can feel like a lottery – it's very hard to know who you encounter when you enter the project through there.

This stuff is hard, and making the right choices is hard – I'm sure Mozilla has not always made the right decisions, but I personally prefer ongoing struggles to make the right decision over a consistent and credible stance.

Re: Firefox Test Pilot

#72

Post by pcwalton »

Aldo_MX wrote: post #39
callahad wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can adjust what events trigger an email at https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/userprefs.cgi?tab=email

Leaving the cynicism and hyperbole aside, what bothers me are not the e-mails, but the double-sided stance of Firefox as a project, in feature-parity bugs we get the draconian speech of "oh no, we must follow the standards strictly, it doesn't matter if every other browser work fine and it doesn't matter if you already spent your time to develop a patch", but in the outside world we get the announcement of support fo…

Firefox's policies are no different from those of Chrome in this regard.

There is in fact a middle ground between "free for all, implement whatever you want" and "implement only what is precisely required by a standards document". In fact, this middle ground is the only way to make a practical browser engine. The two extremes are untenable.

Re: Firefox Test Pilot

#73

Post by wodenokoto »

6a68 wrote: post #47
dingaling wrote: post #44

What a curious page; just blank-white in Firefox 46.0 on Linux with this output in the console: "You have google analytics blocked. We understand. Take a look at our privacy policy to see how we handle your data."

You need to have JavaScript enabled to use the site

That may be, but the error is still terrible.

Re: Firefox Test Pilot

#74

Post by pcwalton »

rhinoceraptor wrote: post #20
6a68 wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You'll be happy to know that somebody recently started working on the date/time input types bug: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=888320 If you have a bugzilla account, you can CC yourself on the bug to catch future updates :-)

Great! So now in like 2 years, hopefully I can simply use type="time" instead of implementing a half baked JS time picker or time validator. It's frustrating seeing them spend so much time on Firefox OS, Hello, etc. and not on making Firefox a really good, standards compliant browser.

A huge amount of the Hello work was really WebRTC, which is a standard--and an important one. Hello is a front end to that.

Re: Firefox Test Pilot

#75

Post by pcwalton »

Aldo_MX wrote: post #22
6a68 wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You'll be happy to know that somebody recently started working on the date/time input types bug: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=888320 If you have a bugzilla account, you can CC yourself on the bug to catch future updates :-)

Fine print: CCing a bug doesn't mean it will be addressed in a timely manner, it may take 10 years[1] but in the meantime you'll receive 2,147,483,647 mails of other people "me too"-ing and discussing about the bug. [1] Not exaggerating: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=390936

How many 10 year old software projects on the scale of Firefox don't have 10 year old open bugs?

I suspect that set is precisely equal to the set of projects that just close bugs en masse after a certain date.

Re: Firefox Test Pilot

#77

Post by dredmorbius »

I was almost going to pass this up based on the HN discussion and the initial CTA[1] on the page. I'm still not sure this answers any of the many frustrations, and hopes, I have for browser development,[2][3] but it's of possible interest.

For the love of all that's holy: Put a compelling argument for a CTA on the page BEFORE the CTA.

And ... put a compelling argument there regardless. This lacks both.

The features mentioned, especially tabs management, strike me as useful. Tabs are a mistake. That's not my opinion, that's Adam Stiles' view -- and he invented them. Content management is a huge problem.

Web design isn't the solution, it's the problem. My standing recommendation now is that Pocket add a Web Intent to its Android app. If I could use it rather than Firefox or Chrome for browsing, I'd be vastly happier.

Streams, search, bookmarks, content, organisation, reputation (of authors, sites, publishers), fact-checking, influence-registries (Nature just had an item on this IIRC) are all other areas of issue.

Paying content providers is a concern. I'm notafan of micropayments, but building the system into the browser is one option. Broadband or content taxes with usage monitoring similar to music's mechanicals is another. Browsers could play a role in both.

I'm also not a fan of having to register for stuff. But might regardless.

________________________________

Notes:

1. Call to action.

2. Among my longer rants, with a future roadmap: https://www.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/256lxu/tabbed_...

3. Specific to Firefox: https://plus.google.com/104092656004159577193/posts/VX64KGmi...

Re: Firefox Test Pilot

#78

Post by the8472 »

morinted wrote: post #16
lol768 wrote: post #13

Not entirely sure why this requires a Firefox account. It appears possible to install the mentioned add-ons manually: Tab Center appears to be available from http://people.mozilla.org/~bwinton/TabCenter/ Universal search: (edit: link here was incorrect) Activity streams: https://moz-activity-streams.s3.amazonaws.com/dist/latest.ht...

Looks like the wrapper add-on will: - Sync your experimental add-ons across browser instances - Provide useful metrics for the TestPilot add-on - Cleanly remove all add-ons and metrics when you uninstall it

I don't use sync in general, so this particular instance of sync is not positive point to me.

And I don't see how the other things need an account.

Re: Firefox Test Pilot

#79

Post by ianbicking »

dredmorbius wrote: post #77

I was almost going to pass this up based on the HN discussion and the initial CTA[1] on the page. I'm still not sure this answers any of the many frustrations, and hopes, I have for browser development,[2][3] but it's of possible interest. For the love of all that's holy: Put a compelling argument for a CTA on the page BEFORE the CTA. And ... put a compelling argument there regardless . This lacks both. The features…

Somewhat an aside, but Sticky Reader View would be a great Test Pilot experiment.

Re: Firefox Test Pilot

#80

Post by rhelmer »

sametmax wrote: post #68
mrmondo wrote: post #62

Honestly all I want from Firefox is better stability and performance - I don't care about almost anything else barring security. Firefox has become so unstable and slow (on OSX at least) that many people I know - myself included have switched to chromium. We don't want to use it but we have to because of all the crashes and massive slowdowns during long running sessions or when many tabs are open. This goes for stabl…

Big fan of mozilla and firefox. I've been defending it for years, but now I'm having a hard time. It's slower in almost any case than the competition, from initial rendering to switching tabs. Some stuff hang the page completly. Watching too many videos or scrolling too much twitter slow down the browser to a crawl even after closing all tabs and require a restart. I'm not using firefox out of sheer ideology and supp…

As others have mentioned, while this article is about Test Pilot and focused around how you can help with UX experiments, there are lots of wonderful devs hard at work on platform features.

Some are just starting to land after literally years of work:

You might be more interested in reading about platform improvements like getting Servo/Rust components into Gecko: https://blog.servo.org/2016/05/09/twis-62/

Or progress in multi-process support (codename e10s): http://arewee10syet.com/

While these are focused on Firefox to improve performance, stability and responsiveness, there are also experiments like the Positron project, which is making Gecko able to host Electron applications: https://github.com/mozilla/positron

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