Mozilla Firefox

We decided to implement a lightweight Conflict of Interest policy for the MOSS Committees, not because we have had problems, but because we’d like never to have them :-) They are based loosely on the Wikipedia ones, and are here for anyone to use who ... [More] wants them (CC-0). MOSS Conflict of Interest Rules (v1.0) As a committee member, you must: 1. Disclose actively if you are receiving, will receive, or have received in the past 5 years payment or anything of value from an applicant or their project; 2. Disclose actively if any family member, spouse, partner, business associate, significant other, close friend, or their organizations or employers would benefit from the approval of an application; 3. Answer fully and honestly any relevant and appropriate questions about potential conflicts of interest when discussing an application; 4. Disclose actively if your approval or disapproval of an application could be perceived by others or the public as improper, because even the perception of a conflict or unauthorized personal gain needs to be disclosed; 5. Not approve applications for personal gain. Under the above rules, a person should “disclose actively” a potential or actual conflict of interest. To “disclose actively” means (1) to report the conflict to the MOSS Administrator; and (2) to do so explicitly and as soon as the conflict is known. The MOSS Administrator will assess the conflict and, if it is judged to be material, will report it or request that the member report it to the committee. [Less]

Share Kernel Contributions and Community

Meetup for Mozilla Festival 2017 Volunteers

mconley livehacks on real Firefox bugs while thinking aloud.

This is the SUMO weekly call

(my blog has moved this is just a copy of this post) This demo presents the RNNoise project, showing how deep learning can be applied to noise suppression. The main idea is to combine classic signal processing with deep learning to create ... [More] a real-time noise suppression algorithm that's small and fast. No expensive GPUs required — it runs easily on a Raspberry Pi. The result is much simpler (easier to tune) and sounds better than traditional noise suppression systems (been there!). Read More [Less]

The new Firefox is on its way and we can’t wait to share it with you. So we’re not. Waiting that is. Firefox Quantum is here in Beta and Developer … Read more The post Get ready for Firefox Quantum appeared first on The Firefox Frontier.

Mozilla is releasing a short film and launching a new magazine. They explore the impact of a pervasive internet on our lives and our future   What happens when AI virtual assistants can mimic our voices, learn our habits, and double as our drinking ... [More] buddies? It’s a future that doesn’t seem far off. It’s also a future Mozilla is exploring in a new short film and with a new bi-annual magazine. Today, Mozilla is releasing a short film commissioned from Superflux titled “Our Friends Electric,” and launching a new magazine titled DING, to explore the impact of connected devices on our lives, our society, and our future. The movie and magazine cover a wide range: You’ll see a stubborn AI bickering with its owner. You’ll read about anti-corruption bots in Brazil, and the harmful impact of connected devices on the environment. And you’ll hear from one of the founders of interaction design, Gillian Crampton Smith. The work is led by Mozilla’s Open IoT Studio, a research studio seeking to advance internet health in emerging technologies. “It’s imperative that we go beyond what’s possible with technology, and instead consider what’s responsible,” says Michelle Thorne, who leads Mozilla’s Open IoT Studio. “We wanted to critically engage in debates about the Internet of Things while offering something constructive in return. For example, we researched the current landscape of voice assistants and found that most devices today only encourage you to consume. We asked: what if they could also help you create?” The Film Mozilla collaborated with London-based design agency Superflux to create “Our Friends Electric,” a six-minute film about the future of voice-enabled AI. The film features virtual assistants that grow with you, AI that speaks on your behalf, and a philosophically-minded companion that accidently orders 2,000 pounds of organic horse manure. The film officially premiered at the London Digital Design Weekend at the V&A museum on Saturday, September 23. The Magazine We founded DING magazine because we saw a gap in the practice of slow, considered making and the breakneck speed of technology. We wanted to anthologize the sprawling online conversations and provide a place of reflection for people interested in crafting technology in more responsible ways. It is a place of refuge to discuss internet health and emerging technologies — slowly, sustainably, and in print. Our inaugural issue is dedicated to the topic of craft and features a range of stories, including: An interview with Gillian Crampton Smith, one of the founders of interaction design. She describes the practice of designing the right thing — and designing the thing right. As virtual and physical worlds converge, Gillian argues that we need craft to inform how we interact with connected objects   An overview of recent ethical technology projects, like Operação Serenata de Amor, an anti-corruption bot in Brazil   An essay on the invisible costs of connected devices, from the graveyards of the cargo ships that carry our electronics to the cartels that shorten the lifespan of everyday objects. The essay is authored by Vladan Joler of the University of Novi Sad DING will publish twice yearly. Read the first-ever edition » About Mozilla’s Open IoT Studio Mozilla’s Open IoT Studio is part think tank, part open-source laboratory exploring and advocating for ethical IoT. It seeks a holistic viewpoint on how and why internet technologies are developed, and how they could be healthier. The studio is a distributed community made up of dozens of technologists, activists, academics, and researchers around the globe. The Open IoT Studio is part of the larger Mozilla Network — a global cohort fighting for a healthy internet. We’re working toward a web that’s open, decentralized, safe, and secure for all, with projects like this and like CommonVoice. The device prototypes from “Our Friends Electric,” a short film about IoT and AI The post New Film, Magazine: The Uncertain Future of Artificial Intelligence and IoT appeared first on The Mozilla Blog. [Less]

Mozilla is releasing a short film and launching a new magazine. They explore the impact of a pervasive internet on our lives and our future   What happens when AI virtual assistants can mimic our voices, learn our habits, and double as our drinking ... [More] buddies? It’s a future that doesn’t seem far off. It’s also a future Mozilla is exploring in a new short film and with a new bi-annual magazine. Today, Mozilla is releasing a short film commissioned from Superflux titled “Our Friends Electric,” and launching a new magazine titled DING, to explore the impact of connected devices on our lives, our society, and our future. The movie and magazine cover a wide range: You’ll see a stubborn AI bickering with its owner. You’ll read about anti-corruption bots in Brazil, and the harmful impact of connected devices on the environment. And you’ll hear from one of the founders of interaction design, Gillian Crampton Smith. The work is led by Mozilla’s Open IoT Studio, a research studio seeking to advance internet health in emerging technologies. “It’s imperative that we go beyond what’s possible with technology, and instead consider what’s responsible,” says Michelle Thorne, who leads Mozilla’s Open IoT Studio. “We wanted to critically engage in debates about the Internet of Things while offering something constructive in return. For example, we researched the current landscape of voice assistants and found that most devices today only encourage you to consume. We asked: what if they could also help you create?” The Film Mozilla collaborated with London-based design agency Superflux to create “Our Friends Electric,” a six-minute film about the future of voice-enabled AI. The film features virtual assistants that grow with you, AI that speaks on your behalf, and a philosophically-minded companion that accidently orders 2,000 pounds of organic horse manure. The film officially premiered at the London Digital Design Weekend at the V&A museum on Saturday, September 23. The Magazine We founded DING magazine because we saw a gap in the practice of slow, considered making and the breakneck speed of technology. We wanted to anthologize the sprawling online conversations and provide a place of reflection for people interested in crafting technology in more responsible ways. It is a place of refuge to discuss internet health and emerging technologies — slowly, sustainably, and in print. Our inaugural issue is dedicated to the topic of craft and features a range of stories, including: An interview with Gillian Crampton Smith, one of the founders of interaction design. She describes the practice of designing the right thing — and designing the thing right. As virtual and physical worlds converge, Gillian argues that we need craft to inform how we interact with connected objects   An overview of recent ethical technology projects, like Operação Serenata de Amor, an anti-corruption bot in Brazil   An essay on the invisible costs of connected devices, from the graveyards of the cargo ships that carry our electronics to the cartels that shorten the lifespan of everyday objects. The essay is authored by Vladan Joler of the University of Novi Sad DING will publish twice yearly. Read the first-ever edition » About Mozilla’s Open IoT Studio Mozilla’s Open IoT Studio is part think tank, part open-source laboratory exploring and advocating for ethical IoT. It seeks a holistic viewpoint on how and why internet technologies are developed, and how they could be healthier. The studio is a distributed community made up of dozens of technologists, activists, academics, and researchers around the globe. The Open IoT Studio is part of the larger Mozilla Network — a global cohort fighting for a healthy internet. We’re working toward a web that’s open, decentralized, safe, and secure for all, with projects like this and like CommonVoice. The device prototypes from “Our Friends Electric,” a short film about IoT and AI The post New Film, Magazine: The Uncertain Future of Artificial Intelligence and IoT appeared first on The Mozilla Blog. [Less]

Because we only like to reinvent the wheel when we have toBeta releaseFor many, today is just another day. Well, not for me, my team, and all the other people who spent the last six months on version 57 of the browser, the new Firefox Quantum. Today ... [More] , we’re going into Beta release with the new UI which adheres to the new Photon visual language. If you feel your head spinning, you’re right. Let’s put one thing after another.Style guide vs. design systemsMy name is Emanuela Damiani, and in few days, it will be one year since I began working at Mozilla.When I joined, I was asked to focus my attention on two products in particular: add-ons and the new design system.Building a design system is not an easy job. First, what is a Design System? What is it not? What are the differences between a style guide and a pattern library? All those questions were buzzing in my mind like one hundred bees.A design system is not a one-man job. When you I say ‘we’, I mean: Tina, Tori, Helen, Amin, Markus, Philip and myself.Our team is not too big, or too small. It has six members, distributed from Vancouver to Taipei, passing through central Europe, and with just one person able to work 100% on the design system. Since the beginning, we have tried to use Slack as much as is possible to make it easy for anyone to give feedback and fill the gap of not being able to share time together.When we all met together at the beginning of November last year, there was a zombie Firefox style guide in the wild.We wanted to learn from that failure. We spent time interviewing anyone who worked on that project. What was the challenge? Why did the few things in the style guide feel so different from everything present in the product?A design system success is not connected with the launch of style-guide or a UI-kit. The real success happens when your design system is adopted in your products.One main point of failure of the previous style guide was in the process taken by the team. Without a complete inventory, the team was documenting and improving at the same time, ending up with some excellent and delightful insights for future development but nothing truly actionable for the present or representative of the product.Plus, the style-guide had a strong focus only on the desktop, ignoring the complex ecosystem where Firefox products live.Photon: from a visual refresh to a visual language“We started from the existing style guide, we checked if the identified macro areas were still valid, and we analyzed (or looked at) other existing design systems that were around for a while.”— Amin Meanwhile, somewhere else in the organization, a group of people decided it was time to give all the cool improvements on the backend (a.k.a. Quantum) a nice visual refresh. The code name for this project was Photon.That was the perfect opportunity for us. We started from there. All of the visual changes are expected to be in the product, overruling previous decisions. We had to start somewhere, so we started there.Our first job was to understand all of the design decisions and be ready to raise our hands if some choices contradicted each other or did not meet accessibility standards. We made them aware of the other projects, products, constraints, and needs of other teams so that the team in charge of the visual refresh would have a more broad understanding of the design and development requirements.While we were documenting, we ended up actively co-designing what eventually became a real design language that supported multiple platforms and multiple products.Design for Scale“The higher the expected visibility on parts of your work, the more important it is to align to Photon. If very limited visibility is expected, full alignment is of lower priority. Use platform components until you have time to align better.”— Design for Scale, Photon Design SystemWe wanted to have documentation that combines theory and resources where theories are principles, visual guidelines, and patterns, and resources are everything from visual assets to tokens, from demos to templates, and from tools to code.But how might we build a successful design language that also able to feel native in all the different platforms? Designing for scale is a challenging, delicate task. We wanted to support people going through this task and provide written content to help them understand this principle and apply it.Feedback, feedback, feedback“With every page, we added we learned, step by step — we learned how to structure pages, how to structure the whole system, and we learned how to align differences between individual design teams and how to get people to make decisions that can be structured and documented.”— Markus While we’re building the design system, we never stop collecting feedback by everyone on the Firefox team. In the end, those people are our primary users.We like to think of the design system as a tool, a tool which enables other people, designers and non-designers, to design. It saves time on digging into Sketch files, trying to find patterns from other designers, and fixing design issues like incoherency, accessibility across platforms, and localization.During Mozilla’s June 2017 All Hands in San Francisco, we spent hours just talking with different product teams, asking for feedback. How are they using the system? How is the system relevant for them?When you ask “Can you bring somebody from your team?” and 15 people show up, you know you’re doing something right.Photon Design System: todayFirst, we gave it a name: Photon — it just makes sense, right?Three months ago, we had a lot of visual decisions documented on the website, and many of those decisions were already on the Nightly release, but the design of our site didn’t really seem to reflect any of it. So, we applied all the principles documented in the product. The Photon Design System website today reveals how we use it in the wild.We are working on the components and patterns. Day to day, our job resembles a detective’s. We follow leads in all the products and identify the ones that can bring extra value to the Firefox team. Where we see complexity, we act to simplify.We want everyone who builds for Firefox to use the design system in their everyday workflow. Using the design system should be not more than easy, it should feel natural. To accomplish that, we’re focusing not only on the content but also on building tools and resources.Final thoughtsFor many, today is just another day. For the Photon Design System team, it’s when we see the system’s value realized.Photon Design SystemA design system is not built overnight but shaped gradually through our daily practices. It evolves every day — or maybe every week — and most importantly, it’s never done.Just another day was originally published in Firefox User Experience on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story. [Less]