Mozilla Webdev

Having recently come from the Plone world to join Mozilla, I am in the delicious but fleeting position to compare two major Python web frameworks with some pretension of familiarity. Through a series of articles focusing on specific features, I will compare the Zope family of frameworks (as they are used in Plone) with the Django framework, which is gaining popularity at Mozilla and currently runs support.mozilla.com and addons.mozilla.com. Read more

As JavaScript codebases become larger and more complex, we start to miss the niceties we take for granted in general purpose programming languages. It would be really great to have a JavaScript module system. The CommonJS community has created a standard that Jetpack and Node.js use. Read more

This week, we pushed version 2.2 of support.mozilla.com (SUMO). The main feature in this release was our new Support Questions feature, replacing the old Firefox Support Forum.

The Support Questions, designed by the inimitable Chris Howse,  take advantage of a number of HTML5 and CSS3 features to improve the look and experience: rounded corners, background gradients, placeholder and accept attributes, and more.

In recent blog posts I’ve talked about our plans for Socorro and our move to HBase.

Paul Osman, Dan Mills, and I recently attended the Federated Social Web Summit and a commonly mentioned problem was discovery in a de-centralized environment. How do you get website A to talk to website B without a centralized service to coordinate? This post takes a stab at solving this problem with a progressive enhancement that works on Firefox 3.5 and later.

Here is a short screencast to describe an example problem and showing the solution in action.

We’ve been incredibly busy over on the Socorro project, and I have been remiss in blogging. Over the next week or so I’ll be catching up on what we’ve been doing in a series of blog posts. If you’re not familiar with Socorro, it is the crash reporting system that catches, processes, and presents crash data for Firefox, Thunderbird, Fennec, Camino, and Seamonkey. You can see the output of the system at http://crash-stats.mozilla.com. Read more