Note: Several people asked where the link is to actually add feedback to the site. This is, of course, a good point. As mentioned in the comments: The designated entry point for the feedback application is going to be an extension bundled with Firefox 4 Beta. For more information, please read Aakash’s blog post. To try out the application already, feel free to add happy or sad feedback to the test site.

This morning, we published the Firefox Input application. It is a little web application soliciting feedback from our Firefox Beta Program users. The aim is to make it as easy as possible for people to tell us what specifically they like or dislike about an upcoming version of Firefox.

The application was, as far as software goes, developed very rapidly: We made it from requirements to production in a mere three weeks. What made this possible was a number of reusable components that allowed us to avoid reinventing the wheel and stay focused on making the application awesome.

A few key components of the Input application:

• Django. I can’t stress this enough, but Django is a fantastic web application framework. It makes it incredibly easy to set up a web application quickly and securely. Their built-in admin pages save me days of work that I would otherwise have to spend to allow project admins to edit the application data.
• Jinja2 and Jingo. The only big drawback of Django is its template language: The instant you make nontrivial web applications, it gets in your way. Luckily, like all parts of Django it is replaceable: Jinja2 and Jeff Balogh’s jingo interface comes to the rescue. The two of them are already in use over at AMO and also serve us well on Input.
• Term extraction. Firefox Input extracts key words from all feedback. Sure, you can just split the sentences into words, but if you want to avoid collecting all sorts of meaningless particles (“the”, “a”, “if”, …), it becomes a little more complicated. We are using the topia.termextract library, which gladly does the heavy lifting for us. Only caveat: It only works for English, so once the application is localized, we need a different solution for the other languages.
• Search. For the longest time, there was no generic way to do search in a Django app (other than straight SQL queries). In the meantime, haystack has started to fill that gap. We use it on Input in conjunction with Whoosh, a pure-Python search library. That is very easy to set up, at the expense of scalability — if we outgrow it, however, it will be easy to switch search engines with virtually no code changes at all. Thumbs up!
• Product details. Only very recently we released a Mozilla product details library for Django, and this is the first application to rely intimately on up-to-date product data: Input only lets users of the latest beta versions of Firefox add feedback, so it auto-updates its product data periodically to gather feedback for the newest versions as quickly as possible.

As always, the source code of Firefox Input is openly and freely available. If you notice any problems with it, feel free to fork it on github, or file a bug in our bug tracker.

Everybody knows Mozilla makes Firefox. But there is a lot more software at work here at Mozilla that you might not be aware of. For example: What happens when you go to getfirefox.com and click on the download button?

By clicking on the button, you ask our servers to send you a specific file, for example: Firefox 3.6.3, for Windows, in German. On a small website, the server would just fetch the file and hand it to you. But if you need to handle millions of downloads a day like we do, a single server can’t handle it all by itself, so it gets more complicated. In order to provide you with downloads, updates, etc., as fast and conveniently as possible, Mozilla collaborates with a number of mirror providers that have volunteered to host Firefox and other downloads on our behalf, thus sharing the load of our numerous downloads between a number of servers all over the world.

For some years now, we have been running a bundle of software called “Bouncer” to handle our downloads for us.

Bouncer consists of of three components: The user-facing bounce script, an administrative interface called Tuxedo, and a mirror checker called Sentry.

First, the bounce script. It is the only component the “ordinary user” gets to interact with. It essentially does the following after you click on a download link:

• It determines if the product you asked for exists.
• Out of our list of mirrors, it picks one that has your file. Initially, it would pick one at random. Over the years, the logic has become more elaborate though: Meanwhile, it takes into account in what country you currently are, as well as how strong the mirrors are (stronger mirrors serve more downloads, weaker ones serve less).
• A split-second later, Bouncer refers you to the server it decided on, and that server will send you the file you asked for.

But wait, there is more! How does Bouncer know what products are available, for what operating systems, and in what languages? That’s where the admin interface comes in. We have a release engineering team who work hard every day to deliver the newest software versions to you in handy little packages. Previously, during every release, an engineer would manually tell Bouncer that a new version was available for download. But just last week, we improved this process by introducing a new interface to Bouncer, with a project called Tuxedo. The release engineering team can now, fully automatically, feed new versions into Bouncer at the time of release, with no manual intervention. With less time spent on repetitive tasks, we can spend more time making Firefox awesome.

Finally, the Sentry component is a script that periodically checks the health of our mirrors, and adjusts our settings accordingly. This is to ensure that a situation where you are forwarded to a mirror that is currently unavailable is very, very rare. So far, these mirror checks happen from Mozilla Headquarters, and therefore reflect the connectivity we get to the mirrors from here. In the future, we want to improve that by taking into account more how our users’ connectivity is to the specific mirrors (for the geeks out there: Network proximity != geographical proximity), which has the potential to result in faster download times, less expenses for mirror providers, and general happiness.

As you can see, there are a lot of things happening behind the scenes before Firefox makes its way onto your computer at home, and we are constantly working on improving the way we are doing things. Plus, as always: Bouncer is completely open source, and we have a public bug tracker, so if you notice any problems or see room for improvement, make sure to let us know.

Photo credit: “directions”, CC-by licensed by Phillie Casablanca.

There is a Belorussian version of this article provided by PC.

One of the talks I really enjoyed at recent FOSDEM was Paul and Tristan’s presentation on Hackability. (Tristan uploaded the English slides to slideshare, as well as the French ones).

Essentially, it was a great promotion for keeping the Web (and Firefox as the tool we view it through) (both legally and technically) open, its building blocks visible and interchangeable. If you can’t open it, you don’t own it.

As a result, this also means the “view source” function is not there to feed the user’s idle curiosity, it is a vital and irreplaceable part of the Web. Likewise, a tool like Firebug does not exist to “break” other people’s websites. Instead, it helps us to use the web the way it was meant to be used.

Recently, a colleague of mine (don’t remember who, sorry) linked to a little website called patch culture.org, that, in spite of its simple appearance, promotes exactly that: using the Web the way it was meant to be used, fixing, improving the Web on our way through other people’s sites, and better yet, share our changes with the people who own the sites. Their steps are easy: 1) Install Firebug, 2) change a website, 3) email a patch to the owner.

Sounds easy (to geek ears, anyway) but is harder than it looks. For starters, how do I get my changes out of Firebug? It’s a concept we could call “diffability”. If I have to write a book describing what I did to some website’s DOM nodes and CSS rules, I am far less likely to fix someone else’s website for them than when there is an easy way for me to do it. Granted: Even if Firebug let me export a unified diff, owners of non-trivial, framework-based web sites wouldn’t be able to just go ahead and apply it on their codebase. However, diffs are human engineer readable. Without losing a ton of words, the website owner could look at the changes I made and choose to apply them to their software in the appropriate spots.

Second, how do I make my changes stick? We Open Source developers are of course some of the more altruistically inclined citizens of the Web, still if you are going to fix someone’s website, you are likely to do so to lower your own annoyance level first, then everybody else’s. Therefore, you want your changes to “stick”, if or if not the website owner decides to accept and deploy your changes.

Thankfully, this is achievable, though it involves a little bit of a hassle. There are add-ons out there, most notably Stylish (for CSS-based changes) and Greasemonkey (for JS-based changes). These two were recently joined by Jetpack Page Mods. While Greasemonkey is a solid platform with tons of contributions, I see its biggest flaw in missing a solid standard library that takes the pain out of JavaScript, a problem Jetpack mitigates by shipping with jQuery included. In comparison, using jQuery with Greasemonkey is many things, none of which is “beautiful”. If Greasemonkey wants to stay the technology of choice for “web hackers”, it needs a standard library. Only then will it fill its place as a lightweight extension engine in the future, (yes, in spite of its recent inclusion in Chrome). It would be a twisted situation if it became easier to write full-blown (Jetpack-based) extensions than writing a user script. It’s the reason I am already writing small website changes as Jetpacks and not GM scripts, and I am not the only one. But because competition is good for business, on the Web as much as elsewhere, I hope the Greasemonkey guys stay on top of their game.

In summary:

• Let’s make and keep the Web open and hackable!
• We can change web sites, but it’s hard to share what we did. A great way towards more open hacking would be a diff engine in Firebug. Even if it only exports pseudo-diffs, or even if the diffs can’t be applied with one click unless you run a fully static website.
• Finally, it’s possible but hard to make changes stick. Greasemonkey is a strong contender in the field, but if they want to keep being the number one “hackability engine”, they’ll need to make writing scripts easier by adding a decent standard library. After all, it is not the 20th century anymore.

The Firefox 3.6 Release Candidate 1 has been released and its new features are just fantastic! From the first-run page:

• Select a new persona from the Personas Gallery.
• More than 75% of Add-ons work. Test your favorites!
• Try watching a video in full screen mode.
• Have you seen websites using WOFF fonts?
• Kick the tires with improved JavaScript performance, browser responsiveness, and startup time.
• See the release notes for more details.

Go check it out.