I’m now a full-time software developer in Mozilla Labs working primarily on Weave [labs.mozilla.com]. I suppose that means I’ll have to pay income taxes again.. but that’s insignificant compared to helping Weave redefine web clients where users can interact with websites and friends in whole new ways. I’ll have less time to write about the EdBrowser, but being in Labs, I might get to build some of this as a bunch of ideas for that web client was built around Weave.

Most of what I worked on during the week was getting familiar with the Weave codebase and some initial debugging/hacking. I also did a little bit on optimizing the Location Bar for Firefox 3.1+.

Is 4 > 20? Yes! ?

My first task was figuring out why 4 is larger than 20 [bugzilla.mozilla.org]. This was causing problems with Weave history sync on Fennec when we set the Places sorting mode to get a number of recent pages. So to try figuring out what went wrong, I started with my Unibody Macbook and installed VMWare Fusion [vmware.com] to run Ubuntu 8.10 [ubuntu.com] for a cross-compiling scratchbox [wiki.mozilla.org] to build Fennec [wiki.mozilla.org] for the Nokia N810. (Side note: don’t run hg from the scratchbox. It’s old. Like 0.9.1 old.)

That’s just to build Fennec. Getting it to run on the Nokia N810 is just as fun. The default package is bzipped, but that doesn’t work on the device by default, so I have to repackage it as gzip. Even before then, you’ll need to jump through hoops to get Fennec onto the device, but the easiest way seems to be putting stuff on a web server and downloading it wirelessly to the device.

Long story short, I used my x86 asm experience from doing computer architecture/compiler research at UIUC, and noticed the compiled code for SetSortingMode [hg.mozilla.org] was doing a plain comparison of the input argument to the value 20.

cmp r1, #20

While the value 4 was getting passed into the unsigned short argument, the compiler was expecting a 4-byte sign extended value. Vlad gave me a quick patch that made the XPTCall magic handle smaller-than-4-byte types correctly, and all was good. 4 is now less than 20.

Initial Weave Hacking

I got a Weave account and used it for the first time. (And so can you!) [services.mozilla.org] I kept track of various small UI issues as I used the Firefox client and pushed fixes for them — small localized changes are a great way to get into the bigger project. But I eventually messed up my account by typing different passphrases from different computers.

Lucky for me, I’m working on a way for users to reset the data on their client/server [bugzilla.mozilla.org]. The general idea here is to allow the user to “start over” incase something went wrong. 1) Clean sync with the server, 2) Restart the client from server state, 3) Make other clients like the current one, 4) Have clients repopulate the server.

Before I dove too deep into coding, I got a whole look at the Weave architecture to better understand what pieces od what: A bird’s-eye view [toolness.com] and Client APIs [wiki.mozilla.org]. Also, Weave is written with a pattern called Trampolining Generators [neilmix.com]. This basically lets you use asynchronous calls synchronously and get something more like traditional threading.

Color-coded log files for easier tracking of Weave behavior

I also figured I would be looking at debug logs a bunch, so I decided to spice up the plain black/white log file [bugzilla.mozilla.org] and color code the text by the type of message (warning, info, debug, etc.) and the background by the component generating the message. Hopefully now I’ll be able to get deep into Weave hacking.

AwesomeBar Speedup

I posted about speeding up the location bar, and it’s made it into Firefox 3.2 already. On the way there, I used Andrew Sutherland’s SQLite explain parser to better understand why things were slower and faster. Basically, a query becomes a set of opcodes like how javascript code becomes an intermediate bytecode, and the engine executes this stream of instructions.

Andrew first made this tool to analyze his own query optimizations [visophyte.org], and now he’s made the code available for everyone to use and contribute [hg.mozilla.org]. Thanks!

I’ve got a change that should speed up the Location Bar in Firefox 3.1 and 3.2, but I just want to make sure it’s not only me and my computers that are seeing this benefit.

For you to take the test, you’ll need to be running a Shiretoko (Firefox 3.1) build or Minefield (Firefox 3.2) build [ftp.mozilla.org].

What you then need to do is type something that will search through all your history, such as “this page isn’t in my history yay”. Just copy/paste that into your location bar, but keep track of the time you pasted and the time the activity throbber stops spinning in the location bar. (If you do get results, it’ll still be okay, as long as the location bar didn’t find 12 results.)

Depending on how much history you keep and how long you’ve been using Firefox 3, this could take over a minute or two before the throbber stops spinning.

Once you record how many seconds it takes for the throbber to stop, repeat the same thing with the Firefox 3.2 build that includes my optimization [build.mozilla.org].

CPU Usage (1 bar/sec): Old Firefox 3.1 takes 2 minutes; New takes 20 seconds

I’ve tested this on a few Places databases with my current unibody MacBook and my old iBook, and both times it runs much faster. Some times it goes 6 times faster. With one test on a database with over 100,000 places, the location bar throbber stop spinning in 20 seconds instead of 120 seconds.

Please report back your results as comments, and if you’d like, go ahead and vote for the bug, Make location bar autocomplete even faster [bugzilla.mozilla.org], to follow its progress.

Introducing my very own web client of the future! EdBrowser!

A brand new shiny web client with buttons and boxes that's better than foxes!

Okay okay. I’m not actually making a web client of my own, but if I had a lot of time and the right infrastructure, it would probably look like the picture above. (I suppose I do have a lot of time seeing that I’m unemployed. But that does have various benefits.. no going to classes, no studying for exams, no paying income tax to blow up then rebuild bridges.. And who would want to use something called EdBrowser?!)

I’ll just go in left-to-right order describing what you can see (and don’t see) in my mock-up:

1. Identity Center
2. Site Launcher
3. Text Input
4. Web Content

Identity Center

First off, we have something new here — the web client knows who you are and lets you know who it thinks you are. (If your name isn’t shown, you’ll want to “log in” so your experience is personalized for you. Everything described further down can be stored as part of your account.)

When the client knows who you are, it makes it easy for sites to find out that it’s you if you let the site know. Now you won’t need to fiddle with logins and passwords for “simple” sites like forums. Additionally, sites can restrict sensitive data (bank accounts, emails, etc.) and require you to give the web client a password. When you do so, the client will send the server an impossible to guess “password”, which it set up earlier, and now you don’t need to worry about internet hackers guessing your bank password.

There’s a lot more functionality for this “Identity Center,” but because I made it green and ugly, I’ll talk about it at the end.

Site Launcher

You might be wondering wheres the tab bar, and here it is! Kinda. You can initially think of this area as a combination of the bookmarks bar, tab bar, and history drop-down menu.

I’ve mentioned in some other post that even with a smart new-tab page, you still need to open a new tab then find the page you want to open — 2 clicks. Similar two steps if you use the drop-down menu. And bookmarks… ew.. at least the drop-down menu automatically shows the sites you frequently use instead of manually bookmarking sites.

What you really want to do is just get to a site you frequently visit. So let’s just put those sites in an easy-to-find place.. in the Site Launcher! The web client knows which sites you use frequently, and it will automatically populate the area with the icon for that site. Now when you want to open the site in a new tab, you just click on the icon. Done.

But that’s not all! When you move your pointer over the icons, it’ll show you titles and thumbnails of all your open “tabs” that share that same icon. It will also show thumbnails of pages that you frequently go to on that site. This means no more loading the site’s home page then clicking through to the actual page you want. It shows up right there – accessible with a single click.

And as a bonus, you would be able to search the listing of tabs and pages you frequently visit to restrict your searches to just that one site.

Opened sites, unopened sites, trash and active tabs

The Site Launcher has 3 main components:

1. Sites you commonly use
2. Trash for removed sites
3. New/temporary sites

When you visit a site not in the Site Launcher, it shows up towards the right side — to the right of the dot. If you want to “pin” the site, just drag it to the left of the dot. You can close that site just by dragging it to the trash or any other normal way you would close a “tab.”

While the trash isn’t really a site, you can still hover over it just like any other site’s icon. Except now it shows you thumbnails of sites you’ve recently closed and might want to reopen. “Undo” is such a great feature!

The dot is there for you to drag if you want more space for sites to automatically fill in to the left side. But hey, you’ve got a lot of space now that there’s just the Identity Center, Site Launcher, and some small Text Input box…

Text Input

Not much to explain here. Just type what you want to do. You can execute commands or search your history and/or the web. You could just put text to store there if you wanted. I suppose you could type a URL, but why do that when you’ve got the Site Launcher!

But about the location bar.. There’s nothing showing URLs anywhere. Not in this text box or when showing sites you might want to launch — those are just titles and thumbnails. (Wait! Didn’t this guy make the AwesomeBar awesome?! Oh well.. Okay fine. You can still get to the current URL and edit it, but it’s not shown in the main interface.)

I lied. It’s not really just a text box for input. When you click on the “text box,” it also opens up bigger box in the middle of the screen, so when you type it shows up in both places. This box will show the results of what you’ve typed in. So it could be a map of an address you’ve selected or pages that you might want to go to. And after you hit enter for the command or search, the input box clears itself.

Web Content

Content is king! Lots of space for it here with just little partitioned off to the web client.

So I’ve already talked about web sites knowing who you are, and now you won’t need to keep logging into sites before you use them. But there’s more websites can do with information if you give them access!

Share your history to find great deals (but no Wii will be that cheap...)

If I’ve given Amazon.com access to my Target.com history, the next time I visit, the site can figure out what items I’ve been looking at and hopefully offer me a better deal. No need for me to manually search for the same item across multiple websites.

Another example would be sharing my digg.com history with a news aggregator site like Google News. It can know that I dugg an article and show me news stories related. Additionally Google could dig deeper and find when the original article was submitted or when I dugg it and only show news that has happened or updated since those times.

Identity Center

Back to the ugly green button. It actually comes in different colors like red and gray. It would also have a different emphasis state when the site wants to get at more of your data (but hopefully it’s not an annoying animation..)

For example, when you first visit a site, the button will appear gray because you haven’t given the site any access. It would then try to get your attention, and pointing your cursor at it would show a message like “Site ABC would like to know who you are. 40% of your friends have granted access; 3% deny. Grant or Deny?” Granting access could be limited to just the site knowing that if you “log in” to your web client from somewhere else, it’ll know it’s you again. This can be done without ever giving away your name or other personal information.

Having the web client know about your social network is nice, but re-entering all your information to a web client is a pain. You already have a lot of information on a number of websites, so let’s collect that. When you visit certain sites, the Identity Center could let you know that you can extract data from those sites and securely store it on your profile. Then you can share that information with other sites you visit if you choose to do so.

Crude mock-up of attempting to grab attention

Other situations where the Identity Center button might want your attention is if the site wants to know more than just who you are. Clicking the button could show a list of sites that you might have history for. If you do have history, you can preview what information is sent to the site as well as visit the sites that you haven’t been to before.

If Amazon.com is asking for your visit history of competitor’s websites, they’re also giving away which competitors they’re interested in. You could then navigate to new sites that you didn’t even know about. (Or just visit the ones where your friends have also visited and granted access.)

There’s an endless combination of what can be done with having your data accessible online while selectively giving out certain portions to certain sites. Also, there’s plenty of interesting personal data that already exists on some sites, so you could unleash so much potential if it was easy to make that information available.

Do you have suggestions to streamline user tasks in this new web client?

So that’s a quick overview of some parts of my imaginary EdBrowser. There’s plenty more that I’ve thought about but am currently too tired to write up. But even if this web client doesn’t exist yet, the technologies needed to make something like this are coming in. There’s the AwesomeBar as part of Places that pushed towards adaptive behaviors and Ubiquity for new interfaces for “doing stuff.” And there’s Weave for securely pushing data to the cloud and letting the user selectively open it up.

The user is the focus of attention here, and making the experience better and more streamlined is the goal. The user isn’t just passively browsing the web anymore as s/he gets to leverage the web client to easily get at whatever is desired. (So actually.. User is King! or Queen! )

Josh had an interesting comment in my recent post on Firefox 3.1 Location Bar Preferences about hiding certain keywords from the location bar.

At first I suggested using the new “Forget About This Site” feature where you can select a page from your History Sidebar and choose to forget everything (history, cookies, etc) about that site. Doing this would prevent any of those pages from showing up in the location bar because you would have no history for that site.

Quick way to remove a site from the location bar

Unfortunately, that requires the user to actively clear the site from his/her history. (Perhaps Firefox could automatically do that for the user in a privacy-aware manner…)

Josh then had a question regarding userChrome. Since Firefox 3 handles all sorts of fancy CSS 3 selectors including substring matching in attributes with *=, I figured it would be fairly simple to match the url or title of a location bar result and hide it.

This technique works well if you don’t mind leaving trails of your privacy hiding in plain sight. However, I suppose the ease of taking a peek at userChrome is a quite bit more difficult than just typing in the location bar.

Hide pages that match your keyword/pattern in the URL or title

All you need to do is use your favorite way to style Firefox, e.g., editing userChrome.css in your profile’s chrome directory or through an add-on, and add a style matching the class name “autocomplete-richlistitem” as well as a selector for either the “url” or “title” attributes.

For example, if you want to block any results that have “facebook” anywhere in the URL, use the following style:
.autocomplete-richlistitem[url*="facebook"] { display: none; }

This is just a simple hack to prevent certain pages from showing up. The location bar by default tries to show the top 12 pages, but if you’re hiding pages, you might end up with no results. You can try changing the value of browser.urlbar.maxRichResults from about:config to get more results, so if any get hidden, there are others to fill in the space.