I provided some feedback to Mozilla just over a month ago about the Mozilla Firefox Start Page tip of handy tips & tricks (how meta):

“Get the most out of your Firefox! Improve your skills with some handy tips & tricks.”

I’m sure web browser developers share my passion for these web page details, but nothing has changed yet.

As I often see other sites with similar issues, I might as well share this web development tip & trick and other suggestions.

<Title> Tags

First, the <title> field is bad SEO. Says
<title>Mozilla Products | Tips &amp; Tricks</title>
instead of including “Firefox”:
<title>Firefox Tips &amp; Tricks | Mozilla Products </title>

Actually, all the product pages are likely in need of switching the “Mozilla Products” to the end.

This made a big difference for WordPress.com search traffic way back when.

I work with many of our WordPress.com VIP new customers on this issue. Their instinct is to always have their brand or blog name first. But think of which search result you would be more likely to click on? In fact, WordPress historically made it to easy to get this wrong, so in version 2.5 a 3rd parameter ‘seplocation’ was added to wp_title() to make it easier to do it correctly.

So http://www.mozilla.com/en-US/products/ title would become

<title>Firefox Web Browser &amp; Thunderbird Email Client | Mozilla Products</title>
(Plus title case for the win.)

I suggested they give it try and see what happens I’d be surprised if it does not squeeze a little more juice out.

Wow, there are lousy <title> tags all over their sites

http://www.mozilla.org/projects/ title is just <title>Featured Projects</title> Hopefully, David Boswell will have a chance to coax out of someone some work here during the current redesign

Firefox Tips & Tricks

The Manage Your Downloads is an advanced tip? Say what?

“Find it a Flash” intermediate tip reads:

The Find As You Type feature is another handy timesaver. Rather than
using the “find” bar to search for a word on page, just click anywhere
on that page and start typing the word you want. Your cursor will
immediately jump to the first instance of that term.

“You can use it for links, too. For example, instead of moving your
mouse across the page to a “learn more” link, just start typing the
word and when the cursor finds it, press enter.

It does not say that this is disabled by default, and can be enabled at Advanced > Accessibility or any other hint or tip Also, the phrase “on page” feels awkward, maybe “on a page”.

PS. I would not recommend enabling this, because it breaks some web apps that have click to edit.

My good friend Chris Messina wrote a very interesting article, which in many ways comes down to a large, influential part of the web development community being disenfranchised from Mozilla.

Doom! Of course John Lilly is playing cool on the outside, because they have long fought giants. Mozilla’s ability to combat goliaths, and live with fear and uncertain contribute to them being the best browser development community there is.

Although Mozilla is the best browser community, like Chris Messina, I consider myself part of the disenfranchised community, tired of the Firefox is the web mentality. But I will readily admit nobody has a better track record than Mozilla for open source consumer software development.

As impatient consumers, particularly impatient geek consumers, we all want our pet issues addressed right NOW. One of the greatest achievements of Mozilla these last few years is worrying about the right problems at the right time. And one thing they’ve always gotten mostly right is enabling participation in all aspects of Firefox development, promotion and support.

My instincts tell me that it has slowed them down (a lot), but positions them well for the long game.

In many ways their community, their team, is like the guiding principle of the Internet, they can remove a number of members, and the team will continue to function. Firefox development is highly robust and survivable.

Are leaders like Dave Hyatt, Ben Goodger, Blake Ross, Joe Hewitt, and Mike Schroepfer missed? Of course they are, but these are only a few of the many Mozilla champions.

“We build Firefox with an open development process. At Mozilla people earn respect, authority and decision-making ability by demonstrating their abilities. This allows individual people to become full, equal participants, with both authority and responsibility for building a better Internet. The development process for Firefox demonstrates the type of Internet we want to build. (Not perfectly, of course.)”

Chrome will be the browser built by Google, like Safari is the browser built by Apple. Firefox is the browser built by everyone.

Everyone that can cope in the structured, programmer-geeky rule laden Mozilla open source community. But maybe that is what is required for such a complex and important product.

What track record does Google have in open source development of consumer software? Any?

By extension what track record does Google have in supporting consumer products? Here they do have one, and it’s a poor one. Automation ultimately doesn’t cut it. Also, it’s much more fun when the software is installed, as opposed to a web service that you fix and update any time.

What community leaders has Google assembled for these heady tasks?

What open source tools do these Google leaders have in their arsenals? As great of gifts as the Netscape source code in 1998 were the open source tools to develop and collaborate on development.

Although today using Bugzilla and Bonsai (with Hg Web Viewer a poor replacement) would probably drive me nuts, those are a couple of the tools that makes development of a large, complete product by a large Mozilla community possible.

Google Code seems great for small projects, or non-consumer software projects with small teams, but I’m not convinced that Google Code is up for the challenge of a web browser. But I suspect it doesn’t have to be.

I don’t expect Chrome to become a leader in the browser space. I expect it to be about writing cool code, solving cool engineering problems, and pressuring Mozilla into solving the problems that Google cares about, or someone else will take Google’s code and solve them.

The greatest gift of open source isn’t the right to fork, but the ability to merge. I expect Apple to be the first to incorporate this generously licensed code (third-party software). But Mozilla won’t be that far behind, because with the top teams collaborating on WebKit, the myth of the masses will be eroded. Sure, Mozilla’s development team may be made up mostly of volunteers, but those contributions are often picking at the surface of problems or polishing generally solved problems. The complexity of code necessitates highly skilled, highly focused, full time developers.

Chrome’s technologies will be powerful forces for the Mozilla disenfranchised. Will WebKit one day power Firefox? What other technologies or experiences will we see Firefox adopt from Chrome?

The Automattic team have always been huge fans of Firefox. My colleagues including Matt, Mike, and Raanan have found time to test the Firefox 3 betas. Asa calls Beta 3  “the beta you can’t resist“. If I didn’t have a baby on the way, and too much exciting work related to WordPress 2.5, and WordPress.com VIP customers, I’d be embarrassed that I haven’t found time yet.

Recently my colleagues noticed that a number of features on WordPress.com weren’t working properly. Mike investigated, and discovered that Firefox 3b3 blocked access to 3rd party cookies. He did an excellent job reporting the issue Bug 417800: 3rd party cookies should be *sent* even when blocked from being *set*:

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; PPC Mac OS X 10.4; en-US; rv:1.9b3) Gecko/2008020511 Firefox/3.0b3
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; PPC Mac OS X 10.4; en-US; rv:1.9b3) Gecko/2008020511 Firefox/3.0b3

Cookie sets should not be accepted from third party sites, but cookies should still be *sent* to third party sites.Bug 324397 was closed by changing the default of network.cookies.cookieBehavior from 0 to 1. Now Third party cookies cannot be set (e.g. within an iframe). I understand and support this behavior.However, pre-existing cookies for that third party are not currently *sent* to that third party. I believe this behavior is incorrect and is an unintended consequence of changing the default “accept cookie sets from third party sites” behavior.

Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:
1. User goes to example.com and logs in to that site. example.com cookie is set.
2. User goes to a different site: example.NET which contains a “widget” for example.com: an iframe showing example.com content to logged in users.
Actual Results:
Since Firefox 3b3 does not send pre-existing cookies to third party sites, that example.com widget does not work from example.net.

Expected Results:
Firefox should send third party cookies so that the example.com widget works.

Related bugs:
1. Bug 324397: deals with accepting cookie sets from third party sites.
2. Bug 417286: deals with UI for allowing cookie sets from a whitelist of third party sites.

And in a comment:

I don’t believe my proposal would revert the earlier decision to not accept third party cookies. I think my proposal lies between two extremes: never doing anything with 3rd party cookies (current behavior), and allowing anything with 3rd party cookies (old behavior).

For about a week it the ticket didn’t receive much attention, other than from Jo “FBI plant” Hermans, who didn’t acknowledge the pragmatic problems this change caused.

It is hard to know whether a ticket just hasn’t been noticed yet, or if it is being ignored. This situation reminded me of WordPress, like any software projects, challenges in this area, and the importance of your bug triage team and area owners.

After reviewing the bugs, from my layperson’s perspective, I reached out to the always generous Jesse Ruderman, Mozilla Security expert, and he reviewed the ticket, and he suggested that possibly the strongest argument would be to show this behavior not being consistent with the other most popular web browsers — contrary to what the other bugs described. I related this to Mike and Matt.

Like how we, WordPress developers, are incredibly sensitive and jaded about blog spam, Mozilla developers are sensitive to browser spam, so reverting any change like would only come reluctantly.

Matt updated the ticket:

http://www.macromedia.com/support/documentation/en/flashplayer/help/settings_manager06.html

Even if you clear cookies and block third party cookies, you’ll still likely see pagead2.googlesyndication.com there.

That’s not really the issue though.

Good guys, normal widgets, and many sites use iframes to tie distinct sites together are being punished by behaviour that changed from b2 to b3 and there is no good guy workaround for. The new stats widget in 2.5 shows a beautiful iframe-loaded flash graph in IE6+, Safari, and Firefox through 3b2, but now in b3 it shows a login form. Even if I submit the login and get new cookies (although they already exist), if I navigate away from the page or reload it wants me to login again. (And again.)

I’m most familiar with how this breaks things around WordPress because that’s what I work with every day inside of Firefox, but would it help to find other examples of widgets or functionality broken by this change in b3?

Every project does it, but such a change shouldn’t have passed the first gate for approval mid-beta.

Mike Beltzner, Mozilla.com Director of User Experience, thankfully joined the conversation at this point:

At the very least, we need to revert the change from bug 324397. The foundational assumptions in that bug (that this wouldn’t affect web-compat) turned out to be wrong.

Then Dan Witte, Cookie Area Owner, closed the door:

(In reply to comment #9)
> As mentioned above, Bug 324397 comment #39 says the change in that bug brings
> FF in line with Safari and IE.

it turns out bug 324397 comment 39 isn’t accurate. to help clear up all the confusion around this issue, i’ve posted comparisons between FF, Safari, IE6, and IE7 in bug 417286 comment 14. to summarize:

1) IE6, IE7, and Safari 3′s third-party blocking works only when setting cookies. once a cookie is set, it can be read third-party or not. our feature has always blocked setting and reading.

2) IE6 and IE7 (at least) can use the p3p policy to determine whether to permit setting of a third-party cookie. per comment 9, it appears that Safari can also do this, though i haven’t verified that.

3) all browsers have the ability to block third party cookies in iframes.

…

in the face of the problems this feature has caused, we should revert the default pref, and leave this as an option. since it appears to be reasonably effective (at least moreso than the competition), it would be nice to add this back into the pref panel as a choice, rather than keeping it hidden – but that’s an l10n call for drivers to make. people who want this should use it in conjunction with whitelisting for legitimate sites. (given the amount of confusion around whitelisting, better discoverability of this feature seems necessary – but that’s a different topic.)

The behavior has been reverted. Thank you!

Maybe, you have to be strange like me to enjoy a bug report and solution unfolding, but I really enjoyed reading all of the strong arguments, and my two favorite teams working together.

I actually went to the ticket at this time to figure out what were the next steps to see this issue resolved. I was ecstatic that it is already resolved! My thought was that more examples of web breakages would be necessary and that I would reach out to be mashup and web widget experts like Niall Kennedy.

Jo Hermans, Jesse Ruderman, Daniel Veditz, and Dan Witte present a lot important points on web privacy in the ticket, and it is because of the Mozilla team’s approaches and actions that there isn’t another browser I trust as much for the best privacy and security experience.

I love how Firefox is always on the front line battling for the best experience, and look forward to Firefox 3 and everything else coming out of Mozilla!

My first project is to help Mozilla Central/Eastern European communities and raise the awareness of what’s going there in Mozilla project. ) It means that I consider myself as a kind of evangelist, strengthening Mozilla signal in Central and Eastern Europe and on the other hand strengthening the signal from those countries inside Mozilla.

It sounds like he will have a similar community role combining evangelism and technical leadership in internalization and localization there. It seems like a natural progression in his career. He will be continuing his work that was previous volunteering for Mozilla and combining it with a mandate. He is a incredible addition to the Mozilla Corp team!

Zbiggy is a lot of fun to work and hang out with. His energy and passion for open source and helping everyone (around the world) get access to great software and web services is infectious.

I’m not surprised that he studies sociology at university. He really cares about people and tries to improve things on the greatest scales. He is one of my inspirations.

Zbigniew was generous enough to answer some of my questions about his transition over email.

If one has recently read “not-invented-here syndrome in Mozilla” they might be very surprised by you joining Mozilla Corp, except if they really know you. If they know you then they would appreciate the article as your usual candor, and that you were and are as passionate and positive about Mozilla as ever.

This isn’t the first time that Mozilla has considered hiring you and you considering joining their team as an employee, what made the union successful this time?

Tricky question. I can’t say there is a single reason, it’s more that I have grown. I consider any projects as a kind of adventure, a challenge. It has to have the excitement factor, it has to be worth taking, but on the other hand, you have to be mature enough to be a useful part of the team — not the one dangling at the rear of the group. It’s much easier to just stay a volunteer. Mozilla is a unique kind of organization, successfully experimenting with merging corporate business with community and openness to the extend not tested before. It’s unwise to jump in, scream a lot and try to influence the direction of such a huge and tremendous effort, when you don’t feel ready yet. And it’s not worth jumping in to sit down in the corner. So now I feel I can at least whisper something from time to time

Another factor is that Mozilla is reaching the first major creative reorganization since Firefox was accepted as the flagship product. With David Ascher leading a new communication-focused effort, John Lilly taking over the CEO role, stronger investigation of mobile zone and what’s most important, Mozilla 2 project shaping up, there’s a lot of exciting things going to happen I spent the last years volunteering in Mozilla, and, honestly, Flock was the place where much more exciting things were happening for me – as it always happens with pre-1.0 startups. Thanks to the Flock team, I had a chance to participate in the birth of a new web browser, focused on the social web, free to experiment with each and every part of the UI… that was amazing – you should remember that too

So post 1.0 “My World” is much more reliable, and I’m so happy to see that Flock 1.0, Flock 1.1, and Flock 1.2 are all pretty much ready in terms of internationalization without me spending sleepless nights on it

The last factor is the right project. I’m studying sociology, I’m fascinated in how the community works, and while being a member of Mozilla Europe board, I was always pushing in the direction of human social studies on the communities. To understand them better and help them help us So it seems that I managed to get my proposal through

Who will you be reporting to?

I’m extremely proud that Paul Kim, who was always extremely helpful to me, agreed to be my manager Besides that, I am, of course, reporting to, and cooperating with Tristan Nitot, president of Mozilla Europe, and Jane Finette, who’s Director of European Marketing at MoCo

What new opportunities and challenges ahead are you most excited by?

Everything. I’m diving through Mozilla’s corporate culture, routines, learning new names, I must say a lot has changed in Mozilla since the Firefox 1.0 days. Jane is extremely helpful in guiding me through the first weeks, and, what’s maybe even more important, she’s very patient. Thank you, Jane!

I hope to start blogging much more often about my major project in Mozilla, but first I need to prepare for FOSDEM and do the backlog after my exam session.

No one would question your integrity, but many people appreciated your independence, is there anyone else that will provide your previous perspective straddling the Mozillas?

I’m surrounded by extraordinary people, who’re participating in one of the biggest open projects in the history of the Internet. I know many of them for almost 8 years now. I don’t feel that anything changes here. For last 2 years I’ve been a member of the board in Mozilla Europe, so I don’t feel like I’m getting any new inclusive view.

I also hope that my friends, who know me, will be able to kick my butt if they feel like I’m getting conformist It includes you!

Who will be asking all the interesting questions?

Hey, I can promise there are no brain washes on the way into Mozilla. Noone asks you to sign any chirography and nobody “proofreads” my blog posts. Everything is still the same

I don’t expect my questions to stop appearing, I expect myself to have a bit more influence on causes of those questions. As I mentioned at the beginning. It’s a responsibility. I’m joining people like Axel, Pascal, Seth who’re on the first line of communication with our community. This is a kind of role that requires a lot of pushing here and there to get things working better for outsiders.

Don’t worry, there’s always this kick-in-the-butt or slap-with-the-trout whistleblowing system applied in case of emergency

What will your legacy at Flock be?

Flock can be localized to zillion+one language. And Flock has localizers that are localizing the trunk. If one is in the l10n business, he knows what that means.

Besides, I think I was the initial concept author for what’s now called My World, and there are some other small things that were shaped when I was around. I think I brought the coffee for Chris when he doing some nice mockups – that counts, right?

Have you found any time for working on Bugzilla lately?

Nah. I’m still in the very same point with this: http://landfill.bugzilla.org/gandui/ being quite a good concept IMHO

I’m not going to promise that I’ll find time for this. I won’t work on the dashboard until I feel I have a lot of time for my girl, hobbies, job and life

Zbigniew responses share his usual exuberance, humor, and humility. He is too modest. I remember him championing the My World experience based on Netvibes and similar experiences long ago. It became one of my favorite ideas, and I still am looking forward to a more customizable experience being in Flock, a related experience being part of all web browsers, and tighter integration of widgets in desktop OSs, but I digress.

When I asked Clayton Stark, Flock’s VP of Engineering, who would be filling Zbiggy’s big shoes, he said that the responsibilities would be shared among various folks. He had nothing, but extreme appreciation to his work and contribution at Flock:

Gandalf has been a major contributor to Flock for a very long time, and he has been instrumental in securing localizers to create the long list of language versions we now have. Beyond this, Gandalf has always been an active voice in the evolution of Flock, and a great person to work with. I congratulate him in his official move to Mozilla — in my opinion, Mozilla Europe has lucked out to get such a great person on their team.

Definitely, this is great news for Mozilla. Congratulations Zbigniew! Congratulations Mozilla!

PS. Zbiggy has created a Open Projects community survey. Please take the little time to help him in this project.