This is what a social network looks like. Each dot represents a human being. Each line represents a social connection between two people, such as acquaintanceship, financial exchange, friendship, or love. The picture can become arbitrarily more complex as we take one-way relationships into account and add more dimensions to model particular interests and behaviors. Much of the attention around technology these days has something to do with this picture. ... Read more

I recently wanted to create a short, two-minute and thirty second “pitch” for the Herdict-Firefox integration prototype I’m working on with Jennifer Boriss, Laura Miyakawa, and Jeffrey Licht. Here is the result. It turned out that the pitch itself was an experiment for me: after fiddling around with Screenflow and iMovie for a bit, I got frustrated with their limitations and decided to just use HTML to put together the presentation. ... Read more

Firefox’s extension platform is incredibly powerful and generative, but when I created my first extension in early 2008, I found a number of barriers to entry—difficulties echoed by a number of other newcomers I talked to. For one thing, extensions were difficult to get started with. Perhaps the best indicator of this is Myk Melez’s video tutorial titled Extensions Bootcamp: Zero to “Hello World” in 45 Minutes, which actually ended up being 90 minutes long. ... Read more

Back in July, the Mozilla Developer Tools Lab released an experimental memory tool that allowed a web developer to get a better picture of Firefox’s memory usage. That tool was a great start, but it had a few issues: It was slow. It showed the entire Firefox JS heap, which included lots of objects internal to Firefox that weren't of much use to web developers. It was a bit of a hassle to set up, as it involved freezing Firefox and accessing a local web server from a different browser. ... Read more

Since learning JavaScript over a year ago, it’s become one of my favorite dynamic programming languages alongside Python. And as I’ve mentioned before, I think the two languages actually complement each other pretty well. Python, at its heart, is a platform that’s built to be extended. The evidence for this is plentiful: there’s modules and packages out there that offer practically any functionality you want, from web servers to 3D game engines to natural language processing toolkits and more, all instantly accessible through a simple command or an installer download. ... Read more

Every time I think about why I like the open web, I basically think of how well it fits with the way I learned to use and program computers as a kid: my first computer, an Atari 400, came with everything I needed to do programming, and I (or my parents) didn’t have to spend hundreds of dollars or sign an NDA to get a development tool. My favorite technical book as a child was Creating Adventure Games On Your Computer, which contained plain BASIC code for games that you could play, augment, and make your own. ... Read more

One of the recurring issues that the Mozilla platform team has to contend with is the issue of how to allow trusted, privileged JavaScript code to interact with untrusted JavaScript code. Google’s Caja team actually has to deal with a very similar problem, albeit at a different layer in the technology stack. This issue is quite subtle, and fully explaining it is beyond the scope of this blog post. If you know JavaScript, I recommend checking out the Caja Specification, which nicely lays out the problems inherent in running code with different trust levels in the same environment. ... Read more

Over the past few weeks I’ve had the pleasure of working with Dion Almaer on a Browser Memory Tool Prototype. This has been a lot of fun for me; for one thing, I’ve always wanted to help developers diagnose the problem of “I’ve been running my web app/Firefox extension for 8 hours, why’s it taking up 800 megabytes of RAM?”. And I’ve also always wanted to have an excuse to learn about the internals of SpiderMonkey, Mozilla’s JavaScript engine, and play with its C API. ... Read more

Security is hard! It’s tough enough designing a platform that’s powerful, well-documented, and easy to use; but what about security? If we aren’t careful, adding a incorrectly tuned or naive security model negatively affects generativity and usability. Jetpack needs to balance all three. The following is something I wrote at the beginning of June, but didn’t post until now because I’ve had my head in code for a bit too long. ... Read more

A little while ago, Vladimir Vukicevic wrote an excellent blog post outlining the reasons why he’s not a fan of exposing a specific implementation of SQL to Web Content. I agree with everything he says in his post; I’ve also been a fan of CouchDB for some time. A CouchDB-like API seems like a nice solution to persistent storage on the Web because so many of its semantics are delegated out to the JavaScript language, which makes it potentially easy to standardize, as well as easy to learn for Web developers. ... Read more