From what I’ve read of Tim Harford’s The Undercover Economist and The Economist, capitalism seems like a reasonable way to make the world a better place, given its assumptions of human nature. In particular, America’s brand of capitalism, which tries to lower the barriers to getting a job or starting a business as much as possible, seems compatible with notions of liberty and democracy. I just finished reading The Value of Nothing, which provides a fascinating counterpoint to all of this. ... 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

I realized over the past year that the Mozilla community doesn’t just generate cool software—it actually produces a wealth of great visual assets, too. I thought it’d be useful for both folks on the periphery and on the inside to use images as a way of understanding what’s going on at Mozilla—sort of like about:mozilla, but using pictures instead of words. Here’s what I’ve got so far: This prototype is a showcase of what happened in the Mozilla community during the month of November 2009. ... 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

Ragavan recently posted some interesting thoughts on DataLiberation that got me thinking: Another factor to consider is how you define what "your data" is. For example, if you look at it as just exporting your photos out of Picasa and importing them to flickr, I'd posit that's a rather simplistic view. A large part of what makes your data useful and valuable is all the relationships associated with it. I share my photos with my friends and family, I license some under Creative Commons, I group them, I tag them — all of these make my data very context rich. ... 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

Lately I’ve been thinking a bit about Drumbeat, and what the Open Web actually means to me. This morning, I came across an article by Katherine Mangu-Ward titled Transparency Chic which reminded me about a few of its most important aspects. Transparency Chic discusses a Firefox addon called RECAP which helps make U.S. Judicial Records as freely-searchable as everything in Google by taking any of the free information browsed through PACER, the Federal court system’s clunky web-based database that charges eight cents per page, and submits it automatically to a free Internet archive. ... 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

At Mozilla we get the opportunity to design the back of our business card. As I’ve written about before, Mozilla is a unique hybrid organization with a mission that lots of people don’t know about. It’s often hard to communicate to others in passing, so I decided to put it on my business card: I don’t really expect many people to read it, but at least it’s out there for anyone who wants to learn more. ... Read more