Velocity 09

June 29th, 2009

grainy steveLast week Honza and I went to San Jose, CA for Velocity 09 to hang out and take in some of the excellent presentations taking place there.

I can say without hyperbole that this was the best conference I’ve attended. The presentations were from people doing real large-scale web development and included a fair amount of real data and some of their solutions to hard problems.

One of the highlights was John Adams of Twitter talking about the engineering challenges they’ve encountered keeping your tweets flowing. They’ve rewritten intensive chunks of code in C. They’ve implemented their own queue system (called Kestrel which has an API very similar to memcached). They use Google Analytics to monitor the frequency of the Fail Whale. You can see the whole presentation here, on video.

Other speakers I enjoyed seeing included Marissa Mayer of Google, Nicholas Zakas of Yahoo on JavaScript performance tuning and the mighty Steve Souders (pictured above) talking about Even Faster Websites. I liked his presentation so much, I bought the book!

Some of the take-aways from the conference were: Instrument Everything. Analyze your performance constantly. Employ phased roll-outs and measure user reactions to changes.

I was surprised to learn that changes in website responsiveness sometimes as little as 50ms could incur changes to pageviews or searches, directly impacting revenue. Anyone whose ever played Rockband or, gosh, a real guitar or set of drums can tell you that 50ms is very noticeable and at the outer-limit of responsiveness (not to mention can make your music sound imprecise). Humans are capable of detecting latency well below that number, but the surprising thing is that we humans are now expecting this level of performance from our websites.

You can see a simple visual demonstration of this with Ben Galbraiths’ feedback demo, presented by Ben and Dion Almaer in their On Responsiveness session.

I don’t think it’s something we would consciously think about when using a site, though it would likely form some sort of nebulous impression upon us. Using a search engine that didn’t post any response for 50ms or worse would probably make us think, “this thing’s slow” or “I’m not getting any results”. Those delays add up over time. As users know there’s going to be a delay, they might start a search and flip to another application or browser tab. As soon as that happens, the user’s attention is lost and may not return.

What I find really interesting about this, is that people are now treating websites with the same levels of performance expectations that they have with video games and desktop applications. Website performance is more important than ever, so if you’re creating or maintaining a website, keep that in mind.

Too much content, not enough blog. I’ll try to talk about some of the other cool things I saw later this week.

Tags: , ,
Posted in Mozilla, Web | Comments (2)

Firebug 1.4.0b1 Limited Release on AMO

June 3rd, 2009

Today we’ve pushed Firebug 1.4.0b1 (same as 1.4.0a31) to addons.mozilla.org. Currently, we’ve only turned it on for users of 3.5b4 and later, but this version is fully-compatible with Firefox 3.0 as well. Users of Firefox 3.0 who want to try out Firebug 1.4 should download it from getfirebug.com/releases/firebug/1.4 or disable version checking on AMO. When we ship the final version of Firebug 1.4.0 we will set the compatibility for all users of Firefox 3.0 and 3.5.

This is a little different from previous releases. For versions 1.2 and 1.3, we released betas on getfirebug.com and ask users to download from there. We’re adding the betas to AMO this time to allow individuals using Firebug on Firefox 3.0 upgrading to 3.5 to have a seamless upgrade experience. Also, the reason we didn’t enable this for users of Firefox 3.0 is that we feel this is still Beta-level software and didn’t want to throw them into that ring without fair warning first.

What’s new in this release? Quite a lot, actually:

We’ve still got a fair bit of work to do to wrap this up. Templarian’s icon updates are still in the pipe as well as documentation updates and ongoing bugfixes, so stay tuned for more.

To everybody who’s contributed to this release, I would like to extend huge thanks for your help and hard work! Everybody who has tested, reported bugs and joined in on test-day, we couldn’t have gotten here without you.

As always, please report any bugs to http://code.google.com/p/fbug/issues. This software is beta!

Tags: , , , , ,
Posted in Firebug, Mozilla | Comments (0)

Firebug 1.4 Icons

May 28th, 2009

As we close in on Firebug 1.4 to coincide with the release of Firefox 3.5, we have a chance to redo some of the icons that are in place.

IRC user Templarian mocked up this design using the Silk icon set from FamFamFam. I think it looks pretty sweet.

He’s also started a discussion on the Firebug Google Discussion group, so please leave comments there, in the Flickr photo or right here if you don’t feel like traveling.

And while we’re on the topic, you should check out the latest Firebug 1.4(a30) in the latest nightly of Firefox 3.5. It’s coming together.

Posted in General | Comments (9)

Firebug Testday Results

May 11th, 2009

Thanks to everybody who showed up last Friday and ran some Firebug tests for us. It was a decent turn-out and you helped us catch some bugs.

Over the course of the day, we filed around 16 bugs, 1 of which was deemed invalid (Other Component, Weave), and 8 of those remaining were fixed since then.

But we’re not done yet. As of this writing, we have 1.4a27 available for you to try out. It features an even more simplified activation model allowing for more code cleanup under the covers. I also predict there will be an a28 including the fixes from this weekend real soon now. Keep an eye on http://getfirebug.com/releases/firebug for updates.

So, thanks again for helping out. Special props to jcm, tmyoung and jhillacre for their hard work. And a special thank you to aakashd and the rest of Moz QA for their assistance in making this happen.

Update: For now, I recommend users stick with 1.4a25.

Tags: , ,
Posted in Firebug, Mozilla, Quality, Testing | Comments (0)

Firebug Testday On Right Now, 1.4a26 warning

May 8th, 2009

Just a little reminder that we’re testing Firebug over in #testday on irc.mozilla.org. Grab the latest clean release (Firebug 1.4a25) from getfirebug.com/releases/firebug/1.4 and come on in.

Please be advised that Firebug 1.4a26 has been declared “Dead on Arrival”. Please don’t update to this version.

Tags: ,
Posted in Firebug, Mozilla, Testing | Comments (1)

Firebug Testday, Friday, May 8th, 2009

May 6th, 2009

Join us in #testday on irc.mozilla.org and help test out the latest version of Firebug 1.4. If you’re a web developer, a browser power user or just bored and looking for a place to hang out on a Friday (between 8am and 4pm PST), grab the latest version at http://getfirebug.com/releases/firebug/1.4. (currently 1.4a25)

Our goal is to test through some basic features through litmus.mozilla.org (TBD), run Jan Odvarko’s test suite and/or a couple of online tutorials. The purpose of these tests is going to be to determine Firebug compatibility with Firefox 3.0 and Firefox 3.5b4.

Issues discovered will be logged on the Firebug issues tracker.

See the write-up on QMO on their events page. We’re hoping for a good turn out, so I hope to see you there.

Tags: , , ,
Posted in Firebug, Mozilla, Quality, Testing | Comments (0)

Firebug 1.4a20. The Homestretch.

April 21st, 2009

John B. uploaded Firebug 1.4a20 (xpi link, will ask to install in Firefox) to getfirebug.com/…/releases yesterday and I’ve been playing around with it today to see what was what. So far, it looks good. A couple of minor outlying things are still outstanding. Open in New Window from the status icon isn’t working yet — it works from the little detach icon in the tab strip though console functionality seemed a little weird in that mode. Hans Hillens is putting the finishing touches on his accessibility work which should be wrapped up today or tomorrow and then we’re going to think about turning this thing into a beta.

But first, we’d like some feedback on a little feature introduced with this version. “Minimize to status bar” is the new little down arrow next to the “Open in New Window” and “Close” icons on the tab strip. On the Mac, it looks like this:

Clicking that down arrow will drop the currently open Firebug panel into a new icon on the status bar and leave everything running. This sort of approximates the old behavior where you could turn on Firebug and still close the window and receive updates on the console and net panel, but not requiring a separate window to be active. There was some discussion in today’s meeting about the ramifications of this behavior. I think the biggest contention was having multiple icons on the status bar. As you minimize more Firebug panels, you get more icons. This could look a little strange, but on the plus side, you get a visual indicator of how many Firebugs are actually running.

So, if you’re into testing bleeding edge debugging software, install this into a testing profile and try it out. Leave us a comment here or on the Firebug discussion page.

I would also like to note that auto updates to the 1.4 alpha line should be working again after a somewhat embarrassing typo made by yours truly to the install.rdf file. Thanks to “geki007″ for finding the error!

Tags: , , , ,
Posted in General | Comments (0)

FireDiff extension for Firebug

April 17th, 2009

Kevin Decker’s FireDiff extension for Firebug is 0.1 old! It’s still new, but could be the beginning of a one-stop-shop for getting diffs for changes to locally-modified DOM and CSS from Firebug.

You can grab it from the above link or browse the source code in Firebug’s svn repository. You will need Firebug 1.4a17 or higher.

Tags: , , ,
Posted in Firebug, Mozilla | Comments (1)

Tabs on Top

April 6th, 2009

Curtis Bartley landed his “Tabs on Top” patch last week and John Barton pushed out a new alpha version, number 1.4a17. You can get it in the usual places on getfirebug.com/releases/firebug/1.4. The debug version is next door.

We think this makes more sense. Tabs are top-level objects and the toolbars change depending on which tab you have active. There will be a couple other minor tweaks coming up to go along with this change. The inspect button may move up alongside the Firebug icon menu and we’re still looking at a couple of options for the Script tab’s “Break on next” debugger function.

So, please take a look. If you have any comments or suggestions, feel free to file them on the Firebug Issues page or drop us a line in the Firebug discussion group in the Tabs on Top thread.

Tags: , , ,
Posted in Firebug, Mozilla | Comments (1)

Firebug and 3.5 compatibility

March 25th, 2009

Awhile back I stated that Firebug 1.4 was compatible with Firefox 3.1b2 (soon to be rebadged as 3.5). At the time, this was a true statement, though the version we had available, a12, wasn’t really ready for prime-time. I said we’d be ready for February back in January thinking we would have a version ready to go by then. Certainly in time for the release of Firefox 3.1b3.

Time passed. Firefox 3.1b3 shipped. Firebug was not ready.

I’m not making excuses for this when I say that we were ripping the guts out of Firebug’s activation interface. John Barton’s been working hard with backup from Jan Odvarko to get all the bits and pieces of Firebug’s confusing 3-checkbox-activation code excised from the system. He writes about some of the pain he’s had getting Firebug working with Firefox 3.5 over the last couple of months in a separate blog post on the getfirebug.com/blog.

Last week, we released Firebug 1.4a13. While it works pretty well on Firefox 3.0, there are some issues with 3.1b3. Since then, John’s found a work-around for a problem in the script panel which should make debugging work properly again. There is still an outstanding issue with the Net panel caused by bug 483672. I’m hoping we can get a resolution to that very soon.

When these issues are resolved, I feel confident that Firebug 1.4 will be considered “compatible” with Firefox 3.5. Then we’ll be able to release a beta version to a wider audience and buckle down on any remaining polish bugs and UI issues we have left-over before Firefox makes final release.

How can you help? We could use help testing the latest published alpha version or the svn tip of branch1.4 on Firefox 3.1b3 and Shiretoko nightlies and filing bugs on our issue tracker. Anything directly-related to 3.5 compatibility should have the “3.5compatible” label affixed to the bug. If you’re feeling really gutsy, helping to write or convert existing unittests to our current test tool FBTest would be a great boon to us going forward. We have a small but powerful set of tests currently that will get better. Expect a follow-up post soon documenting how to get an environment setup and running on your system to write unittests. In the meantime, you can find us on irc://irc.mozilla.org/#firebug and either myself someone else can help you through the setup.

My own mission in all this is to finally get our unittest system running under automation. It’s been through a few different incarnations, but it’s finally in a state I think we can use to move forward. Thanks to John Resig, Jan Odvarko and John Barton for all their effort to get that working. This has been on my goals list for a long time now (too long) and should make our lives much better when we have a visible set of unittests running regularly.

Posted in Firebug, Mozilla | Comments (0)

« Older Entries