matthew's blog

In short

If you are making a base Firefox profile which will be deployed to other machines, be sure to delete the profile lock files before creating the template/image. The filenames to delete vary by operating system and can be found in the roaming profile directory:

As part of the performance investigation for Australis (the in-progress Firefox desktop redesign), we wanted to be able to easily track Talos performance benchmark numbers across all of the relevant platforms without having to open 52 graph server links (Datazilla wasn't ready at the time) . My goal was to use the graph server API to pull in the data and display the regression percentage for all of the tests we were tracking in an overview. Rather than writing a new tool from scratch, I decided to look into Google Apps Script, which I had only heard about before, and it seemed to be able to help implement what I wanted on top of Google Spreadsheets. The result is a shared Talos Google Apps Script Library [Google login required] (revision log) (API docs) that anyone can use. You can see it in use for TART and other tests for Australis along with the demo spreadsheet.

Implementing Australis, the new theme for Firefox, is one of the top goals for the desktop team this quarter. As a result, I've recently taken over work on the tab strip visual redesign portion of the project. At this point the tab shape and styling has been implemented on Windows and is undergoing review so it's a good time for testing from a wider audience so the feature can get some polish before development starts on OS X and Linux in the upcoming weeks. The following is a screenshot of a build with the the latest patch.

Current Progress

• worked on API design and features discussed in Aug. 6 meeting
• improved initial working prototype
• Automatically hiding icon notifications after a delay
• Notifications are shown as menu buttons when notification button clicked
• More code and UI cleanup

Loose threads

• where in the UI should the doorhangers be shown? (need input from beltzner)

Next target

• fully working version of doorhangers
• ETA August 21, 2009

My second major project this summer on the Firefox team is to implement Doorhanger Notifications. The main goals are to redesign the notification interface to address various issues and to provide a unified notification area for them to be displayed. For now you can read the wiki page for more information. Below is my progress thus far:

My first project this summer as an intern at Mozilla on the Firefox team was to improve the form history feature. It's a feature that most people use when they fill out forms but don't even realize it. For those of you who don't know what I'm talking about, it's the dropdown of previously submitted text that appears when typing into a form input field. The two main improvements that I have been working on in form history (which are also known as form awesomecomplete) for Firefox 3.6 are detailed below.