6a68

Hi, Lockbox desktop dev here. Some thoughts:

> if there isn't a Chrome plugin, it's not going to be of much use to me

Working on it! We have to get the webextension working in Firefox first, then we'll branch out to other browsers. (Contributors welcome, btw: https://github.com/mozilla-lockbox/lockbox-addon)

> I still use Chrome on my laptop (for a multitude of reasons) and if Lockbox doesn't interoperate with it, it's not a useful tool.

Well, you can import Chrome passwords into Firefox pretty easily, and set up Firefox Sync, and then you've got all your (Chrome) desktop logins on mobile. Not ideal, but works.

> I don't want to switch to a product that's only going to be retired in a year

Sure, I definitely understand. I've personally worked on Persona, FxOS, Test Pilot, and Screenshots (and now Lockbox). IMO Mozilla has gotten steadily better at shipping new products, and once we get Lockbox integrated into desktop, it'll have really good chances of long-term survival.

Besides, any new startup might go away; at least with Mozilla products, you can be sure we aren't going to do anything sketchy with your data.

Finally, I'll point out that, if you try Lockbox, it'll give Mozilla's management good signals that they should keep investing in Lockbox :-)

> I don't understand why the default behavior isn't to isolate every website from every other website? Why is least privacy the default?

Default privacy settings are tough to manage.

Some people want privacy, and will accept broken websites if it keeps their data and online movement private.

Other people just want their usual websites to work, don't understand or care to think about privacy, and if some random content farm looks busted in Firefox, will just switch to another browser.

Aside from picking a sensible default, Firefox also offers to educate users where it makes sense. For example, when you open a new private browsing window in Firefox, the tracking protection section includes a "See how it works" button that takes you to a tour-style walkthrough of how tracking protection works.

I dunno, it seems like the learning process of putting together a series of unsuccessful promo packages might be the exact training you need to become "senior".

If the (good) work you did wasn't reflected in the metrics, then you need to figure out how to change the metrics, or change what you work on.

There's nothing inherently scummy or "political" about influencing the collective direction: identify problems, come up with good ideas for solutions and how to measure (partial) success, and talk it over with your team and manager around the time goals are being set. People are biased, distracted, and fallible, but generally recognize good ideas when they are communicated clearly.

If you're not good at documenting your successes, reflect on what is and isn't getting documented, and find ways to set yourself up for success the next time. Talk to people who've gotten the promotion you want, and figure out what you've missed.

Learning to independently identify problems, devise solutions, measure success, document success, and advocate for your ideas and yourself are essential skills for the human organizational / business part of writing code for a living. This is true whether you work on your own, at a startup, or at a bigco like Google.

Good luck! :-)

It sounds like you were away from coding for a really long time (10 years!), then you got back into it, picking an area you didn't know much about, expected it to be easy, maybe didn't put in the time outside of work...this approach wouldn't work for anyone, no matter their age.

Here's a manager-y question for you: how could you have done things differently when you went back to being an IC, to have had a better transition? Maybe doing more prep work before you left the manager track? Maybe going back to C++ instead, or an area that was closer to what you used to work on? Maybe doing open source work in that new java/python target area, to get experience, build a portfolio, and be sure you liked it, before you bet your livelihood and reputation on it?

Want to get some production experience with react? Tons of webdev projects are using it at Mozilla. Come on over and find yourself a good first bug :-)

I dunno about all that :-)

MITI is Mozilla trying to keep the internet credible as a source of news and information. This is in keeping with Mozilla's core principles. Give the blog post a careful read, as it might change your mind: https://blog.mozilla.org/blog/2017/08/08/mozilla-information...

Re: Cliqz, working with a search-oriented company might be a way that Mozilla can help avoid monopolies in search. The goal is to find new ways to keep the web open, so that new challengers have a level playing field vs. dominant companies.

Andreas wrote a good blog post about the worrying monopolistic trends in search a couple years ago: https://andreasgal.com/2015/03/30/data-is-at-the-heart-of-se...

Edited to add: Cliqz is a very privacy-conscious company, and I think that respect for the user was a major factor in Mozilla partnering with Cliqz. This is just to say that, AIUI, the partnership was evaluated, again, in keeping with Mozilla's principles.

Also, here's the Mozilla manifesto, which documents those guiding principles: https://www.mozilla.org/about/manifesto/

Yeah, this is a legit concern.

Screenshots is implemented as a WebExtension. Unfortunately, the WebExtensions framework in Firefox currently appends items to the bottom of the context menu--so you'll notice this with other WebExtensions, too.

There's a bug open to change this behavior: http://bugzil.la/1325758 . If you'd like to hack on some browser JS, I'd be happy to help get you connected with a bug mentor on the addons team :-)

The code's on github, so you could definitely just stand up your own copy: https://github.com/mozilla/send

Just FYI, this has already been done with emscripten a while ago, and it does work. See: http://pypyjs.org/

Hey Bill! Thanks a lot :-)

I know, the name thing, what can you do? I worked on Persona before this, so I guess I'm not surprised by the Mozilla enthusiasm for reusing project names.

Have you tried the Activity Stream add-on? Captures so much of what we wanted to do with Chronicle. It's amazing what that team was able to crank out in four months.

The Search add-on turned out really well, though I wound up having to rewrite it in XUL after the MVP feature set got trimmed. It took some pretty strange requestAnimationFrame hacks to get highlight stealing working, I blogged about it: http://6a68.net/2016/highlight-stealing-hack/

Let's round up the Chronicle alums and grab drinks in SF sometime!

See you in the comments section ^_^

Test Pilot isn't happening at the cost of stability and performance improvements. It's a complementary program that helps us ship better features through data-driven iteration.

I hear your concerns, though. The platform and desktop teams are doing tons of great work on improving stability and performance--you might want to give Firefox another try sometime. If you do, maybe try out some Test Pilot experiments while you're at it, and let us know what you think.

Yeah, the site is templated client-side using Ampersand (though lmorchard keeps threatening to rewrite it in React as a weekend project). Should work fine with tracking disabled, but won't work at all without JS.

A 'doorhanger' is this bit of UI: https://www.dropbox.com/s/8yivzcq2gw63pqq/Screen%20Shot%2020...

Thanks for editing your post :-)

I agree, it's tough to understand much about the project based on the testpilot.firefox.com landing page. That page is tightly focused around the 'sign up' call to action.

You can get more context from hanging around in IRC, or poking around in the wiki or bug trackers. You can even join our team meetings if you want; they're public. Pretty much everything is linked from our main wiki page: https://wiki.mozilla.org/Test_Pilot

Hey there!

Our wiki has a list of bug trackers: https://wiki.mozilla.org/Test_Pilot#Found_a_bug.3F

You can also talk with us in #testpilot on Mozilla IRC.

Are you talking about the doorhanger that appears when you try to install the add-on?

Firefox always shows a warning doorhanger if an add-on is installed from a website other than addons.mozilla.org.

What you're seeing is a Mozilla web property following the same rules as every other website. Nothing to worry about.

The Test Pilot website explains that you install the add-on after creating an account and signing in.

It's actually super easy, give it a try :-)

You need to have JavaScript enabled to use the site

I hear your frustration; people inside the company found some of those changes frustrating, too. Test Pilot is a step in a new direction that's more participatory and inclusive of the community, and injects a lot of data into the decision-making process.

As far as web standards go, Gecko's the only open-source browser controlled by a nonprofit. The alternative is a webkit monoculture, a world controlled by Apple and Google (oh, and Microsoft). Within Mozilla, the Firefox and Platform teams are super focused on improving standards compliance and squashing bugs. Things are getting better :-)

pull requests welcome: https://github.com/mozilla/testpilot

The bug I linked was just assigned last month: it's being worked right now.

There are definitely some 10 year old bugs, just like there are funny, off-topic, celebratory bugs (https://bugzil.la/1000000). Like callahad said, you can tweak your email settings, and the bugzilla email headers are super easy to filter on.

Hey, that's actually the wrong link for the search add-on.

What you've downloaded is a deprecated earlier prototype that may not work at all--you're looking at the wrong github repo. (I just took down the built add-on, so other people don't make the same mistake.)

Test Pilot is about reconnecting desktop Firefox with its community; it's about more than just whatever add-ons are available today. We have feedback forms now, we'll have Discourse user forums integrated soon, and I hope we can eventually start building ideas that come from the community, with the help of the community. You should give it a try :-)

You'll be happy to know that somebody recently started working on the date/time input types bug: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=888320

If you have a bugzilla account, you can CC yourself on the bug to catch future updates :-)

I think of it like this, roughly:

"Full-stack engineer" describes a person's technical knowledge: comfortable doing front-end or server work, maybe comfortable designing whole things from scratch.

"Product engineer" describes a person's motivations: primarily interested in writing code as a means to making a product, or improving a product.

Lots of engineers are primarily motivated by writing high quality code, or very performant code, or prefer to write tools (libraries/frameworks) over writing products using those tools.

> How else is one supposed to react to this other than with cynicism?

How about empowerment instead of cynicism?

Maybe it's possible to build browsers and advertising and mobile devices that don't relentlessly erode privacy. I work at Mozilla to help build that tech. I firmly believe the dystopian corporate future isn't the only option.

You should check us out: https://www.mozilla.org/mission

Exploding offers are a standard move in the VC startup playbook. You're probably going to get a standard "just an engineer" startup experience. Is this what you want?

Here, read this and think it over: https://al3x.net/2013/05/23/letter-to-a-young-programmer.htm...

I think it would have been cool to ping one of the MLB.com developers, not write a blog post and laugh at them publicly/without warning. Just sayin'.

Well, fuck you very much. This is unbelievable.

This is one of my fave posts ever on HN. Nicely done, Tim

One thing I want to add right off the bat: we're going to build new features, where "we" is some of the people who used to get paid to work on Persona + some people in the community.

We'd love help! There are some get involved links at the bottom of our MDN page: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/Persona