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potch

1,537 karma · joined September 24, 2010

HTML5 Engineer at Mozilla; JavaScript/CSS fiend

I work for Mozilla, and speak for myself.

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potch··on The Power of Web Components
Hello! Author here. I'm a fan of web components for widgets and embeddable third-party interfaces. I'm not as much a fan of them to wrap a site's primary content, for both accessibility and user styling reasons.
potch··on Deep-copying in JavaScript
JavaScript is pass-by-reference for all Objects and Arrays. Value types are pass-by-value.

    let obj = {a: 1}
    
    function foo(arg) {
      return obj === arg;
    }
    
    foo(obj) // true
The === operator operates on object not by comparing their value, but by comparing their memory reference [1]. A function argument variable can be reassigned using = in the function body, but that changes which location in memory the reference points to and isn't somehow "proof" of pass-by-value.

[1] https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/JavaScript/Refe...

potch··on Firefox 58
I came to it from the web development world, and after getting into speaking transferred internally onto our DevRel team. We're a small team- we encourage any Mozilla employee to speak about their own work if they want, so there's only a few of us for whom it's a full-time job.

Since we're a small team, it's pretty uncommon for a specifically devrel role to open up, but the sibling reply from my teammate callahad is spot-on for how to get involved with Mozilla and Firefox!

potch··on Firefox 58
I wrote up a more detailed look at some of what's in Firefox 58: https://hacks.mozilla.org/2018/01/firefox-58-the-quantum-era...
potch··on How the Scripto App Became a Fixture of Late-Night Comedy News
I was wondering if it was based on etherpad- super cool!
potch··on Evolution of <img>: Gif without the GIF
I've floated the idea of allowing various video formats in <source> for the <picture> element. Would allow for the right codec to be selected, and would easily allow for a <img src="foo.gif"> as the final fallback. Might be worth pushing on more.
potch··on Blocking Top-Level Navigations to Data URLs for Firefox 58
I can confirm <a download> links with data: URIs will work after this change.

I built a test to demonstrate: https://data-uri-test.glitch.me/

potch··on Blocking Top-Level Navigations to Data URLs for Firefox 58
Hello! I work at Mozilla and am figuring out those exact particulars right now. Will update here when I figure out the final decision re: <a download>
potch··on Firefox Send: Private, Encrypted File Sharing
Perhaps peruse this: https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/mission/

Firefox is Mozilla's flagship, and the largest by far way in which we achieve our mission, but our goal is a healthy and open internet.

Additionally, this is a great way to determine whether something like this would work well as an in-browser feature, and we've built it in such a way that it works in more browsers than just Firefox on day one.

potch··on Zilla Slab: A common language through a shared font
We didn't throw away Fira Sans, which is the typeface of Firefox. However, we wanted to update the Mozilla brand apart from the Firefox brand, and so Zilla Slab was commissioned.
potch··on Firefox tracks users with Google Analytics in the add-on settings
Quick breakdown of what's going on here (I work at Mozilla, and have worked on the Add-ons site in the past):

The "Get Add-ons" view in Firefox is an iframe to a page hosted by addons.mozilla.org. AMO, as all Mozilla sites, use GA to collect aggregate visitor statistics. We negotiated a special contract with Google [1] to only collect a subset of data and that that data is only used for statistical purposes.

Google Analytics is only loaded when this view is loaded, and is not otherwise "inside" Firefox. I filed an issue [2] to make sure that our privacy policy is linked from the Get Add-ons view so users can be better informed.

Mozilla tries to walk a very thin wire to ensure that we have the data we need to make sure our products are working properly without being intrusive, and to let concerned users opt-out of even that baseline data collection.

[1] https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=697436#c14 [2] https://github.com/mozilla/addons-frontend/issues/2789

potch··on Firefox tracks users with Google Analytics in the add-on settings
Given that the discussion in the issue is "hey let's use DNT/tracking protection as a signal to not load this", assume we're looking at a reasonable mitigation here and that this was at worst an oversight.
potch··on Powerful New Additions to the CSS Grid Inspector in Firefox Nightly
IE 10 and 11 support an earlier revision of CSS Grid via -ms-grid (old enough to still have prefixes!). You may be able to polyfill the basic support that way.
potch··on Powerful New Additions to the CSS Grid Inspector in Firefox Nightly
You can search using the Style Editor: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Tools/Style_Editor

Press Ctrl/Cmd+F to search.

It's not presently possible to search across all files at once, but the Style Editor is one of the tools is due for an update to match the current Debugger tool which has a better interface!

potch··on Powerful New Additions to the CSS Grid Inspector in Firefox Nightly
I work at Mozilla, but I'm excited about this because I'm a web developer!

If you've ever tried to use flexbox to align content across multiple rows (like laying out a form with labels), you'd know that it's not a true two-dimensional layout tool. CSS Grid is, and will likely supplant flexbox as a flexbox is merely a one row/column grid.

The inspector is a pretty handy way to see what's going on under the hood, and being able to see the line numbers and named areas is great for visual debugging.

potch··on Containers Come to Firefox Test Pilot
Not the PM you're looking for, but: that feedback has definitely already been recorded.
potch··on How to build the next Trello and sell it for $425M or more
What if we all did this and got hundreds of millions of dollars! Think of the inflation! ;)
potch··on Firefox Gets Better Video Gaming and Warns of Non-Secure Websites
Have a public URL? Would love to add it to a test suite to help find pathological performance cases.
potch··on Regressive Web Apps
"Progressive Web Apps" is a Google brand. It's made of some good best practices and great technologies, but they reserve the right to re-define it and change the rewards around it however they choose. Install buttons are the carrot, and search rankings are the stick. Will non PWA-compliant but otherwise fast, well-made mobile web sites rank as highly as PWAs?
potch··on TiltBrush by Google
I got a chance to try tiltbrush recently. I drew a little cottage around myself, complete with a table and couch. While I was painting the ceiling, I subconsciously stepped around my couch to avoid tripping on it. That's when VR clicked for me :)
potch··on Investigate switching away from GitHub
In my experience, hosting code/issues off of GitHub reduces triage time maintenance burden by reducing the number of contributors.
potch··on Mozilla to stop Sponsored Tiles in Firefox
see literally the comment below this.
potch··on Mozilla to stop Sponsored Tiles in Firefox
Where the jargon "value to the user" means being things the user was interested in clicking.
potch··on Mozilla to stop Sponsored Tiles in Firefox
We put ads that didn't require an extensive tracking network in the new tab page of Firefox. We were able to make some money on them and show how to do ads respectfully. Even so, it was decided to remove them from Firefox as they didn't provide enough value to the user.
potch··on Firefox for iOS now available
This is true only until that incognito session is closed. Future sessions will have no knowledge of that tab.
potch··on Network Effect
Works great in Firefox so long as you lie about what browser you're using. Cool project, wish it wasn't a jerk about user agent sniffing.
potch··on Firefox 41 can screenshot a single DOM element
I think this has to do with some DPI issues- I filed https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1209773 about general lack of smarts about DPI for this feature, hope that fixes it.
potch··on Firefox 41 can screenshot a single DOM element
(I work for Mozilla) It captures the page cropped to the bounding box of the element, so any background content would also be captured. The results would not contain transparency.
potch··on What the IBM Acquisition of StrongLoop Means for the Node.js Community
I imagine it doesn't mean much beyond some more b2b uses of Node. Node has its own independent governance and nothing about this acquisition changes that.
potch··on Show HN: Differential Equations Explained
Hovering on the graphs in Firefox, nothing happens and the console logs NaN problems.
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