Working on the Servo project

I began to work on the Servo project. Actually, my first open source project was Mozilla and also I was involved in the Korea Mozilla community. During the time, I contributed to Fennec browser by fixing bugs and localization. Anyway, this blog article motivated me work on Mozilla again.

I landed a simple patch and am working on adding the ellipse API to Canvas API. I see many missing features so it looks like the blue ocean for me compared to the Chromium project.

Debugging Fennec front-end

Fennec is a XUL application, like Firefox based on Mozilla Platform. Therefore, it can be debugged and modified with the Firefox debugging tools you are familiar with.

XUL applications consist of several XUL, JavaScript, and CSS files, which are archived in a Jar file. In the case of Fennec, it has two jar files in fennec/chrome/. en-US.jar which has localization information, chrome.jar which has Fennec front-end code.

To modify them,

1) Extract the chrome.jar in the current path
2) Modify the chrome.manifest as follows

override chrome://global/skin/about.css chrome://browser/skin/about.css
skin browser classic/1.0 content/..
content branding content/branding/
content firstrun content/ contentaccessible=yes
content browser content/

In order to display variable values or simple JavaScript debug message information in the system console, you can use the dump function. Before using this command, it needs to enable browser dump preferences by typing about:config in the URL bar.

browser.dom.window.dump.enabled=true

This is an example of using dump() in the startup() funciton in browser.js

 startup: function() {
    var self = this;

    dump("begin startup\n");

    let container = document.getElementById("tile-container");
   ...

The dump function works well on Linux system, but it doesn't work in Visual Studio in Windows system in order to debug Fennec for Windows Mobile.
It works well in Visual Studio, so I could see debug messages in the output box of Visual Studio using the latest build of Fennec.


References

• http://www.getbooksmarts.org/news/2007/03/17/debug-output-logging-in-firefox/
  
• https://developer.mozilla.org/en/Debugging_JavaScript
  

Fennec is running on SAMSUNG i780

I was told a very good news from Blassey blog.

Doug Turner solved the test blocker of Fennec for Windows Mobile.

I was delight to hear the new because I had tried several times to run Fennec on my SAMSUNG i780 (called Mirage in Korea). I had failed to run Fennec.

Tooday, I tried to build Fennec for Windows Mobile from the trunk of Mozilla.

It is working well, but very slow on i780.

I found several problems as follows,

- Multiple instances

- Long start-up time

- IME button not disappeared

- Broken Hangul(Korean)

I will file up these problems on the Bugzilla and try to fix them.

Firefox Seoul Party for celebrating the release of Firefox3

Mitchell Baker, chair of the Mozilla foundation and Gen Kanai, Asia marketing manager, visited Korea to attend the OECD ministerial meeting during June 17th ~ 18th and give talks in the Future of Global Web Technology conference on June 19th.

Coincidentally, Mozilla had officially released Firefox3 in this period of time, so the Mozilla Korea Community hosted a Firefox Seoul party to celebrate the release of Firefox3. They also attended the party, so it made the event more exciting for the community.

Before the party, I had the opportunity to have dinner with Mitchell Baker and Gen Kanai. I heard about the story of how Mitchell started her career in IT and was involved in the Mozilla project. It was an awesome story. I think she is part of the history of the Web.

I was also pleased to meet Gen, although we had not met each other,  because I had seen his talk in the Lift conference and read his blog. So I felt like I was meeting people I was already acquainted with. In addition, he has already written about the Mozilla Korea Community activities and the unique situation of using ActiveX controls in Korea in  his blog. So I'd like to thank him for his efforts.

There were some events during the party. Firstly, we enjoyed an interesting video of introducing the new features of Firefox3 and some photos of the Mozilla Korea Community activities.

Secondly, we had a Q&A time with Michell Baker. She kindly gave us answers about many questions regarding Mozilla/Firefox despite the late time and busy schedule. It left me wondering where she got her power & passion.

As the chair of the Mozilla foundation, she has striven to make the people all over the world access the Web equally without any restrictions. So I think that those efforts make her more powerful and active.

Thanks, Mozilla for keeping the Web for everyone; I will also help Mozilla spread Firefox.

Photo by Gen Kanai

Latest looks of Fennec (Mobile Firefox)

The plan of Mobile Firefox was announced in October last year and the Mozilla community is now very busy to develop Mobile Firefox.

Fennec is the code name of Mobile Firefox, which is a desert fox. You may have seen a fennec in TV animation. The size of fennec is smaller than normal fox and it has big ears. So I think the name of Fennec seems to be suited well for Mobile Firefox.

The Mozilla Community opened the source code of Fennec and a guide of how to build it. It is a little bit intricate to build it because it is not merged into the Mozilla trunk.

After build and run, you can see the following appearance.






The basic features of browser were already implemented such as the navigation bar and bookmark menu. But, panning is a little bit slow and zooming is not working in the latest code.

Fennec can be built in Maemo Scratchbox and run on XULRunner so I'll post a way of how to build and run in N810 later. It would be helpful if you give any feedbacks to the Mozilla community after testing Fennec.

References

• Mozilla and Mobile
• Creating Nightly or “on change” ARM builds for Fennec
• Mozilla's Fennec May Be Just What Mobile Browsing Needs

Open Source in Asia

I'd like to introduce a presentation about open source in Asia.

The speaker is Gen Kanai who is working for Mozilla Corporation.
He talked about Mozilla community & open source activities in Asia such as:

• Situation of Mozilla Community in Korea, China, Japan, and Taiwan
• Three barriers to participate in Open Source Projects such as culture, language and education
• Examples of Open Source Project in ASIA (Ruby, Red flag linux, and Dzongkha Debain Linux)

The leader of Korea Mozilla Community, Channy Yun commented the situation of Open Source Activities in Korea.

You can understand the situation of Open source in Korea from this article.

Thanks

libpng patch for Mobile Firefox

There are submitted patches for Mobile Firefox on the Mozilla wiki.
http://wiki.mozilla.org/Mobile/Patches

My colleague tried to apply the png patch to Mozilla and get a good result related to performance improvement.

As you know, we can build the libpng fixed point routines like the above patch.
(Use #define PNG_NO_FLOATING_POINT_SUPPORTED in mozilla/modules/libimg/png/mozpngconf.h )

In this case, he can get 8.6% performance improvement.
It's great. I think this patch is valuable to use on Mobile Firefox.

However, there is the following problem in this patch.
Mozilla handles some floating point values to get image information from the libpng so the patch commented those parts in the info_callback() function. (mozilla/modules/libpr0n/decoders/png/nsPNGDecoder.cpp)
The problem is that color management feature should get color profile information from the libpng. The following code shows the example:

void
info_callback(png_structp png_ptr, png_infop info_ptr)
{
...

if (gfxPlatform::IsCMSEnabled()) {
decoder->mInProfile = PNGGetColorProfile(png_ptr, info_ptr,
color_type, &inType, &intent);
}
...
}

We can check the value of gfx.color_management.enabled through the gfxPlatform::IsCMSEnable() method.

If the gfx.color_management.enabled is true, you can use the color profiles embedded in images to adjust the colors to match your computer's display. In this case, Mozilla should call the PNGGetColorProfile() method. But this method handles floating point values.

Fortunately, Mozilla sets the value of gfx.color_management.enabled to false as default. The PNGGetColorProfile() method is not called. Nevertheless, the patch commented this part because a user may try to set the value to true.
Anyway, the color management feature is not used basically now.


If Mobile Firefox should use the color management feature, the png patch needs more tweaks.

How do you think about that?

Korea Mozilla Community Party

I attended the Korea Mozilla Community Annual Party 2007 last week which was hosted by Channy.
Channy is the leader of KoMoCo, a contributor for localization of Firefox. Actually, his company, Daum has supported many open source communities including KoMoCo. So, I always thank for Daum and his efforts.

For more details, I'd like to share some blog articles regarding the party.

• KoMoCo Anual Pary Photos in Flickr
  
• Mozllia Japan Gen Kanai's introduction about KoMoKo anual party
• John’s Blog
  

Introduction to Mozilla based web browsers

We are using Firefox browser that has been developed by Mozilla. As you may know, Firefox is based on the Mozilla application framework that provides a good way of supporting cross-platform for running applications.

However, supporting cross-platform has some weak points. The first weak point is performance, the second is that it can not utilize the native user interface.

Some web browsers are based on the Mozilla application framework with a native user interface. So they are tightly integrated into the specific platform such as Windows, Mac, and Gnome Desktop to provide their own look and feel. But they are still based on the technology of the Mozilla application framework such as the component model and the 2D layout engine.

These are good examples:

• Camino is a web browser for Mac OSX based on Mozilla’s Gecko layout engine using Cocoa framework.
• Galeon is a web browser for GNOME based on Mozilla's Gecko layout engine.
• K-Meleon uses native Windows API to create the user interface (instead of using Mozilla's cross-platform XUL layer), and as a result, is tightly integrated into the look and feel of the Windows desktop.

There is another kind of Mozilla based web browser. That is Flock.

• Flock is a special web browser that offers some famous web service such as flickr viewer, blog uploader, and RSS Reader.

You can choose any web browser depends on your taste.