Mozilla Labs

I agree definitly alot faster, but it's a shame almost no plugins work except for extensions/addons/plugins found at http://mozillalabs.com/ But just give it a little time, firefox 4 is definitly worth the wait.

I was one of the first fellows of their WebFWD program back in 2013 [1]. I'm sure a lot has changed in the last decade but it was refreshing to find partners who were not venture capitalists for our for-profit open source company. Sadly, the other partner wound down last year. The Shuttleworth Foundation - funded by Mark - was super critical for us. they provided almost $1m in funding. Both provided contacts for legal, marketing, etc. I wish we had more of these initiatives which weren't so focused on profit. [1] https://www.mozillalabs.com/webfwd/

Has there been a public review of the last incarnation of Mozilla's funding of non-Mozilla projects, Mozilla Labs and Mozilla WebFWD? I feel like an honest and open discussion around what went well and did not go well with the last time this was done from Mozilla should be a prerequisite to doing this again or the same mistakes could be made. https://www.mozillalabs.com/ https://www.mozillalabs.com/webfwd/

Did they? Seems like something they should mention on https://mozillalabs.com No-one to turn out the lights?

Mozilla Rainbow is not a crossbrowser solution, only work in firefox but worth a try http://mozillalabs.com/rainbow/

It's still being worked on by the community, there is a build from 2011-01-27. https://mozillalabs.com/ubiquity/2010/03/10/community-maintained-versi… I still use and love this tool every day.

Doing raytracing in javascript is a bad idea. Period. There are many ways to do 3d on the web with greater flexibility and WAY more performance. WebGL is one, CUDA support in javascript is another: http://mozillalabs.com/jetpack/2010/01/25/elevating-javascript-perform… There is no reason to do that type of computation in the interpretation layer of javascript. (This is akin to saying you would prefer a pure python implementation of disk io, as opposed to the built in method which is implemented in C.)

I never said that this application shouldn't exist; I just don't see the point in making it a web application And that's exactly what I was responding to. A web application is somebody else's problem, from start to finish. In this case, everything but the writing. Any other solution has its own constraints and so on that become your problem, which quite often isn't worth the expenditure of attention. What I'm really saying is that this application seems like the perfect candidate for http://mozillalabs.com/prism/ http://fluidapp.com/ + 30 seconds.

Implementing good text controls in Canvas is a fool's errand. The spec itself warns against it: http://www.whatwg.org/specs/web-apps/current-work/multipage/the-canvas… They wanted to be ambitious and to their credit they got very far. They gave a few talks on the hurdles they had to overcome. Measuring the height of text, making their own custom scrollbars, resizing woes, etc. They did a good job with a lot of it. They admitted it was fun but too hard to get everything right. They ran into most of the problems in the spec: "Unlike Skywriter, Ace uses the DOM to render instead of the <canvas> element making it compatible with a wider range of browsers and potentially giving it a leg up in accessibility." http://mozillalabs.com/skywriter/2011/01/18/mozilla-skywriter-has-been… The code for Skywriter was actually really good. I used a lot of it to make my in-canvas scrollbars before moving on to my own code.

You hit the nail on the head. The library is meant for applications that can not use CSS layout, because the algorithm they need is not possible in CSS, or because they are rendering to a context that does not have layout management such as Canvas or SVG. Think of projects like Mozilla Bespin (https://mozillalabs.com/bespin/) which uses Canvas for drawing its editor. Having standard layout algorithms available would be a great help there. I was quite hesitant about making the jQuery plugin public because I was fearing reactions such as this. It was meant as a demo, and a nice way to test the layout managers. For a long time I had a message on the jQuery plugin page stating something along the lines of "please, please, consider using CSS before you use this plugin." The nice thing about programming against a layout manager API is that you can easily write new algorithms while the (DOM) interface remains the same. It would be trivial to write a layout manager that does layout like Masonry. As another example, I'm currently working on a pack layout which can be used to pack small images into a larger one (e.g. CSS sprites,) and a layout manager that implements the CSS box layout module. I was also considering a text layout based on my TeX line breaking work (http://www.bramstein.com/projects/typeset/.)

Why? Because of all the reasons most people switched away from Firefox to Chrome to begin with... Firefox is slow, klunky and the UI is deplorable. Mozilla and also hates native platforms and therefore Firefox doesn't respect my OS. For instance - since the beginning of time, every Windows program let me close the window by double-clicking in the upper left corner. People have been asking Mozilla to change this for years and got ignored. Meanwhile, the Chrome team changed it immediately upon request when one of their builds lost the ability. IMO, Mozilla is a second-rate has-been that turns out nothing but useless crap like Rust and Servo that nobody needs or uses since there are much higher quality alternatives already in existence - http://www.mozillalabs.com/en-US/projects/

Yep, it's inactive. New URL is http://www.mozillalabs.com/en-US/demo-party/

Why do I get a certificate warning on https://www.mozillalabs.com/en-US/projects/ which indicates its webserver is showing a certificate from www.github.com?

Servo is one of a hundred initiatives that they have. They have been developing the Rust Language itself, and all the tooling around it. They are trying to kill PDF plugins with PDF.js. They are trying to kill closed source video codecs with Dalaa. They have been trying to improve online collaboration, multimedia, 3D, and a zillion other things. They also help with web standards, documentation, legal battles, and advocacy. http://www.mozillalabs.com/en-US/projects/

It looks like that's a Mozilla Labs project, not a Mozilla Research project. https://mozillalabs.com/en-US/pdfjs/

For an example of a pulled Mozilla project, see Skywriter/Bespin: https://mozillalabs.com/en-US/skywriter/

This feels quite similar to https://mozillalabs.com/en-US/chromeless/ To bad Mozilla abandoned that project years ago!

Mozilla Raindrop, now inactive used to do that. https://mozillalabs.com/en-US/raindrop/

Other companies with projects named PRISM: Palantir https://docs.palantir.com/metropolisdev/prism-overview.html Mozilla (inactive) https://mozillalabs.com/en-US/prism/ CriticalBlue http://www.criticalblue.com/prism-technology.html Goodwill http://www.goodwilltalentbridge.com/tb/projectPrism.aspx Universities with projects named PRISM: Texas Tech http://www.texastech.edu/it/prism.aspx Georgia Tech http://pag.gatech.edu/prism Princeton http://www.princeton.edu/prism/industry/industrial_affiliate/ While many of these projects have nothing to do with technology, they illustrate a point: PRISM was a great name for a project. The fact that Facebook has a "Project Prism" too is just coincidence.

I'll have you know mozilla was very involved with Prism some time ago. https://mozillalabs.com/en-US/prism/

It felt a bit like Prism (https://mozillalabs.com/en-US/prism). Unlike them, who are just slapping a browser inside a chromeless window, you are actually building it from the ground up?

This is an article from 2010 and the project is considered no longer active: https://mozillalabs.com/en-US/chromeless/

T think this is the Mozilla demo for intents: https://mozillalabs.com/blog/2011/07/web-apps-update-experiments-in-we…

I'm looking forward to seeing what their equivalent of "intents" is. Google and Mozilla are already collaborating on Web Intents[1], and Mozilla already has a proof of concept[2]. [1]: http://www.webintents.org/ [2]: https://mozillalabs.com/blog/2011/07/web-apps-update-experiments-in-we…

It seems like the ideal scenario is: 1) Your data is stored, encrypted by you, in the cloud 2) In a standards-based service which you pay for 3) And federated to other services by you Mozilla Weave was an instance of a narrow application of this: http://mozillalabs.com/blog/2007/12/introducing-weave/ There is still the issue that once you grant access to a third party you can't revoke it, but that's unsolvable through technical means in somewhat the same way DRM is unsolvable.

Link to the actual project announcement: http://mozillalabs.com/blog/2012/01/pancake-a-new-project-from-mozilla…

Mozilla also has a Firefox addon called Zaphod which will allow you to force scripts in web-pages to be executed with your (customized) Narcissus interpreter, instead of executing scripts with SpiderMonkey directly: https://mozillalabs.com/zaphod/

Mozilla labs played around with that in Ubiquity, a natural language command line interface for firefox. https://mozillalabs.com/ubiquity

Maybe you could implement it using Mozilla's Chromeless: http://mozillalabs.com/chromeless/

And of course this would finally make the omgawesome Mozilla Seabird concept phone a bit more realistic :) http://mozillalabs.com/conceptseries/2010/09/23/seabird/