Mozilla Labs

Mozilla Labs

50p

93 comments posted · 0 followers · following 0

13 years ago @ Messaging Add-ons - F1: sharing links even... · 0 replies · +1 points

We are looking into support for Google Reader. Thanks for the suggestion!

13 years ago @ Messaging Add-ons - Announcing Thunderbird... · 0 replies · +1 points

You can read the GitHub commit logs, it's realtime, and usually includes a pretty clear summary of what's happening https://github.com/protz/GMail-Conversation-View/commits/master . I'm merely providing the Changelog_master file as a way for people to get a rough idea of what's happened.

13 years ago @ Gaming - Defy Gravity: Game On ... · 0 replies · +2 points

Hi Toji,

Yeah - WebSockets is problematic. Please note that not only Firefox but also Opera (and most likely all major WebKit browsers such as Chrome) disabled or will disable WebSockets until a security flaw in the underlying protocol is fixed (for more information see http://www.webmonkey.com/2010/12/security-flaws-force-firefox-opera-to-turn-off-websockets/ and the Wikipedia entry on Websockets: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WebSockets).

Trust us - it's far from awesome and everyone at Mozilla is working very hard with the involved 3rd parties to revise the WebSockets stack to be secure and thus usable. As it stands at the moment, I would not expect WebSockets support in major browsers for the next round of releases.

If your game heavily depends on WebSockets, please note this in your submission - we'll find a way to make this work.

(By the way - we have a email address for the Game On contest: gameon@mozilla.com - you can find it on the Game On Contest website)

Warm regards
Pascal (Mozilla Labs)

13 years ago @ Gaming - Defy Gravity: Game On ... · 0 replies · +1 points

It's the 11th - sorry for the typo!

13 years ago @ Messaging Add-ons - Announcing Thunderbird... · 0 replies · +1 points

Well I'm afraid I'm no lightning user, so as this is not actively bothering me, I probably won't look into it for a while. I was rather expecting some help from the Lightning people, or maybe from some motivated contributor who might want to work on the Conversations/ Lightning bridge as I did for Enigmail.

You also have to keep in mind that there still is the More > "View using the classic reader" menu item, that should allow you to fallback to the standard UI.

[protz]

13 years ago @ Messaging Add-ons - Experimental addon off... · 0 replies · +1 points

As we get more providers people will have the choice between a system like this and others. The situation is actually very similar to most systems unless you own your own domain. Free providers can shut down and go away or start charging you. An ISP can hike its rates. I would really love to get a domain provider who offered this API so we could actually provide people with some greater choice and control. We are offering Hover because they were the first ones to step up and help us craft an API, they really deserve some credit for changing the landscape even if you don't want their service. But I understand that in the prototype it looks like we're only interested in them.

13 years ago @ Messaging Add-ons - Experimental addon off... · 0 replies · +2 points

Agreed. This prototype only has a single provider who has an API for creating accounts. We are at the same situation like when we started ISPDB. It wasn't a good service at all until most of the providers information was included and now it has an excellent hit rate to get people setup.

The next steps are to get a couple more providers, hopefully a free one, but see my comments above about the issues with free providers. Once we get a couple more providers we'll likely have to change the interface to represent the greater number of choices available.

So far I'm thinking the choices should look like this:

Do you have an email? Yes / No

If Yes -> Auto Config
If No -> What kind of address do you want?

And from here I think we'll continue to ask for your name or some search terms for the username / domain name you're interested in. However our result list would likely be grouped by providers

Gmail (20+ available) - Free
joeuser39829@gmail.com
Yahoo (20+ available) - Free
joeuser83292@yahoo.com
Hover (10 available) - $20 / year
joeuser@joe.com

Each provider giving a rough number of possible results with the likely total cost and a preview of the top result. When you choose a provider we expand those results to browse and you could go back up to the top list or do a new search at anytime.

Anyway, that's the likely direction we'll go in assuming we can bring in more providers. Again I'd really love to hear ideas about how free providers could be integrated with Thunderbird. It's important to think of the free providers concerns for giving away email and having no contact (page views) with the user at all, while at the same time providing a more valuable experience to Thunderbird users. Kind of a hard problem...

13 years ago @ Messaging Add-ons - Experimental addon off... · 1 reply · -1 points

That kind of list of options is the eventual goal of this system. Right now we only have one provider who was excellent to work with and willing to create an API for email account creation. This prototype hopefully opens up the doorway for other providers to create a similar API which should create a different set of prices and domains available. The interface will likely have to change to allow for showing who the providers are once we have more than one.

And some users aren't going to want to pay for an email address and we are working with free email address providers to get an API to create an email address through them. However free email isn't actually "free". The free providers rely on page views (ads) to pay for their free service and so it's harder for them to create an API that avoids their pages. Obviously this is possible with some services like gmail but their IMAP support was really added to allow for iPhone users to access their gmail accounts and they still expect people to use their web based interface.

I'm looking for ideas on how we could create a mutually beneficial relationship with these free providers. Any ideas people have on that would be really helpful. Things like changing the start page to be the email providers page might work. But there must be other ways that people would get a benefit from having better integration. And just to note, we are Mozilla, so obviously anything we do here isn't in the direction of locking Thunderbird users into a single provider; our mission is to encourage choice. Things like changing the start page to my yahoo page would still be an option for the user but might be a default we provide.

13 years ago @ Messaging Add-ons - F1: sharing links even... · 0 replies · +1 points

Yes, if domains use a specific sharing url F1 respects that difference. The mzl.la domain actually comes from bit.ly through a partnership. However if you share a flickr url you'll see we use the flic.kr domain they provide instead of bit.ly.

The latest release of the F1 add-on provides the F1 key as a shortcut to open the share tool.

13 years ago @ Messaging Add-ons - Announcing Thunderbird... · 0 replies · +1 points

Yes, that's the point. Opening a message in a new tab will fire the old message reader, so that you can perform the actions that are not implemented yet in the conversation view. I'm thinkint about adding a contact to the local address book, creating filter, and such. This is exactly what the More > "View using the classic reader" command does, btw: it opens the message in a new tab.

[protz]