From John, emphasis mine:

The reason we have a vibrant, open web today is because of millions of little decisions and contributions made by thousands of people in that timeframe — people who work on browsers, people who build web sites & applications, people who evangelize for standards, people who use the web and ask/demand that it be better.

From CNET:

Other questions from the audience ranged from what computer science professors should be teaching to whether Internet Explorer would support HTML 5. Ozzie said he had nothing to announce on the latter front, but added, “It is our commitment to be a world class Web browser, what our competitors like to call a modern web browser. I think you can expect us to do the right thing.”

Very much looking forward to it.

Until recently, removing this add-on from Firefox required that users manually edit the registry, but I’m pleased to report that Microsoft has made available a downloadable patch, and has now added it to the knowledge base article on the topic. Once this patch is applied, the add-on can be uninstalled per-user. (On Windows 7 Release Candidate, the add-on is already the fixed version, at least in my own testing.)

The add-on that was delivered through Windows Update is not compatible with Firefox 3.5, so we’re still trying to figure out how to make sure that 250M-or-so users aren’t confused or — worse — scared off of the upgrade when they are informed that this add-on will be disabled. I’ll report back when we know how that’s going to work, hopefully before Firefox 3.5 is released!

[Edit: removed reference to "disabling".]

Our commitment to the success of open video on the web requires that we select codecs for Firefox that are usable by everyone, without restriction or licensing fee. To that end, we’ve chosen Theora as the format for Firefox 3.1.

We believe that Theora is the best path available today for truly open, truly free video on the internet. We also believe that it can be improved in video quality, in performance, and in quality of implementation, and Mozilla is proud to be supporting the development of Theora software with a $100,000 (USD) grant. Administered by the Wikimedia Foundation, this grant will be used to support development of improved Theora encoders and more powerful playback libraries. These improvements will benefit future versions of Firefox, and anyone else who supports open video on the web.

[Update: Chris Blizzard, being the awesome evangelist I always hoped I'd be, has a great post with a much deeper discussion of why this all matters.]

The Rules

• Link to your original tagger(s) and list these rules in your post. (see above)
• Share seven facts about yourself in the post. (see below)
• Tag seven people at the end of your post by leaving their names and the links to their blogs. (see below)
• Let them know they’ve been tagged. (you’ll just have to trust me)

The Seven Things

1. I, too, figure skated when I was younger, to mild success. I don’t believe there are pictures of it on the web, which is OK.
2. I once wrote a multi-user email system on top of DOS batch files, without the use of a text editor (copy con: represent).
3. In high school, I was an avid member of the school’s technical theatre (and assembly, and school dance, and gaffer-ball varsity) club — avid to the point that I only narrowly managed to actually graduate from high school.
4. I married my high-school sweetheart.
5. I do not like to eat coconut- or banana-flavoured things, with a few exceptions like coconut milk in curries because what sort of animal do you think I am anyway? For the past 18 months or so, though, I have been trying to train myself to tolerate, if not enjoy, suchly-flavoured things so that I don’t unwittingly pass my aversion on to Claire. (See also: snakes, though not in a culinary sense.)
6. I didn’t get my driver’s license until I was 29.
7. I have lived at 21 addresses in 10 cities.

7 people, all of whom I believe share my disdain for such things to some degree

• Vlad, for taking care of me in Serbia.
• Mom, for taking care of me.
• Phil, for never disguising his contempt for the stupid.
• Hoye, ibid.
• Dave, for teaching me to teach.
• Kev, for being the photographer, bbqer and responsible adult I’d like to be some day.
• George, for being George.

(I’m about 6 months behind on posting pictures; I’ll try to be quicker about the ones from her birthday drop-in this Saturday, ahem.)

Since we landed TraceMonkey 10 (ahem) days ago, we’ve been working mostly on stability and bug fixes, as is usual for the early-but-promising stage of new tech. Jesse’s fuzzers have been as deliciously useful as always, and we’ve been able to make some small performance improvements along the way. Things are looking pretty good.

Pretty soon we’ll be able to dive back in and work on more optimizations, and perhaps even write a paper or two. (We’ve learned a lot in the past couple of months, and it would be great to share those lessons with others who might be looking to make dynamic languages fast.) I have lots to keep me busy, but I’m hoping I’ll be able to sneak off and dabble here and there. Don’t tell my boss.

We’re not done. In addition to continuing to work on our existing JavaScript interpreter (some 20% improved over Firefox 3 already), we’re also looking farther into the future of JS performance, and have some early news to share. Permit me, if you will, to set the stage:

These are the early results from a project we’ve been calling TraceMonkey, which adds native code compilation to Mozilla’s JavaScript engine (”SpiderMonkey”). Based on a technique developed at UC Irvine called “trace trees“, and building on code and ideas shared with the Tamarin Tracing project, a few of us have spent the last 2 months (and most of the last few nights) teaching SpiderMonkey some exciting new tricks.

The goal of the TraceMonkey project — which is still in its early stages — is to take JavaScript performance to another level, where instead of competing against other interpreters, we start to compete against native code. Even with this very, very early version we’re already seeing some promising results: a simple “for loop” is getting close to unoptimized gcc:

Yesterday we landed TraceMonkey in the Firefox 3.1 development tree, configured off by default. We have bugs to fix, and an enormous number of optimizations still to choose from, but we’re charging full speed ahead on the work we need to do for this to be a part of Firefox 3.1. Depending on the benchmarks you choose, you might see massive speed-up, minor speed-up, or maybe even some slowdown — those latter cases are definitely bugs, and reporting them through bugzilla will be a big help.

Here are the current speedups of some common and uncommon benchmarks, as compared to Firefox 3: Apple’s SunSpider, the SunSpider “ubench” tests added for squirrelfish; an image manipulation demo; and a test of the Sylvester 3D JavaScript library doing matrix multiplication.

There are many wins left in each one of those benchmarks, and we’ll be working on those through Firefox 3.1 and beyond: better code generation, more efficient guards, improvements to some data structures, parallel compilation, use of specific processor features, new optimization passes, tracing more code patterns, and many more. Right now we write all values back to memory at the end of every loop, for example, so there are some easy wins available in avoiding that — perhaps 2-3x on tight loop performance.

There’s lots more to write about why we chose tracing as the path to future performance, what to expect in terms of future work, how these sorts of performance gains can translate into new web experiences and capabilities, and what we’ve learned along the way. (One example out of left field: the static analysis tools are written in JavaScript, and apparently they are immensely faster due to even the current JIT work.) Look for posts about that from myself and other TraceMonkey hackers soon.

If you’re the sort of person who reads computer science papers, you may find the Hotpath paper to be of interest: it’s a great paper, and a great introduction to the art and science of tracing.

Thanks are especially due to Brendan, Andreas and David for making it fun to be the dumbest guy on the team; Andreas’ colleagues at UCI (Michael Franz, Mason Chang, Michael Bebenita, Gregor Wagner) for their advice and help; Ed Smith and the Adobe Tamarin team for their tech and wisdom; Rob Sayre, Vlad Vukicevic, Blake Kaplan, Boris Zbarsky and Bob Clary for testing and timely guidance; and the Mozilla developer community for letting us hold the tree closed for more than a day to get it landed.

This is obviously a very exciting opportunity for me as well, even though the circumstances make it bittersweet right now. I’m really looking forward to helping our amazing cadre of engineers and engineering managers continue to produce amazing products, and any engineering lead in the world would give an entire collection of limbs for the team we’ve assembled here at Mozilla. Schrep and I are already working on what we expect will be a smooth transition, and this week’s Summit will be a great chance to get everyone synched up.

It’s a cliché that it’s an incredible honour to be recognized this way, but it’s no less true for being clichéd — and perhaps more for me than for most recipients because I’ve had the opportunity to work with Seneca students. One of the many wonderful opportunities accorded an honorary degree recipient (at Seneca at least) is being part of the barrage of professors and board-of-governors members and faculty who congratulate each graduate. Being able to congratulate some of the students I’ve worked with over the past few years was fantastic, and an unexpected treat.

I wrote some things down before, and then said them — more or less — on the day. They appear below. There is a video of it as well, and because people seem quite interested in watching a grown man cry, I will probably post it once I make it smaller than 100MB.

Thanks to Johnathan Nightingale, who helped me tweak the words, and to everyone at Seneca who listened to them quite politely. And also, of course, to everyone who’s contributed to Mozilla and our work with Seneca.

Thank you Dr. Miner, Professor Humphrey, fellow Senecans.

This is a tremendous and humbling honour; through my own work with Seneca, I’ve come to know first-hand how hard Seneca’s students, faculty and administration work to learn, teach, and make a difference, and I’m very flattered and proud to be counted among you.

“College is for people who do“; Professor Dave Humphrey taught me that, and that certainly describes the Seneca that I’ve come to know and love over the past years. My own Seneca education, if you will, began with some students working on a project with Prof. Humphrey. They wanted to change Firefox, and while there are many schools and classes around the world that undertake such projects every year, it was obvious from the first meeting that there was something qualitatively different going on here. These students were collaborating with industry to make sure that their work was grounded in reality and had practical applications — and it was really interesting work! Long before Apple’s iPhone demonstrated how a touch-based interface could work well with the web, students here at Seneca were making it happen for a small local company. I was hooked; they were about doing.

The more I got to know the students and staff at Seneca, the more I got to see creative, passionate work being nurtured, and people learning at break-neck speed. Not just fundamentals from a textbook, but often things that had probably never been learned or taught in quite this way before. As I remarked several times to my colleagues, it was a good thing that nobody told them that this work was too hard for students! These days, the Mozilla community is virtually littered with Seneca contributions and contributors, and Senecans — some of whom are graduating with us here today — have already affected the lives of hundreds of millions of people; there’s no sign of that great work slowing down. Today the programme of practical academic collaboration that Seneca and Mozilla began together a little over two years is expanding to include even more open source projects, and that programme is the envy of schools around the world. I consider myself incredibly privileged to have witnessed Seneca’s growth into an open source powerhouse, and I will always, always cherish the lessons I’ve learned and experiences I’ve shared as part of it. I’ve had the opportunity to make friends, make mistakes, make software. I’m a better software developer, teacher, and student myself for that time, and I owe a tremendous debt.

But of course college is also for people who learn, and you’re now coming to the end of the most intensive period of that since you learned not to eat Legos. There’s a pretty fun little exercise you can do, just making a list of all the things you know how to do. Bake a cake, normalize a database, skin a model. Then go back over that list and put a star next to the things you’ve learned in the last year or two; your lists right now would have a lot of stars on them, which is as it should be. I do this every few years — I’d do it more often, but I’m pretty absentminded — and it helps me decide when I need to seek out something new to play with.

Many of you will leave here today looking ahead to new jobs and opportunities, and while the workplace has many things going for it (money, for example, which can be exchanged for goods and services), many workplaces make it too easy for us to forget to learn. You’ll tend to be given work that you already know how to do, which is generally good economics and management, but it means that you’ll have to be much more intentional and deliberate about your own learning. You’ll need to seek out projects that provide an opportunity to do new things, and to seek out mentors and peers to help you learn from the new things you try. And you’ll want to find opportunities to teach as well — a truth that has been proven out dozens of times in my own experiences, especially at Seneca, is that teaching and learning run in both directions when they’re being done well. While my daughter is learning to crawl, she’s also teaching me to never start a game that I am not willing to play for an hour, for example. One of the most wonderful things about working with classes here at Seneca is watching the students teach each other, and share in the joy of each other’s success and discovery. You will certainly use and build on the specific skills and knowledge you’ve learned in your time at Seneca; please also prize and build on the feeling that you should be learning. Remember to learn, remember to teach, and remember to do things that can fail, and you will be on a path to making a difference in the world around you. A bumpy path at times, a path with poor markings to be sure, but I believe the only path that’s worth being on.

Congratulations, graduates, and thank you again to Seneca for this incredible honour.

Thanks are due to many people for the wonderful time I’ve had working with Seneca, but one person stands out even in that sea of achievement and dedication: Dave Humphrey, without whom there would truly be no Mozilla@Seneca, and who is a great friend in addition to the best teacher I’ve ever had the pleasure of watching in action.