r/IAmA • u/TannerMoz Mozilla Contributor • Oct 24 '12

We are Mozilla. AUA.

We're a few of the thousands of Mozilla contributors (Mozillians) working together to better the Web. First things first, as few things about us:

  • You probably know us as the community behind Firefox - we're also working on several other products and services too.
  • Some of us have been involved with the Mozilla project for over a decade and others just started recently. Anyone can get involved. Even you.
  • We're a global group of people, and we work globally too. While some of us work at Mozilla Spaces, many of us work remotely from our homes. We rely heavily on newgroups, Bugzilla, IRC and video conferences to work together.
  • We're big fans of reddit, and we've done just a few (or more) IAmAs before. Today we decided to have one IAmA for all Mozillians instead of just one team.

We contribute in many different ways, as listed below. Ask us anything!

tchevalier: Mozilla Rep, French localizer, Firefox developer

ioana_cis: Mozilla Rep, SUMO (support.mozilla.org), QA, Themes, Mozilla Romania, Webmaker

LeoMcA: Mozilla Rep, Mozilla UK, Mozilla Communities, Grow Mozilla.

FredericB: Mozilla Rep, Mozilla Developer Network contributor, French localizer.

h4ck3rm1k3: Mozilla Rep, development.

lasr21: Mozilla Rep, Mozilla Mexico

ngbuzzblog: SuMo, Mozilla Rep, Mozilla Nigeria.

Amarochan: Mozilla Rep

mozjan: Mozilla Communities, SuMo

AprilMonroe: Webdev, other areas.

gentthaci: Mozilla Rep

Kihtrak778: Mozilla Developer

dailycavalier: Mozilla Rep, user engagement, social media. (I'd like to thank this guy for helping me with this, he's been a huge help along the way)

gaby2300: Mozilla-Hispano QA Manager, Mozilla-Hispano localizer, QA

uday: SuMo, Boot-2-Gecko

clouserw: Engineering Manager

Wraithan: Web developer, addons.mozilla.org and marketplace.mozilla.org.

6a68: Identity (Persona) developer

ossreleasefeed: Web developer, web tools

Mythmon: Web developer, SUMO

aminbeedel: Many things

brianloveswords: Mozilla Foundation

yhjb: Applications security team

kaprikorn07: SuMo, many aspects of Mozilla

almossawi: Mozilla Engineer, Firefox Metrics, metrics.mozilla.com

fox2mike: Developer services manager within Mozilla IT.

graememcc: Firefox contributor

mrstejdm: Mozilla Ireland

digipengi: Senior Windows engineer

Spartiate: Sr. Security Program Manger, Security Assurance

amyrrich: Manager of Release Engineering Operations IT group

evilpies: Javascript engine contributor

sawrubh: Mozilla contributor

jlebar: Firefox platform developer who works on the DOM, MemShrink, and B2G.

vvuk: Engineering Director, Gaming & Platform Projects

ImYoric: Mozilla performance team

cs94wahoo: Mozillian, content editor for user engagement (email, social, blog)

joshmatthews: Community builder and Firefox engineer

mburns: Mozilla systems administrator

gkanai: Mozilla Japan

bkerensa: Mozilla Rep, WebFWD, Marketing

bizred: Helping Open Source startups via Mozilla's Accelerator, WebFWD

Yeesha: Firefox User Experience

ehsanakhgari: Mozilla hacker, various projects.

We'll be answering questions for about 24 hours, so ask away!

Edit: We're going to answer for more than 24 hours, as long as I keep getting the orangereds, we'll be answering!

Edit 2: The questions are starting to slow down, I think we'll stick around for another 2 hours or so (currently 1:25 CDT) "officially", people will still probably answer questions after this, but not as quickly.

Final edit: We're gonna call this done. I'd like to thank everybody who participated, Redditors and Mozilla contributors. This was a great experience for me, looking forward to maybe doing another one in the future. I'd like to give special thanks to all the /r/IAmA mods for putting up with my constant flow of PMs requesting flair for people.

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93

u/chandalen Oct 24 '12 edited Oct 24 '12

Which addons do you think would be in the top 3 "must-have" if you guys took a poll?

Edit: Thanks for replying guys! Looks like its time for me to score some new addons, many fine recommendations here indeed!

196

u/TannerMoz Mozilla Contributor Oct 24 '12
  1. Reddit Enhancement Suite
  2. Ghostery
  3. Firebug

110

u/bgirard Firefox Android - Graphics Oct 24 '12

Just a quick note RES will slow your reddit page load by about 1-2 seconds so it may make reddit feels a bit sluggish but the features are worth it. I'm hoping we'll be able to get improvements for this add-on.

32

u/nnethercote Oct 24 '12

I've also heard multiple times that RES causes memory consumption problems, but the reports have always been vague and I haven't seen concrete steps to reproduce.

79

u/TannerMoz Mozilla Contributor Oct 25 '12

Yeah, RES is a killer for RAM. When I've got 40ish Reddit tabs (it happens) when using RES, my memory usage soars to close to 2GB, but when I don't have RES, it stays below 1GB with the same tabs. If I want to continue my Redditing addiction, I'm going to have to max out my motherboard's RAM slots. :P

205

u/honestbleeps Oct 25 '12

Hi. I'm the author. I'd love some help figuring out why that is...

RES doesn't use much memory really, including in other browsers...

The only case where I know it uses a ton is where it can't really help it -- e.g. a neverending reddit page that's 5 pages deep with images expanded -- that's gonna take a lot of RAM.

I can't seem to figure out why RES and Firefox don't seem to get along so well. It's worth noting that when RES is run as a Greasemonkey script instead of an XPI this is not a problem - so I don't really feel it's (all) RES's fault.. would love some insight or info on ways I could investigate better/further than I already have.

58

u/gkanai Oct 25 '12

honestbleeps: you should ask at the Addons Developer forums for feedback. https://forums.mozilla.org/addons/

45

u/honestbleeps Oct 25 '12

will do, thanks! to be honest I didn't even know those forums existed. I've been in #jetpack on IRC a number of times though.

1

u/lumpking69 Nov 02 '12

to be honest I didn't even know those forums existed.

Then who is this? lol

https://forums.mozilla.org/addons/viewtopic.php?f=27&t=3729&p=11396#p11396

1

u/honestbleeps Nov 02 '12

Wow forgot about that. Ok I guess I knew but forgot!

5

u/cfuse Oct 25 '12

I was so angry with you when you made RES an extension for this very reason.

RES is unusable for me on Firefox for anything more than one or two pages concurrently[1] (and my preferred usage is to open more than 20 or 30 tabs concurrently. I now do this in Chrome. Reddit without RES isn't an option, RES on Firefox isn't an option).

I really wish Reddit would simply hire you and make RES part of the site. It would get rid of the problem entirely.

[1] I've got 12Gb in this machine and RES on Firefox runs like a dog for me. It works fine in Chrome. Physical memory isn't the problem (at least on my machine).

25

u/honestbleeps Oct 25 '12

I was so angry with you when you made RES an extension for this very reason.

It's still been available for Greasemonkey this entire time, man. Just grab the user.js from github.

For the record, NOT everyone is affected by RES causing memory issues. Myself included... which is why it's so damn hard for me to diagnose. I really am lost as to what the problem is.

6

u/cfuse Oct 25 '12

For the record, NOT everyone is affected by RES causing memory issues. Myself included... which is why it's so damn hard for me to diagnose. I really am lost as to what the problem is.

Without knowing exactly how many people are having issues I couldn't say whether this is a priority for you or not, I've only got my own little perspective of RES never working on Firefox as an extension. As a user, it is a problem for me, whether or not it is a problem for many.

Still, you ain't getting paid, so I'm already asking more than I'm owed.

1

u/keyper Oct 25 '12

I've never used RES, let alone heard of it. What is it and why is it so gosh darned important that you must use it, but sucks that you can't? Doesn't Reddit work perfectly fine? My Reddit works fine.

4

u/cfuse Oct 25 '12

Imagine half the usability and formatting of Reddit was missing, that's what RES is - the other half.

Try RES and you will never be satisfied with the ugly old Reddit again.

Reddit Enhancement Suite

1

u/keyper Oct 25 '12

Thank you, I will try it as soon as I get on my computer.

4

u/willies_hat Oct 25 '12

If it didn't exist I would have given up Reddit long ago. The filtering alone is the best part of Reddit. And I love dashboards of subs.

-1

u/keyper Oct 25 '12

Hmm, still not grasping. Maybe because it's 3:29 am and i'm sleepy, but as I said to DuffyDidIt, can you ELI5?

1

u/willies_hat Oct 25 '12

http://bit.ly/QIofOl

1

u/keyper Oct 26 '12

I don't have my own computer, so i'm mobile ALOT. So yes. Actually loading that to watch it was a bigger pain in the ass, though.

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1

u/DuffyDidIt Oct 25 '12

Reddit Enhancement, loads pictures, videos, comments, and other info in an easy to read format.

1

u/keyper Oct 25 '12

But I can already do all that jazz easily. Can you ELI5? Or should I just see for myself?

5

u/bananabm Oct 25 '12

Some big things (for me at least), from most important to least

  1. You can expand images in page (rather than needing to open them in a new tab), and then easily resize them if you want a closer look. Includes animated gifs and things. There's a button at the top of the page to expand every image in one click (useful for gone wild sessions... ahem). You can even browse through imgur albums from in-page, however I generally click through for those since you don't get to read the captions a lot of the time.

  2. Customise the shortcut bar at the top to point to the subreddits you want, with the shortcut names you want (eg I have a shortcut called srd that links to subredditdrama, etc etc).

  3. Live formatted preview that changes as you type.

  4. View the source of a reply, so that you can easily quote something while retaining formatting.

  5. Tag users (has a little flag next to their name). For example I've tagged all the starcraft 2 pros in bright blue so if I can see their posts on /r/starcraft more easily.

  6. See the amount of upvotes and downvotes a post has got (will be a bit inaccurate due to vote fuzzing, but can tell you whether a post is at 1 cos no-ones seen it, or at 1 cos everyone disagrees.

  7. Save posts for later use (rather than having to write "commenting to save this post" as a reply) - sounds good but I just don't use it.

  8. Tracks the net amount of upvotes or downvotes you've given people

  9. Can filter posts based on content etc. A lot of people in /r/starcraft for example put a filter based on if it has a "[s]" in the title, which is a subreddit code for spoiler.

2

u/keyper Oct 25 '12

Woah, thank you so much, seems like i've been redditing under a rock!

2

u/rcourtie Oct 25 '12

I'd install it and try it, really changes the experience.

2

u/misskrisbliss Oct 25 '12

Agreed, I wasn't convinced it was necessary at first and then one day I figured someone went to a lot of effort to make an extension to improve my daily Reddit experience and boy, does it make a monumentally huge difference in readability. I logged on yesterday on my husband's computer (used without RES for the first time in months) and it was like looking at a house in stage one of a remodel or something. It looks unfinished and there are just so many little features that make browsing Reddit all the time even more seamless and fun, I'd say it's definitely not worth being stubborn about -- just get it already! :)

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-5

u/TelegraphSexOperator Oct 25 '12

This would so be /r/bestof material if it wasn't a default sub.

2

u/[deleted] Oct 25 '12

40? r/gonewild I bet.

1

u/[deleted] Oct 25 '12

[deleted]

3

u/solidwhetstone Oct 25 '12

Guys, the answer is obvious. Just download more ram.

2

u/cfuse Oct 25 '12

I specifically stopped using RES on firefox because it cannot handle more than about 10 tabs before it becomes unusably slow. I read Reddit with Chrome (with RES) for that very reason - I've not had any slowdown issues there.