Mozilla and Programming

posted by Roy Schestowitz on Sep 24, 2024

• Mozilla

  • Mozilla ☛ 14 AI projects to watch: Mozilla’s first Builders Accelerator cohort kicks off

    We launched the Mozilla Builders Accelerator with the theme of local AI back in June. Our goal was to spark innovation in the AI ecosystem. Now, 14 exciting projects are leading the charge.

  • Silicon Angle ☛ Mozilla kicks off Builders accelerator program for ‘local AI’ startups [Ed: More pure BS from Mozilla, throwing money down the drain instead of improving Free software]

    Mozilla Corp., the nonprofit organization behind the Firefox browser, today announced the first cohort of startups in its new, artificial intelligence-themed Mozilla Builders Accelerator. It has selected 14 promising young companies, with each one gaining access to up to $100,000 in funding plus mentorship from Mozilla’s experts.

  • Firefox Developer Experience: Firefox DevTools Newsletter 130

    Developer Tools help developers write and debug websites on Firefox. This newsletter gives an overview of the work we’ve done as part of the Firefox 130 Nightly release cycle.

    Firefox being an open source project, we are grateful to get contributions from people outside of Mozilla, like Artem Manushenkov who made the Inspector show the dimension of the page in an overlay when the window is resized (#1826409)

    Important Debugger fixes…

    We got a report for what we call zombie breakpoints, aka breakpoints that are still seen as active by the engine, even if the user removed it from the client. This was affecting WebExtension debugging and should be fixed now (#1908095).

    Speaking of the Debugger, pretty printing got almost 30% faster and opening large files 10% faster (#1907794). This is due to some work on some work on Cycle Collection in Javascript Workers, which the Debugger is using when opening a Javascript profile to parse its content. We’re currently doing more work to optimize opening files even faster, so stay tunes for even better numbers soon!

    Finally, we fixed local script override for Service Worker cached requests (#1876060) and scripts with crossorigin attributes (#1834799).

    … and quality of life Inspector improvements

    In the markup view, you can now add attributes in the input that appears when you double click the tagname (#1173057).

    You might now know it, but by default, the Inspector element picker ignores nodes with pointer-events: none , as those are often used as absolutely positioned on the whole page and would prevent to pick items underneath it. In the cases where you do want to pick those non-targetable element, you can hold Shift while using the element picker. In 130, we ensured that pressing Shift will change the behavior directly instead of waiting for the next mouse move (#1899704).

    That’s it for this months, this post is shorter than usual as most of the team is working on longer projects that are not shipping yet, but hopefully we can talk about them in the coming months! Thank you for reading this and using our tools, see you in a few weeks for a new round of updates

    Full list of fixed bugs in DevTools for the Firefox 130 release: [...]

  • Rust Blog ☛ The Rust Programming Language Blog: September Project Goals Update

    The Rust project is currently working towards a slate of 26 project goals, with 3 of them designed as Flagship Goals. This post provides selected updates on our progress towards these goals (or, in some cases, lack thereof). The full details for any particular goal are available in its associated tracking issue on the rust-project-goals repository.

• Education

  • Perl ☛ Things I've Learned Serving on the Board of The Perl Foundation

    TPF stands for The Perl Foundation, a U.S.-based non-profit organization dedicated to advancing the Perl language through open discussion, collaboration, and, of course, code.

    TPF got its start around 2001 when Perl was super popular. The organization was originally needed to run a conference; because apparently, you need an official entity to book conference venues. The foundation was also actively raising funds and spending money on Perl development grants at that time, and they've been doing it ever since.

    In 2019, Perl 6 was renamed Raku (long story, not for today), so TPF got new aliases, The Raku Foundation and The Perl and Raku Foundation. Alias is legally called as d.b.a. (doing business as) but either way, I appreciate that the foundation changes its name depending on context. Context is important in Perl.