WeeklyUpdates/EmergingTechnology

Here you'll find weekly news and headlines from Mozilla's Emerging Technologiegs organization, as shared at Mozilla's Weekly Updates meeting. (If that meeting doesn't occur, which happens occasionally, there won't be corresponding headlines here...)

2018 ET Headlines
Latest: October 15th, 2018
October	1st, 8th, 15th, 22nd
September	10th, 17th, 24th
August	6th, 13th, 20th, 27th
July	2nd, 9th, 16th, 23rd, 30th
June	4th, 25th
May	7th, 14th, 21st
April	2nd, 9th, 16th, 23rd, 30th
March	5th, 12th, 19th, 26th
February	5th, 19th, 26th

October 22nd, 2018

• Hubs and Spoke -- Last week we launched Spoke (https://hubs.mozilla.com/spoke), a tool that lets you design and build your own personal social space for use with Hubs. Hopefully you’ve tried Hubs, our new way to get people together using Virtual Reality, and in doing so have thought about how great it’d be to construct your own personal world and equip it with whatever strikes your fancy. Spoke makes that easy, including acquiring all sorts of ready-made scenes, furnishings, animal companions, and more by adding existing 3D models from Sketchfab. There’s a great getting started video that will have you up and running in five minutes. (Though you can spend a lot more time than that if you’d like to get creative.) Indulge yourself, and share it with your friends!
• View Source 2018 -- This coming Friday (Oct 26) we’re hosting Mozilla’s fourth View Source event, which will take place in London as part of the overall week of activities associated with MozFest. View Source is an intimate, single-track conference for front-end web developers and designers, and we’re excited about the great range of speakers who’ll be there. Hopefully you already have your ticket as we’re sold out, though you can still come join us for MozFest. https://events.mozilla.org/viewsource2018.

October 15th, 2018

• Close Conversation is the Future of Social VR -- Most user studies depend on participants doing their best to carry out a task designed and requested by a researcher. Our Hubs project team just published a usability study in which users invited to explore social virtual reality mostly ignored instructions and just started goofing off with each other once they entered the immersive space. Delightfully, that helped us see how people found that space to be natural, private, personal, and fun. We’ve begun a redesign of the Hubs experience based on these findings, which you can check out for yourself (or better yet, with a friend) at https://hubs.mozilla.com.
• Listen to your Pocket -- Pocket 7.0 shipped this past week and with a new reader capability powered by technology from ET’s Scout project, including generating the audio server-side so we have much more control and higher-quality voices. In fact, can you tell which voice is human and which is generated by our Text To Speech model? We bet you can’t, but either way you should definitely give Pocket 7.0 a try.
• Your Home, Your Data -- Version 0.6.0 of Things Gateway by Mozilla was released by our Project Things team with a special focus home monitoring capabilities that let you keep an eye on the state of your home over the web. Version 0.6 adds support for door sensors, motion sensors and customisable push notifications and a wider range of Apple HomeKit devices, as well as general robustness improvements and better error reporting. Everything a connected home needs, but no monthly fees, your private data stays in your home by default, and you can choose from a variety of sensors from different brands.

October 8th, 2018

• MDN Revenue Experiment Launch -- This past week we launched our first MDN revenue experiment, seeking direct support from our users in order to accelerate growth of MDN Web Docs content and platform. After some gentle tests with beta users we ramped up to 1% of the general MDN audience (selected by random sample), showing them a promotional box in the footer of MDN. There’s also a direct payments page if you’d like to take part in the experiment with us.
• You should watch more videos! -- YouTube has started to encode content in AV1, which works well in Firefox Nightly. You’ll need to enable AV1 playback in nightly but there’s information on the YouTube page about how to do that. Spend some time and check it out!
• Firefox Reality Update -- We’ve continued to see solid interest in Firefox Realty. Seven days after launch we’re at 1.5k DAU, 9.3k WAU, 10k+ total installs, >50k sessions. Firefox Reality is one of the top 5 free apps in the Oculus Go store. In this market, those are excellent numbers. Also, Mozilla Hubs now has a camera tool for capturing and socially sharing pictures of your experiences in VR.

October 1st, 2018

• Faster with WebAssembly, and with Firefox -- Folks at Unity published new results of their Unity WebGL benchmark, this time done using WebAssembly to see how performance compares to previous testing using asm.js. You can read all the details in their blog post, which concluded overall that modern browsers load faster and perform better thanks to WebAssembly, and that developers can expect a more consistent user experience for web content. Moreover, they found Firefox to be the fastest browser in nearly all benchmark scenes and on both Windows and MacOS.
• Debugging Reality -- One week after the Firefox Reality launch we have over 3k downloads (a significant portion of the total daily active users (DAU) on standalone VR headsets today!) and continued good press. And if you’re one of those developers interested in delivering content through VR you should check out Josh Marinacci’s post on remote debugging in WebVR using Firefox Developer Tools.
• Rust in Space -- The 2019 IEEE International Conference on Space Mission Challenges for Information Technology (SMC-IT) has issued its call for papers, including soliciting presentations on Rust in real-time and spacecraft systems as well as on WebAssembly for space applications.

September 24th, 2018

• Firefox Reality ships! --
  
  Firefox Reality passed final review and was released last Tuesday, September 18 on Google, Oculus, and HTC VR stores. Response has been great -- we’ve spotted 94 articles in nine countries, 3.6 million impressions of our launch tweet, and our announcement video has had 40,000 views and become the number one watched video on the Mozilla YouTube channel this year, all in just in the first 3 days! Our Mixed Reality team put a lot of effort into designing a browser that really works for virtual reality, leading to features like full speech input for searching the web, a feed of amazing VR content integrated into the Firefox Reality home screen, and private browsing enabled by default. And we’re already seeing that work pay off in the reaction to those features from users around the world.
• Tech Speakers Meetup --
  
  Our Tech Speakers program meetup took place last week in Mozilla’s Paris office. Thirty five active Speakers representing more than a dozen countries took part in the event, which combined coaching on presentation techniques from a four expert conference speakers with hands-on workshops on ET projects including Project Things, Firefox Reality on Oculus Go, WebAssembly, and Rust. One lucky speaker won a raffled Oculus Go, and twenty of them took home a Mozilla Smart Home Kit -- Raspberry Pi 3 (Things Gateway) and three programmable "things" to monitor and control.
• DeepSpeech v0.2 release -- Last week the Machine Learning team released DeepSpeech v0.2. The main new feature is streaming support, which lets users transcribe audio live, as it's being recorded. It also includes much lower CPU and memory utilization, and it's our first release that included Common Voice data in the training! We published Streaming RNNs in TensorFlow on Hacks detailing the changes and improvements.

September 17th, 2018

• On The Road With AV1 --
  

  On The Road With AV1
  Our AV1 team is at the IBC 2018 show in Amsterdam, which is billed as “The world's most influential media, entertainment & technology show”. They’re there showcasing AV1 with our Alliance for Open Media partners Bitmoovin and VideoLAN, highlighting media creation and playback products that support AV1, including Firefox. That day when we’ll have high-quality royalty free video on the web is coming soon, very soon...
• Rich and Beautiful -- Firefox 62 launched on September 5th and among the many cool new features are two designed to enable richer page layouts and more beautiful use of typography -- CSS Shapes and CSS Variable Fonts respectively. We’ve published two posts (CSS Shapes, CSS Variable Fonts) on our Hacks Blog to tell you much more about how to use those new capabilities in your web content, including lots of great examples. And Firefox 62 includes a nifty Shape Path Editor tool to make shaping and flowing text even easier. Give them a try!

September 10th, 2018

• Special Learning Edition - It’s back to school time here in North America and probably lots of the rest of the northern hemisphere too so perhaps that’s why “learning” seems to have worked out to be a recurring theme for our ET headlines this week.
• Learning about Rust -- It’s great to hear how other developers, teams, and companies have built new products and product ideas in Rust, and in that process what their learning experiences have been. Some great, illuminating and educational examples:
  1. After his talk on Rust explorations at Joyent from a few weeks ago, Node.js co-conspirator and generally highly influential systems engineering personality Bryan Cantrill published his first production Rust code, and gave another talk about it.
  2. Rust Language Server is a background resource for IDEs, editors, and other active development tools, intended to make it easy for them to support creating and building applications (and crates) with Rust. Nick Cameron explains what 1.0 means for the Rust Language Server, and what the future looks like.
  3. Automattic’s Ivan Enderlin explains how Wordpress use a combination of Rust and Binaryen to bring their Rust parser for their new modern blog post format to older browsers.
  4. Catherine West’s keynote at RustConf 2018 provides fabulous insight into why Rust (and the Entity-Component-System pattern) is great for game development, and can help you get started building that video game you’ve always wanted to create: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aKLntZcp27M
• Learning about the “DWeb” -- More and more these days we’re hearing talk about “decentralizing” the Web, broadly inclusive of significant personal and policy questions as well as some very interesting technical challenges. We’re publishing a series of articles on our Hacks Blog to help introduce those topics and some of the innovative developers working to address them, which we think you’ll find informative:
  1. Introducing the ‘DWeb'
  2. Decentralizing Social Feeds
  3. Decentralizing files and data (using WebRTC)
  4. Publishing & Sharing directly from your browser (no server required)
  5. Re-decentralizing the web as an Interplanetary File System
• Learning by Listening -- Our Project Things team recently reached out to developers who’ve downloaded our Things Gateway, asking them to give us some feedback viv a survey. This will help us vet aspects of our adoption hypotheses with different audiences: Firefox users, leading-edge makers, and representative samples of conscious choosers and general population in the US and the UK. If you’re one of those folks and receive the survey, we very much appreciate you spending a few minutes to fill it out. And if not, then it’ll only take about the same amount of time for you to download the Things Gateway and learn what all the excitement is about.

August 27th, 2018

• Media Meets Social Mixed Reality -- Hubs by Mozilla, our experiment to bring social mixed reality to the browser, officially launched a new set of media tools, allowing users to share images, video, 3D models, and any content from anywhere on the web with others in a Hubs room simply by pasting a link. You can also upload files and share them, so the next time you need to review code or a slide presentation with colleagues why not do it together in mixed reality‽ Check our blog post for all the details.
• World’s Best Summarizer on Newsroom data set -- If you haven’t had a chance to see our summer intern Rishi Bommasani’s Automatic Summarizer work yet, check out his presentation slides. You can also see an example of summarizations of long and short articles.
• Saving millions of dollars with Rust and WebAssembly -- Read a report (via Twitter) on how a long established, very large (and somewhat old school) Fortune 500 insurance company saved millions of dollars by moving costly computation from the server to browser clients using WebAssembly, thanks in large part to the initiative of one of their internal developers. Oh, and it only took them about two weeks to go from idea to deployable solution.
• Would You Like To Take A Survey? -- The 2018 Rust language survey is out and we’d love to hear from you whether you use Rust or not. The survey is available in 14 languages, and in the first 24 hours we’ve had more responses (3100) than we had for the 2016 survey overall (and about 25% in languages other than English). Please feel free to share the survey link with friends, developer colleagues, at meetups, and broadly around your communities. Thanks!

August 20th, 2018

• Gigabit Community Celebration -- In 2014 Mozilla, the National Science Foundation, and US Ignite launched the Gigabit Community Fund to invest in bringing gigabit networking services to five pilot cities around the US. -- Eugene, Oregon; Austin, Texas; Lafayette, Louisiana; Kansas City, Missouri; and Chattanooga, Tennessee. Over those four years innovators, educators, community leaders, and volunteers have demonstrated just what a 250X increase in internet speed can mean when paired with technologies like VR, IoT, and streaming/recorded video. This past week representatives of those communities along with US Ignite and NSF gathered with us and other Mozillians in Mountain View to celebrate the end of that program. The celebration showcased how what’s been accomplished has strengthened and transformed those cities through the impact of technologies we've been working on at Mozilla, and has led to opportunities for new collaborations with us in ET in areas like augmented reality, machine learning and speech.
• Designing for Social Good -- The Boost VC podcast, hosted by venture capitalist Adam Draper, just aired an episode featuring our very own Sean White. Boost VC focuses on emerging technologies through conversations with industry leaders so was an ideal setting for Sean (whom Adam called “The Tony Stark of Mozilla”). You can listen to the episode and hear how Sean and Adam talk about Mozilla’s work in user agency, augmented reality, social VR, on-line identity, collaborating with the Tech Museum, and the future of human/computer interaction.

August 13th, 2018

• The Presence of Rust in the World -- We often talk about the growing buzz around Rust in the trade press and on social media, but it’s good now and then to step back and talk about the growth of usage and see how broadly people are incorporating Rust into what they’re doing. Jonathan Turner’s recent blog post does just that, highlighting Rust’s continued exceptional usage both as direct evidence (repos, pull requests, company showcases) and indirect use such in job listings and community meetups. That perspective is timely given last week’s the informative blog post on Rust 2018 as the first major update to the language since 1.0 shipped in 2015. Rust 2018 will be released on December 6, 2018.
• Control, At Your Fingertips -- Consistently across the coverage of last week’s Project Things 0.5 release in both tech press and maker press was the special attention paid to the new, experimental “Smart Assistant” functionality that lets you interact with the gateway and control devices either through spoken instructions or through a chat-style interface in which you type in commands in and the Smart Assistant carries them out and replies conversationally. Combined with the enhanced rules engine that lets you easily create your own situational triggers and have your devices predictably interact with each other, Things Gateway 0.5 provides a powerful and totally open platform for building behaviors and putting you in command of your devices, all the while keeping your data private and safe. Oh, and it’s fun to have and use.

August 6th, 2018

• AV1 and codec news -- The official 1.0.0 release version of the market-redefining AV1 codec is now available in Firefox Nightly and on all platforms! (Make sure to toggle the pref media.av1.enabled to true in about:config.) There’s not a lot of content yet so stay tuned, and in the meantime you can watch this clip.) Also, our Daala team landed support for CDEF (Constrainted Directional Enhancement Filter) in the rav1e AV1 encoder, which is particularly noteworthy because it is written entirely in Rust. CDEF is a feature Mozilla contributed to improve the video quality of AV1.
• Things Gateway 0.5 Release -- Our Project Things team released version 0.5 of the Things Gateway last Thursday, which is packed full of new features including customisable devices, a more powerful rules engine, an interactive floorplan and an experimental smart assistant you can talk to. There’s been lots of buzz on social media and in the trade press, and 300 downloads in just the first few days. If you haven’t tried it yet, grab a Raspberry Pi, install the software, and watch as Things Gateway discovers the smart devices around you and helps you get the most out of them.
• Decentralizing the Web -- Last week the Decentralized Web Summit took place in San Francisco, bringing together innovators, policy makers, and entrepreneurs to talk about rethinking and reapplying technologies to “lock the web open” and create the web we truly want (and deserve). Mozilla was well represented through talks, sessions, a keynote by Mitchell Baker, and a hands-on hackathon we hosted at Mozilla’s San Francisco office. Learn more about our efforts through our blog post, and follow along for more as the work continues.

July 30th, 2018

• Announcing View Source 2018 -- View Source, Mozilla’s one-day, intimate, single-track conference for front-end developers and designers, will be taking place on October 26th in London, and the web site has just gone live at https://events.mozilla.org/viewsource2018 with the program and logistical details. That happens to be the day before MozFest (https://mozillafestival.org/), so why not plan to come join us in London for both events?!‽
• Take Control of 30,000 colored LEDs -- In June, Mozilla collaborated with an artist named Ian Brill to create an installation called the “Arch” at JSConf EU in Berlin. This interactive environment allowed people to experience the intersection of art and technology in a physical, pulsating, immersive way, and to control that experience through web technologies including Rust and WebAssembly. Check out the video and post on our Hacks Blog to see the Arch in action, and watch for it to make an appearance at future events.
• New Tools and Techniques -- The Rust/Web Assembly working group has been busy, but then there’s a lot of excitement and enthusiasm around Rust and Web Assembly these days. They’ve adopted and announced an RFC process similar to the one Rust itself uses, but lighter-weight. This will help ensure that the group’s work is focused on solving real-world issues and make it easier for implementers and stakeholders to coordinate.. And they’ve published new versions of several important tools -- wasm-pack for publishing Wasm modules to npm package manager, the Twiggy code size profiler, and the wee-alloc memory allocator.

July 23rd, 2018

• All The Things and More -- Interest in Mozilla’s Project Things has been phenomenal throughout the first half of the year, and in fact we’ve passed ten thousand downloads of our Things Gateway software which was our initial goal for all of 2018. A new software update is coming soon, with more cool features (and an updated download goal for 2018, too).
• Growing The Library -- We’ve won an NSF grant to support a PhD student in working on Deep Speech at Mozilla, focusing on adding support languages with limited existing speech engine support such as Welsh and Catalan. The grant will also let us get started on a few other languages we’ve wanted to enable but haven’t yet collected open data on -- such as German (which just launched). You can keep track and contribute on the Common Voice languages page: https://voice.mozilla.org/en/languages.
• Hands-On Decentralization - If you’re attending the Decentralized Web Summit in San Francisco August 1-2 or if you’re based in the Bay Area, you might be interested in attending a hackathon Tantek Çelik and Dietrich Ayala from our Developer Outreach team are hosting in our SF office on Tuesday, July 31st. We’d like anyone who wants to come discuss, brainstorm, or go hands-on with on any and all decentralized / distributed / indieweb technologies to join us for the day. More details and RSVP info is at https://indieweb.org/2018/SF.

July 16th, 2018

• Reality, Feature Complete -- Firefox Reality has just added support for Immersive WebVR content, reaching V1 feature complete. The team will be heading into a testing and bug fixing phase for the next few weeks as we prep for a wider beta release. Next Wednesday, the 25th, Nancy Hang will have headsets on-hand in the Mountain View office for a lunchtime bugbash - along with the first print run of stickers with the new logo!
• Mozilla Research Grants - Our review team, after much deliberation, chose eight projects out of over 115 applications for the 2018H1 Mozilla Research Grants, including projects to improve Firefox, help us address harassment, make better synthesized speech and improve security for the Web of Things. We award grants each half-year and have seen a growing number of incredibly relevant, impressive proposals. Congratulations to the recipients and thanks to all the submitters for introducing us to so many strong ideas and Mozilla-aligned research programs.
• Faster Firefox With WebAssembly -- We worked with the creators of the PSPDFKIT WebAssembly benchmark before they publicly released results for all browsers. Based on our feedback they changed the benchmark in forward-looking ways which also resulted in Firefox even more decisively beating other browsers, being twice as fast as the nearest competitor.

July 9th, 2018

• Rust News -- Microsoft announced its first project in Rust, the IoT Edge Security Daemon, which is part of Azure IoT -- services and solutions designed to enable end-to-end IoT applications on Azure. While just an initial step, the code is already available on Github and reflects Microsoft’s recognition of the high value of Rust for safety, security and stability.
• Rust News, Part Deux - Also in Rust news, the official "The Rust Programming Language" book is now published and available on Amazon both in print form and as an eBook. It’s currently the #1 book in Software Development and is the perfect companion to “Programming Rust” (which was published back in December).
• Bringing it to the Web -- Our Mixed Reality team launched the 1.4.0 update of our WebVR exporter tool for Unity. Sixty percent of all AR and VR content is built using Unity, so WebVR export allows all those assets to be easily incorporated in virtual experiences on the web. Check out the Mixed Reality Blog for more information including weekly updates on Firefox Reality.

July 2nd, 2018

• Two Million and (Still) Growing -- Our Mozilla Hacks blog and Layout Land video sites are now at over 2 million users for the year! Celebrate by becoming one of them (if you haven’t already), and check out this video on the shape editor Jen published during our San Francisco All Hands.
• Let’s Get Smaller -- At Dropbox, file compression is not just a good idea it’s essential, and even a 1% improvement in efficiency can have a huge impact on their business. This past week Dropbox announced DivANS, a new compression architecture designed around a modular series of stages with open interfaces and an open intermediate representation format, aimed at enabling community innovation and inspired by modern programming languages. Dropbox chose to build DivANS in Rust, citing its speed, reliability and productivity, and runs via WebAssembly to allow it to be embedded in a web page. Early results show compression savings of 2.5% - 12% on representative Dropbox datasets.
• More Languages -- Our Deep Speech team is working on new speech-to-text (STT) engines that are being trained with the data rolling in from Common Voice, which just recently started collecting samples in Turkish, Tatar, Breton, and Chuvash. Samples can now be recorded and validated in fourteen different languages with forty three more under development. More details on the languages supported and in progress are on the Common Voice web site at https://voice.mozilla.org/en/languages.

June 25th, 2018

• Privacy and the Internet of Things - Project Things and the Web of Things working group were featured in a nice piece from Samsung’s developer blog, continuing a series of articles and presentations from them reflecting their excitement about our Project Gateway. This particular post highlights the growing implications of data privacy in the IoT world as the realities of GDPR work their way through the realities of software, hardware, and business models, so is especially timely.
• Watch This Space - Firefox has the ability to read web pages out loud, and we’ve launched a Snippet experiment to test demand for that experience in mobile and desktop by asking users to answer a few survey questions. This is a follow-up from a previous experiment we’d done that showed a surprising number of folks were interested in listening to the web on desktop systems, so we’re hoping to understand that better. Keep an eye on the bottom of the new tab page to learn more…
• Making Browser Music -- Propellerhead Software, a Swedish company dedicated to the idea that everyone should be able to compose and create music, has ported their “Europa” stand-alone wavetable synthesizer to WebAssembly, allowing it to run fully featured in a web browser. Try it out, entertain your friends, and explore the word of audio synthesis at https://www.propellerheads.se/europa?launchEuropa.

June 4th, 2018

• Qt for WebAssembly - Qt (pronounced “cute”), a popular cross-platform UI framework for classic and embedded applications, included in their recent 5.11 release a technology preview of Qt for WebAssembly. Hailed as a key part of an enhanced cross-platform strategy, Qt for WebAssembly allows their developers to target the web and browsers as a platform for applications. Qt for WebAssembly uses Emscripten, and is seen as a great option for multi-app or enterprise environments that need to deliver Qt or Quick applications across multiple target platforms. Check out the blog post for more details and an assortment of good examples.
• Mozilla XR Studio Opens - Thirty awesome women have started their mixed-reality and machine summer project work with us through Mozilla’s XR Studio in San Francisco. Come join open hours in the SF commons space from 9:00am to 11:00am on Mondays and Fridays to meet the participants and learn more about what they’re working on.
• Closing In on Completion - The MDN Browser Compatibility Data project is in sight of the data migration finish line, as the last sprint got us to 77% complete in the overall conversion of in-page data to our new API-accessible repository. Outstanding pull requests bring that close to 90% complete, and everything is on track to have all the data migrated and available by the end of the quarter.

May 21st, 2018

• Lots of Rust News - Last week we announced release of Rust 1.26, possibly the most feature-packed release since 1.0 launched almost exactly three years ago. Rust 1.26 includes not only new language features but an updated edition of the definitive Rust Programming Language book. Check out the blog post for all the nifty details, with a link to the book. Also, the steady stream of interesting open source projects using Rust continues. Sudo_pair is a command line tool developed for internal use at Square, enabling two-user confirmation of administrative operations on sensitive systems, and Askalono (which is Esperanto for “shallot”) is a side project an Amazon engineer wrote to help identify source code license texts.
• Go with WebAssembly - Google’s Go programming language has announced official support for WebAssembly, calling out their desire to have Golang be part of the growing momentum of WebAssembly adoption. Golang apps compiled to WebAssembly can be run in browsers and have interoperability with JavaScript, though that’s currently in a very early state with more integration to come. Golang apps can also be run on WebAssembly outside of browsers too to enable other stand-alone and embedded use.
• At the Faire -
  

  At the Faire
  Our Advanced Development team was out in force in our very own Mozilla booth at Maker Faire this past weekend. While kids were entertained playing with things on the "Maker" table, especially the Pixelwall project, we engaged with parents on the importance of privacy, security, and interoperability of IoT data. We explained how Mozilla's Project Things let's them *own* the data in their homes, and decide which data to share with cloud-based service providers (or not). The message was extremely well received by lots of makers, educators, and professionals, many of whom proudly exclaimed how they love and use Firefox (and also took home lots of stickers).

May 14th, 2018

• Machine Readable MDN -- Microsoft Visual Studio Code (“VSCode”), Microsoft’s flagship software development environment, started using data from MDN through our Browser Compatibility Data project. The April release of VSCode introduced new features based on the ability to source information on CSS properties including identification, enhanced completion, and value validation all in real-time from MDN during editing. You can see examples of the improved developer experience MDN provides for VSCode in the release update notes.
• More Languages for Common Voice -- The Common Voice project team has been working hard to enable collection of speech data in a wider range of languages beyond English and just recently launched support for twenty-three additional ones spoken by a total of over 2 billion people world-wide. That means they’ve localized the Common Voice site and user experience to those languages, started gathering a suitable set of sentences for contributors to read and validate, and made it possible for volunteers to sign up so they can contribute in those languages as soon as we’re ready. You can check the Common Voice web site to see which languages are coming soon, and sign up to help out if you’re interested.
• Mozilla Research Grants -- Applications closed for the 1H2018 Mozilla Research Grants. We received 115 applications (up from 48 for 2017H1 and 72 for 2017H2) from 22 countries, which would total $4.7M if we were to fund them all. Next step: a whole lotta reviewing.
• Congratulations -- to Lin Clark, who was included in TechNotification’s "10 Twitter Accounts Every Programmer Should Follow", and Jen Simmons for completing Season 1 of Layout Land, with 29 episodes published over 16 weeks reaching 1 million watch minutes and 250,000 views.

May 7th, 2018

• XR Studio Update -- Part of the great response to XR Studio, our mixed-reality and machine learning studio for women in San Francisco this summer, has been interest in how folks who can’t be in San Francisco could still contribute or bring elements of the experience to their local community. We’ve added a survey to the XR Studio information web page to help capture that interest and to give us a chance to follow up and see what we can work out.
• Springtime is Maker season -- If you like building and making, it is definitely your time of year. Bay Area Maker Faire -- a family-friendly festival of invention, creativity and resourcefulness known as the Greatest Show (and Tell) on Earth -- is in San Mateo May 18th-20th and Mozilla’s Project Things team will be there showcasing our Things Gateway work and giving attendees hands-on experience connecting things to the Web. And you can also join us for Mozilla's Global Sprint this Thursday and Friday (May 10th and 11th) -- a forty-eight hour, continuous around the world hackathon that brings a diverse network of educators, engineers, artists, scientists, and many others together in person and online to build projects for a healthy Internet. Gear up for Maker Faire and the Global Sprint by reading James Hobin’s post in our Hacks blog showing you how easy it is to become a Maker using our Things Framework.
• Getting the word out -- It seems like spring is also a time when research publications are sprouting and events are blooming far and wide. Jofish, Janice and Blair represented Mozilla in Voice, XR, and AI workshops at ACM SIGCHI 2018, a group of Mozillians published a paper on the effect of add blocking at Webconf in Lyons, and as always you can see our ongoing research publications on our Research web site. Additionally, Lin was a guest on the Changelog podcast speaking about Rust, Servo and WebAssembly, Jen was featured on Jeffrey Zeldman's Big Web Show speaking about intrinsic Web Design, and Flaki presented on Mozilla and AV1 at foss-north.

April 30th, 2018

• Hubs is live! -- Our Social Mixed Reality Team unveiled a preview release of Hubs by Mozilla, a new way to get together online within Mixed Reality, right in your browser. Hubs is the first experiment we’re releasing as part of our Social Mixed Reality efforts, and we think it showcases the potential for the web to become the best, most accessible platform to bring people together around the world in this new medium. With a single click Hubs will create a web-based room for you and give you a link you can share to invite others to join you. When they open the link on their phone or PC, they’ll join you in the room as an avatar. If they have a VR headset, they can enter the room in Mixed Reality. All with no app downloads, walled gardens, or content gatekeepers, and on any device you wish. Hubs is built with WebVR and A-Frame and therefore, most importantly, through open source software that respects your privacy and is built on web standards. Check it out at https://hubs.mozilla.com/.
• The Gift of Packages -- In our continuing efforts to enable new ways to use Rust and WebAssembly with JavaScript we’ve released wasm-pack, a tool that helps developers easily combine Rust and JavaScript packages without having to have all the developer environments for both. Wasm-pack assembles and packages Rust crates that target WebAssembly. These packages can be published to the npm Registry and used side-by-side with JavaScript and other packages, and in many kind of applications. We definitely want JavaScript developers to be easily able to use more wasm-based modules in their projects.
• Listen up -- In further exploring how people want to interact with speech-based interfaces we ran a Heartbeat study this past week to ask Firefox users some questions about their interest in having web pages read to them and when/how they might like that to happen. Nearly 1500 folks responded and provided us with some interesting insights. For example, there’s great interest in voice interactions on desktops and laptops, not just mobile. And over half the Android users that responded were interested in listening on their phone -- twice as many as on iOS.

April 23rd, 2018

• XR Studio -- This week Mozilla announced XR Studio, a futuristic studio for thirty women to develop works in machine learning and mixed reality in San Francisco. The space, provided by Mozilla, will be open to participants 24 hours a day, with special access and security, giving participants the freedom to work and collaborate on projects anytime. A mentorship coalition of top engineers, experienced designers and creatives in their fields will provide expert office hours and workshop sessions throughout the summer for participants. Applications are being accepted through May 1st, and participants will be selected and notified by May 5th. Please help us spread the word, and watch the @mozilla Twitter for updates!
• WebAssembly Studio -- Our WebAssembly.Studio Hacks “sneak peak” post reached the top of Hacker News this week. That’s because a lot of folks were interested in learning more about WebAssembly.Studio, an online IDE (integrated development environment) that runs in the browser and helps you learn and teach others about WebAssembly. It’s also a Swiss Army knife that comes in handy whenever working with WebAssembly. Naturally WebAssembly Studio is also an open source project, and is a key part of our strategy to enrich the developer ecosystem with technologies that support openness. If video is more your speed, check out this post on the Hacks YouTube channel: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2AQWR7Ly7EE
• Build "Things" in your studio too -- We only just released version 0.3 of Project Things in February, and yet now 0.4 is out. Excitingly, not only are there a raft of new features -- a larger selection of adapters to support even more connected devices, new kinds of triggerable rules, and expanded developer capabilities -- but the team also introduced the Things Framework to make it easy for you to build and integrate your own web things. The Things Framework implements the Web Things API Mozilla has helped propose as a new W3C standard. Read our blog post to learn more about getting started as a web thing developer with Android, Python, or JavaScript, and find pointers to helpful examples and community support.

April 16th, 2018

• AV1 in the limelight -- Last week was a big one for our Research team as there was lots of continued activity and excitement following the recent announcement of the AV1 codec. Check out this webinar with Bitmovin for an external view, and an AV1 Tech Briefing hosted by Havi Hoffman with Michael Bebenita & Nathan Egge. Michael and Nathan were also very busy this past week representing Mozilla and our AV1 work at the annual National Association of Broadcasters (NAB) show in Las Vegas, including demoing Firefox and AV1 in our pop-up booth, co-hosting a public event with Microsoft and Bitmovin, and presenting to press and analysts in a joint panel with other AOMedia partners.
• Deep Speech for Mycroft -- Mycroft, a free and open source personal assistant and knowledge navigator for Linux systems, announced they were adopting Mozilla’s Deep Speech speech-to-text engine in their production systems. They moved to Deep Speech because they saw an opportunity to have human-class performance, greater throughput on today’s hardware, and much better privacy for their users. This is an important proof point for the utility of Deep Speech, and also provides a data source to improve the engine.
• Machine Readable MDN -- The migration of MDN browser compatibility data (BCD) to machine-readable formats is now 64% done and we’re on pace to have all the data migrated before the end of Q2. Two new projects have joined the collection of external efforts using the data: a polyfill compat tool and a plug-in for ESlint. You’ll find the latest information and tools to let you use the data yourself on the BCD project’s github page.

April 9th, 2018

• The New World -- This past week we announced Firefox Reality -- a new kind of web browser that has been designed from the ground up to work on stand-alone virtual and augmented reality (or mixed reality) headsets. Press and social media coverage has been great, with lots of enthusiasm for Firefox Reality as the first cross-platform browser for mixed reality and the only open source browser for mixed reality. Moreover, Firefox Reality has all the qualities users expect and love about Mozilla and Firefox - fast, puts their privacy first, and optimizes for their browsing experience (even though there is a lot to experiment and learn about delivering great mixed reality experiences). We think browsers are the future of mixed reality, so if you’d like to learn more and be part of bringing mixed reality to everyone via the web keep an eye on our blog or follow us on Twitter.
• “Web Thing... Groovy” -- Folks from our Advanced Development team demoed their “Web of Things” work and taught a technical workshop for makers and potential hardware collaborators as part of Get Launched! In Oakland. We gave attendees a chance to turn a garden variety “thing” into a “Web Thing” with an IoT-ready microcontroller board and our awesome Things Gateway by Mozilla. One of the team’s core objectives this year is to gain reach and traction with makers and developers, so expect to see us out and about quite a bit over the coming months. (Maker Faire, perhaps? :-))
• Microsoft and WebAssembly -- As we’ve talked about before, adoption of WebAssembly by both new and popular web frameworks is something we’re actively encouraging this year, and we continue to see strong interest in helping make that happen. Just this past week Microsoft announced Blazor, a new standards-based framework, that brings the .NET full stack environment (runtime and tooling) to the web. Blazor provides a full .NET runtime implemented in WebAssembly, and on older browsers falls back to an asm.js runtime. All the code is available on GitHub so folks can join the community and get involved.

April 2nd, 2018

• AV1 1.0 Announced -- Mozilla, as a founding member of the Alliance for Open Media, was part of last week’s excitement around announcement of the 1.0 specification of the AOMedia AV1 video codec including Nathan Egge from our AV1 Codec team participating in the “An Introduction to AV1” webinar with Bitmovin for over 500 registrants including CEOs, CTOs and other decision makers. AV1 is an open, royalty-free technology that unleashes the highest-quality video for creators and consumers on the web and in devices. “Royalty free” is a big deal, as today’s mainstream video systems, including browsers, depend on proprietary tools that incur hundreds of millions of dollars annually in licensing fees. We’ve had AV1 support in Firefox Nightly since last summer, and are looking forward to more news from software, hardware, and video entertainment partners including at the upcoming National Association of Broadcasters show where we’ll be sharing a booth with our good friends at Bitmovin.
• It’s In Print -- The most recent issue of Net Magazine, the #1 print publication for web designers in the world, had not one but two cover stories with ties to Mozilla -- an article by Florian Scholtz’s on our MDN Browser Compatibility project, and a cover feature on Augmented Reality that directly relates to Blair MacIntyre’s blog post on A-Painter.
• Rookie of the Year -- Over the last decade, Black Duck Software - a leader in solutions for securing and managing open source software - has recognized innovative and influential open source projects launched each year through their “Rookie of the Year” awards. Previous winners have include Docker, Kubernetes, and Ansible, and we’re delighted that this year’s award recipients included Mozilla’s Common Voice project. Black Duck was impressed with Common Voice’s remarkable accelerated growth, eager and vocal contributors, and noteworthy community adoption.

March 26th, 2018

• The Gang’s All Here -- The MDN Web Docs team hosted a three day “Hack on MDN” event in Paris with participation from over thirty of our community members and representatives of Product Advisory Board members Google, Microsoft, Samsung and W3C. The aim of the event was to give individuals and teams a chance to work together on specific updates to MDN content and services, with an emphasis this time around on our Browser Compatibility Data project. Thanks to everyone who attended, and we hope to see you next time!
• The Warm Glow of Web Assembly -- Ember, an open source Javascript framework that is among the most popular and widely used on the web, announced in a keynote at their annual conference that they’ve rewritten part of the ember.js core in WebAssembly and Rust. This is the first major JavaScript framework to announce adoption of WebAssembly, which is fabulous, and we’re working to engage more top frameworks in 2018 too.
• Registering and Persisting Realities -- There’s great excitement about Mixed Reality, and Augmented Reality in particular, because of the extraordinary ability to create combined physical and virtual experiences in ways that can endure and be openly enjoyed in the real world. There are some interesting technical challenges though, including precisely aligning real and virtual objects and having them persist over time. After all, how can everyone discover the animated virtual Firefox you've put on your front lawn? If you're interested you can read more about these challenges and what we’re doing in both the mixed reality platform and tools to overcome them.
• Most Loved, Thrice -- Rust has been named "most loved" programming language for third year in a row, as voted by over 100,000 developers in the annual Stack Overflow survey.

March 19th, 2018

• An Epoch Year -- A major factor in Rust’s success and popularity is the community-centered planning process, which has just published the Rust 2018 roadmap. That updated roadmap focuses on moving Rust towards its "2.0" style (“epoch”) release called Rust 2018, with major work in WebAssembly, command-line applications, support for embedded devices, and network services (think “large scale, cloud-based production environments”). An additional important goal is building resources to help programmers go from basic knowledge of Rust’s mechanics to knowing how to wield it effectively
• Reading is Fundamental -- We’ve done some research to explore how people in the US (n=162) read articles on the web. As expected, most people have articles they want to read, but are unable to finish (78.4%), and most people tell us they stop reading before they get to the end of an article (73.3%). We saw some slim age differences in how people report saving articles for later: 18-29 year olds are most likely to leave the tab open; 30-44 year olds equally reported leaving the tab open and bookmarking it; 45-60 year olds were most likely to email the URL to themselves, and 60+ year olds were fans of bookmarking. We’re using data to think about better ways to integrate Pocket and other sources of content with voice assistants.
• Mozilla Research Grants 2018H1 -- We’re now accepting submissions for the Mozilla Research Grants, 2018H1 edition. We are explicitly interested in supporting research into wide variety of technological domains -- mixed reality, voice, accessibility, IoT, tools for creators and developers, uses of Firefox, and more -- and in supporting research that goes beyond innovative technology into solutions exploring problems we don't know how to answer. If you’re interested or know someone who might be please check out our call for participation and contact us if you’d like to know more.

March 12th, 2018

• Have Your Fast, and Easy Too -- Our Nick Fitzgerald’s new article "Speed without Wizardry" is a fascinating but admittedly deeply geeky read explaining how Rust and WebAssembly can outperform JavaScript, and do so with far less effort than it would take to optimise the JavaScript. Using a concrete example he compares some real world (but wizardly) optimizations with straightforward benefits anyone can get by using Rust and WASM.
• Mozilla at FOSDEM -- FOSDEM has been a flagship gathering for free and open source developers since 2000. At last month’s conference Mozilla had a strong presence, and if you missed it you can see any and all of our fifteen presentations on topics like Firefox Quantum, faster JavaScript, our Deep Speech and Common Voice projects, Firefox Dev Tools, Demystifying Rust, and much more. Just head on over to the Mozilla FOSDEM channel on YouTube, pick a video, and hit ‘Play’.
• WebVR on MacOS -- Firefox 60, which is scheduled to go into beta this week, will include support for WebVR on Mac OS, making it our first release channel version to do so. WebVR on Mac OS is based on Open VR and is supported at the moment for HTC Vive.

March 5th, 2018

• You Heard It Here First -- Project Thing’s 0.3 release of the Gateway software continues to exceeded our expectations! We’re approaching 5,000 downloads and see 125 or so daily active gateways up and running worldwide. Press coverage has been strong with over 40 articles in the US, UK, Germany & France. The team is continuing to share tricks and engage the community through posts like this WOT clap sensing tutorial on Hacks.
• Rust as Competitive Advantage - We published the first of the series of commercial Rust adoption case studies, highlighting work at Tilde, Inc., a startup based in Portland, OR disrupting the application performance monitoring space. By their very nature performance monitoring agents need to be fast, efficient, and exceptionally stable and after unsatisfying experiments using Ruby and C++ Tilde gave Rust a try and was delighted with the results. Read more about their experience and their next major plans for Rust, and stay tuned for more Rust customer success stories.
• Layout Land? Is that a theme park?? -- Last week was Resilient CSS Week at Layout Land, a YouTube channel recently started by Jen Simmons, Mozilla Designer and Developer Advocate in our DevRel team. Layout Land is all about helping designers and web developers learn what’s now possible in graphic design on the web -- layout, CSS Grid, and more. “Resilient CSS Week” was a special collection of seven brief yet knowledge-packed videos from Jen explaining how to write “Resilient CSS” -- CSS that gives you all the power of great new features like CSS Grid yet which can work in every browser, even the old ones. Layout Land is a magical place indeed, and you should check it out.

February 26th, 2018

• Do less work and get done faster -- Rust release 1.24.0 is now out, with incremental compilation turned on by default. The idea of incremental compilation is basically this: when you’re working on a project you often compile it, then change something small, then compile again. Historically the Rust compiler has compiled your entire project each time, no matter how little you’ve changed the code. With incremental compilation you only need to compile the code you’ve actually changed, which means that that second build (and every one thereafter) is faster. There’s other good stuff in 1.24.0 too, e.g., rustfmt (for “standard style” code beautification). Read more about it in our blog.
• Community led, by example -- The MDN team and community have been working over the last while on a project to bring interactive examples to MDN pages so developers can not only read explanatory information about an HTML, CSS, or JavaScript feature but can interact with live examples in each MDN page to explore and better understand how those features work. Writing examples is quick and fun, and the community has gotten involved in a big way. In our most recent three-week sprint alone we had 150 contributions from the community just for CSS interactive examples. The project is continuing, so if you’re interested we’d love to have you involved.
• More is better (really, and virtually) -- Unity Web VR export support is now live in the Unity asset store, which means you can use Unity, a powerful tool set very popular with artists and game builders, to create VR experiences that can be viewed on the web. If you'd like to give it a try we’ve published a tutorial to help you get started.

February 12th, 2018

• Last Tuesday’s Big Launch -- Last week’s we launched a major update of our Things Gateway, part of Mozilla’s Project Things, and response has been *fabulous*. We’ve had over 2200 downloads of the software in the first six days and now see an active network of over 300 operating gateways worldwide. Press and social media pick up was outstanding too, tied to a series of blog posts on the launch, new gateway features, and how to integrate your own new devices.
• Taking the Guesswork out of Browser Compatibility -- MDN unveiled The Browser Compatibility project, which transformed all the browser compatibility tables on our documentation pages into an open-accessible database with an API that can be used by developer tools, sites, and even from the command line. Better still, all the data is being maintained by MDN and browser makers, so we’ll make sure it’s always up to date. Check out our blog post to learn more including how you can access the data yourself.
• Royalty Free For All -- AV1 is credited with “breaking” the MPEG business model and bringing an end to proprietary, costly, tightly controlled access to online media for consumers and creators. Read more about this frank recognition of what AV1 has accomplished in a blog post from Leonardo Chiariglione, Chair of MPEG: “A crisis, the causes and a solution.”

February 5th, 2018

• Project Things Update -- Tomorrow the Mozilla IoT team will be launching a new version of our experimental Things Gateway software. You can use this software to build your own "Web of Things" gateway with a Raspberry Pi, to directly monitor and control your home over the web without a middleman. The latest version includes a rules engine for setting "if this, then that" style rules for how things interact, a floorplan view to lay out devices on a map of your home, experimental voice control, and support for lots of new types of "things". There's also a brand new add-ons system for adding support for new protocols and devices, and a new way to safely authorise third party applications to access your gateway. Look out on the Mozilla Blog for the announcement, Mozilla Hacks for a hands-on "how to" guide and come and hang out with us in #iot on IRC. You'll also be able to ask questions in the new Mozilla IoT category on Discourse and follow @MozillaIoT on Twitter.

December 4th, 2017

• Free Speech -- This week we released DeepSpeech, Mozilla’s open source speech recognition engine along with a pre-trained American English model. Our initial release is designed so developers can use it right away to experiment with speech recognition, and so includes pre-built packages for Python, NodeJS, and a command-line binary. DeepSpeech represents over a year of effort by our team and a community of like-minded developers, and provides an open source speech-to-text engine of exceptional quality -- our word error rate is 6.5%, on par with how we do as humans. Check out the blog post for more info.
• Free Speech Data -- As a companion story to release of our DeepSpeech engine, we also announced release of Mozilla’s Common Voice dataset. Common Voice accumulated 400,000 recordings from 20,000 different people, totalling over 500 hours of speech That makes it the second largest publicly-available voice dataset we know of, and it’s still growing through the continued contributions of volunteers. You can download the data via the Common Voice website and we’ve included links to other open data sets that may also be of interest.
• Documenting the Web - We had our first ever meeting of the new MDN Web Docs “Product Advisory Board” last week with representatives from Google, Microsoft, Samsung, and W3C (plus Mozilla, of course). First meetings are always focused on getting things going, but part of the session was a retrospective on 2017 for MDN and it has been an outstanding year. Developer usage of MDN Web Docs, which now stands at 7.8 million visitors per month, has grown by 51% year over year which means we’ve more than doubled the growth rate compared to 2016. We estimate we’re reaching about 45% of web developers on a monthly basis, and along with the other members of the Advisory Board look forward to exciting opportunities in 2018.

November 27th, 2017

• Let’s Get Medieval -- Mozilla and Sketchfab announced the winners of the Real-time Design Challenge we co-sponsored, focused on developing creative commons assets that can be shared and used for building games and experiences in VR. The theme of the competition was “Medieval Fantasy”, and over the four weeks of the challenge we had 105 submissions and were able to crowdsource hundreds of assets. You can see who won and read more on the announcement post. And there’s a follow-on community challenge to come, based on A-frame.
• Understanding Our VR Popularity -- We’ve started to get preliminary results from new telemetry in WebVR to help us understand how it is being used. While the data is still coming in and being analyzed, we do see about a million users a day hitting WebVR content of some kind, which is *amazing*. Stay tuned for more insights here, and a cool new dashboard (soon).
• Business Modeling -- ET hosted a non-traditional business model workshop in partnership with Models of Impact, using their open source toolkit designed for organizations looking to effectively blend revenue and social impact. A group of participants from across the company explored techniques for combining a wide range of business model components for sustainably reaching conscious choosers and developers. You can try it yourself or in your teams -- it’s all open source -- so contact us if you’d like to know more.
• More Quantum, Creatively - Quantum interest is still very high on our Mozilla Hacks blog and Dan Callahan published a post on new features in Firefox 58. Firefox Quantum made Firefox fast again, but speed is only part of the story. A ton of work has gone into making Firefox an exceptional tool for creating on the Web. You can see some of what’s coming for Firefox 58 by taking a look at Firefox Developer Edition.

November 20th, 2017

• Quantum Propulsion -- Firefox Quantum’s release last week was a really big deal, and those of us in ET were especially proud to usher in the release with Lin Clark’s excellent article “How Firefox Got Fast Again” on the Mozilla Hacks blog. Lin’s article was such a hit that it’s currently the 23rd most up-voted post on Hacker News ever, beating out both the death of Google Reader and the debut of Ubuntu on Windows. Lin’s article and the Firefox Quantum release notes were the most popular two posts in the past month. We’ve also had a lot of positive pick-up on our related articles, including Salva de la Puente’s overview of Quantum’s impact on WebVR.
• Are you talking to me? -- Project DeepSpeech continues to train a speech-to-text model that we plan to release by the end of the month. The team is preparing press materials and packaging the code so it’s easy to use from C++, Python, Node.js, etc. Stay tuned, as we may put out a call for volunteers to help test the engine in the near future.
• See y'all in Austin -- We’re eagerly anticipating the Y’all Hands in Austin next month. For those of you who will be there, Emerging Technologies will host a few special sessions that we’d love to see you attend:
  • Tuesday at 17:00 -- Demos of all of our Projects and Research
  • Thursday at 13:00 -- Our always-popular Research Lightning Talks.
  • We’re also hosting electives on Mixed Reality, Voice-driven User Interfaces, the Web of Things, and Machine Learning.

November 13th, 2017

• Describe all the things -- Members of our Project Things team represented Mozilla at the W3C Web of Things working group last week. There are a number of aspects of our experimental efforts we’re keen to bring into the W3C working group discussion, and began that process last week by submitting a co-authored proposal for a generalized, extensible way to describe any device connected to the World Wide Web.
• Faster in stereo -- We implemented in Servo a new WebGL architecture that takes a different (but still standards-based) approach to rendering stereo images, resulting in performance improvements of up to 40% in displaying WebVR content. Technical details and some additional related updates are on our Mozilla VR blog.
• Countdown to Launch -- As we all know, Firefox Quantum launches tomorrow and we couldn’t be more excited. Watch for some updates and blog posts from Emerging Technologies as part of the grand festivities.

November 6th, 2017

• Increasing interest in the future of speech technology - An interview with Mozilla Research’s Kelly Davis by British Airways appeared as part of a story on the future of voice recognition as the cover article of their “Business Life” magazine. (And in the “Future” section!) Kelly’s comments highlighted the article’s recognition of speech interfaces for accessibility and in creating a richer, safer world for humans. (You can read the article by flying on British Airways, or by downloading the magazine app on iOS or Android.)
• Fun with Rust (Lots of fun!) -- Popular independent game developer Chucklefish announced they’re building one of their next two projects in Rust, and had some great comments on why they feel strongly about doing so in a post on Hacker News. (Chucklefish is responsible for major game titles like ‘Stardew Valley’ and ‘Starbound’ and publishes on multiple gaming platforms so it’s great to have them actively involved with Rust.)
• Stanford Encourages You to Rewrite it in Rust -- Speaking of Rust, Stanford has added coverage of Rust to its Programming Languages course, and specifically structured the exposure through exercises in which students rewrite three small existing applications in Rust to understand how knowledge can transfer from one language to another and get used to the basic Rust workflow. You can try it out too through the course assignment repo on github.

October 30th, 2017

• SPECIAL EDITION: Emerging Technologies in London - This week ET’s Headlines come to you from along the banks of the Thames
• Gateway Up Close and Personal - Our Project Gateway team had a busy week in London, capped by two days demoing at MozFest and also hosting a hands-on Saturday afternoon workshop for a room full of eager developers and curious community members. The week also included further work on our contribution to the W3C “Web of Things” standards working group, which we’re finalizing in advance of a its meeting in early November.
• View Source Recap - View Source, our front-end developer and designer event in London the day before MozFest, was completely sold out and a hive of activity. Twelve presentations covered topics like the “Indie Web”, Web performance and security, WebVR and fonts, new and exciting ways to build for and on the web, hacking your coffee machine, and a powerful call for enlightened technological activism. We streamed everything live and also recorded it for later viewing so stay tuned for details on how you can see everything you missed.

October 23rd, 2017

• Making Web Development A Little Easier - Last week Mozilla announced formation of the MDN Product Advisory Board to bring other industry leaders together and collaboratively grow cross-browser documentation on MDN. Microsoft, Google, Samsung, and the W3C are our initial Advisory Board members, and we’d welcome others to join as well. Six million developers and designers visit MDN each month and readership is growing at 40% annually, and there was lots of positive reaction to our announcement, so we know there’s tremendous interest in learning and sharing information about building for the open web. Microsoft announced they've already started redirecting over 7,700 MSDN pages to corresponding topics on MDN.
• Much Anticipated Incremental Acceleration - The Rust team landed new and incremental compilation updates, and though there’s still lots of optimizing and tuning yet to be done early results show as much as a 30% improvement in compilation times. This is something that has been in the works for a long time, so congratulations to everyone involved. (And hey, it makes is all even *more* productive, so thanks!
• Speed Through the History of Virtual Reality -- How about a quick, five minute journey through the evolution of Virtual Reality from the stereoscope through the ViewMaster, Sensorama, Sword of Damocles, Data Glove, VR pods in malls, VRML, WebVR, and more? Josh Marinacci from our DevRel team is your tour guide, and you’ll find the video here.

October 16th, 2017

• Mozilla Wins Developer Satisfaction Awards - At their 2017 Future Developer Summit this past week SlashData (previously VisionMobile) recognized nine organisations from the software industry as leaders for developer satisfaction based on feedback from over 40,000 developers surveyed annually from around the globe. Mozilla was overall winner for documentation in developer programs (yay, MDN!), and 2nd runner up for engagement through developer programs (yay, DevRel!) We received actual trophies for our awards so will find a way to share them when they arrive. More info from SlashData
• New Project Things Gateway Release - We’ve landed version 0.2 of Project Gateway and there are a whole bunch of great features for you to check out. A built-in speech interface enables voice interaction with the gateway and connected devices, you can upload a floor plan of your physical space and manage devices using it, a powerful rules-engine facilitates command and control, and we’ve made the whole system a lot more robust and transparent. This is the version we’ll be showcasing at MozFest in a couple of weeks, including a hands-on workshop for interested community members. Grab a copy from github, install it on your Raspberry Pi 3, and let us know what you do with it, or just come by and see us at MozFest.
• It’s All About The Jank - Lin Clark’s latest “Code Cartoons” post appeared on our Hacks Blog and gave us a comprehensive walk through of WebRender, another big piece of Servo that’s making its way into Firefox through Project Quantum. To help us all understand why WebRender offers such tremendous advantages in graphics performance and smoothness Lin took us through an up-close tour of the browser rendering engine, patiently explaining and cleverly illustrating all sorts of magic we all benefit from but few understand. The post got a ton of visibility on the web (#1 on Hacker News, for example) and social media. You should definitely check it if you haven’t already.

October 9th, 2017

• It’s Implementation Time! - The Rust community has been hard at work throughout the year on the overall roadmap and enters Q4 at the start of a focused “Implementation Period” dedicated to completing work on committed features. Not all of them involve writing code! There are already 35 teams up and running to plan and implement the features, so if you’ve ever wanted to contribute to Rust but weren’t sure how now is the perfect opportunity for you! We’ve published all the details in an introductory blog post, set up interactive channels for each group, and will be publishing a weekly newsletter to keep everyone involved. Love to have you join us!
• WebVR on MacOS - If you’ve been watching for WebVR support in MacOS you’ll be happy to know that it has just been enabled by default in Firefox Nightly. We currently support OpenVR for the HTC Vive on MacOS High Sierra, with announcements of compatibility on other headsets and confirmed release dates in Firefox still in progress -- so stay tuned for future updates.
• RustFest Zurich - RustFest is an ongoing series of conferences dedicated to Rust and the Rust community in Europe. The second 2017 RustFest event took place last week in Zurich and was the largest one so far with over 220 rustaceans attending two days of talks and workshops. For more information on RustFest and materials from past events, head over to the RustFest website
• WebRender News - An important part of Project Quantum is getting WebRender, Servo’s graphics engine, integrated into Firefox. WebRender is already in Firefox Nightly and early adopters are starting to comment publicly on how much they like it . If you’d like to know more about the novel architecture of WebRender and why it is important for Firefox you should check out a great post on the Mozilla Gfx Team Blog

October 2nd, 2017

• Congratulations André !! -- For the fifth year in a row CNET’s Spanish-language sister site CNET en Español has assembled its annual list of 20 Most Influential Latinos working in technology and we are INCREDIBLY proud that Mozilla’s and ET’s very own André Natal was included, recognizing his many years of continuing contribution to voice and speech software.
• Donate your noise to science - Our research team has been exploring application of deep learning concepts to the classic problem of removing noise from voice, and doing so in a compact and efficient way that could be used everywhere to improve phone conversations, conference calls, live meetings and more. They’ve created a demo that shows and explains how their implementation, RNNoise, works including letting you try it out live from your web browser. Because the deep learning approach requires training you can help us make the algorithm much better by donating a minute of your noise from anywhere you might communicate. Visit the demo site to learn more, or you can go right to the ‘Donate your Noise to Science’ page and contribute.
• Winners in the sixth annual Js13kGames contest were just announced - In case you’re not familiar with the Js13kGames competition it’s run by Mozillian Andrzej Mazur and awards over $20,000USD in prizes for HTML5 and JavaScript games that must be no larger than 13 kilobytes. In addition to the traditional Desktop, Mobile, Server, and Community categories new this year was a special category for A-Frame VR games, with judges from our Mozilla VR and DevRel teams. See all the entrants (and by "see" we mean "play"), and the winners, at http://2017.js13kgames.com/#winners.

September 25th, 2017

• Project Gateway at MozFest - Look for our Project Gateway team at MozFest this year (October 28-29th) as we’ll be staffing a demo table throughout both days of the event plus hosting a hands-on workshop to help people get involved. Reminder: Project Gateway’s goal is to let you build your own Web of things gateway based on the Raspberry Pi. More information and all the code is available on github.
• Growing support for WebVR - At their Edge Web Summit last week Microsoft demonstrated support for WebVR 1.1 in Edge on their Mixed Reality Headsets. They showcased A-Frame as part of their demo, which was enabled through contributions from both Microsoft and our team here at Mozilla just in time for the 0.7.0 release of A-Frame. WebVR support is currently available in Edge for developers and is scheduled for broad consumer availability in the Windows 10 Fall Creators Update next month alongside the release of the Windows Mixed Reality headsets.

September 18th, 2017

• Big Welcome - This past Monday we had six new folks join our Mixed Reality team, coming to us after working together at Altspace VR. In pursuing ET’s mission of growing new areas for Mozilla we’d identified a key opportunity for virtual and augmented reality in building new services and products around identity, presence, avatar, and multi-user services. We aim to build open services that work across both the tens of millions of VR devices and hundreds of millions of handheld AR devices to be enabled in the coming weeks through Apple’s ARKit and Google’s ARCore. Definitely watch this space...
• Update on our Voice Fill experiment via Test Pilot -- We’ve fielded 29,955 spoken queries and are working on an update that would add voice integration to even more frequently visited Google, Bing, Yahoo, and Duck-Duck-Go websites. We’re also starting to receive contributions to the underlying code from community members, which is great!
• We’re kicking off our Developer Roadshow in Asia this week and next, with stops in Singapore, Ho Chi MInh City, Taipei, Kuala Lumpur, Penang, and Hong Kong. Check out the website for links and more details, especially if we’ll be somewhere near you.

September 11th, 2017

• Project Things mentioned in a publication - The MagPi publication (official Raspberry Pi magazine) has an article about our Things project (issue 61) in the September issue which talks about Mozilla’s efforts in the area of IoT and Web of Things in particular.
• More companies announce they are using Rust in production - Atlassian & Tumblr have indicated they are doing so and will add their names to the “Friends of Rust” page. In case you’re curious, adding those two brings the official total to ninety five -- so stay tuned for word that we’ve reached one hundred organizations with Rust in production.
• We’re number one! - Initial integration of language model into a TensorFlow connectionist temporal classification beam search yielded a 6.48% word error rate on the Librivox clean test data set for DeepSpeech. What the heck does that mean? It means we have the best open source speech recognition engine (as our closest alternative, Kaldi, has a 8.01% word error rate on that same test data set). Booyah!
• More languages for Deep Speech - Oh, and we’ve landed the code that provides multi-language support for Deep Speech so the Community is now actively working on adding French, German, Spanish, Macedonian, Urdu, Persian, and Kurdish.

August 28th, 2017

• RustConf 2017 happened this past week in Portland, Oregon and was a big success. The event was completely sold out, which translates into 275 attendees all involved in and excited about Rust -- and we had lots of positive reactions from them during the conference. We also had conversations with a number of important tech companies including Google, Microsoft, Facebook, Intel, and Baidu, all of whom are looking at Rust and some already using it . (We even heard that Amazon is hiring for Rust so they’re active too.). RustBridge, an all-day diversity-focused initiative, had their fifth meeting at RustConf, with 20 attendees from underrepresented groups learning to program in Rust. Here's a picture: https://twitter.com/ag_dubs/status/898687617427881985
• Lin Clark published another in her series of “Code Cartoons” blog posts, this time on Quantum CSS (which we also know as “Stylo”). In order to properly explain Stylo Lin demystified and illustrated quite a lot of what goes on inside a web engine, and, like her other “Code Cartoons” the post has been very well received -- reaching over 650 points on Hacker News and being picked up by a variety of tech press and social media. Check it out: https://hacks.mozilla.org/2017/08/inside-a-super-fast-css-engine-quantum-css-aka-stylo/
• A big change is in the works for MDN Web Docs, in the form of an interactive code editor that will be added directly in relevant pages so developers can easily see and experiment with JavaScript and Web APIs. Starting this week we’ll be carefully A/B testing the interactive editor with a few users on a few pages, but if you’re curious you can get a look starting tomorrow (Tuesday) when the test goes live using one of these two magical URLs: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/CSS/box-shadow?v=b and https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/JavaScript/Reference/Global_Objects/Array/push?v=b
• The second Alliance for Open Media (AOM) face-to-face meeting since the start of AV1 development happened last week. There were twenty-five tools presented over two days. Eleven were adopted or conditionally adopted, and three of those were ours. Google presented seventeen of the twenty-five tools, and had five adopted or conditionally adopted.

August 21st, 2017

• Over 300,000 recorded voice samples have been contributed so far to Common Voice, adding up to over 400 total hours of data. We’ve also had over half a million samples validationsl. (In case you didn’t know, you can contribute not only by leaving us samples of your own voice but by listening to other people’s samples and confirming they match the target phrase. Check it out at https://voice.mozilla.org!).
• To understand a bit more about voice assistants, to inform a project we’re calling Foxy, we gathered about a hundred Alexa logs from Reddit and social media by paying $5 each for them. We found that around 40% of all commands were about music - playing artists or genres, stopping or starting playback, that kind of thing. Another 15% were general search queries: who did the voices for Animanics, or what’s the weather in Seattle? And another 15% were Internet of Things related queries, particularly turning lights on and off, so that’s informing some of the work we’re doing in Web of Things.
• VoiceFill has been running within Test Pilot. We’ve had 11,722 users enable Voice Fill overall. Over 800 users have been active in just in the past seven days, engaging in almost 2000 sessions, and we’re continuing to explore and experiment.

August 14th, 2017

• Facebook is open-sourcing a large Rust codebase! (It’s a modern take on the ancient theme of mediating between humans and trees.) Facebook is releasing a high performance mercurial server written in Rust. It’s open source, GPLv2. The project is called Mononoke and you can take a look on GitHub at https://github.com/facebookexperimental/mononoke.
• Firefox 55 made history as the first desktop browser to ship with WebVR enabled by default! (It’s just as much fun but a whole lot easier to maintain than those flying cars we’ve all been waiting for.) If you have a Rift or Vive, head on over to vr.mozilla.org for immersive demos. And if you’d like to develop VR content, the entire WebVR API is documented on MDN.
• The View Source conference is coming to London in October! View Source is a fantastic single-track conference, bringing visionary speakers to designers and front-end developers, and registration is now open. View Source is on October 27th, right before MozFest on the 28th and 29th. Sign up if you can make it, and spread the word!

August 7th, 2017

• Publish your own 360 degree videos with a new WebVR template! It’s easy to build Virtual Reality scenes with A-Frame, but we’re making that even easier by adding a tool that can get your project started using pre-built templates. A great first example of that is a template for publishing your 360 degree videos in VR. If you’d like to give it a try or just see how it works check out Salva’s blog post (Beware, this new tool is still in pre-release. Here be dragons.)
• Search the web with your voice using Firefox today! The Voice Fill test pilot went live last week and has been receiving a lot of attention: CNBC and TechCrunch both covered the launch with CNBC calling it a “challenge to Google’s AI dominance”. We’re closely monitoring how that experiment goes and working on a follow up release to make it even better and more responsive.
• Automate the web of things in your home! We landed an initial proof of concept prototype of a rules engine for the Things Gateway which lets you set “if this then that” style rules for the web of things in your home. Look out for an upcoming article about Mozilla’s Project Things in the official Raspberry Pi magazine, MagPi. A big shout out to community contributor Ian Gilham for contributing a new device adapter for the Things Gateway! Find out how you can contribute on our web site.

July 31st, 2017

• We need your voice! Literally! We recently unveiled Common Voice, a new project we’ve jointly created with the folks in Open Innovation. Common Voice seeks to create an open collection of labelled voice data anyone can use to build highly-accurate voice recognition software. We’ve asked people to help us out by capturing their voice and are receiving 15-20 thousand recordings a day. And we’re getting lots of good press coverage too. If you’ve participated already, “Thank you!”, and if not but would like to please head on over to the web site. We’re currently only set up to record English language samples but other languages are coming soon.
• WebVR in Firefox keeps getting better! Thanks to some requests from our friends at Sketchfab, we’ve made some substantial performance improvements. Sketchfab released the world’s first WebVR animated short film, including with full sound support. It’s an excellent example of the ongoing feedback loop between folks with the urge to create and our efforts to make the web better at supporting that creativity! Read more and watch (hear!) the video
• Big thanks to Dietrich Ayala for the blog post chronicling the amazing performance improvements in Firefox’s tab handling. We loved the social media and press pick-up around your 1691 open tabs, thanks to Quantum Flow. (I now have a new life goal...so thanks also for that). Check out headlines like “Firefox’s blazing speed with huge numbers of tabs leaves Chrome in the dust” to get the feeling of winning.
• The “Voice Fill” experiment we highlighted last week is slated to go live tomorrow, August 1. It was delayed along with all the pending Test Pilot projects, but we’re very happy it’s going forward now.

July 24th, 2017

• AV1 codec now enabled in Firefox Nightly. Check it out by watching a bit of the short film ‘Tears of Steel’ at http://demo.bitmovin.com/public/firefox/av1/. Keep in mind when you do that the whole idea here is to provide (and improve!) high quality audio and video on the web and make it all completely open and royalty free.
• Stylo has landed in Firefox Nightly on all platforms, so there’s more of Servo (and Project Quantum) for you to explore. It’s off by default but you can turn it on via a pref. Details on how to do that and general Stylo status info is available in a public Etherpad here.
• Keep an eye on Test Pilot this week for news as we’re launching an experiment called “Voice Fill” which will let you interact with the Web by talking to Firefox. Up first will be voice input to search engines so you can initiate web searches through speech.
• We’ve unveiled “Project Things” our Web of Things initiative, and our first project, an open WoT gateway, is available on github for download and use on a Raspberry Pi' Give it a try! Turn your lights on and off at home with it. (We do.)
• We trust you’re keeping an eye on what we’re up to with Developers by following our Hacks blog, but in case you aren’t Lin Clark published another great “Code Cartoon”, this time explaining how you can add WebAssembly to JavaScript on your web page and what’s going on under the covers when you do that. And we have posts from Andre Vrignaud and Jukka Jylänki about the latest and greatest for gaming on the Web.