
Firefox Test Pilot - vladikoff
https://testpilot.firefox.com/
======
greglindahl
Very excited to see this launch! The Internet Archive has been working with
browsers to check (opt-in) the Wayback Machine whenever endusers click on a
dead link. We're in the queue for the next round of Test Pilot tests!

~~~
amjd
There's an existing add-on that (kind of) does this. It checks Google Cache
and Internet Archive, among others.

[https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/resurrect-
pag...](https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/resurrect-pages/)

~~~
greglindahl
Yes, there are a bunch of plugins which kind of do this. We're hoping to get
this into all browsers, and only offer to take the end-user to the Wayback if
we actually have a good capture of the URL.

------
morinted
This looks neat because it allows people to try new features without risking
stability in a beta or nightly environment.

It also doesn't hold Mozilla accountable to get these new features into
Firefox's core without proving that they are viable and popular.

I'm impressed.

~~~
lmorchard
FWIW, we're also working to make these things remove themselves cleanly - and
if you uninstall the initial Test Pilot add-on, it pulls out all the
experimental add-ons along with it and disables any metrics we might have
enabled along with it. Bug reports very welcome if this doesn't work as
expected

------
mrmondo
Honestly all I want from Firefox is better stability and performance - I don't
care about almost anything else barring security. Firefox has become so
unstable and slow (on OSX at least) that many people I know - myself included
have switched to chromium. We don't want to use it but we have to because of
all the crashes and massive slowdowns during long running sessions or when
many tabs are open. This goes for stable, dev edition and nightly. It really
saddens me and I'm sure others because of the great work that Mozilla does
especially with regards to transparency, privacy and security.

Edit: I'm also in two minds about the plugin systems between the two browsers.
The idea of all JavaScript plugins scares me to death, there really are no
good download managers for chromium / chrome, on the other hand Firefox
plugins I rely on like Evernote web clipper keep breaking and don't even work
on dev/nightly when enforcing the new plugin system.

~~~
6a68
Test Pilot isn't happening at the cost of stability and performance
improvements. It's a complementary program that helps us ship better features
through data-driven iteration.

I hear your concerns, though. The platform and desktop teams are doing tons of
great work on improving stability and performance--you might want to give
Firefox another try sometime. If you do, maybe try out some Test Pilot
experiments while you're at it, and let us know what you think.

~~~
burfog
They "are doing tons of great work on improving stability and performance",
but I've heard this before and somehow we got to where we are today.

Do you alternate between improving these things and worsening them? Could you
possibly not worsen them, or at least warn us to not upgrade when that
happens?

Regressions are really not OK. People are trying to use this browser. Well,
mostly they __were __trying to use it. I stuck it out longer than most. Having
512 MB of RAM and dozens of tabs is my use case.

~~~
mistermann
I have 12GB of RAM and probably ~120 tabs open at any given time. This used to
be fine, but it seems Firefox is just getting worse over time, the main
problem is the frequent 5 to 30 second pauses while it is doing....something.

~~~
Morgawr
>the main problem is the frequent 5 to 30 second pauses while it is
doing....something.

Oh god I thought I was alone on this. I've been talking to various Firefox
users and nobody was able to relate with me. I usually keep Firefox open 24/7
with around 20-30 tabs open (~6 or so pinned). Every time I am typing (like in
a hangout popup window or in a HN comment) Firefox is micro-stuttering and
freezing and it eats away some of the words I am typing and it becomes very
frustrating. I ended up typing comments in vim and then copypasting because it
was faster. It feels like typing in an SSH connection with high-latency.

Also when scrolling long pages (like reddit threads) the "view" takes a while
to update so I end up scrolling down to a totally grey page which then updates
with content over and over again. And don't make me talk about twitter taking
ages and setting my CPU to 100% (one core) with loud as hell fan every time I
click on "show 50 new tweets"...

I have 16GB of RAM and a 2-years old top-of-the-line (back then) i7 CPU on a
laptop, I shouldn't be having these issues...

~~~
trycatch
Yes, I have the same problems. Last time I looked into these pauses, those
were mostly GC pauses. At first you feel like moving on a bumpy road with
micro-freezes and frame drops - that's incremental GC, and then you meet a
concrete wall - that's non-incremental GC kicks-in, sometimes in multi-second
territory. It got better in the last few releases, to be fair, but still far
away from other browsers.

------
kibwen
Is the "Tab Center" feature a prototype for an official version of tree-style
tabs, perhaps? I've seen that Servo/browser.html was experimenting with tabs-
on-the-side, I'd love to see this graduate to more than just an experiment.

~~~
chuckharmston
Potentially!

The simple story is that the current tabbing model in was designed to save you
from needing half a dozen browser window open. It just doesn't scale well past
a dozen tabs or so, and we know that some users have dozens or even hundreds
open at the same time. Tab Center is taking a fresh look at the problem with
that in mind.

~~~
chongli
The whole problem of a tab UI for power users with hundreds or even thousands
of open tabs (like me) is mindblowingly daunting. I don't know that tabs on
the side is the solution. For a long time I'd been using Tab Groups but I've
been frustrated with its limitations.

Ideally, I think I'd like something similar to the spatial system of the
Classic Mac OS Finder, which I coincidentally expounded upon recently in
another thread[0]. Tab Groups goes part of the way there with its spatial
organizational system but it lacks the hierarchy and persistence of those
Classic folders and desktop.

[0]
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11664984](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11664984)

~~~
reitanqild
Did you try tree style tabs?

It solves the problem for me using a combination of auto indentation and auto
collapsing of inactive tab trees.

~~~
chongli
My issue with systems like this is that they consume valuable horizontal real
estate. Like most people, I use a widescreen monitor. To take full advantage
of this, I use a tiling window manager (Xmonad) and typically use two browser
windows side-by-side, akin to a full two-page broadsheet newspaper. Putting a
tab bar on the side of each window would consume nearly 1/3 of the screen and
generally get in the way of the content.

~~~
greglindahl
The Tab Center in test flight mostly collapses the side tab bar unless you
hover over it.

------
lol768
Not entirely sure why this requires a Firefox account. It appears possible to
install the mentioned add-ons manually:

Tab Center appears to be available from
[http://people.mozilla.org/~bwinton/TabCenter/](http://people.mozilla.org/~bwinton/TabCenter/)

Universal search: (edit: link here was incorrect)

Activity streams: [https://moz-activity-
streams.s3.amazonaws.com/dist/latest.ht...](https://moz-activity-
streams.s3.amazonaws.com/dist/latest.html)

~~~
6a68
Hey, that's actually the wrong link for the search add-on.

What you've downloaded is a deprecated earlier prototype that may not work at
all--you're looking at the wrong github repo. (I just took down the built add-
on, so other people don't make the same mistake.)

Test Pilot is about reconnecting desktop Firefox with its community; it's
about more than just whatever add-ons are available today. We have feedback
forms now, we'll have Discourse user forums integrated soon, and I hope we can
eventually start building ideas that come from the community, with the help of
the community. You should give it a try :-)

~~~
lol768
Thanks for the heads-up regarding that link, I've edited the post just to try
and prevent any confusion.

I can totally understand wanting more community involvement in the feedback
process and with this context, the account requirement makes a lot more sense.
Thanks for explaining some of that reasoning. I only wish this was documented
a bit better on the site - I guess it just appeared a little unwelcoming to me
with the sign-in requirement at first.

Now that I've actually tried it, the site itself is very slick and the
experiments I've played with look pretty interesting. I look forward to seeing
how things develop.

~~~
6a68
Thanks for editing your post :-)

I agree, it's tough to understand much about the project based on the
testpilot.firefox.com landing page. That page is tightly focused around the
'sign up' call to action.

You can get more context from hanging around in IRC, or poking around in the
wiki or bug trackers. You can even join our team meetings if you want; they're
public. Pretty much everything is linked from our main wiki page:
[https://wiki.mozilla.org/Test_Pilot](https://wiki.mozilla.org/Test_Pilot)

------
jgruen
While this isn't integrated into the Test Pilot site UX for the time being, we
have Discourse forums set up for all of the experiments in Test Pilot.* If
you'd like to register questions or feedback ton Discourse, team members and
community moderators will be monitoring the forum.

[https://discourse.mozilla-community.org/c/test-
pilot](https://discourse.mozilla-community.org/c/test-pilot)

*Yes, you'll need to sign in with Persona ;)

------
dfc
Why do we encourage users to override security protections? I click "get
started now", and am presented with a warning message reminiscent of an ssl
cert error. In general when users see the "this site is trying to install
software" warning message I hope they become suspicious and do something else
(certainly not override the warning dialog). I am not entirely sure why that
should not be the case now. I am inclined to think that mozilla is an
organization with "good" technology and principles. But if that is the case
why cant they get the left hand to talk to the right hand and install test
pilot in a manner that does not teach users that its okay to override the
security warning dialogs?

~~~
6a68
Are you talking about the doorhanger that appears when you try to install the
add-on?

Firefox always shows a warning doorhanger if an add-on is installed from a
website other than addons.mozilla.org.

What you're seeing is a Mozilla web property following the same rules as every
other website. Nothing to worry about.

~~~
danielweber
What is a doorhanger?

~~~
chuckharmston
A doorhanger is a term for this sort of warning notification:
[http://i.imgur.com/huWjWjq.png](http://i.imgur.com/huWjWjq.png)

As 6a68 mentioned, Firefox presents this doorhanger whenever any site other
than addons.mozilla.org attempts to install an add-on.

------
fiftyacorn
My first thought was the Clint Eastwood film

~~~
cyberferret
LOL - me too! I thought someone had built a flyable Mig-31 Firefox and were
looking for someone to fly it...
[http://archive.is/ZqD9a](http://archive.is/ZqD9a)

------
dingaling
What a curious page; just blank-white in Firefox 46.0 on Linux with this
output in the console:

"You have google analytics blocked. We understand. Take a look at our privacy
policy to see how we handle your data."

~~~
6a68
You need to have JavaScript enabled to use the site

~~~
wodenokoto
That may be, but the error is still terrible.

------
smacktoward
Very nice! So far I'm liking this quite a bit, especially Tab Center.

On that note, one usability suggestion: having the tab sidebar run all the way
to the top of the window means that the years (decades?) of muscle memory I've
built up telling me to mouse to the top left of the window to hit the Back
button now results in me hitting the New Tab button. It'd be better if the
awesomebar area spanned the complete width of the window, and the tab center
column started at the same height as the content area.

------
chipperyman573
Interesting that these changes are installed via an add-on instead of through
a different browser entirely.

~~~
lmorchard
That's because a) we want to make it easier for folks to try these features
out without switching to another release channel, and b) we want to get
feedback on how they work in the browser that folks normally use day-to-day

------
tux3
I have to say I love the concept, and I'm very happy with my brand new tabs on
the side.

That said I did find a bug and I have some performance problems to report, but
it's not clear to me where I can report a bug for a particular experiment.

It looks like the feedback button wants me to fill out a whole satisfaction
survey, and "File in issue" takes me to the test pilot github, which seems to
be about the Test Pilot program in general.

Is there a better place to report bugs?

~~~
6a68
Hey there!

Our wiki has a list of bug trackers:
[https://wiki.mozilla.org/Test_Pilot#Found_a_bug.3F](https://wiki.mozilla.org/Test_Pilot#Found_a_bug.3F)

You can also talk with us in #testpilot on Mozilla IRC.

------
dynofuz
if the drone fox needs a dome, he probably also needs rockets to replace the
propellers

~~~
6a68
pull requests welcome:
[https://github.com/mozilla/testpilot](https://github.com/mozilla/testpilot)

------
toyg
This is a step in the right direction. No more should crap like Pocket land in
FF without warning. Making new features, which might be controversial, go
through a "preview" stage like this, should help restore a lot of faith in the
development process, and show that Mozilla is again focusing on the browser
rather than random me-too projects following the latest web-fad.

~~~
lmorchard
Yeah, I can't speak for everyone, but I think Test Pilot is in part a reaction
to the Pocket thing. Even among Mozilla employees, there were folks who
thought it was a great addition and there were folks who thought it was a huge
mistake.

Either way, it was a surprise, and not entirely pleasant. Test Pilot will
hopefully be a way to reduce surprises of this nature.

------
webwanderings
Firefox was once working on improving the Bookmarks Manager. I recall lengthy
articles detailing the extensive study and research (sorry, do not have the
link handy. No pun intended). Whatever happened to that project?

All the more power to introducing improvements to the Browser, but above does
not give me confidence in signing up.

------
brokentone
White screen in Chrome 43: TypeError: Array.from is not a function

~~~
cornedor
Do you have a reason to run an old Chrome version like that? Just curious.

~~~
brokentone
Corporate version... have to imagine I'm not alone.

------
tyoverby
There is no link to the Test Pilot plugin, and it's not available in the
store.

I'd like to help, but you need to make it easy :(

~~~
6a68
The Test Pilot website explains that you install the add-on after creating an
account and signing in.

It's actually super easy, give it a try :-)

------
dredmorbius
I was almost going to pass this up based on the HN discussion _and_ the
initial CTA[1] on the page. I'm still not sure this answers any of the many
frustrations, and hopes, I have for browser development,[2][3] but it's of
possible interest.

For the love of all that's holy: _Put a compelling argument for a CTA on the
page BEFORE the CTA._

And ... put a compelling argument there _regardless_. This lacks both.

The features mentioned, _especially_ tabs management, strike me as useful.
Tabs are a mistake. That's not _my_ opinion, that's Adam Stiles' view -- _and
he invented them._ Content management is a _huge_ problem.

 _Web design isn 't the solution, it's the problem._ My standing
recommendation now is that Pocket add a Web Intent to its Android app. If I
could use it rather than Firefox or Chrome for browsing, I'd be vastly
happier.

Streams, search, bookmarks, content, organisation, reputation (of authors,
sites, publishers), fact-checking, influence-registries (Nature just had an
item on this IIRC) are all other areas of issue.

 _Paying content providers_ is a concern. I'm notafan of micropayments, but
building the system into the browser is one option. Broadband or content taxes
with usage monitoring similar to music's mechanicals is another. Browsers
could play a role in both.

I'm also not a fan of having to register for stuff. But might regardless.

________________________________

Notes:

1\. Call to action.

2\. Among my longer rants, with a future roadmap:
[https://www.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/256lxu/tabbed_...](https://www.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/256lxu/tabbed_browsing_a_lousy_bandaid_over_poor_browser/?ref=search_posts)

3\. Specific to Firefox:
[https://plus.google.com/104092656004159577193/posts/VX64KGmi...](https://plus.google.com/104092656004159577193/posts/VX64KGmikfg)

~~~
ianbicking
Somewhat an aside, but Sticky Reader View would be a great Test Pilot
experiment.

~~~
dredmorbius
Good suggestion.

------
owaislone
Great, now can we have ubiquity back?

------
rhinoceraptor
Mozilla, please implement HTML5 input types.

Thanks, frontend web developers.

~~~
6a68
You'll be happy to know that somebody recently started working on the
date/time input types bug:
[https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=888320](https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=888320)

If you have a bugzilla account, you can CC yourself on the bug to catch future
updates :-)

~~~
Aldo_MX
Fine print: CCing a bug doesn't mean it will be addressed in a timely manner,
it may take 10 years[1] but in the meantime you'll receive 2,147,483,647 mails
of other people "me too"-ing and discussing about the bug.

[1] Not exaggerating:
[https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=390936](https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=390936)

~~~
kibwen
Having a ten year-old bug isn't a mark of shame, if anything it's laudable
when a project doesn't take the easy way out by silently closing ancient bugs
like most projects do. Bugs should be fixed according to importance and
priority, not simply according to age.

~~~
Aldo_MX
The problem is that "importance and priority" are pretty much subjective
terms, for example, for many people Hello or Pocket were everything but a
priority.

~~~
kibwen
The solution is that it's an open source project. If you disagree with the
priorities of the other developers, then you are empowered to take the
initiative.

~~~
alphapapa
Okay, I would like to remove Hello and Pocket from Firefox. Do you think
Mozilla will merge my pull request that I am empowered to initiate?

~~~
kibwen
As though I said anything about merging into upstream, or about Hello/Pocket,
or about "open source" meaning "dictating development with random patches". :P
But sure, if there were a ten year-old bug about removing them, then I would
certainly expect them to welcome such a patch.

~~~
alphapapa
I guess we're not understanding each other. My point is that Mozilla's
development of Firefox is no longer user-driven. Instead it's about what
Mozilla thinks users should want, and they can take it or leave it, and if it
helps Mozilla make money, users should want it.

Despite vocal and repeated requests and complaints, Mozilla refuses to back
down and remove things that users did not ask for and do not want; instead
Mozilla does things like sneak Pocket support in in a point-release without
any advance warning or any chance for the community to give feedback. And note
that Pocket has had a fully functional Firefox extension ever since it was
Read-It-Later--there was absolutely no technical reason to build in support
for Pocket and deprecate the extension.

Mozilla has never been forthcoming about the real reason for doing this. In
fact, the few Mozillians who have spoken about it seem to have had no idea why
it happened, either.

Instead all we get is vague "people want to save things, this makes it easier
for people to save things" statements. Well, people want to use Facebook, too:
where is the built-in Facebook plugin? Where's the built-in Netflix extension?
Amazon shopping support? etc. Clearly the decision to build in new Pocket code
had nothing to do with a principled policy of making things easier for users.

The only reasonable conclusion is that Mozilla cut a deal and is getting money
for it. And if that is the case, what is to stop them from doing the same for
anything else? What if Microsoft cuts a deal to build in Bing support? etc.

~~~
kibwen

      > where is the built-in Facebook plugin?
    

Years ago Facebook Messenger was actually built into Firefox. I remember using
it myself, but have no idea what's become of that effort since then. See
[https://www.facebook.com/notes/facebook-engineering/under-
th...](https://www.facebook.com/notes/facebook-engineering/under-the-hood-
facebook-messenger-for-firefox/10151175913223920/)

    
    
      > Where's the built-in Netflix extension?
    

Users demanding Netflix support is literally the reason why Mozilla was
strongarmed into adding support for EME, despite trying to hold out against it
for so long.

    
    
      > Amazon shopping support?
    

Click in the search box, type a query, and at the bottom of the suggestions
dropdown you'll see that Amazon is one of the search engines supported out-of-
the-box. I actually use this fairly regularly.

    
    
      > What if Microsoft cuts a deal to build in Bing support?
    

Just like Amazon, Bing is already supported out-of-the-box, as is Google,
Yahoo, DuckDuckGo, eBay, Twitter, and Wikipedia. Mozilla has regional
partnerships where they get paid to install such search engines, so you'll get
Baidu as your default in China and Yandex as your default in Russia. These
even vary per platform: in the US, Google is the default on Ubuntu, and Yahoo
is the default on Windows. If Yahoo collapses within the next few years, I
fully expect Microsoft to begin paying Mozilla to make Bing the default on
Windows.

These default search engines are how Mozilla makes 95% of its income
(donations are basically a drop in the bucket, and because of tax laws they
aren't allowed to use donation funds to finance Firefox development anyway).
Mozilla sees this as a problem and has been actively looking for ways to
diversify its revenue streams in the past years (go read any of their past
financial statements to see them explicitly categorize their over-reliance on
search engine revenue as a potential threat to the company), which has led to
things like FirefoxOS (in the hope that telecoms would toss some cash
Mozilla's way) and the "suggested sites" on the New Tab page. This why I find
it extremely unlikely that someone "cut a deal", because Mozilla would _want_
people to know that they're succeeding at the task of finding alternate
revenue streams.

~~~
alphapapa
> Years ago Facebook Messenger was actually built into Firefox. I remember
> using it myself, but have no idea what's become of that effort since then.

Yes, I remember. Another example of CADT-style development.

> Users demanding Netflix support is literally the reason why Mozilla was
> strongarmed into adding support for EME, despite trying to hold out against
> it for so long.

EME is about more than just Netflix, though, and I was referring to site-
specific support, just like the Pocket support only works with Pocket. As I
wrote on the mozilla-governance list, what should have been done instead is to
define and implement a save-for-later API (which could be built-in to the
Firefox Places/bookmarks/etc API), which Pocket could then add support for on
its end, and then users could choose to sync with a save-for-later API
provider.

> Click in the search box, type a query, and at the bottom of the suggestions
> dropdown you'll see that Amazon is one of the search engines supported out-
> of-the-box. I actually use this fairly regularly.

Yes, I know how the search engines work, thanks; I've been using Firefox since
at least Phoenix 0.6. Again, that is not the same thing. The search engine API
is a standard that is used by many web sites to let their site-specific
engines get added to the list. In contrast, the Pocket support _only works
with Pocket_. An analogy would be if Mozilla added an Amazon-only sidebar that
integrated Amazon.com logins and shopping lists and order status, etc. They
aren't doing that, so they shouldn't have done it with Pocket, either.

> This why I find it extremely unlikely that someone "cut a deal", because
> Mozilla would want people to know that they're succeeding at the task of
> finding alternate revenue streams.

Now that is an interesting point, and thanks for sharing that. However, I'm
still skeptical, because, again, we still have not heard an actual explanation
for why Pocket was added, other than vague "it helps people save stuff, and
people want to save stuff [even though they could already do that]."

There must have been some kind of inside deal. If not, what other explanation
is there? Mozilla added Pocket support suddenly, without any community input,
going against established Mozilla policy regarding features being in addons.
Mozilla has shown a pattern of _removing_ features and leaving the community
to reimplement them in addons, yet here it does the opposite, and for a
proprietary service! And it has ignored repeated requests for an explanation
of the real reason.

So some kind of secret, inside deal is the only answer I can see. If it wasn't
for money, it must have been for something. If you are in fact right that they
would want people to know about a deal for money, then what does that suggest?
Why would it need to be kept secret? What is going on here?

Whatever the real story, the way they are handling it undermines trust.

------
746F7475
Just gave it a 10 seconds and decided this is not for me. Very first thing I
enabled (Tabcenter) made Firefox completely unusable to a point where I
couldn't even disable the feature or uninstall the plugin. Thankfully these
pieces are named nicely in ~/.mozilla/firefox/<profile>/extensions and thus
can be removed manually.

Of course to even to read this advice after fucking up you need to know about
firefox's -P startup option.

