Exploring Things ......

First and Foremost " Happy New Year 2012".

Recently I have been exploring a lot of things which demands an article completely dedicated to it.

Mozilla Web QA Team :

Recently I started contributing to the Mozilla Web QA (Quality Assurance ) Team. Thanks to Matt Brandt for his support and motivation. I worked on two projects for Mozilla , the affiliates and the mozillians projects. As a part of a QA team we conducted various Exploratory , Manual and automated tests on these websites. The main focus of the projects for the release was the Browser-ID authentication system. We conducted a lot of tests on the new authentication system (Browser-ID) for the websites affiliates and mozillians. In this process I did make some good friends working at Mozilla. Matt Brandt (QA Lead on Input, Breakpad, Affiliates, and Mozillians) being my mentor for all my ventures , Stephen Donner (WebQA Manager for Mozilla ) for motivating me through the process. I even did had a nice  chat with developers of mozillians and affiliates on IRC channels #affiliates and #mozillians.

The Most important thing that drove me towards contributing to the Mozilla projects was the transparency with which they operate all there activities which include development ,testing or release of the products. All of there projects are Opensource hosted on github.

I did learn a lot of stuff during this venture. 

• I started coding in Python and writing automated test cases for testing websites. 
• Learnt the working of Selenium server and use of it for automating test cases.
• Understood the complete life-cycle of a bug.

Python :

Motivation behind learning and coding in Python mainly came from Mozilla . Mozilla's most of their projects require Python knowledge and since I started contributing to the Mozilla Team , I needed Python for writing unit and automated test cases for testing websites. I learnt most of the stuff about Python from a book "Dive into Python" and Markana tv videos on Python.

Python is indeed a great language and it was always my dream to code in Python some day but did not get enough motivation and time .

Github repo for Python code snippets https://github.com/rShetty/pythology.

Javascript :

Motivation behind learning Javascript was the project for my 7th sem (The QA Portal). To bring dynamicity and to implement events to the site we needed Javascript . I started my Journey to learn JavaScript with book "JavaScript: The definitive guide " One of the finest books of all times for JavaScript. Further I explored the Jquery Library in JavaScript which is just Mind Boggling Library.I also coded in node.js  (Javascript platform for building fast ,scalable applications ).

Github repo for the Javscript https://github.com/rShetty/jsbits.

So far it was great experience exploring stuff . Hope in 2012 I explore more awesome stuff and Primarily code more :)

about:telemetry

about:telemetry is a new functionality included in firefox 6 and above versions.This basically is an add-on to the browser. You can install it from here

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/abouttelemetry/ .

Earlier firefox team relied on some standard benchmarks such as Spidermonkey , Talos etc to test the firefox browser and optimize it accordingly. This did not seem correct as the browser was used by varied people having different system environments and configurations. Thus the Mozilla team decided to build this add-on known as about:telemetry which basically sends the browser performance statistics of every firefox user with the add-on installed to the Firefox team. This helps them analyze the varied environments the browser is being deployed and optimize on it accordingly.

This indeed seems to be great idea!!!! ALOHA

Firefox takes care to protect the privacy of the users by sending only the relevant information.

Install the add-on now , and help firefox team build better browsers optimized for your systems in the future.

Firefox Hack

Here is a simple Firefox hack to introduce backward and forward compatibility into your Firefox Browser.

MOZILLA FIREFOX : BROWSER OF THE FUTURE

Mozilla as we know is a global community of thousands of people all over the world who believe in the power of technology in enriching people's lives . It is a non-profit organization .
Mozilla Firefox being the open-source software project , It's code is readily available to the public on internet and other media.
Mozilla Firefox is a browser developed by Mozilla corporation which is presently working on Firefox 4.0 beta which can be downloaded at http://www.mozilla.com/en-US/firefox/beta/
Presently the stable version of firefox being the Firefox 3.6.8 , which is readily available for download at http://www.mozilla.com/en-US/
Mozilla Firefox is the most secure, robust , and fully customizable web-browser.
It is indeed one of the best browsers in the market with its features such as :