3 ms·

Thank you François for the explanation. If you are reading this, did you evaluate various information sources (Ghostery, etc.) before settling on Disconnect? It

Thank you François for the explanation. If you are reading this, did you evaluate various information sources (Ghostery, etc.) before settling on Disconnect? It would be valuable to everyone to know the results of that research; users mostly have to trust the various vendors without knowing how effective they really are. OT: Does anyone understand why Mozilla publishes valuable information like this over random personal blogs, rather than a central place like a knowledge base (e.g., a wiki)? It makes discoverability, both when the information is published and more importantly when I need it, very difficult. I know about Planet Mozilla, their aggregated blog feed, but the signal-to-noise ratio is much too low (which isn't a criticism of the content, I just don't have time or interest in that much detail about Mozilla).

ronjouch 11y ago
OP here, I discovered this via Planet Mozilla. If you can't bear the firehose, I don't know of anything close to a "knowledge base (e.g., a wiki)" curating Mozilla news. Maybe you could subscribe to https://hacks.mozilla.org/ https://hacks.mozilla.org/ and https://blog.mozilla.org/ https://blog.mozilla.org/ , but yeah you'll only scratch the surface and e.g. would have missed this post.
Osmose 11y ago
It's not intentional. Granted, it's not like Mozilla itself decided that fmarier's blog was the best place to put this, he just posted it because it's his blog and he's a smart person. :D It's actually consequence of a few things (including things I'm not aware of), like: 1. There is no one team dedicated to writing detailed technical documentation at the level you're talking about, and it's not required as part of submitting a patch. 2. The details about these implementations change often, making it harder to keep what documentation there is up-to-date. 3. Firefox is so friggin' big. It'd be a _ton_ of documentation that most users (read: not developers) wouldn't care about. We have a wiki, but it's more useful to contributors and staff than it is to the general public: https://wiki.mozilla.org https://wiki.mozilla.org We have MDN (which is also basically a wiki), which is more user-facing in terms of it's content, and it has https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/Firefox/Privacy/Tracking_Protection https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/Firefox/Privacy/Tracking..., but that doesn't go into detail like this post. It's tough.
- hackuser 11y ago
  From years watching and occasionally contributing a tiny bit to Mozilla, I got that sense. I understand that creating and maintaining technical documentation takes more resources than most people assume, but there are compromise solutions ... > it's not like Mozilla itself decided that fmarier's blog was the best place to put this, he just posted it because it's his blog and he's a smart person. ... instead of posting such things to personal blogs, where few people can discover them, how about just posting the exact same things to a central wiki? For the same amount of work by the authors, they would be far more discoverable by people who need the information; the authors would reach a much wider audience. Wiki updates could publish in Planet Mozilla. (I'd make the wiki editable only by Mozilla employees, to reduce the burden on authors who might not want to get into debates with the world over what they post.) It may not be authoritative documentation, but it would be far better than what's available now and at little additional cost. You can make clear to readers that it's ad hoc documentation (e.g., call it the Beta Wiki, put a notice at the top of each page, etc.), and at the top of each page post the date the page was last revised in a way that nobody will overlook. Right now you are wasting a lot of great knowledge by hiding it where nobody will discover it; it's like developing great features but hiding them in the interface where nobody will find them. > Firefox is so friggin' big ... It is, but to be fair there are many comparable or larger software projects out there where detailed technical documentation is more discoverable. Windows comes to mind. All easier said than done. Good luck to you guys; you do great work.
- jacquesm 11y ago
  It's also quite hard to file a bug. I did just that the other day, didn't want to make an account tried to use my github account, failed at that eventually did make an account. It's a pretty annoying bar to have to create an account with some system just to report a bug (which one should be able to do even anonymously). I understand you're trying your very best and work extremely hard but these little details all taken together add up to a fragmented and inconsistent picture which is something I really find a pity because Mozilla is an absolutely excellent product from a group of extremely capable people.
  - kuschku 11y ago
fmarier 11y ago
> did you evaluate various information sources (Ghostery, etc.) before settling on Disconnect? Monica Chew, the engineer who did the bulk of the work on this feature, did consider a number of available lists before settling on this one. The Disconnect list was the best freely-licensed (GPL) one at the time. Also, they now have a web form to let users suggest new trackers to block (https://disconnect.me/trackerprotection https://disconnect.me/trackerprotection) so it should get even better. > Does anyone understand why Mozilla publishes valuable information like this over random personal blogs, rather than a central place like a knowledge base (e.g., a wiki)? It's pretty tricky to share information in the "right place" because of the amount of information produced by everyone at Mozilla. Someone's preferred channel is often another person's blind spot. In this particular example, all of the information is on the wiki page I maintain (https://wiki.mozilla.org/Security/Tracking_protection https://wiki.mozilla.org/Security/Tracking_protection) but it felt like a more accessible description of the overall system would also be useful. I put it on my blog because it seemed too detailed/technical for my team's blog (https://blog.mozilla.org/security/ https://blog.mozilla.org/security/) or Hacks (https://hacks.mozilla.org/ https://hacks.mozilla.org/).
- hackuser 11y ago
  How ironic that I only discovered the information, present the whole time in the wiki, via your blog! Thanks for taking the time to respond and to write up the blog post in the first place. I hope what I wrote was taken as intended, referring to general practices and not to your efforts.

ronjouch 11y ago

OP here, I discovered this via Planet Mozilla. If you can't bear the firehose, I don't know of anything close to a "knowledge base (e.g., a wiki)" curating Mozilla news. Maybe you could subscribe to https://hacks.mozilla.org/ https://hacks.mozilla.org/ and https://blog.mozilla.org/ https://blog.mozilla.org/ , but yeah you'll only scratch the surface and e.g. would have missed this post.

Osmose 11y ago

It's not intentional. Granted, it's not like Mozilla itself decided that fmarier's blog was the best place to put this, he just posted it because it's his blog and he's a smart person. :D It's actually consequence of a few things (including things I'm not aware of), like: 1. There is no one team dedicated to writing detailed technical documentation at the level you're talking about, and it's not required as part of submitting a patch. 2. The details about these implementations change often, making it harder to keep what documentation there is up-to-date. 3. Firefox is so friggin' big. It'd be a _ton_ of documentation that most users (read: not developers) wouldn't care about. We have a wiki, but it's more useful to contributors and staff than it is to the general public: https://wiki.mozilla.org https://wiki.mozilla.org We have MDN (which is also basically a wiki), which is more user-facing in terms of it's content, and it has https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/Firefox/Privacy/Tracking_Protection https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/Firefox/Privacy/Tracking..., but that doesn't go into detail like this post. It's tough.

hackuser 11y ago
From years watching and occasionally contributing a tiny bit to Mozilla, I got that sense. I understand that creating and maintaining technical documentation takes more resources than most people assume, but there are compromise solutions ... > it's not like Mozilla itself decided that fmarier's blog was the best place to put this, he just posted it because it's his blog and he's a smart person. ... instead of posting such things to personal blogs, where few people can discover them, how about just posting the exact same things to a central wiki? For the same amount of work by the authors, they would be far more discoverable by people who need the information; the authors would reach a much wider audience. Wiki updates could publish in Planet Mozilla. (I'd make the wiki editable only by Mozilla employees, to reduce the burden on authors who might not want to get into debates with the world over what they post.) It may not be authoritative documentation, but it would be far better than what's available now and at little additional cost. You can make clear to readers that it's ad hoc documentation (e.g., call it the Beta Wiki, put a notice at the top of each page, etc.), and at the top of each page post the date the page was last revised in a way that nobody will overlook. Right now you are wasting a lot of great knowledge by hiding it where nobody will discover it; it's like developing great features but hiding them in the interface where nobody will find them. > Firefox is so friggin' big ... It is, but to be fair there are many comparable or larger software projects out there where detailed technical documentation is more discoverable. Windows comes to mind. All easier said than done. Good luck to you guys; you do great work.
jacquesm 11y ago
It's also quite hard to file a bug. I did just that the other day, didn't want to make an account tried to use my github account, failed at that eventually did make an account. It's a pretty annoying bar to have to create an account with some system just to report a bug (which one should be able to do even anonymously). I understand you're trying your very best and work extremely hard but these little details all taken together add up to a fragmented and inconsistent picture which is something I really find a pity because Mozilla is an absolutely excellent product from a group of extremely capable people.
- kuschku 11y ago

fmarier 11y ago

> did you evaluate various information sources (Ghostery, etc.) before settling on Disconnect? Monica Chew, the engineer who did the bulk of the work on this feature, did consider a number of available lists before settling on this one. The Disconnect list was the best freely-licensed (GPL) one at the time. Also, they now have a web form to let users suggest new trackers to block (https://disconnect.me/trackerprotection https://disconnect.me/trackerprotection) so it should get even better. > Does anyone understand why Mozilla publishes valuable information like this over random personal blogs, rather than a central place like a knowledge base (e.g., a wiki)? It's pretty tricky to share information in the "right place" because of the amount of information produced by everyone at Mozilla. Someone's preferred channel is often another person's blind spot. In this particular example, all of the information is on the wiki page I maintain (https://wiki.mozilla.org/Security/Tracking_protection https://wiki.mozilla.org/Security/Tracking_protection) but it felt like a more accessible description of the overall system would also be useful. I put it on my blog because it seemed too detailed/technical for my team's blog (https://blog.mozilla.org/security/ https://blog.mozilla.org/security/) or Hacks (https://hacks.mozilla.org/ https://hacks.mozilla.org/).

hackuser 11y ago
How ironic that I only discovered the information, present the whole time in the wiki, via your blog! Thanks for taking the time to respond and to write up the blog post in the first place. I hope what I wrote was taken as intended, referring to general practices and not to your efforts.