Mozilla-Seneca Projects QA

Please add your questions for Shaver below. We'll use this list as a starting point for his talk on Wednesday. Any serious questions from the community are also welcome:

General Interest

• How long have you been working on Mozilla?

• If you were a tree, what kind of tree would you be? (dria)

• Do you ever use a web browser that is not Firefox? If so, what would be one feature from that browser that you would like to see in Firefox? (moe)

• Computer technologies move very quickly and what's the best today may become obsolete next year, usually because of the 'new thing' nobody thought about. Are you considering this in choosing worthwhile projects within the Mozilla Foundation and can you share any of your ideas on this topic? (andrew)

• Mozilla is a not-for-profit corporation. Where does a corporation of this size look for funding? Would a for-profit Mozilla be viable? (lorne/halcyon1234)

Project Specific

• A number of the projects have connections, for example, the d-bus and AppleScript project both need to allow data from outside to pass into the browser. Can you comment on this? Where to start in terms of the Mozilla side?

• What types of "web services" can you imagine people wanting to connect a generalized-Joga extsion to?

• Many of the projects have extension pieces (e.g., Joga, Bug Triage extension, etc.), and it seems like connecting these to the XULRunner project might be a good idea. Can you talk a bit about XULRunner with regard to these projects?

• There is a lot of talk about Airbag as a potential replacement for Talkback. Can you talk about Airbag and what you see as the possible outcomes for people working on this? Where does Firefox connect to Airbag (i.e., where are the points of contact within Mozilla to an Airbag server)?

• Would you be able to comment on the involvement of Apple in Firefox, more specifically the integration of the OS X Keychain?

• A couple of projects require the creation or modification of UI in Firefox. Could you provide us with some insight as to how the code behind Firefox interacts with the user?

Open Source Development Best Practices/Skills

• It's clear that one of the main advantages of open source development is being able to use/consult/model/etc. existing code. How does one do this practically? For example, with respect to the OS X Keychain integration project, knowing that this has been done in other projects, where does one begin and how?

• A number of previous speakers have mentioned LXR. Can you show us some of the ways you use LXR?