Mozilla Firefox (or Mozilla Politics) and Chrome

• Firefox 77 new contributors

  With the release of Firefox 77, we are pleased to welcome the 38 developers who contributed their first code change to Firefox in this release, 36 of whom were brand new volunteers!

• Mozilla's Christopher Arnold: Money, friction and momentum on the web

  Back when I first moved to Silicon Valley in 1998, I tried to understand how capital markets here made the valley such a unique place for inventors and entrepreneurs. Corporate stocks, real estate, international currency and commodities markets were concepts I was well familiar with from my time working at a financial news service in the nation's capital in the mid 1990's. However, crowdfunding and angel investing were new concepts to me 20 years ago. The emergence of crowdfunding platforms (Kiva, Indiegogo, Kickstarter, Appbackr for instance) were more to the advantage of the funding recipient than the balanced two-sided exchanges of the commercial financial system. When trying to grasp the way angel investors think about entrepreneurship, my friend Willy, a serial entrepreneur and investor, said: “If you want to see something succeed, throw money at it!” The idea behind the "angel" is that they are the riskiest of risk-capital. Angel investors seldom get payoffs from the companies they sponsor. But they do it to grow a cause they support in spite of the the uncertain outcome of the specific industry initiative they're funding, much like charitable gifting. During the Augmented World Expo in May, I attended a conference session called "Web Monetization and Social Signaling," hosted by Anselm Hook, a researcher at the web development non-profit Mozilla, where I also work. He made an interesting assertion during his presentation, "Money appears to be a form of communication." His study was contrasting social signals (such as up-voting, re-tweeting, applauding with emojis) to draw attention to content users discovered on the web, in this case the Firefox Reality VR web browser. There are many reasons for this kind of user "social signaling." It serves as a bookmarking method, it signals to friends of the user who might also like the content and it gives feedback to the content/comment provider. However, he found in his research that participants actually reacted more strongly when they believed their action contributed financial benefit directly to the other participant. The interactions we need to enable as web developers is a new kind of gesture akin to the act of tipping with cash in offline society.

• We’ve Got Work to Do

  The promise of America is “liberty and justice for all.” We must do more to live up to this promise. The events of last week once again shine a spotlight on how much systematic change is still required. These events — the deaths at the hands of police and civilians, the accusations that are outright lies — are not new, and are not isolated. African Americans continue to pay an obscene and unacceptable price for our nation’s failure to rectify our history of racial discrimination and violence. As a result, our communities and our nation are harmed and diminished. Change is required. That change involves all of us. It’s not immediately clear all the actions an organization like Mozilla should take, but it’s clear action is required. As a starting point, we will use our products to highlight black and other under-represented voices in this unfolding dialog. And we’re looking hard at other actions, across the range of our activities and assets.

• 10 Best Chrome Extensions to Save Open Tabs in Chrome

  How many times have you been researching stuff online that lead you to open more tabs than you needed? Many times I have even opened tabs and left in the far left corner of my browser because, while they had the information I was interested in returning to use later, I didn’t want to bookmark them. In a way, closing a tab makes me feel like I am done with it. But that was a while ago anyway because I have the power of tab managers under my fingers. Tab (or session) managers are productivity tools that enable one to save tabs for later as well as to easily traverse the open ones. Continuing my streak of productivity-related topics, here is my collection of the best extensions that will enable you to take back control of your Chrome tabs and browsing sessions like it’s magic.

Second Beta for Krita 4.3.0 Released

This is the second beta release for Krita 4.3.0. It’s later than expected because our system for making release builds was temporarily unavailable.

Devices With GNU/Linux

• Pinebook Pro, First Impressions

  After seeing it in action at FOSDEM (from afar, as the crowd was too large), I decided to buy a Pinebook Pro for personal use. From the beginning, the intention was to use it for pkgsrc development, with NetBSD as the main OS. It was finally delivered on Thursday, one day earlier than promised, so I thought I would write down my first impressions.

  If you have never heard of the Pinebook Pro: It is a cheap, open, hackable laptop with an ARM processor, the successor of the original Pinebook (which I thought was too low-end to be a useful daily driver) with generally more premium components.

• Let’s make art at home this week

• What’s the deal with edge computing?

  With over 41 billion IoT devices expected to be active by 2027 — that’s at least 5 devices for every person on the planet — edge computing has emerged as a tenable solution to prevent the impending snowballing of network traffic. Allow me to lift the veil on this buzzword and explain why it’s been gaining attention in tech circles lately. The concept IoT devices generate a lot of data. Smart home hubs constantly accrue information on voice commands, ambient noise, and auxiliary device output. Connected security cameras transfer several gigabytes of image data each day. And self-driving cars will, in all likelihood, be gathering hundreds of terabytes of data each year. The idea of edge computing is to process all this data at the location it is collected. Data that is only of ephemeral importance can (and should) be crunched on the device itself. This is in contrast to cloud computing, where data is sent to massive, far-away compute warehouses for processing.

• 10th Gen Comet Lake computer has GTX GPU and 10 GbE ports

  Sintrones’ fanless, Linux-ready “ABOX-5210G” transport PC features an up to 10-core Comet Lake-S CPU, Nvidia graphics, 3x M.2, 2x mini-PCIe, 3x DP, 2x HDMI, 2x SATA, and 10x GbE ports with optional PoE. Sintrones has announced the second embedded PC we’ve seen with an Intel 10th Gen Comet Lake-S processor after Vecow’s recent ECX-2000 Series. The fanless ABOX-5210G uses slightly lower powered, but more power-efficient Core TE Comet Lake-S models than the Vecow system, including a 2.0GHz/4.5GHz Core i9-10900TE. There is also a 2GHz/4.6GHz Xeon W-1290TE, which similarly offers 10x dual-threaded cores, 20MB Intel Smart Cache, and a 35W TDP.