Alexander Sack (asac)'s software site

In order to not loose upstream support for nss/nspr, we are working on upgrading nss to the latest upstream release in hardy, intrepid and jaunty. The plan is to first get some pre-testing in a PPA and if that works well, go through -proposed to -updates and -security.

Although nss and nspr follow really strict ABI rules – otherwise we wouldn’t consider to do this – this kind of update needs extra care and testing; even more so, because this has special implications on distribution upgrades. For example, the version in hardy-security will be higher than the version in intrepid-release, which can lead to tricky situations.

To document the progress of our efforts, we set up a wiki page. It also gives information how to test the special implications mentioned above.

OK, so here the instructions on what needs to be done:

Prerequisites:

Hardy, intrepid and jaunty users need to upgrade nss and nspr to the latest versions in the nss3.12.3 ppa. Just enable the PPA and update your system to do that.

Testing:

1. Use firefox and friends and report any regression you find (comment or IRC).
2. There are also other applications you use that might be affected and you would want to test; to spot those, please check the output of “apt-cache rdepends libnss3-1d libnspr4-0d”. Please test those thoroughly as well.
3. Besides from upgrading real installs to latest nss/nspr from the ppa, we also need to do two extra tests with intrepid and jaunty installs – pure installs, that don’t have any security/stability updates yet. See the wiki pages “special testing” section for background on this. As usual, all tests can also be done in VMs; for most a chroot would be fine as well.

Let me know about your test results – either comment here or drop me a message in #ubuntu-mozillateam on irc.ubuntu.com.

Edit: doing this has some risks; so if you rely on a rock solid ubuntu experience, don’t do this.

There is some valuable discussion about what the multisearch extension we just added to firefox in alpha3 does and why it does it the way it does it. Instead of replying to all the threads and bugs individually we decided that its better to put the information to a central place (like this blog).

So here the basic facts on what Multisearch is:

1. First of all it’s an experiment designed for an ubuntu alpha release (meaning: this is not expected to make all happy, nor should someone expect this to be of production quality now).
2. The multisearch extension adds a new search place to your browser experience, namely: newtab; hence the name “Multisearch”.
3. The multisearch extension changes search identifiers in all four search places (homepage, awesomebar, quicksearch, newtab); also we had to switch to Google’s “Custom Search” as that was technically the most feasible way for us to get the anonymous usage patterns we are looking for in this experiment.
4. The multisearch extension can be disabled in Tools -> Addons; this was done intentionally so you can easily (and should) do this if the Custom Search interferes with your workflow.

So that’s basically what it does; imo, there is not much else to wonder ‘bout, really! Also there is by far no conspiracy, nor do we want to remove features from your google search; it’s just that for now we want the data for your usage
patterns mentioned in 3.

Anyway, I don’t want to reply to each and every claim and rumor and conspiracy theory posted around the web; but still I want to remove some understandable concerns that sprung up. So here a few more points that I think are worthwhile to mention:

• “Multisearch” (extension id: me001@canonical.com) is not intended to stay forever – at least not in its current form.
• “Multsearch” 0.0.1 does not reflect how a newtab experience would look like, if we decide to implement something like that for karmic; check out the mozilla newtab efforts to get an idea [1][2]; something like that combined with our own ideas would probably be closer to any eventual karmic newtab experience. If you like the general idea of having a useful newtab experience and want to contribute, use this event as a chance to file bugs about it. Remember to tag your bug “multisearch”, as otherwise we might not see it when reviewing all the feedback we got.
• “Multisearch” is not a well thought out name ;); it was just choosen as a project codename; we didn’t want to put much thought in it for now; also I felt using “Multisearch” is a better name than just “me001@canonical.com”.

Last but not least, I want to answer a few core concerns I picked up from the various places I found:

• “You installed this without asking/permission”: We regularly change features for software during the development release; also we add new stuff to our default installs that will get automatically installed if you opted into ubuntu-desktop; I agree that it might have been better to move this to a standalone package and seeding that through ubuntu-desktop; but then its just an intermediate thing what you see now and you can always disable it in Tools -> Addons for the time being.
• “You are trying to make money from me”: For now nobody wants to make money from you. If we wanted to make money putting this in an early alpha release would probably be a pretty bad business decision. Even if we wanted to make money from you, we should still clarify what “we” means here; it basically means “ubuntu”: and even though it might practically mean canonical its obvious that getting a constant revenue stream will help to fund more talented developers and events to keep ubuntu the best distribution that exists.
• “Custom Search delivers an inferior search experience”: this is true, but using the “Custom Search” bits was the most feasible way of pursuing this experiment for us; we are also sure that this experiment will be of a great longterm benefit for the ubuntu project as a whole, so please be patient.

Jaunty:

11:11 < asac> we only use official branding for our default browser
11:11 < asac> (default for jaunty is 3.0)
11:11 < asac> also we explicitly want both to be installable side by side
11:11 < asac> and same branding would make them indistinguishable on your desktop
11:11 < asac> another point to consider is that branding is part of top-level UI
11:11 < asac> and changing (top-level) UI is not something we do in stable/security updates anyway

Karmic:

12:12 < asac> we only use official branding for our default browser
12:12 < asac> good news is that firefox 3.5 will become our default browser in karmic soon
12:12 < asac> - which is when we will do the branding switch
12:12 < asac> if you are curious, there is a blueprint for transitioning to firefox 3.5 by default
12:12 < asac> it is called desktop-karmic-firefox-3.5 and has lots of TODO's
12:12 < asac> wanna help? join #ubuntu-mozillateam on freenode!

Update: firefox 3.5 is not called Shiretoko in karmic anymore. Thx!

Update: please read http://www.asoftsite.org/s9y/archives/161-FAQ-Why-is-my-firefox-3.5-still-called-Shiretoko.html#c927 before commenting on this post.

(See: https://blueprints.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+spec/desktop-karmic-firefox-3.5)