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Mozilla QA now has a new addition to its family, QABot! We’re using him in #testday to answer commonly asked questions like the following:

qacmds?

This command will output all possible answerable questions by qabot.

builds?

This command will output the location of builds for the testday.

testplan?

This command will output the location of the testplan for the testday.

testday?

This command will output the event link on QMO for the testday.

topic?

This command will output the topic of the testday.

results?

This command will output the number of bugs filed for the testday.

To ask QABot any of these questions, just simply type in “qabot:” and then “command” (i.e. “qabot: builds?” to get the builds for the current testday). Big thanks to Raymond Etornam (irc: retornam) and Tanner Young (irc: tmyoung) in getting this accomplished.

The Mobile QA team and Mario Alvarado have been formulating a set of specifications for a beta tester tool extension that can help out our community in really getting a better grasp of testing their Fennec builds and would like to ask our community about any comments/suggestions they may have. Here’s what we’ve come up with so far:

- screenshots-taking capabilities
- copy-paste build id
- quickly disable extensions.checkCompatibility without going to about:config
- quickly enable the error console without going to about:config
- determine full build identifier (full 14-digit)
- copy list of extensions to clipboard
- save webpage source code

If anyone has something they’d like to see added, or just want to talk about the ones mentioned above, please feel free to comment on this blog post!

About 3 months ago, I took a walk around a park near my parent’s house with my handy Nokia N900 in hand. During the walk, I remembered that I needed to find movie times for Avatar that night. So, during a quick check on Fandango, I noticed a problem with the Form Fill Helper. Well, I was in the middle of a walk on a weekend afternoon and filing a bug on Bugzilla via a mobile device really didn’t tickle me anything fancy. It sucked that there wasn’t a method for users to report problems easily within the browser without jumping through hoops.

So, I undertook a little initiative to port and morph the “Report Broken Website” Feature from Firefox into Fennec. From that initiative, I’m happy to introduce the Website Problem Reporter! It’s a feedback mechanism which allows anyone, using Fennec, the capability to submit problems they find during their browsing session without having to leave the website where the problem was found.

How Does it Work?

When you find an issue with Fennec or a website you’re viewing using it, click on the favicon and click on the “Website Problem?” button.

Once the dialog pops up, select a category that relates to the problem you see, add a comment if you’d like and submit the report!

Where can you Get It?

Download it from its addons.mozilla.org page!

Features

* Portrait/Landscape Modes
* URL Sanitization
* Optional Comments Box
* URL, Problem Category and Comments Submission to reporter.mozilla.org

I’d like to thank Mario Alvarado for creating a great extension and getting it done in a such short amount of time. Also, I’d like to give a shout out to the Mobile Team, Asa Dotzler, Robert Accettura, Nick Nguyen, Elizabeth Compton and Julie Martin for their help throughout this process.

For those that are interested in learning about Mario’s experience with coding an extension on Fennec, take a look at his nifty blog post about some of the problems he encountered while coding it.

Belorussian translation

As of 2/25, Fennec’s build system has changed to incorporate datetime to filenames in .deb files. For anyone that’s been automatically updating Fennec nightly builds on their Nokia Maemo devices, will not continue to receive those updates unless you uninstall Fennec and then re-install it back onto the device. The reason for this change is to better work with Nokia’s application manager update service in the future and remove any potential headaches that might come about with changing versions.

If you need any help setting up your device again, just check out my blog post written back on 1/18 that offers a step-by-step guide to do so.

As most of you n900 users know now, plugins have been disabled by default due to quality issues on Mobile Firefox 1.0. The mobile team tried **really** hard to get it fixed in time for 1.0, but it just wasn’t possible. Instead, we’re treating it as an experimental feature that can be enabled for those very adventurous web browser-ers (and hopefully, bug filers *wink* ) out there. The following instructions are for those who think of themselves as such ( and, again, are those who like to file bugs on Bugzilla under Core:Plugins for Flash-related issues on Fennec *double-wink* ).

Here’s how to enable plugins on your profile for Mobile Firefox:

1. Type in “about:config” in the url bar and press enter. ( Screenshot )
2. Click on the button with the following text, “I’ll be careful, I promise!”
3. In the input field next to “Filter”, type in “plugin.disable” (without the quotation marks). ( Screenshot )
4. Tap on the row entry for “plugin.disable”
5. Press the Enter/Return key. ( Screenshot )
6. Close the browser and re-open it.

To disable, simply repeat the steps above.

One thing to note is the n900 is optimized for the h.263 codec standard. So, websites like Youtube, who use it, will play well on the device, but sites like Dailymotion and Vimeo, who don’t use it, will have a terrible time with video and/or audio playback. For those that want to watch videos on Youtube without tripping over any flash-related issues found on other sites, you can download the Youtube Enabler add-on for your video-on-mobile-device needs.