Articles by Marco Castelluccio
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Implementing form filling and accessibility in the Firefox PDF viewer
Last year, during lockdown, many discovered the importance of PDF forms when having to deal remotely with administrations and large organizations like banks. Firefox supported displaying PDF forms, but it didn’t support filling them: users had to print them, fill them by hand, and scan them back to digital form. We decided it was time to reinvest in the PDF viewer (PDF.js) and support filling PDF forms within Firefox to make our users' lives easier.
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Testing Firefox more efficiently with machine learning
A browser is an enormously complex piece of software, and it's always in development. About a year ago, we asked ourselves: how could we do better? Our CI relied heavily on human intervention. What if we could instead correlate patches to tests using historical regression data? Could we use a machine learning algorithm to figure out the optimal set of tests to run? We hypothesized that we could run fewer tests to save money, get results faster, and reduce the cognitive burden on developers.
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Teaching machines to triage Firefox bugs
To help get bugs in front of the right Firefox engineers quickly, we developed BugBug, a machine learning tool that automatically assigns a product and component for each new untriaged bug. By presenting new bugs to triage owners faster, we hope to decrease the turnaround time to fix new issues. Check out BugBug for your own issue-tracking triage.
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Web Push notifications from Irssi
Our main communication tool at Mozilla is IRC. I’m running an IRC client called Irssi under screen on a server constantly connected to the network. It’s a close-to-perfect solution with only two outstanding issues for me. One is the lack of emoji characters (I can live with that). The other is more important: there is […]
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Offline Web Apps on GitHub Pages
Service Workers are a response to the problems of Application Cache, and they’re a powerful and elegant way to offline your web app. But they’re also more complex to implement and maintain. Meanwhile, GitHub Pages is a great, simple static host for offline-first apps. But deploying apps to GitHub Pages requires manual configuration, especially if […]
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Report from Ancona: CONFSL 2012
Last month I attended CONFSL, an interesting conference about Free Software that took place in Ancona, Italy. I had the opportunity to meet other Mozillians (Iacopo Benesperi and Francesco Lodolo) and to talk to some people working for Mozilla: Tristan Nitot, Marcia Knous, Marco Bonardo, Paolo Amadini. They are amazing people who make our lives […]
