Stephen Donner's Weblog

Help us test search on SUMO (support.mozilla.com)

We're in the process of switching to a new (and improved) Sphinx-based search engine on SUMO (support.mozilla.com), and would *love* your help ensuring it meets your needs.

There are a number of ways you can help:

* ad-hoc test search, here: https://sumo-forumux.stage.mozilla.com for now, but probably by the time you read this, we'll have merged back into trunk: https://support-stage.mozilla.org
* Test/verify Resolved FIXED 1.5 Search bugs
* convert |in-litmus?| and/or |in-testsuite?| flagged bugs into testcases (manual and automated via Selenium, respectively)

(New to Litmus and/or Selenium? No problem! The team contact info is up at our Web Testing homepage; if you're familiar with IRC, it's best to reach us at #sumodev on irc.mozilla.org.

To familiarize yourself with what's already been found, here's our open 1.5 buglist.

Short list of things to play around with:

* proper nouns, e.g. "Facebook"
* common phrases, "Firefox crashes" (I'm talking to *you* 3.5!)
* word stems, i.e. "fail" in "failing"
* named articles, with/without quotes: "Cannot clear location bar history"
* misspellings (which tests the "Did you mean" feature)
* URLs in Forum posts and KB articles
* ensure that the results returned include Forum and KB (Knowledge Base) URLs, when appropriate (if it includes both, KB first, followed by Forum results)
* XSS

In particular, we could use help with native-language searches other than en-US (though, to be sure, we could use help there too).

* Tildes
* Umlauts
* Kanji
* Aramaic

etc...

Please file bugs here: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/enter_bug.cgi?product=support.mozilla.com

The goal is to code freeze the 24th of November and ship December 3rd.

Thanks!

In-litmus flags for SUMO and AMO now available

We now have |in-litmus| flags for bugs needing testcases in both the SUMO (support.mozilla.com) and AMO (addons.mozilla.org) projects; flag away!

To use: simply flag as |in-litmus?| if you're unsure whether a test exists; we'll triage and either add a comment (preferably with a Litmus testcase ID #), and/or flag it as + or -, depending on whether a test exists or is not needed, respectively.

(Sprinkle liberally!)

When What's New vs. First run Mozilla.com pages appear

Since I test Mozilla.com What's New and First Run pages, I thought it'd be useful to write down when which appears when.

I've put it up at our web testing wiki, and here it is, below:

* Freshly installed Firefox, you get:
o First Run (left tab focused/active)
o Firefox start page on Google.com (right tab)
* 3.0.x -> 3.5.x, you get:
o First Run (left tab)
o What's New (right tab focused/active)
* 3.0.x-1 (next-to-latest version) -> 3.0.x (latest version)
o Firefox start page on Google.com (left tab)
o What's New page (right focused/active)

Help us test the next version of AMO search!

Mozilla web developer Dave Dash has put out a call for help testing AMO's move to a Sphinx-based backend; I second that call, and encourage you to let us know of any new issues not already tracked in bug 498999's dependency tree.

New to testing search? Here's an incomplete list of things to try:

* substrings ("fire" from "firefox")
* named add-ons without quotes (Adblock Plus)
* named add-ons *with* quotes ("Adblock Plus")
* leading/trailing whitespace (" Adblock Plus ")
* broken-up strings ("stumble upon") -- bug 517344
* using SeaMonkey, Thunderbird, Sunbird, Mobile (Fennec)? Help us test those applications' search support too
* localization
* categories
* collections
* sandboxed add-ons
* advanced search options, such as:
** versions
** types
** platforms
** last-updated dates
** sorting views

The preview server, apt-named, is: https://preview.addons.mozilla.org

Thanks in advance for helping ensure our next version of AMO has a great search experience!

Interesting Selenium |type| bug?

While writing Selenium IDE tests for SUMO (support.mozilla.com), I've noticed something weird with its input handling.

A normal recording of a login to SUMO looks like this:

open /en-US/kb/Firefox+Support+Home+Page
clickAndWait link=Log In

type login-user username
clickAndWait login-button

The problem with this is (obviously) that it omits issuing:

type login-pass password, and so the next (and successive) commands will all fail.

(Perhaps Firefox itself doesn't propagate the value submitted, to Selenium, for security -- that would make sense.)

Pretty self-explanatory, but: login-user = name of username textfield element, login-pass is the name of the password textfield element, and username/password are placeholders for the real thing.

I'm actually learning a decent amount of Selenium by trial and error, but I'd love to hear tips and tricks -- email mozwebqa@mozilla.org, comment here, or join us in #mozwebqa on irc.mozilla.org.

Shipped SUMO (support.mozilla.com) 1.3 tonight!

Tonight we shipped SUMO 1.3 (http://support.mozilla.com/); full bug list.

We resolved 84 bugs as fixed; some regressions, others features -- a huge release by any measure.

Thanks to the SUMO team and our mozwebqa contributors for their help!

(We're now moving on to SUMO 1.4, which will aim to revamp the forum experience significantly for the better.)

Quick call out for AMO 5.0.9 testing help

We could use help testing AMO 5.0.9; if you want a lightweight way of helping out, please run any of the tests in our Litmus repository.

If you know enough to file a bug, please do; otherwise, just leave a comment when/if you mark something as failed or unclear.

Additionally, come find the Mozilla Web QA test team on IRC, at #mozwebqa on irc.mozilla.org.

Thanks!

- Stephen

How I break down a website for testing, part 2

In my last blog post, I covered only a few of the page elements at the top of the Mozilla Creative Collective site; here, I'll finish up that page.

Header navigation:

* Does it use JavaScript to replace the image on hover, or CSS?
** If JavaScript, try disabling it, and see what happens
* Ensure that links go to their intended destinations

Post Your Design:

* Does it have a hover effect? If so, see above
* Make sure the post-design page honors logged in status (and encourages you to log in, otherwise)

Latest Design Challenge:
* We should consider whether this is programmed content (and if so, we should test the admin interface to verify we can change it) or whether this is a time-based module (runs a certain promo based on dates)
* What are the expected ALT/TITLE attributes on the tags?

Rotating content block:
* Verify that clicking on each section below the image replaces the content
* Verify that long content is either ellipsized (...) or discouraged from the admin interface
* What are the expected ALT/TITLE attributes on the tags?

Hot Designs:
* This could run off an algorithm (and if so, we should test that when we manipulate the test data, the algorithm adjusts accordingly) or it could be programmable content
** How many likes/favorites does it take for a design to be "hot"?
** Is this block cached in any way? On a cron job? Immediate?
* What are the expected ALT/TITLE attributes on the tags?

Designers you Like:
* Verify that only favorited designers are displayed
** Try favoriting one and come back; does it appear?
** Similarly, un-favorite one and return; does it disappear?
* What are the expected ALT/TITLE attributes on the tags?

Staff News:
* RSS feed displays staff in the same order as they appear on the homepage
* Author name links to their blog/page
* Title links directly to their post
** Try long titles -- do they wrap?

Footer:
* Copyright date
* Logo links to homepage/page top
* Links work and take you to their intended destination

Of course, the above list isn't comprehensive, but it's a good start; feel free to add comments to the blog entries for anything I've missed or gotten wrong.

Also, if you're interested in helping the Mozilla Web QA team test, please check out out Volunteer page.

Thanks!

How I break down a site for testing, part 1

I've often wanted to write a blog post or a wiki page explaining the process by which I look at a site (or in this case, a single-page mockup), and start to break down the functionality/elements that I'll be testing.

Let's look at the Creative Collective example, below:

First things first: the first thing I notice is that the site stores and recognizes usernames (or email addresses, depending on how it authenticates its users). I'd immediately expect that the "Join Us" link leads us to an account creation/registration page, wherein users fill in a combination of their real name, username, and/or email address. (Other fields like a short bio, etc. might exist too.)

On an account-creation page, the usual test candidates are:

* username/password length
** Does it accept more than the stated length limitation?
** How about something like 250 characters?
** How about "special characters", such as ":/?#[]@!$&'()*+,;=.<>"?
** Does it accept empty or only-space-character usernames?
* unique username (try to register two that are identical)
* empty password

Of course, those are just the individual fields; we also need to ensure that users enter all the required information upfront, and if they don't, that we don't lose what they'd typed, and even more than helpfully pointing a user to the field with the problem, we should tell them how they can correct it and move on.

And, that's just registration -- we want to be equally helpful to the user on login: which fields are required, what their minimum lengths are, etc. To test, I would:

* try valid username or email address (whichever the site uses) but invalid password
* try valid username/email address without a password
* try invalid username/email address but valid password (etc.)
* test the forgotten-password feature

Login and account-creation pages also should be served through HTTPS, so ensure that the links start and stay on https:// -- we don't want to send users' data "over the wire" in plain text -- that could potentially be read by others. Additionally, we should test that the fields properly escape data (encode it so that invalid/evil input is made safe); we should also test for XSS (cheat sheet here).

After testing this, I'd move on to search functionality. In the mockup above, we have "Search for" (images) * [search textfield]. Let's break it down: we know from "images" that one datatype will be images, but not how our search terms might match that category; because it's a selector, we can also assume there will be other datatypes -- maybe one for "text", and/or "images and text". For text, are we searching on perhaps tags, titles, or authors (each of which could be in the selector)? And whenever we think of search, there are a bunch of use-cases to consider:

* when you click on the pre-filled "search" text, does it disappear, to be replaced by your entered text?
* what should the empty (i.e. default) search experience be? (Should the user be able to search without entering something? Typically, yes.)
* what about substrings? e.g. "paint" in "painting" -- would it match "painting"?
* do misspelled words trigger a helpful "did you mean?" suggestion (a la Google)
* when you change the "Search for" pulldown, does the textfield clear?
* do your criteria get reset when reloading the page?
* try pasting something huge like the text of the U.S. Constitution -- does the server have to process it in its entirety, and take forever? Does it balk? Throw up an error page, with, perhaps, any internal server-config values/messages? Are there layout issues on the search-results page from such huge a string?
* again, also try XSS here
* try, of course, regular searches :-)

So far, I've really only touched on four components of this site--nay, this page--so you can quickly see how complex (and fun) website testing is.

I'll come back to finish this page towards the end of this week or early next week, so stay tuned!

Feedback/questions welcome at stephend@mozilla.com

As always, Mozilla's Web QA team can be found at https://wiki.mozilla.org/QA/Execution/Web_Testing

MozWebQA (testing) volunteer resource page

I've taken a pretty rough cut at gathering together a document to help those wanting to get started in (or whom are just interested in learning more about) MozWebQA (testing) with Mozilla:

Web Testing volunteer page

It currently shares content with the Web Testing homepage intentionally -- I'm still working out the balance between introductory guide and reference.

We would absolutely love your feedback!; feel free to make direct edits within parentheses, as I'll be editing this quite frequently and will incorporate suggested improvements/corrections, etc.

I'm encouraged by the recent team momentum, and need your help in growing interest and documentation.

Thanks!

Stephen Donner, on behalf of:
mozwebqa@mozilla.org

verifyAttribute help w/Selenium for AMO?

Earlier today, I tried to write a Selenium testcase to help ensure that bug 504188 never happens again; the bug was that advanced-search parameters in our AMO 5.0.7 candidate weren't getting set properly.

View source on the following page, and grep for "Linux" -- we want to verify that whole line, basically:

* option 2 is selected
* has "Linux" in its value

In the Selenium IDE, we're checking for:

verifyElementPresent, //div[@id='advanced-search']/fieldset[2]/div[3]/label[@for='pid'], Value="Linux"

But this isn't working -- verifyElementPresent is happy and returns success/true, because it finds the element, and doesn't care about the value in Value=; I *think* verifyAttribute is what we want, instead, but Raymond, Juan, and I tried that tonight without success.

Help is appreciated!

Started writing testcases for SUMO (support.mozilla.com)

I've promised this for a while, and it's finally here: I've started to write Litmus testcases for SUMO (support.mozilla.com).

The *only* reason these weren't previously added is that I simply never had the bandwidth to write them before :-(

Here they are:
SUMO Litmus testcases.

Even more importantly, I've created products in Litmus for AMO and Spread Firefox, as starters; I would *love* your help creating testcases for any of the above, so please contact us at webqa@mozilla.org if you're interested in helping out. You don't even need a Litmus account if you just want to write and send testcases for us to review and submit.

The plan, of course, is to write testcases and build BFTs (basic functionality tests) from a selected group of those testcases, and run those every release, in addition to verifying a good portion of the fixed bugs for each milestone; this really should cut down on the number of regressions, which is much-needed if we're to move forward rapidly.

Our WebQA's group page is at https://wiki.mozilla.org/QA/Execution/Web_Testing, so take a look around at our projects and let us know if you're interested.

Thanks!

- Stephen Donner, (just one of) Mozilla's Web-App Floggers.

Need help testing SUMO 1.0.1 (support for Firefox 3.5, basically)

WebDev QA would appreciate your help in testing the SUMO 1.0.1 release (so far, only two resolved-fixed bugs):

1.0.1

The fixes are aimed at supporting Firefox 3.5 detection on the SUMO (Firefox Support
) website.

Thanks!

(Contact me at stephend@mozilla.com or comment in the bug.)

Need some help testing AMO 5.0.4 changes

Krupa and I are a little nervous about bug 441739, so if you're interested in helping us, file any bugs you see as blocking that bug; we'll also be taking a look at this probably Monday, but would love more help.

The changes are to the experimental-override functionality (logged in vs. logged out, etc.); for more information about what to test, see Bug 441739, comment 42

Thanks!

Want to help Mozilla better-test a few of our key web properties?

Got IE 8 and want to help out Mozilla (you don't have to like IE!)?

We're looking for people to help us test IE 8 support across a few key Mozilla properties; we're starting with:

* mozilla.com
* addons.mozilla.org
* spreadfirefox.com
* support.mozilla.com
* blog.mozilla.com

If you would, please let us know of any bugs you find while using IE 8 on any of these sites.

To file a bug, please just file a bug in the same component as above, and add a blocks dependency.

Thanks! (If you've already looked at a site, please let me know how it was.)

For more info, contact me at stephend@mozilla.com

A sincere welcome to Krupa Raj, Mozilla's 2nd webdev QA engineer :-)

All -

Without trying to make her blush and get all embarrassed and stuff, I'd like to extend a sincere welcome to our new webdev qa contractor Krupa Raj, who comes to us from Livescribe (check it out, that pen is pretty amazing!) and HP.

She's got really solid QA chops, and is a great addition to our slowly-but-ever-so-surely burgeoning webdev QA team :-) (We're still just two people, for those of you in the community who don't know!)

She's right now shadowing me on all my projects, and co-attending my meetings, so that's a lot to hit her with right away, but she's doing great.

Again, welcome!

Thanks for private browsing, Ehsan

Thanks again, Ehsan.

I just wanted to publicly thank Ehsan Akhgari for implementing the Private Browsing mode in what will be the next version of Firefox.

That feature was almost dropped, when he took it, then drove it to completion.

Great, great stuff; a beacon of the kind of community involvement we really love and appreciate here @ Mozilla -- he's also localized AMO for us, and I think done RTL support on SUMO, too (if not, Ehsan, we could use your help on the 1.0 release!)

(Others worked really hard on it too, like mconnor and faaborg, among others; didn't mean to down-play their involvement, but he deserves special attention since he took such initiative.)

More web fail, this time of the didn't-provision-enough-commit-bandwidth variety

Customer-support bots FTL

I was having problems loading http://www.playphone.com (it was returning HTTP 500, Internal Server Error), so I decided I'd report it to the company in the "quickest way possible" (ahem): live chat.

Below is the actual transcript of that rather unsuccessful session, which just goes to demonstrate that live help is really, really appreciated :-)

-------
An agent will be with you shortly. We appreciate your patience. While you wait feel free to begin typing your question.
Thank you for patiently waiting. You are currently at position number 1 in the queue. We will be with you shortly.
You have been connected to Noemi J.
Noemi J: Hello,Stephen. Thank you for contacting mobile support. My name is Noemi, how may I help you?
Stephen Donner: Hi there
Noemi J: How are you doing today?
Stephen Donner: your homepage is giving me HTTP 500 internal server errors
Stephen Donner: http://s5.tinypic.com/jj3ayv.jpg
Noemi J: May I have your mobile number, please?
Stephen Donner: I already entered that; why do you need it?
Stephen Donner: I'm not a customer yet
Stephen Donner: just reporting to you that your homepage doesn't work
Noemi J: I am apologies for your inconvinient , How you would like me to help you today?
Stephen Donner: Report this error to the webmaster / server op / IT team?
Stephen Donner: did you see the error?
Noemi J: I am apologies we can not see any error if you don't identify the phone number, and model of your phone? I will try to help you what exactly is what you tryin to to ?
Stephen Donner: I'm not using a phone!
Stephen Donner: http://s5.tinypic.com/jj3ayv.jpg
Stephen Donner: it's a web browser
Stephen Donner: firefox 3.0.6, to be exact
Stephen Donner: I'm loading your homepage
Stephen Donner: and it gives the error that I've screenshotted in the URL, above
Stephen Donner: it's an internal server error, which means it's not Firefox's fault
Noemi J: Thank you, one minute while I look up the information requested.
Noemi J: May I have your mobile number, please?
Stephen Donner: omg
Noemi J: Hello,Stephen. Thank you for contacting mobile support. My name is Noemi, how may I help you?
Stephen Donner: are you serious?
Stephen Donner: are you a bot?
Noemi J: We are continually working to obtain new exciting content and hope that you will come back and visit us in the near future for your media content needs. Thank you for choosing PlayPhone as your media content provider.
Stephen Donner: hello?
Thank you for contacting PlayPhone. You may now close this window.
Your session has ended. You may now close this window.

7 facts about Stephen Donner -- you probably want to skip this post with your feed reader

Well, it had to happen; I've been tagged by the omnipresent Tomcat and the always-hip and hilarious djst, both of whom give me way too much street cred by claiming I'm, "the WebMonster !" and "QA superstar, excellent writer, and great friend," respectively--none of which (sadly) are true. Also tagging me was Clint, who spoke the truth when he wrote that I "need(s) to blog more".

So, here goes; as an aside, something about this is oddly reminiscent of email chain letters, but I digress.

(Oh, and here, as a preface, are the rules.)

1. Link to your original tagger(s) and list these rules in your post.
2. Share seven facts about yourself in the post.
3. Tag seven people at the end of your post by leaving their names and the links to their blogs.
4. Let them know they’ve been tagged.

7 (largely useless) facts about myself:

1. Although born in Port Huron, Michigan on our family's furlough from dad's work as a radio-tower/studio engineer for TWR, I grew up as a missionary kid (mk, for short) in both Mbabane, Swaziland and Pinetown, South Africa (in that order). As part of this, I attended a South African school, in which I was forced to attempt to learn Afrikaans, a language of which I can only remember enough to count to 10. I also wore a uniform... I believe we left in 1983, and I grew up learning the hardships of apartheid, and its accompanying white South-African police brutality, as well as internal, tribal violence.
2. I've been working intermittently on Mozilla either as a volunteer or a paid employee in various capacities since 1998; still love it to this day, of course.
3. I can't stand the smell and shape of shrimp (which gets in the way of me wanting to taste it).
4. I pride myself in having pretty eclectic musical tastes; my friends--most of whom were in band/jazz band with me--were the same way. I still don't like most country to this day (it's the vocals, I've come to realize), but I dig Southern rock.
5. I was diagnosed as having a mitral valve prolapse when I was just 15--something which, when I think about it too much (at all?) scares me perhaps more than it should. I've been told by my doctor that it could also be responsible for increased anxiety.
6. I'm a workaholic; if you've worked with me at all, though, you might already know that. Really need to get some semblance of a work/life balance going and keep it up.
7. Only 7? I'm starting to enjoy this probably more than I should, given that I was so reluctant to do it all, in the beginning. Growing up, I wanted to be a:
* fireman
* policeman
* audio-recording engineer
* Microsoft Certified Systems Engineer (yes, yes, I know!) I even had my parents cough up the $14k to attend the Clark Computer Career Institute in Braintree, MA (now called "The Career Institute of American International Colleges").
* writer -- still do; in fact, I graduated with a BA in English from IUSB in hopes of bettering my skillset in that very area. Maybe someday I'll marry my love of writing and computers in something that can be both satisfying and rewarding (financially). Until then, I really don't mind testing software...

So, that's it for now; tag, you're it:

(1) morgamic -- you've already been tagged by Tomcat, and because I want to read you write about other things than sports
(2) ss -- because something has to pull you away from your gripping Gossip Girls episode(s)
(3) clouserw -- just 'cuz
(4) marcia -- because you probably should blog more too
(5) lorchard -- you're from Michigan, the first bug we worked on was ever-the-epic one, and you're part of webdev (much love!) -- I wanted to tag Laura, but was too late.
(6) mikeal -- because I emphatically stated in #qa how lame I thought this was, so here's my just-dessert
(7) fligtar -- just nominating him might make him angry
(8) rdoherty -- addendum; how could I forget Ryan??

(I think bhearsum might be right in his closing remark, BTW.)

Odd Google Suggest...

If you type "spread firefox url:wiki.mozilla.org", Google Suggest proffers, "Did you mean: google.com".

No, I didn't; really!

Cool Download Day progress widget, by Ehsan Akhgari

Many thanks to Ehsan for the awesome widget, below!

How you can help prevent [insert QA team member name here] from losing his/her mind, while all the while making Firefox 3 better

There's a voluminous amount of QA work remaining for Firefox 3--both for its beta(s?) and its 3.0 release; even though I'm immersed in it daily, I still find it hard to not only prioritize, but even to capture what work remains. I'm going to make a feeble attempt to encapsulate said work, but I'm quite positive I'll fail in some way :-P Still, here goes...

How can you help?

1. Write or clean up Litmus testcases. Although the current setup of Litmus requires Admin status to edit (add/delete) testcases, you can still write them if they're not clearly stated enough in the bug. In tandem with an "in-litmus?" flag, it can be very helpful to ensure test coverage.

Write:

List of requested testcases for Firefox 3.

In the query above, I've excised "Open" bugs simply because that *should* mean the feature/bug fix isn't yet implemented; that doesn't mean, of course, that test coverage around it isn't needed; it's just a prioritization. (Semi-colons ftw!)

Clean up:

Most-unclear testcases

Recently unclear testcases

Ready to start? Create an account!

2. Run Litmus testcases. It should be self-explanatory, but we're looking for users running nightly builds of Firefox 3 to help us track its level of quality and feature implementation. By running *any* accurate test and submitting your valuable feedback, you help us get a clearer picture of when and if something has regressed, or, in general, how stable a given feature set is (based on its tests, though, so coverage varies by each area's level of test-completeness.)

Recent test failures--there are more such links on the footer of Litmus.

3. Verify Resolved FIXED Firefox 3 bugs.

4. Flag bugs as needing Litmus testcases. In each Firefox 3 bug, there should be a flag called "in-litmus" with four states: 1) empty, 2) ?, 3) -, and 4) +.

If you think a fixed bug (including those in the "VERIFIED" state) needs a manual testcase, select "?" from the "in-litmus" dropdown. Feel free to sprinkle liberally, but please exercise common sense; in addition to bugmail spam (which is all fine and good), for those of us whom run queries and write testcases, the time spent determining whether a testcase is indeed needed should be a no-brainer.

That said, the current list we have is by no means comprehensive, and, although it takes time to parse through the current list of testcases covered and match them with the request, it's well worth it to have more comprehensive coverage.

5. Stop by #qa on irc://irc.mozilla.org if you have further questions; we'd love to have folks helping out with any of these areas!

Thanks!

The original Thunderbird bug!

I was reading some of my old entries here, and found the _original_ Thunderbird bug; i.e. the bug that began the work which eventually transformed Mozilla MailNews into what's now known as Thunderbird.

Historic.

Mozilla Web-Development QA would love your help!

Every day, I go to work for a company for which I truly enjoy working; I'd like to take a moment to relate some of my experiences, and petition you to consider applying, especially in the Web Development and QA departments.

Mozilla is described by nearly everyone within its walls as "organic," a somewhat-difficult term to digest. You immediately think "OK, sounds like there are no rules." For the large part, that's actually quite true: the mix of employees' experiences, personalities, and work style coalesces into a slow, but ever-progressively gelled set of "best work practices." We strive ardently for not repeating our mistakes; most times, we succeed; occasionally, we drop the ball. 2.0.0.8 wasn't a hot release--not to the public nor to us, individually--but it did fix over 200 issues (most of them security!), and provided somewhat limited (due to the surprise), but well-meaning, support for OS X; needless to say, we think we've really got it right this time--a noticeable Mac OS 10.5 AJAX bug aside--for 2.0.0.9, which we just shipped tonight around 4PM PST.

There's another side to Mozilla that often goes unnoticed,--until you need them--and that's the Web Development team (and, humbly, its nearly-sole QA counterpart, yours truly ATM). We're supporting Marketing and Engineering in each's drive to understanding the Firefox user-experience and making it the best it can be. Together, we're responsible for a successful launch on another platform, like Rock your Firefox, in addition to the many and increasing number of pages within the breadth of the Firefox experience (such as the new First Run, What's New, and Operation Firefox pages/compaign, respectively).

As one such prominent example of our work, we're redesigning the user-experience of browsing, installing, and managing Add-ons for Firefox 3 (both in the client and on the web), and the changes on http://add-ons.mozilla.org will also reflect this, in a newly skinned version set to launch within 7 or so weeks. We could use your help in testing! If you've got prior familiarity with the add-ons website (or, just mad testing/coding skills in general), please shoot me an email at:

stephend@mozilla.com

Your excellent feedback will help me solidify my Test Plan.

While I'm not a web-testing newbie (having tested both my.netscape.com and my.aol.com for both divisions of AOL), there's always more to learn, and any/all help really is appreciated!

Keeping in mind, though, that its goal is to launch in about seven weeks, please try to constrain the scope of suggestions/fixes in-line with the 3.2 PRD.

Thanks for your help!

- Stephen

Call for testing help!

If you've got especially either Mac OS X 10.4 or Windows Vista, Mozilla QA would be very appreciative of and interested in any testing help you can provide for the Download Manager.

Bug 103487 has landed, which now means we *should* integrate with the various anti-virus vendors' software.

Additionally, we now have Vista Parental Controls (which can disable the download ability), and other Download Manager fixes/UI features left to land.

At present, there are ~ 250 either open or known fixed/resolved bugs.

It's daunting at first, but if you're interested in helping out, you can:
1) File/verify bugs
2) Write testcases (using Litmus)
3) Stop by in #qa of irc://irc.mozilla.org and we can help you test this and/or other components

Asking 'stephend' in #QA is the best pre-screen for Download Manager bugs, as I've probably run into most of them, or at least have read their bugs.

My testplan (work-in-progress) might get you thinking about ways in which you can help test.

Thanks in advance for your interest and help in making Firefox 3 great! (And yes, most of us hope that the "Clear / Clear All" button is returning :)

Check out these guys' amazing sets, if you like progressive trance and/or house...just click on "Downloads" using Firefox 2.0.0.6, and get what you can.

Work.

If you're one of the 2 billion folks that I need to get back to via email, phone, instant messenger, Facebook, MySpace, Friendster, or--gasp--in person, please note that I will be doing so as soon as humanly possible, given the workload I'm currently experiencing.

More Firefox 3 QA love!

Just a note to myself that, I've signed up to test:

Add-ons (Plugin Management System)
Content Handling (Download Manager updates)
Search / Tabbed Browsing / Visual Refresh (theme changes)