Category Archives: Musings

Things I’ve Learned This Week (April 20 – April 24, 2015)

Short one this week. I must not have learned much! 😀

If you’re using Sublime Text to hack on Firefox or Gecko, make sure it’s not indexing your objdir.

Sublime has this wicked cool feature that lets you quickly search for files within your project folders. On my MBP, the shortcut is Cmd-P. It’s probably something like Ctrl-P on Windows and Linux.

That feature is awesome, because when I need to get to a file, instead of searching the folder hierarchy, I just hit Cmd-P, jam in a few of the characters (they can even be out of order – Sublime does fuzzy matching), and then as soon as my desired file is the top entry, just hit Enter, and BLAM – opened file. It really saves time!

At least, it saves time in theory. I noticed that sometimes, I’d hit Cmd-P, and the UI to enter my search string would take ages to show up. I had no idea why.

Then I noticed that this slowness seemed to show up after I had done a build. My objdir resides beneath my srcdir (as is the defaults with a mozilla-central checkout), so I figured perhaps Sublime was trying to index all of those binaries and choking on them.

I went to Project > Edit Project, and added this to the configuration file that opened:

{
    "folders":
    [
        {
            "path": "/Users/mikeconley/Projects/mozilla-central",
      "folder_exclude_patterns": ["*.sublime-workspace", "obj-*"]
        }
    ]
}

I added the workspace thing too1, because I figure it’s unlikely I’ll ever want to open that thing.

Anyhow, after setting that, I restarted Sublime, and everything was crazy-fast. \o/

If you’re using Sublime, and your objdir is under your srcdir, maybe consider adding the same thing. Even if you’re not using Cmd-P, it’ll probably save your machine from needlessly burning cycles indexing stuff.

  1. That’s where Sublime holds my session state for my project. ↩

Things I’ve Learned This Week (April 13 – April 17, 2015)

When you send a sync message from a frame script to the parent, the return value is always an array

Example:

// Some contrived code in the browser
let browser = gBrowser.selectedBrowser;
browser.messageManager.addMessageListener("GIMMEFUE,GIMMEFAI", function onMessage(message) {
  return "GIMMEDABAJABAZA";
});

// Frame script that runs in the browser
let result = sendSendMessage("GIMMEFUE,GIMMEFAI");
console.log(result[0]);
// Writes to the console: GIMMEDABAJABAZA

From the documentation:

Because a single message can be received by more than one listener, the return value of sendSyncMessage() is an array of all the values returned from every listener, even if it only contains a single value.

I don’t use sync messages from frame scripts a lot, so this was news to me.

You can use [cocoaEvent hasPreciciseScrollingDeltas] to differentiate between scrollWheel events from a mouse and a trackpad

scrollWheel events can come from a standard mouse or a trackpad1. According to this Stack Overflow post, one potential way of differentiating between the scrollWheel events coming from a mouse, and the scrollWheel events coming from a trackpad is by calling:

bool isTrackpad = [theEvent hasPreciseScrollingDeltas];

since mouse scrollWheel is usually line-scroll, whereas trackpads (and Magic Mouse) are pixel scroll.

The srcdoc attribute for iframes lets you easily load content into an iframe via a string

It’s been a while since I’ve done web development, so I hadn’t heard of srcdoc before. It was introduced as part of the HTML5 standard, and is defined as:

The content of the page that the embedded context is to contain. This attribute
is expected to be used together with the sandbox and seamless attributes. If a
browser supports the srcdoc attribute, it will override the content specified in
the src attribute (if present). If a browser does NOT support the srcdoc
attribute, it will show the file specified in the src attribute instead (if
present).

So that’s an easy way to inject some string-ified HTML content into an iframe.

Primitives on IPDL structs are not initialized automatically

I believe this is true for structs in C and C++ (and probably some other languages) in general, but primitives on IPDL structs do not get initialized automatically when the struct is instantiated. That means that things like booleans carry random memory values in them until they’re set. Having spent most of my time in JavaScript, I found that a bit surprising, but I’ve gotten used to it. I’m slowly getting more comfortable working lower-level.

This was the ultimate cause of this crasher bug that dbaron was running into while exercising the e10s printing code on a debug Nightly build on Linux.

This bug was opened to investigate initializing the primitives on IPDL structs automatically.

Networking is ultimately done in the parent process in multi-process Firefox

All network requests are proxied to the parent, which serializes the results back down to the child. Here’s the IPDL protocol for the proxy.

On bi-directional text and RTL

gw280 and I noticed that in single-process Firefox, a <select> dropdown set with dir=”rtl”, containing an <option> with the value “A)” would render the option as “(A”.

If the value was “A) Something else”, the string would come out unchanged.

We were curious to know why this flipping around was happening. It turned out that this is called “BiDi”, and some documentation for it is here.

If you want to see an interesting demonstration of BiDi, click this link, and then resize the browser window to reflow the text. Interesting to see where the period on that last line goes, no?

It might look strange to someone coming from a LTR language, but apparently it makes sense if you’re used to RTL.

I had not known that.

Some terminal spew

Some terminal spew

Now what’s all this?

My friend and colleague Mike Hoye showed me the above screenshot upon coming into work earlier this week. He had apparently launched Nightly from the terminal, and at some point, all that stuff just showed up.

“What is all of that?”, he had asked me.

I hadn’t the foggiest idea – but a quick DXR showed basic_code_modules.cc inside Breakpad, the tool used to generate crash reports when things go wrong.

I referred him to bsmedberg, since that fellow knows tons about crash reporting.

Later that day, mhoye got back to me, and told me that apparently this was output spew from Firefox’s plugin hang detection code. Mystery solved!

So if you’re running Firefox from the terminal, and suddenly see some basic_code_modules.cc stuff show up… a plugin you’re running probably locked up, and Firefox shanked it.

  1. And probably a bunch of other peripherals as well ↩

Things I’ve Learned This Week (April 6 – April 10, 2015)

It’s possible to synthesize native Cocoa events and dispatch them to your own app

For example, here is where we synthesize native mouse events for OS X. I think this is mostly used for testing when we want to simulate mouse activity.

Note that if you attempt to replay a queue of synthesized (or cached) native Cocoa events to trackSwipeEventWithOptions, those events might get coalesced and not behave the way you want. mstange and I ran into this while working on this bug to get some basic gesture support working with Nightly+e10s (Specifically, the history swiping gesture on OS X).

We were able to determine that OS X was coalescing the events because we grabbed the section of code that implements trackSwipeEventWithOptions, and used the Hopper Disassembler to decompile the assembly into some pseudocode. After reading it through, we found some logging messages in there referring to coalescing. We noticed that those log messages were only sent when NSDebugSwipeTrackingLogic was set to true, we executed this:

defaults write org.mozilla.nightlydebug NSDebugSwipeTrackingLogic -bool YES

In the console, and then re-ran our swiping test in a debug build of Nightly to see what messages came out. Sure enough, this is what we saw:

2015-04-09 15:11:55.395 firefox[5203:707] ___trackSwipeWithScrollEvent_block_invoke_0 coalescing scrollevents
2015-04-09 15:11:55.395 firefox[5203:707] ___trackSwipeWithScrollEvent_block_invoke_0 cumulativeDelta:-2.000 progress:-0.002
2015-04-09 15:11:55.395 firefox[5203:707] ___trackSwipeWithScrollEvent_block_invoke_0 cumulativeDelta:-2.000 progress:-0.002 adjusted:-0.002
2015-04-09 15:11:55.396 firefox[5203:707] ___trackSwipeWithScrollEvent_block_invoke_0 call trackingHandler(NSEventPhaseChanged, gestureAmount:-0.002)

This coalescing means that trackSwipeEventWithOptions is only getting a subset of the events that we’re sending, which is not what we had intended. It’s still not clear what triggers the coalescing – I suspect it might have to do with how rapidly we flush our native event queue, but mstange suspects it might be more sophisticated than that. Unfortunately, the pseudocode doesn’t make it too clear.

String templates and toSource might run the risk of higher memory use?

I’m not sure I “learned” this so much, but I saw it in passing this week in this bug. Apparently, there was some section of the Marionette testing framework that was doing request / response logging with toSource and some string templates, and this caused a 20MB regression on AWSY. Doing away with those in favour of old-school string concatenation and JSON.stringify seems to have addressed the issue.

When you change the remote attribute on a <xul:browser> you need to re-add the <xul:browser> to the DOM tree

I think I knew this a while back, but I’d forgotten it. I actually re-figured it out during the last episode of The Joy of Coding. When you change the remoteness of a <xul:browser>, you can’t just flip the remote attribute and call it a day. You actually have to remove it from the DOM and re-add it in order for the change to manifest properly.

You also have to re-add any frame scripts you had specially loaded into the previous incarnation of the browser before you flipped the remoteness attribute.1

Using Mercurial, and want to re-land a patch that got backed out? hg graft is your friend!

Suppose you got backed out, and want to reland your patch(es) with some small changes. Try this:

hg update -r tip
hg graft --force BASEREV:ENDREV

This will re-land your changes on top of tip. Note that you need –force, otherwise Mercurial will skip over changes it notices have already landed in the commit ancestry.

These re-landed changes are in the draft stage, so you can update to them, and assuming you are using the evolve extension2, and commit –amend them before pushing. Voila!

Here’s the documentation for hg graft.

  1. We sidestep this with browser tabs by putting those browsers into “groups”, and having any new browsers, remote or otherwise, immediately load a particular set of framescripts. ↩

  2. And if you’re using Mercurial, you probably should be. ↩

Things I’ve Learned This Week (March 30 – April 3, 2015)

This is my second post in a weekly series, where I attempt to distill my week down into some lessons or facts that I’ve picked up. Let’s get to it!

ES6 – what’s safe to use in browser development?

As of March 27, 2015, ES6 classes are still not yet safe for use in production browser code. There’s code to support them in Firefox, but they’re Nightly-only behind a build-time pref.

Array.prototype.includes and ArrayBuffer.transfer are also Nightly only at this time.

However, any of the rest of the ES6 Harmony work currently implemented by Nightly is fair-game for use, according to jorendorff. The JS team is also working on a Wiki page to tell us Firefox developers what ES6 stuff is safe for use and what is not.

Getting a profile from a hung process

Update [January 23rd, 2017]: Markus Stange contacted me to let me know that the function mozilla_sampler_save_profile_to_file has been changed to profiler_save_profile_to_file. This happened in this bug. I’ve updated the post to reflect this.

According to mstange, it is possible to get profiles from hung Firefox processes using lldb1.

  1. After the process has hung, attach lldb.
  2. Type in2, : 
    p (void)profiler_save_profile_to_file("somepath/profile.txt")
  3. Clone mstange’s handy profile analysis repository.
  4. Run: 
    python symbolicate_profile.py somepath/profile.txt

    To graft symbols into the profile. mstange’s scripts do some fairly clever things to get those symbols – if your Firefox was built by Mozilla, then it will retrieve the symbols from the Mozilla symbol server. If you built Firefox yourself, it will attempt to use some cleverness3 to grab the symbols from your binary.

    Your profile will now, hopefully, be updated with symbols.

    Then, load up Cleopatra, and upload the profile.

    I haven’t yet had the opportunity to try this, but I hope to next week. I’d be eager to hear people’s experience giving this a go – it might be a great tool in determining what’s going on in Firefox when it’s hung4!

Parameter vs. Argument

I noticed that when I talked about “things that I passed to functions5”, I would use “arguments” and “parameters” interchangeably. I recently learned that there is more to those terms than I had originally thought.

According to this MSDN article, an argument is what is passed in to a function by a caller. To the function, it has received parameters. It’s like two sides of a coin. Or, as the article puts it, like cars and parking spaces:

You can think of the parameter as a parking space and the argument as an automobile. Just as different automobiles can park in a parking space at different times, the calling code can pass a different argument to the same parameter every time that it calls the procedure.6

Not that it really makes much difference, but I like knowing the details.

  1. Unfortunately, this technique will not work for Windows. 🙁  ↩

  2. Assuming you’re running a build after this revision landed. ↩

  3. A binary called dump_syms_mac in mstange’s toolkit, and nm on Linux ↩

  4. I’m particularly interested in knowing if we can get Javascript stacks via this technique – I can see that being particularly useful with hung content processes. ↩

  5. Or methods. ↩

  6. Source ↩

Much Ado About Brendan (or As I’ve Seen It)

Since Brendan Eich’s resignation, I’ve been struggling to articulate what I think and feel about the matter. It’s been difficult. I haven’t been able to find what I wanted to say. Many other better, smarter, and more qualified Mozillians have written things about this, and I was about to let it go. I didn’t just want to say “me too”.

I felt I had nothing of substance to contribute. I feebly wrote something about Brendan Eich and the Kobayashi Maru, but it became a rambling mess, and the analogy fell apart quite quickly. I was about to call it quits on contributing my thoughts.

And then this post happened.

Don’t ask me where this came from. A muse woke me up in the night to write it (it’s just past 4AM for crying out loud – muse, let me sleep). Maybe through the lens of this nonsense, some real sense will prevail. I’m not hopeful, but this muse is nodding emphatically (and grinning like a lunatic).

Please believe that I’m not at all trying to trivialize, oversimplify, or make light of the events of the past few weeks by writing this. I’m just trying to understand it, and view it with a looking glass I have at least a little familiarity with.

And maybe it’s mostly catharsis.

I also apologize that it’s not really told like a story from the Bard. I think that’d be too long winded (no offense, Shakey). I’m pretty sure the narrator / stage directions have the most lines. It’s actually quite criminal.

I also want to point out that the only “real world names” in this little travesty is Brendan Eich’s, Jay Sullivan’s, and Mitchell Baker’s. The rest are from the world of Shakespeare.

And I also apologize that it’s not in iambic pentameter – that’d probably be more appropriate, but I have neither the wit nor the patience to pull this off with that much verisimilitude.

Oooh! Verisimilitude! Fancy words! Enough apologies, let’s get started.

Much Ado About Brendan (or As I’ve Seen It)

Prologue

Venice, Italy. Sometime during the Renaissance. This glorious city is composed of many families – the Montagues, the Capulets, the Macbeths, the MacDuffs, the Aguecheeks, the Fortanbras, the Whitmore’s, and many many more. Too many to name or count.

Many of these families argue and disagree about things. There’s almost always one thing that one family does or thinks that another family just cannot abide by.

It is in this turbulent city of families that we find The Merchant’s Building. The Merchant’s of Venice are selling their wares, lending or selling books, playing music, and much more – and people are constantly streaming in and out. It’s a marketplace of endless possibility.

In one section of The Merchant’s Building, is the Mozilla booth. Mozilla does and makes many things – but it’s probably best known for its Firefox jewelry. Mozilla is one of a small number of merchants giving away jewelry – and jewelry, in this building, is special: the more people wear your jewelry, the more of a voice you have at the Merchant’s Weekly Meeting, where the rules of the building are written and refined.

So what is special about this Mozilla merchant? Why should we wear their jewelry? There are certainly other merchants giving away jewelry a few booths down. What does Mozilla bring to the table?

For one thing, the jewelry is beautiful. And it makes you walk faster. And it’s got the latest features. And it makes it harder for sketchy people to follow you. And it doesn’t have a built-in tracking device recording which merchants you’re visiting. And you can add cool charms to it, and make it look exactly how you want it.

And another thing that’s unique to the Mozilla booth is that they’re composed of members of every single family in Venice. Every single family has at least one member working in the Mozilla booth. And what’s more – a bunch of these workers are volunteering their time and efforts to make this stuff!

Why? Why do they volunteer? And why do these family members work side by side with people their families might balk at, or sneer at?

Well, In the very center of the Mozilla booth, overhanging the whole thing, is… The Mission. The Mission is the guiding principals upon which the Mozilla booth operates. This is what these family members bury their gauntlets for. They work, sweat and bleed side by side for this mission. This is their connective tissue. This is what guides them when they vote and argue for things at the Merchant’s Weekly Meeting.

The other truly unique thing about the Mozilla booth is that there are no walls to it! You can walk right in, and watch the craftspeople make jewelry! Heck, you can sit right down at a bench and somebody will show you how to make some yourself. They’ll guide you, and they’ll critique you, and soon, somebody will be wearing a piece of jewelry that you made.

The greatest debates also occur within the Mozilla booth. People stand on soap boxes and give their opinions about jewelry, or other merchandise – or merchandise practices. People say what they think out loud, and perhaps print it on a t-shirt and wear it. Sometimes, discussions get heated, but level thinking usually prevails because these Mozillians are an unusually bright bunch.

ACT I

There is a leadership selection underway. Someone needs to be the Chief of Business Affairs (or CBA) in the Mozilla booth. The current chief, Jay, has been holding the position as an interim chief, and the Board of Business Affairs is trying to select someone to take the position permanently.

Two members of this board already have their bags packed – for a while now, they’ve been neglecting other interests of theirs, and after this chief is selected, they feel they need to do other things.

Enter Brendan Eich. Brendan Eich is chief craftsperson of the makers of jewelry in the Mozilla booth. He’s a brilliant and widely respected craftsperson himself, having invented some of the amazing techniques that are used by all serious jewelry makers. He is also one of the founders of the Mozilla booth, having set it up with Mitchell Baker.

The Board of Business Affairs selects Brendan to be the next Chief of Business Affairs.

They announce this, and there is much applause! People clap Brendan on the back. Many craftspeople are pleased that one of their own will be in charge.

The two board members, as they’ve agreed to, take their bags, salute, and walk off out of the booth and on to other things.

A third board member leaves as well, but for reasons not related to what I describe below.

Suddenly, several Montagues and Montague supporters in the Mozillian booth grow concerned. They recall that several years ago, Brendan had donated $1000 dollars to a law that supported Capulet values – a law which impacted their rights. The Montagues and Montague supporters grow concerned that someone who supports this Capulet law is not fit to be Chief of a booth that houses all of the families, Montagues included.

Several of these Montagues raise these concerns out loud. This is not unusual in the Mozilla booth, as most concerns are raised out loud – and, as usual, debate begins. Brendan states that he will 100% abide by the Mozilla participation guidelines, and what’s more, began supporting a project that a Montague in the Mozilla booth has been working on – to bring more Montagues into the booth.

Vigorous debate continues, as is the Mozilla booth custom.

However, as the booth lets anybody in, and the debate can be heard outside of the booth, several Montagues and Montague supporters hear these concerns and start passing the message along to one another – a Capulet has been selected to be the CBA!

Many of these Montagues are reasonable, and say and write reasonable arguments about why they are concerned, and why Brendan may not be the right choice as CBA.

ACT II

A few meters away, the Cupid booth overhears all of this concern from the Montagues. Perhaps they really are Montague supportors (or, more likely, they just wanted to perk up business), but they suddenly decide to take a stand. For people who try to come into their booth wearing Firefox jewelry, they have to read a big sign that tells them about why the Cupid booth believes that restricting the rights of Montagues is terrible, and that the Mozilla booth is terrible for making a Capulet the CBA. They tell the people wearing Firefox jewelry that they should probably wear other things.

And so some people start to take off their Firefox jewelry. Some Montagues take it off angrily, and smash it into the ground – stomping it with their feet, creating a big dust cloud.

Enter Iago, and his team of writers. There are many writers and story-sellers in the Merchant’s Building, but Iago is one of those writers that just wants people to listen to him. He likes to twist words and make things up, or to insinuate things that are not true. He saw the board members leaving the Mozilla booth and concocts some headlines, insinuating that they left in protest of Brendan’s support of the Capulet laws. He also writes about how all of the Mozillians in the booth were not supporting Brendan’s appointment as CBA (which is not true – it’s true that some were concerned and questioned the wisdom of his appointment, but certainly not all). He writes and he writes, and his messengers pass copies and leaflets around. Montagues and Montague supporters read these leaflets, or hear people talking about them, and they grow very concerned. More Montagues start to take off their Firefox jewelry.

Some Montagues start to engage with Mozillians and try to figure out what is happening. As always, each family has calm and reasonable people to converse with – and that’s always welcome in the Mozilla booth.

However, every family also has their groundlings. The groundlings are the members of a family who are always looking for a fight. Always looking for blood. Always hoping an actor will forget their lines, and will shout distracting things at them to make it happen. They always have a bag of rotten fruit and vegetables with them to throw. Some of them just like to make trouble.

Every family has their groundlings. You’ve probably met some yourself.

The groundlings start to hear these rumors that Iago has been spreading around, copied and recopied, distorted and mutilated – and they see the signs at the Cupid booth.

And they rush the Mozilla booth! They start throwing rotten fruit and vegetables, and they tear off their Firefox jewelry, and swear to never wear it again! They gnash their teeth, and they rip out their own hair in a rage, and they scream and yell and make so much noise – it’s almost impossible for the craftspeople in the Mozilla booth to work!

A tempest of Montague rage was upon the Mozilla booth.

ACT III

After several hours of this, Brendan addresses the crowd outside, and speaks to some storytellers (Iago and his team are among them – he always is).

They ask him if he renounces Capulet ways, or if he will apologize for the Montague rights that were impacted by the Capulet law that he helped fund.

And Brendan says something along the lines of “I don’t think that’s helpful to discuss. I don’t think that’s relevant here. I’m not going to run this booth as if everybody in here were Capulets – I helped make this booth, I know that it’s composed of many families, and I know how it operates.”

But Iago and the groundlings were not satisfied. They put up signs and placards claiming that anybody wearing Firefox jewelry is supporting the Capulets!

The Mozillians look at all of the broken and stomped-on jewelry on the market ground. All their work, being trampled. If this continues, their ability to improve things for all families at the Merchant’s Weekly Meeting will fade. Their ability to enact their Mission will fade. They are agitated, discouraged, upset, angry, sad, anxious, confused – a cocktail of emotion playing pretty much the entire spectrum.

Brendan’s speech had not done anything to quell the groundlings. And Iago could smell blood, and was not going to stop writing about Brendan or Mozilla.

The other leaders look to Brendan. What will we do?

And Brendan said, “This noise is getting absurdly loud. How are we supposed to work under these conditions? There’s no way we can enact the mission like this.”

And Brendan steps onto the proscenium, and says:

To leave, or not to leave, that is the question—
Whether ’tis Nobler in the mind to suffer
The Slings and Arrows of outrageous Fortune,
Or to take Arms against a Sea of troubles,
And by opposing end them?

And so, after much thought, he takes arms. He sacrifices, and he chooses to leave the booth – the booth he helped plant into the ground over 15 years ago. The booth he helped build, the jewelry and techniques he helped craft.

“I think if I leave, you folks might have a chance to keep the mission going.”

And so he leaves, to the heartbreak of many Mozillians, and to the cheering of the Montague groundlings outside.

ACT IV

Several of the more sensible Montagues watch Brendan leave and wonder if perhaps the groundlings in their family have made them look petty and vindictive. Some of them are also sad that Brendan left the Mozilla booth – all they wanted from him was an apology, they say. That would have sufficed, they say. They didn’t expect or want him to leave the whole booth.

But the damage is done, and Brendan has left. There is no chief craftsperson, and there is no CBA. Holy shit.

The Mozillians in the booth start to get back to work, since the cheers of the Montagues outside are much easier to work against as a backdrop than the booing, hissing and food-throwing. A bunch of Montagues dust off their stomped Firefox jewelry (or grab new copies!) and put them back on proudly. Others are happy with the new jewelry they got, and don’t care about the Mission. Still others never took off the Firefox jewelry, but said they did. And now they wear it publicly again, proudly.

But suddenly, the Capulets and Capulet supporters in and around the Mozilla booth look at this gaping void where Brendan was and sense injustice. This was wrong, they cry! This man should not have been chased out of here!

Vigorous debate begins, as is the Mozilla booth custom.

And reasonable Capulets say and write reasonable things about why they think it was wrong for Brendan to have left.

And Iago, who never really left the area, hears all of this, and smells more blood in the air. He takes his poison pen, and writes stories about how Brendan was forcibly removed from the Mozilla booth by an angry mob of Montagues. He writes that, like Julius Cesar, Brendan was heard gasping “Et tu, Brute?” as he was stabbed by his fellow senators – or, like King Hamlet, poisoned and betrayed by the people closest to him.

But as usual, Iago gets this completely wrong. Not that he cares or bothers to check. What a douche. And LOUD too, holy smokes. And people listen to Iago, and read what he writes, and hear what he says, and the rumours abound!

And a second tempest starts to brew.

ACT V

Many reasonable Capulets, both inside and outside of the Mozilla booth are concerned about what this means for them. Does this mean that Capulets aren’t allowed to become CBA’s? That’s certainly against the inclusiveness guidelines, is it not? And much debate resonated, as is the Mozilla way.

But, as you recall, every family has their groundlings, and the Capulets are no exception. The Capulet groundlings heard the rumours that Iago and his ilk were slinging, and they gnashed their teeth, and they pulled out their hair.

“YOU KILLED BRENDAN”, the groundings howled at the Mozilla booth.

“No, he left on his own accord to save us and the mission,” some Mozillians said with sadness.

“NO HE DIDN’T, HE WAS BETRAYED AND MURDERED BY HIS CLOSEST ALLIES!” the groundlings yelled back.

“No, that’s simply not true. He left on his own accord in an attempt to save the booth and the mission.”

And the reasonable Capulets understood this, and they understood the mindblowing complexities of this whole clusterfuck. And they spoke with reason and passion.

The Mozillian craftspeople got up from their work making jewelry to talk to these Capulets, and the supporters of the Capulets. And many were very reasonable and calm – but the groundlings among them were vicious and yelled and made so much noise. In some ways, their rage was indistinguishable from the Montegue groundling rage, which I believe is some kind of irony.

And, as you’d expect, the Capulet groundlings, like all groundlings, love blood. They love a fight. And they tore off their Firefox jewelry, and they stamped it into the ground. Vegetables and rotten fruit started to be thrown at the Mozilla booth. Again.

And the Mozillians in the booth looked at each other. They looked at the gaping void where Brendan used to stand. They all hugged one another, and comforted one another, as the jeers and boos of the groundlings got louder and louder, and as rotten fruit and vegetables slammed into them and their works.

And this is where we currently are, I believe.

Epilogue

If these ramblings have offended,
Think but this, and all is mended,
That you have but slumber’d here
While these visions did appear.
And this weak and idle theme,
No more yielding but a dream,
Gentles, do not reprehend:
if you pardon, we will mend:
And, as I am an honest Mike,
I do yet miss this Brendan Eich.
Now to ‘scape the serpent’s tongue,
We will make amends ere long;
Else the Mike a liar call;
So, good night unto you all.
Give me your hands, if we be friends,
And Robin shall restore amends.

For a less silly and more sober analysis of what happened, I suggest reading this next.