Websites/Snippets/Geolocated-Snippets

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Last updated: 2013/05/02

Elevator Pitch

Firefox OS will land on devices in specific countries at different times. This project will allow us to use the snippets area of about:home to notify users only in those countries about the availability of Firefox OS devices.

Geolocated Snippets launched in Q12013.

Overview

Responsibility Assignments

  • Responsible: Justin Crawford
  • Accountable: Winston Bowden
  • Consulted: Privacy, Brand, IT, Security, Mike Kelly
  • Informed: Chris More, Chris Beard, Dave Slater, Mary Colvig, Pete Scanlon

Documentation

How does about:home decide what snippets to display?

Geolocated snippets flowchart.gif

Testing on Staging

The new client-side code is now online. This means there is a working end-to-end system ready for review. In order to exercise it, you need to take the following steps (in Firefox):

  1. Visit https://snippets.stage.mozilla.com/ and accept the security certificate.
  2. Navigate to about:config
  3. Search for browser.aboutHomeSnippets.updateUrl
  4. Change the url to https://snippets.stage.mozilla.com/%STARTPAGE_VERSION%/%NAME%/%VERSION%/%APPBUILDID%/%BUILD_TARGET%/%LOCALE%/%CHANNEL%/%OS_VERSION%/%DISTRIBUTION%/%DISTRIBUTION_VERSION%/
  5. After saving the value, restart the browser.
  6. Navigate to about:home.
  7. Open the Web Developer > Web Console (ctrl+shift+k).
  8. At the prompt (">") type the following and hit return: localStorage['snippets-last-update'] = 0
  9. At the prompt (">") type the following and hit return: localStorage.geoLastUpdated = 0
  10. Keep the Web Console open and refresh about:home. In the Web Console you should see a request to snippets.stage.mozilla.com and another request to geo.mozilla.com.
  11. At the prompt (">") type the following and hit return: localStorage.geoCountry
  12. You should see a country code derived from your IP address ("US" for United States).

You have now requested the new snippets code from the staging snippets server; and the new snippets code has made a request to the new geo server and stored the result in your browser. If you were in a country that had country specific snippets, you would see them. (There are none yet.)

To restore your browser, navigate to about:home again and modify the snippets server URL (steps 1-3 above). Its default value is:

https://snippets.mozilla.com/%STARTPAGE_VERSION%/%NAME%/%VERSION%/%APPBUILDID%/%BUILD_TARGET%/%LOCALE%/%CHANNEL%/%OS_VERSION%/%DISTRIBUTION%/%DISTRIBUTION_VERSION%/

Meetings

Considerations

Project Management

Tracking Bugs:

Timeline:

End of Life