Websites/Snippets/Geolocated-Snippets

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

• Code name: geolocated-snippets
• Prod URL:
• Stage URL:
• Dev URL:
• Code Repo:
• L10N Repo:
• Code: https://github.com/mozilla/geodude
• Product Owner: Engagement; Winston Bowden
• Dev Team: Web Production
• IRC Channel: #snippets on irc.mozilla.com

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?

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

• Weekly meeting 20130327
• Weekly meeting 20130320
• Weekly meeting 20130313
• 2013-03-08 QA Meeting
• Weekly meeting 20130306
• Weekly meeting 20130227
• Weekly meeting 20130220
• Weekly meeting 20130213
• Weekly meeting 20130206
• Opt-out meeting 20130205
• RASCI planning
• 20130123 planning kickoff

Project Management

Tracking Bugs:

• bug 836532

Timeline:

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