GSoC 2013 completed

Last week, the 2013 edition of the Google Summer of Code officially finished. The Firefox team had come up with a few project ideas for this year and I mentored Abhishek Choudhary in the project dubbed “about:memory for real people”. The goal was to produce a friendlier and prettier version of about:memory that could be used by users and web developers to investigate the memory usage aspects of their webpages.

Mentoring GSoC was a nice experience again (it was my 4th time as a mentor) and I’m happy to say that the project was completed successfully! On Sep 16th, the “soft pencils down” goal on GSoC timeline, Abhishek tagged the 1.0 version on GitHub and the code was called complete. After a small extra bug fix, 1.0.1 was tagged and then submitted to addons.mozilla.org!

The project itself was very interesting because it was not a straightforward coding exercise: there was also a creative element to it which allowed us to experiment different visualization styles to try and see what worked best. It began with a few different separate visualizations but it evolved over time to one main integrated viz that supports seeing the data consumed by each tab and to watch how it evolves over time. The user can take manual time snapshots or let it take one every 5 seconds, and then use the time slider to go back and forth between the last 5 snapshots. The main hope is that this should be useful for a web developer who wants to see how a particular action on the website might affect its memory usage and if it fits the expectations (does that operation increase memory? does it release it as expected?).

Here’s a screenshot of the main interface:

You can see more details and install it from AMO. There’s a small catch: the add-on currently won’t work with Aurora or Nightly, just Beta and Release. This was an interesting part of the project: on the few last weeks of the project, the API that the add-on had been using changed, and it was not possible to change it to the new API among the other wrap-up tasks for the project. But luckily add-on versioning works well, and as the goal of this add-on is end users, shipping for beta and release is ok for now, and we’ll soon be posting a new version that is compatible with FF25+.

Abhishek also has a very nice blog post that you should be reading instead of mine :), describing the project progression and his experience working on it. I want to take this opportunity to say congrats to him and thanks to all students who participated in the GSoC project this year! I hope everyone had a nice time and hopefully the experience have interested some of you to continue to be part of community! Looking forward to next year’s projects.