Archive for May, 2009
May 31st, 2009
In this issue…
- Community marketing and Firefox 3.5
- Firefox 3.5 knowledgebase update
- Visual polish for Firefox 3.5
- Fennec Add-on Development
- Labs: Introducing Jetpack
- Mozilla Foundation update
- Getting involved with Mozilla Education
- Upcoming events
- Developer calendar
- About about:mozilla
Community marketing and Firefox 3.5
Jay Patel writes, “Over the past few weeks we’ve held a number of marketing workshops to get our community ready for the Firefox 3.5 launch. We covered a number of areas that will help raise awareness and get people excited about the fastest Firefox ever!” Jay goes on to discuss his Campus Reps workshop, linking to his slides and a video of his presentation. The Community Marketing program is a great opportunity to get involved with the Mozilla Project and help make a huge impact during the Firefox 3.5 launch.
Firefox 3.5 knowledgebase update
The Firefox Support project (SUMO) needs your help. While great progress has been made getting the support.mozilla.com site updated for Firefox 3.5, there is more work to be done. The SUMO knowledgebase is a wiki that you can help edit, so it’s really easy to dive in and get started. Chris Ilias has written an article explaining what needs to be done and how to get started, so head over to his blog and check it out.
Alex Faaborg has posted about some visual polish work that is just getting finished up for the Firefox 3.5 themes. “Across all 4 platforms roughly 25 of the icons are either being tweaked or are entirely new (there were some last minute feature additions, like geolocation).” Highlights include modified secondary glyphs in the Windows main window, removing the background etch from the Mac OS X keyhole, and Linux plugin icons. More information is available at Alex’s blog.
The Fennec (Firefox Mobile) team has put together a small but growing collection of Fennec-specific add-on developer resources. These include an architecture overview, extensions basics, code snippets (that show how doing things for Fennec can be different than Firefox), and an extensions best practices guide. More documentation and tutorials will be added over time, but this should be enough to get developers started working on add-ons for the Firefox Mobile browser.
Last week the Mozilla Labs team introduced a new experiment called “Jetpack” whose purpose is to explore new ways to extend and personalize the Web. “We want to grow our community of developers by orders of magnitude through making add-on creation much more accessible, and yet more powerful by developing it as an extensible platform for innovation itself. Specifically, Jetpack will be an exploration in using Web technologies to enhance the browser with the goal of allowing anyone who can build a Web site to participate in making the Web a better place to work, communicate and play.” For more information, see the Labs weblog.
Mark Surman has posted the Mozilla Foundation update for May. “Building on the team priorities list posted in early April, the MoFo team is focused on a small number of activities aimed at having impact in 2009 as well as creating a framework for future growth.” Mark describes some of the current highlights, including the education program, mission messaging, organization development, and community responsiveness and development ideas. Further details are available in Mark’s post.
Getting involved with Mozilla Education
David Humphrey is one of the leaders of the growing Mozilla Education program and he recently wrote an article describing what getting involved looks like. “This past Thursday and Friday I led a short workshop on getting started in Mozilla from a professor’s point of view. I’ve put up the outline of what I presented, along with notes and links.” David’s post also talks about some of the valuable lessons he has learned about getting students involved with the Mozilla project over the years, including a short list of things you should and shouldn’t do to help students get the most out of their time with the project.
The Mozilla community is organizing an increasing number of events and meetups all the time, so we’re going to start including a list of these every week. If you have events you would like included here, send them along to: about-mozilla*at*mozilla.com.
* Tue, May 26 – Mountain View, CA – Add-ons Meetup
* Fri, May 29 – Online – Firefox 3.5 RC 1 Testday
* May 30-31 – Copenhagen, Denmark – Mozilla Maemo Danish Weekend
* Fri, Jun 5 – Online – Website testing testday
* Wed, Jun 24 – Mountain View, CA – Testing Mozilla web properties
For an up-to-date list of the coming week’s Mozilla project meetings and events, please see the Mozilla Community Calendar wiki page. Notes from previous meetings are linked to through the Calendar as well.
about:mozilla is by, for and about the Mozilla community, focusing on major news items related to all aspects of the Mozilla Project. The newsletter is written by Deb Richardson and is published every Tuesday morning. If you have any news or announcements you would like to have included in our next issue, please send them to: about-mozilla[at]mozilla.com.
If you would like to get this newsletter by email, just head on over to the about:mozilla newsletter subscription form. Fresh news, every Tuesday, right to your inbox.
May 31st, 2009
In order to keep the trees calm for the upcoming Gecko 1.9.1 / Firefox 3.5 code freeze, the mozilla-central (trunk) repository has been restricted to:
- patches that fix Gecko 1.9.1 / Firefox 3.5 blockers
- patches that fix bustage or regressions that will need to land on 1.9.1 as well
- patches that are not part of the Firefox build
- patches that update/fix tests
As always, exceptions can be made by the sheriff or Mozilla 1.9.1 / Firefox 3.5 drivers who can usually be found in #developers or #shiretoko on irc.mozilla.org or can be emailed directly.
Once Gecko 1.9.1 / Firefox 3.5 freezes, this restriction on mozilla-central will be lifted.
May 31st, 2009
In this issue…
- New Labs Design Challenge!
- Personas update released
- Fennec Alpha 1 for Windows Mobile
- SUMO: Part of Mozilla’s periscope
- Subscribe to the SUMO newsletter!
- New Labs discussion groups
- Mobiletesters mailing list
- Growing the MozEdu community
- On hybrid organizations
- Personas: Art and the browser
- Upcoming events
- Developer calendar
- About about:mozilla
The Mozilla Labs team has launched another Design Challenge. “In collaboration with IxDA and Johnny Holland, we once again invite designers, students and design-focused people from all around the world to develop new ideas and mockups for the future of the Web.” This Design Challenge is focusing on finding creative solutions to the question: “Reinventing Tabs in the Browser – How can we create, navigate and manage multiple web sites within the same browser instance?” Participating in the Design Challenge is easy: just create a mockup of your proposed solution (anything from a napkin drawing to a polished Photoshop masterpiece) and a short video explanation, upload those somewhere on the Web, then send an email with links to both to conceptseries@mozilla.com. For more information, see Pascal Finette’s original announcement on the Labs weblog.
Since the Personas project launched about six weeks ago, the team has been working with the community to improve the Personas user experience through three quick website releases and one extension update. Details about the changes can be found in Suneel Gupta’s post on the Labs weblog. “The Personas project will continue to evolve quickly with your ideas and feedback. If you have thoughts on how to make Personas better, please discuss and debate them in our discussion group or add a solution to our newly created support wiki.”
Fennec Alpha 1 for Windows Mobile
Fennec (aka: Firefox Mobile) Alpha 1 has been released for Windows Mobile 6 and is available for download by developers and testers. It’s important to note that this is an early developer release, and is not intended for regular use at this time. As with previous releases, Madhava Enros has created a video walk through of this release. For more information, including installation instructions and a list of known issues, see the release announcement.
SUMO: Part of Mozilla’s periscope
David Tenser, Mozilla’s SUMO project lead, has written an interesting article that talks about how SUMO is a vital tool in quickly spotting and dealing with emerging problems Firefox users are encountering. “The background of this story is the problem many Firefox users experienced with anti-virus program BitDefender a few weeks ago, where BitDefender would quarantine one of Firefox’s program files, treating it as a malicious trojan.” The team first became aware of the issue through SUMO’s Live Chat system, and the Release Rapid Response Team flew into action. In less than two hours, BitDefender released an update and the problem was solved. For the full story, see David’s weblog post.
Subscribe to the SUMO newsletter!
Chris Ilias writes, “The about:SUMO newsletter is coming! You can subscribe now. If you are not actively involved in SUMO, but are still interested in knowing what is going on in the SUMO world, this is a great way to keep in the know. Just use the online subscription form.”
The Labs team is constantly on the lookout for better ways to do things, better tools, and better infrastructure. Recently they realized that the project forum system wasn’t working as well as it could, so it has been replaced. With the new system, discussions can now be read via Web, RSS feeds and email, and responded to by email or on the Web. The hope is that this will make it easier for everyone to participate in and become part of the Labs community. A full list of the Labs discussion groups and RSS feeds is available on the Mozilla Labs website.
The Mobile team has set up a new mailing list to help coordinate and discuss Fennec testing. “In the mobile environment, there are several different operating systems, hundreds of different devices, and thousands of cellular networks across the globe. The only way we can begin to test these complicated real-world scenarios is with your help. We need you to check out our milestone releases, run them on your devices, and let us know what is working and what isn’t.” You can sign up for the Mobiletesters mailing list to stay informed about ways you can help test Fennec for the upcoming 1.0 launch. This is a great way to get involved in the future of the mobile web.
Growing the community of people working on education in a Mozilla context is one of the primary goals of the Mozilla Education project. “Many of the lessons Mozilla has learned building world-class software products can be applied to how we enable and support those in education: be open, be collaborative, share in community, leverage the open web. Another lesson we’ve learned from Mozilla is that people contribute in different ways, and there is no one size fits all approach. The same is true for Mozilla and education.” David Humphrey writes about various ways the project is working to build the Mozilla Education community, discussing a number of things that we can each do to get involved and help with the project.
Mark Surman, Frank Hecker, and David Humphrey have all been thinking about and posting about “hybrid organizations” lately. Mark started the ball rolling with his “What is a hybrid organization?” post, followed by “Hybrid orgs. What’s old? What’s new?” and “Why do hybrid orgs matter?“. Frank and David followed these with “Hybrid organizations and maximizing public benefit” and “Mozilla, Education…Hybrid“. If you’re at all interested in this sort of “meta discussion” about the Mozilla Project, these posts are a great way to get involved with this growing and ongoing conversation.
Suneel Gupta has outlined a number of ideas the Personas team is looking at towards increasing the ratio of original art (vs. repurposed art) in the gallery, and providing the emerging community of Personas artists with better support and visibility. These “actionable concepts” include: adding a designer profile and dashboard, improving preview functionality, expanding the definition of a “popular” design, collaborating with other design communities, and working with other add-on authors. The Personas commuity has grown rapidly, and the gallery now contains over 5,000 designs from over 3,500 contributors. Get the full story from Suneel’s blog post.
The Mozilla community is organizing an increasing number of events and meetups all the time, so we’re going to start including a list of these every week. If you have events you would like included here, send them along to: about-mozilla*at*mozilla.com.
* Wed, May 20 – Online – Firefox 3.5 launch workshop
* Thu, May 21 – Online – Test Dev Thursday
* Fri, May 22 – Online – New AMO site sneak peek and testing
* Tue, May 26 – Mountain View, CA – Add-ons Meetup
* May 30-31 – Copenhagen, Denmark – Mozilla Maemo Danish Weekend
* Fri, Jun 5 – Online – Website testing testday
* Wed, Jun 24 – Mountain View, CA – Testing Mozilla web properties
For an up-to-date list of the coming week’s Mozilla project meetings and events, please see the Mozilla Community Calendar wiki page. Notes from previous meetings are linked to through the Calendar as well.
about:mozilla is by, for and about the Mozilla community, focusing on major news items related to all aspects of the Mozilla Project. The newsletter is written by Deb Richardson and is published every Tuesday morning. If you have any news or announcements you would like to have included in our next issue, please send them to: about-mozilla[at]mozilla.com.
If you would like to get this newsletter by email, just head on over to the about:mozilla newsletter subscription form. Fresh news, every Tuesday, right to your inbox.
May 31st, 2009
In this issue…
- Download Day gets a Webby!
- Design Challenge “Best in Class” announced
- Prism 1.0 beta available
- Weaving identity into the browser
- Front-end performance in Firefox 3.5
- QMO: Introducing Test Dev Thursdays
- Multiprocess Firefox project underway
- Relicensing Wiki.mozilla.org to CC-BY-SA
- Mozilla as a data driven community
- The future of Add-ons
- AMO: Contributions pilot
- Getting insight into your email
- Upcoming conferences + meetups
- Developer calendar
- About about:mozilla
The Firefox 3 Download Day event was recently named the People’s Voice Winner in the Webby’s Interactive Advertising Online Campaign category. Mary Colvig, who lead the project, writes, “while the International Academy of Digital Arts and Sciences named Absolut the category winner, I’m thrilled we snagged the People’s Voice. Our campaign was entirely people-powered — 8 million of us taking the time to download Firefox and nab a Guinness World Record.” Mike Morgan has written an accompanying post where he talks about how Download Day succeeded, describing the anatomy of the project and how teamwork and the Mozilla ecosystem made it all possible.
Design Challenge “Best in Class” announced
Three months ago Mozilla Labs launched its first Design Challenge, inviting design-focused students from around the world to try and answer the question, “What would a browser look like if the Web was all there was?” A panel of design experts evaluated the 18 prototypes submitted, and have now selected four “Best in Class” entries. Pascal Finette’s announcement includes links to all the prototypes and the list of “Best in Class” submissions.
Prism started as an experiment with the goal “to bridge the divide in the user experience between web applications and desktop apps”. Last week the Prism team announced the beta version of Prism 1.0, the culmination of more than a year of real-world use by companies like Yahoo! Zimbra, DesignLinks International, and many others. “Tens of thousands of end users have installed Prism-enabled sites. Based on their feedback, as well as the experience of website creators, we’ve added new features to bring the user experience of web apps even closer to that of their desktop counterparts.” For more, see Matthew Gertner’s post at the Mozilla Labs weblog.
Weaving identity into the browser
The Mozilla Weave team, headed up by Dan Mills, has unveiled a new Weave-related experiment that builds a form of identity management right into the browser. The experiment “changes the browser to provide single-click login to sites with saved passwords as well as sites that support a federated identity (OpenID in this case). It also provides the option to automatically sign in when the page is loaded, essentially providing a single-sign-on-like experience regardless of the login method being used.” For more on this exciting new experiment, see Dan’s post (with video!) at the Mozilla Labs weblog.
Relicensing Wiki.mozilla.org to CC-BY-SA
Gervase Markham has announced a new initiative to relicense the content in the Mozilla Wiki from the GNU Free Documentation License to the Creative Commons Attribution-Sharealike license. “We believe that this is consistent with contributors’ expectations based on their experience with other Mozilla sites, and it will simplify moving wiki.mozilla.org content to other sites and remixing it with content on those sites.” If you have an objection to this plan, please post it in the thread in the mozilla.legal discussion forum.
Front-end performance in Firefox 3.5
Dietrich Ayala has written an article that discusses front-end performance improvements that are being included as part of Firefox 3.5. “Firefox 3.5 contains a large number of internal changes to how we store, manage and display [history and bookmark data], in order to improve performance. Shawn Wilsher and Marco Bonardo spent an immense amount of time and effort altering almost every SQL query in Places, the bookmark and history infrastructure.” Ed Lee has also been able to drastically speed up searching in the Awesomebar, and further work will vastly improve the performance of the history menu, sidebar, and smart folders. For the full story, see Dietrich’s weblog.
QMO: Introducing Test Dev Thursdays
Mozilla’s crack QA team has launched a new initiative: Test Development Thursdays. These all-day events will be happening every two weeks, with the next occuring on May 21st. “Writing tests is a fun way to see your code get into the Mozilla Central tree. Also, this will enable us to expand our code coverage to areas where we desperately need tests.” Further information is available through the blog post, or pop into the #qa channel on irc.mozilla.org.
Multiprocess Firefox project underway
Percy Cabello, Mozilla Links lead, has posted a story about a new project that that will turn Firefox into a multi-process application, with one process running the main user interface (chrome), and another or several others running the web content in each tab. “The main benefit would be the increase in stability: a single tab crash would not take down the whole session with it, as well as performance improvements in multiprocessor systems that are progressively becoming the norm.” See Mozilla Links for the full post, and the project wiki goes into much more detail.
Mozilla as a data driven community
Ken Kovash has shared his slides from a recent talk about Mozilla and analystics. The ensuing discussion identified several ways the metrics team can work in closer collaboration with other teams across Mozilla. The team would like to see Mozilla become increasingly data-driven, relying more on the their services before decisions are made and earlier on in initiatives. Ken’s post has more information and a link to his slides.
Nick Nguyen, Mozilla’s Add-ons lead, has been working hard to define the future of the Add-ons program. He recently gave a presentation on the topic at the Mozilla All-hands meeting, and has now shared his slides from that talk. “This was a fun presentation to create and give because I’m incredibly excited about the future of add-ons. To me add-ons are the ultimate form of user generated content, created by a group of users who are more passionate, intelligent, and principled than any user community I’ve ever seen.” Nick’s post includes a link to his slides.
The addons.mozilla.org (AMO) team is developing some new features for the site that will allow participating developers to request voluntary contributions from users in a way that helps explain how those financial contributions help with the development of an add-on. Initial mockups are now available, and include a redesign of the add-ons listing page as well as a new “Meet the developer” page. These updates will be available to all developers, not just ones who ask for financial support. The AMO team is still looking for add-on developers to participate in the pilot program, and you can sign up over at the AMO weblog.
Getting insight into your email
The Thunderbird team has been playing with some new ideas for the “Start page” of each mail folder in the application. The result is an early patch that takes advantage of the large amount of data Thunderbird has access to, summarizing critical data, marking the last message read, flagging messages that are most likely to be of interest, and presenting a histogram showing activity in that folder over the past 52 weeks, among other things. David Ascher goes into much more detail in his blog post, where he also includes some screenshots.
Upcoming conferences + meetups
The Mozilla community is organizing an increasing number of events and meetups all the time, so we’re going to start including a list of these every week. If you have events you would like included here, send them along to: about-mozilla@mozilla.com.
- May 13 – Portland, OR – Firefox Developers Meetup
- May 14 – Munich, Germany – Mozilla Meetup
- May 26 – Mountain View, CA – Add-ons Meetup
For an up-to-date list of the coming week’s Mozilla project meetings and events, please see the Mozilla Community Calendar wiki page. Notes from previous meetings are linked to through the Calendar as well.
about:mozilla is by, for and about the Mozilla community, focusing on major news items related to all aspects of the Mozilla Project. The newsletter is written by Deb Richardson and is published every Tuesday morning. If you have any news or announcements you would like to have included in our next issue, please send them to: about-mozilla[at]mozilla.com.
If you would like to get this newsletter by email, just head on over to the about:mozilla newsletter subscription form. Fresh news, every Tuesday, right to your inbox.
May 31st, 2009
In this issue…
- Mozilla Service Week: Be the difference!
- John Lilly on poetry and pragmatics
- A new look for the Spread Firefox project
- Creative Collective and building social capital
- Geolocation in Firefox 3.5 and Fennec
- Improvements to Firefox.com
- Creative Collective site design: round 1
- Mozilla.org redesign: round 3
- AMO: Firefox 3.5.* maxver now available
- AMO: New developer agreement
- Personas gallery expands: help wanted!
- Developer calendar
- About about:mozilla
Mozilla Service Week: Be the difference!
Mary Colvig is heading up an exciting new project that aims to harness the amazing energy and skills of the Mozilla community to help organizations and individuals in need.
The project has been dubbed “Mozilla Service Week”, and you are invited to participate by using your skills to help people learn how to use the Web, have better access to the Web, and to have a better Web experience overall. Activities can take a variety of forms, and suggestions include helping a school set up a wireless network, refurbishing and donating hardware to a community center, creating documentation and tutorials on how to get started on the Web, or helping a non-profit refresh its website. “The possibilities are endless for people of all skill levels to jump in and make a difference.”
Mozilla Service Week will be taking place from June 22 to June 29, 2009. This is your chance to take some time to get involved and help make the Web better for everyone. Lots more information is available in Mary’s blog post.
John Lilly on poetry and pragmatics
John Lilly recently gave a talk at the Mozilla all-hands meeting, and he has posted his slides for everyone to see. “I wanted to talk about some of the context that we find ourselves in now and how we can think about becoming a longer term organization, now that Mozilla’s first 11 years are behind us. I focused on the tension between what I’ve come to call Poetry & Pragmatics. The pragmatics of an organization are how you do things; the poetry of an organization is why you do them.” See John’s blog post for some more explanation and a link to the slides.
A new look for the Spread Firefox project
Last week a new design was unveiled for the Spread Firefox project, Mozilla’s community marketing home. “With the new layout and design, we’re striving to make the site more engaging and reflective of the great personalities behind Firefox grassroots marketing. At the same time, we’re trying to make it more straightforward for users to figure out what to do and where to go next when they come to the site.” A full recap of the major improvements is available, and it’s easier than ever to get involved and help spread the word.
Creative Collective and building social capital
The Mozilla Creative Collective is an initiative to organize and build Mozilla’s visual design community. “Building a successful online community from scratch takes a lot of work and planning. To attract members and encourage active participation, you need to offer incentives for people to join and unique benefits that they can derive from their membership over time. In other words, it’s important to offer heaps of social capital.” The Collective has spent a lot of time thinking up ways members can build social capital, and Tara Shahian has written about some of these ideas on her weblog.
Geolocation in Firefox 3.5 and Fennec
Doug Turner has announced that a new feature called Geolocation is being included in Firefox 3.5 and Fennec. “Geolocation is an opt-in tool that lets users share their location information with web sites through Firefox and will enable a new range of services on the web. Geolocation can make web sites smarter and you more productive. Websites that use geolocation will ask where you are in order to bring you more relevant information, or to save you time when searching.” Doug’s weblog post goes into a lot more detail about the new features and what this new feature means for both users and web developers.
The Marketing and Metrics teams have been working to improve the user experience of the Firefox download page and to increase the visit-to-download conversion rate. After experimenting with and testing various designs, they have implemented browser detection on the en-US locale of that page so users will get different content based on whether they’re using a non-Firefox browser, an old Firefox browser, or the current version of Firefox. “It turns out that presenting visitors with relevant content actually seems to work!” Ken Kovash and David Rolnitzky have both recently blogged about this initiative.
Creative Collective site design: round 1
The team developing the Mozilla Creative Collective project is looking for feedback on the first round of site mockups from the designers at Airbag Industries. John Slater has blogged about these initial designs, and he’s looking for feedback. “A big source of inspiration was the logo itself, as Airbag incorporated its colors, style and major elements whenever possible. They also made an effort to evoke the feel of the other Mozilla sites (especially mozilla.com and QMO), resulting in subtle textures, rough edges and a generally open, handmade feel. As always, the goal is to reflect Mozilla’s ‘people-powered’ essence rather than creating something slick and corporate.” John’s blog goes into more detail about the project, and the initial mockup is also available through his post.
Another Mozilla design project that is well underway is the redesign of the Mozilla.org website. David Boswell has posted the third round of designs. “It’s taken us a few weeks to complete this round because we made design changes based on feedback from the community and we coded the pages.” Three different coded pages have been posted for review, and the team is looking for help. “We are very interested in getting people to view these templates on a range of devices, including phones and netbooks. Any and all feedback is welcome.” The team is also accepting patches if you have better ideas about how to approach the “liquid layout” they’re going for.
AMO: Firefox 3.5.* maxver now available
Add-on developers take note! “With the Firefox 3.5b4 release, we’ve enabled the 3.5.* maxver in the AMO Developer tools. For the vast majority of add-ons without binary components, you can simply update your maxver to 3.5.* and it will be compatible with all versions of Firefox 3.5 through the release. If you do have a binary component, you should only have to recompile your code against the latest — for more information see the Firefox wiki.” It’s time to start updating your add-ons to ensure your users have the smoothest possible experience when upgrading to Firefox 3.5.
Nick Nguyen has posted about the new Developer Agreement that is part of the Addons.mozilla.org (AMO) site. “Up until now, we’ve had a fairly basic developer agreement that hasn’t changed with the needs of our developers and our service. We’re launching a new agreement that clarifies and protects our developers’ rights and ensures that we can continue to promote add-ons via multiple ways and channels as our service expands.” Nick’s post goes into more detail, describing what has changed in the agreement and why.
Personas gallery expands: help wanted!
Since launch, the Personas add-on has been downloaded over 2.5 million times and now exceeds over one million active daily users. “More importantly,” writes Suneel Gupta, “we have welcomed over 3,000 new designers and over 5,000 new designs to the Personas community.” This incredible number of submissions is overtaking the team’s ability to review and approve them all, however, so the team is looking for help. “The immediate goal is to reduce the size of the approval queue. The near-term goal is to reduce the amount of time a community member needs to wait between submitting a design and being able to view that design in the gallery and share it with friends.” If you would like to help the team achieve these goals, check out Suneel’s blog post and get involved.
For an up-to-date list of the coming week’s Mozilla project meetings and events, please see the Mozilla Community Calendar wiki page. Notes from previous meetings are linked to through the Calendar as well.
about:mozilla is by, for and about the Mozilla community, focusing on major news items related to all aspects of the Mozilla Project. The newsletter is written by Deb Richardson and is published every Tuesday morning. If you have any news or announcements you would like to have included in our next issue, please send them to: about-mozilla[at]mozilla.com.
If you would like to get this newsletter by email, just head on over to the about:mozilla newsletter subscription form. Fresh news, every Tuesday, right to your inbox.
May 31st, 2009
In this issue…
- Firefox 3.0.10 now available
- Firefox 3.5 beta 4 released for testing
- Jumpstarting the Firefox 3.5 launch team!
- Add-ons meetup in Mountain View, May 26
- Trademarks: The Good, the Bad and the Ugly
- Security: Measure what matters
- What is a hybrid organization?
- Community store: 114 t-shirts and counting
- Focus manager How To
- Undo Close Window has landed
- Mozilla Foundation team priorities
- Developer calendar
- About about:mozilla
As part of the Mozilla Corporation’s ongoing security and stability process, Firefox 3.0.10 is now available for Windows, Mac, and Linux users as a free download from getfirefox.com. We strongly recommend that all Firefox users upgrade to this latest release. If you already have Firefox 3, you will receive an automated update notification within 24 to 48 hours. This update can also be applied manually by selecting “Check for Updates…” from the Help menu. For a list of changes and more information, please see the Firefox 3.0.10 release notes.
Firefox 3.5 beta 4 released for testing!
Firefox 3.5 beta 4 is now available for testing. This milestone is focused on testing the core functionality provided by a number of new features and changes to the platform. You can follow along with planning at the Firefox 3.5 planning center as well as at mozilla.dev.planning, and in the irc.mozilla.org #shiretoko channel. New features and changes include: 70 languages, Private Browsing Mode, TraceMonkey performance improvements, Location Aware Browsing using new geolocation web standards, and support for native JSON and web worker threads, among other things.
Firefox 3.5 beta 4 is a public preview release intended for developer testing and community feedback — please read the DevNews announcement and the release notes before installing this beta.
Add-ons meetup in Mountain View, May 26
On May 26th at 7pm Mozilla will be hosting an Add-ons meetup in Mountain View, California. Pizza and refreshments will be served, and we’ll be giving presentations about what’s happening in the add-ons world both now and in the near future. The meetup will be taking place at Mozilla HQ at 1891 Landings Dr, Mountain View, CA, and please RSVP if you plan to attend — any schedule or venue changes will be sent to people on the RSVP list. If you can’t attend in person, virtual participation will be possible via air.mozilla.com, phone, and IRC.
Jumpstarting the Firefox 3.5 launch team!
The Mozilla Marketing team had an overwhelming response to their call for volunteers for Firefox 3.5 marketing help. “Over 130 people from Argentina, Bangladesh, India, Indonesia, Sri Lanka, Zimbabwe, Macedonia and more heeded the call! Our truly worldwide team will jump in on several marketing activities including public relations, events, and testimonials.” Starting soon, a series of online workshops will be held to discuss what’s being planned for each area, how you can contribute, how to go about it and, of course, to answer questions and brainstorm. The sessions will be held via Air Mozilla and archived for people who can’t attend the live sessions. The full schedule is available on Mary’s weblog, where more information will be posted about each workshop.
Trademarks: The Good, the Bad and the Ugly
Harvey Anderson has written an interesting post in which he talks about Mozilla trademarks, the various ways they’re used and abused, how those are categorized, and what we do about it. “The cases seem to fall into three different categories that I’ll nominally call the good, the bad, and the ugly. When we receive reports or identify problematic activities, we ‘exercise due diligence, care and prudence’ all of which means we analyze the reports and treat each case differently based on the intent and severity of the matter.” See Harvey’s full post for all the details.
Security: Measure what matters
Browser security is increasingly important as everyone wants to know they are safe when it comes to security. A growing number of groups are attempting to compare browsers based on their security record, which is great news — users are more informed than ever, and browser vendors have a better idea of where they stand and how to improve. Johnathan Nightingale writes, “The thing to watch when you’re measuring software security, though, is that you’re measuring the things that matter. We’ve talked about this before, but it bears repeating: if you measure the wrong things, you encourage vendors to game the system instead of actually making things better.” Johnathan’s article goes on to discuss the three elements that make for a good security metric, and what this means both now and in the future.
What is a hybrid organization?
Mark Surman, executive director of the Mozilla Foundation, has started a conversation about hybrid organizations. “Every time the hybrid term drops, it begs (or I get asked) the question: hybrid of what? I figured the time has come to push on this question with a little series of posts about hybrid orgs and why they matter. Over the next couple of weeks, I want to ask a few questions about this new territory. Why do these hybrid organizations matter? What challenges do they face?” Read Mark’s complete post at his weblog and get involved with the discussion.
Community store: 114 t-shirts and counting
The Mozilla Community Store opened late last year with around 60 designs. The exciting news is that there are now 114 different Mozilla-themed shirts available. John Slater writes, “Most of the new shirts feature Firefox-inspired artwork contributed by our design community, but we’ve also seeded it with logos from other Mozilla projects such as Camino, Bugzilla, Sunbird and SUMO. The idea is to be as participatory as possible, and to make sure the store has something for everyone.” You’re invited to check out the huge variety of designs on the Community Store and, if you can’t find anything you like, contribute your own!
The way focus works in Gecko has changed, as there is now a single focus manager service which handles everything related to it. “It keeps track of the topmost top-level window (called the active window), and the child frame window where the focus currently is located. For instance, if something within a particlar tab is focused, then the acitve window is the chrome browser window containing it and the child frame window is the DOM ‘window’ loaded within the tab.” Neil Deakin has written a “Focus How To” explaining these changes and giving developers a guide to how things work with the new system.
Paul O’Shannessy writes, “I’m happy to announce the landing of Undo Close Window. This adds a menu and keyboard shortcut for reopening your previously closed windows. By default we store 3 windows (though sometimes more due to special cases involving pop-up windows).” For more information about this new feature, see Paul’s blog post where he gives a quick history of the feature and links to the relevant bugs if you want to dig into the code or other details.
Mozilla Foundation team priorities
Earlier this month, the Mozilla Foundation team held a virtual work week to go over its priorities for the year. “Mostly this was about refining ideas we’d already discussed in the past, and making some choices about where our small four person team could have the most leverage and impact.” Some of the high level goals that emerged from that meeting are: Communications, Community, Programs, and Organization. Mark Surman’s blog post goes into a lot more detail, including some of the activities the team is pursuing towards achieving these goals. As always, Mark is looking for feedback, so check out his blog post and get involved with the conversation.
For an up-to-date list of the coming week’s Mozilla project meetings and events, please see the Mozilla Community Calendar wiki page. Notes from previous meetings are linked to through the Calendar as well.
about:mozilla is by, for and about the Mozilla community, focusing on major news items related to all aspects of the Mozilla Project. The newsletter is written by Deb Richardson and is published every Tuesday morning. If you have any news or announcements you would like to have included in our next issue, please send them to: about-mozilla[at]mozilla.com.
If you would like to get this newsletter by email, just head on over to the about:mozilla newsletter subscription form. Fresh news, every Tuesday, right to your inbox.
May 31st, 2009
Please note: Firefox 3.5 Beta 4 is a public preview release intended for developer testing and community feedback. It includes many new features as well as improvements to performance, web compatibility, and speed. We recommend that you read the release notes and known issues before installing this beta.
Firefox 3.5 (formerly known as Firefox 3.1) Beta 4 is now available for download. This milestone is focused on testing the core functionality provided by many new features and changes to the platform scheduled for Firefox 3.5. Ongoing planning for Firefox 3.5 can be followed at the Firefox 3.5 Planning Center, as well as in mozilla.dev.planning and on irc.mozilla.org in #shiretoko.
New features and changes in this milestone that require feedback include:
- This beta is now available in 70 languages – get your local version.
- Improved tools for controlling your private data, including a Private Browsing Mode.
- Better performance and stability with the new TraceMonkey JavaScript engine.
- The ability to provide Location Aware Browsing using web standards for geolocation.
- Support for native JSON, and web worker threads.
- Improvements to the Gecko layout engine, including speculative parsing for faster content rendering.
- Support for new web technologies such as: HTML5 <video> and <audio> elements, downloadable fonts and other new CSS properties, JavaScript query selectors, HTML5 offline data storage for applications, and SVG transforms.
Testers can download Firefox 3.5 Beta 4 builds for Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux in 70 different languages. Developers should also read the Firefox 3.5 for Developers article on the Mozilla Developer Center.
Note: Please do not link directly to the download site. Instead we strongly encourage you to link to this Firefox 3.5 Beta 4 milestone announcement so that everyone will know what this milestone is, what they should expect, and who should be downloading to participate in testing at this stage of development.
May 31st, 2009
As part of the Mozilla Corporation’s ongoing security and stability process, Firefox 3.0.10 is now available for Windows, Mac, and Linux users as a free download from getfirefox.com.
We strongly recommend that all Firefox users upgrade to this latest release. If you already have Firefox 3, you will receive an automated update notification within 24 to 48 hours. This update can also be applied manually by selecting “Check for Updates…” from the Help menu.
For a list of changes and more information, please see the Firefox 3.0.10 release notes.
Please note: If you’re still using Firefox 2.0.0.x, this version is no longer supported and contains known security vulnerabilities. Please upgrade to Firefox 3 by downloading Firefox 3.0.10 from getfirefox.com.
May 31st, 2009
As part of the Mozilla Corporation’s ongoing security and stability process, Firefox 3.0.9 is now available for Windows, Mac, and Linux users as a free download from getfirefox.com.
We strongly recommend that all Firefox users upgrade to this latest release. If you already have Firefox 3, you will receive an automated update notification within 24 to 48 hours. This update can also be applied manually by selecting “Check for Updates…” from the Help menu.
For a list of changes and more information, please see the Firefox 3.0.9 release notes.
Please note: If you’re still using Firefox 2.0.0.x, this version is no longer supported and contains known security vulnerabilities. Please upgrade to Firefox 3 by downloading Firefox 3.0.9 from getfirefox.com.
May 31st, 2009
In this issue…
- This Wednesday: QA Meetup
- Cool new Firefox 3.5 demos
- Firefox 3.5 beta 4: 70 localizations
- Automating tests for Fennec
- JavaScript 3.1: Brendan Eich interviewed
- Bespin community update
- Proposed Mozilla accessibility strategy
- Friday April 24: Test day for Firefox 3.5 beta 4
- BrowserCouch: JavaScript CouchDB implementation
- Thunderbird dev docs getting a kick start
- NVDA and Firefox for website accessibility testing
- Developer calendar
- About about:mozilla
This Wednesday: QA Meetup
The Mozilla QA team is hosting a meetup at 6:30pm PDT on April 22 in Mountain View, California. The meeting will center around a testing hack-a-thon whose goal is to do some live testing of the development version of Firefox 3.5. All you need is your laptop and a desire to get involved with the development of Firefox. This really is a great chance to get involved with the project if you’re in the Mountain View area — the QA team will be on hand to help you get set up, to answer any of your questions, and to help out however they can. Pizza and drinks will be provided!
Cool new Firefox 3.5 demos
Paul Rouget, part of Mozilla’s developer relations team and crack demo maker, has been hard at work again, producing a handful of new demos of some of the new capabilities of Firefox 3.5. The demos show how Firefox 3.5 has improved support of XMLHttpRequest including two new features, how the new Web Workers implementation works, a quick experiment using Canvas and the newly supported <video> element, and an interesting demonstration of <video> combined with CSS3 and SVG. Of course, you’ll need the latest Firefox beta in order to see these demos in action.
Firefox 3.5 beta 4: 70 localizations
The Mozilla localization team has announced that Firefox 3.5 beta 4 will be available in 70 languages. Seth Bindernagel writes, “The number is huge, but it was the effort and patience from our localizers that was most successful.” 70 of the 71 localizations made it through a somewhat chaotic beta process, making this our most successful localized beta ever. Seth makes special mention of the six new locales that are participating: Spanish (Mexican), Kazakh (Kazakhstan), Bengali (Bengladesh), Assamese (India), Croatian (Croatia), and Tamil (India). This is really phenomenal news, and everyone involved with all the localizations should be immensely proud of what they have accomplished.
Automating tests for Fennec
Mozilla’s Quality Assurance team is looking for help. “The big push we are working on in the next couple of months is to add automated test cases to exercise the Fennec UI. Now that the product is starting to stabilize, we need to catch up and get some real automation for all the hard work the dev team has been doing.” If you’re interested in helping out with this initiative, the team suggests picking up (and running with) one of these projects: Fennec preferences, Fennec panning/zoom, Fennec download manager, Fennec awesomebar, Maemo Mochitest failures, Maemo Chrome failures, Maemo Reftest failures. For more information, see the original post over on the QMO blog.
JavaScript 3.1: Brendan Eich interviewed
The Software Development Times blog has posted an interview with Brendan Eich. “Today, I had the privilege of speaking with Brendan Eich, CTO of Mozilla Corp. and the creator of JavaScript. Brendan and his cohorts on the ECMAScript 3.1 committee recently finished working out the details for what will become the next version of JavaScript. Rather than cut up his words into a story, I’m just going to post the interview verbatim.” Check it out over at the SDTimes weblog.
Bespin community update
Dion Almaer has posted a new Bespin community update. Included is a video by Kevin Dangoor, showing the results of his work to integrate VCS with Bespin. Also new is support for searching within a file, with a partially implemented search design. The settings implementation has been changed, too. “We are finding that the user specific BespinSettings project is a great place to store all of your user specific data. The editor settings will now be found at settings.txt.” Bespin now also has themes. “There are some core themes that you get out of the box…simple white, black, and a recent ‘Pastels’. We will be moving this format to simple CSS soon.” For further details, see Dion’s blog post.
Proposed Mozilla accessibility strategy
Frank Hecker has published a new proposed high-level strategy for Mozilla-related accessibility efforts. It is not a detailed roadmap or a commitment to fund such work, but is intended to provide a context within which Mozilla can make overall decisions about where funding and effort should be concentrated. “This is especially important because our resources are very much finite, and we will need to make decisions about what we should do and what we should leave undone or leave for others to do.” The strategy document is a work in progress that will be revised over time to reflect changing circumstances and priorities. Frank is looking for feedback, which you can leave on his blog post.
Friday April 24: Test day for Firefox 3.5 beta 4
The QA team has announced that the Firefox 3.5 beta 4 test day will be taking place on Friday, April 24th. “We need your awesome testing skills to make sure it is as great as it possibly can be! Our community representatives will be available through IRC chat (channel #testday on irc://irc.mozilla.org), QMO forums, as well as the dev-quality newsgroup to help with your questions, comments, and suggestions.” The test day announcement has all the details, including how to get ready, some tips, and specific ways you can help.
BrowserCouch: JavaScript CouchDB implementation
Inspired by Vlad Vukicevic’s blog post outlining reasons why he’s not a fan of exposing a specific implementation of SQL to web content, Atul Varma spent some time prototyping a JavaScript implementation of CouchDB, which he has dubbed BrowserCouch. “A CouchDB-like API seems like a nice solution to persistent storage on the Web because some many of its semantics are delegated out to the JavaScript language, which makes it potentially easy to standardize, as well as easy to learn for Web developers.” Atul is clear that this is very much a work-in-progress, and more information about BrowserCouch is available through Atul’s blog.
Thunderbird dev docs getting a kick start
Eric Shepherd, Mozilla’s Developer Documentation lead, has blogged that the folks over at Mozilla Messaging have gotten themselves a documentation expert to help get the Thunderbird documentation project underway. “Jennifer Zickerman will be helping to figure out what’s needed, what needs to be fixed, and how to get everything organized. She’ll also be goading people into contributing the needed documentation.” It’s always good to have more hands on board working on Mozilla’s documentation projects, and we’re all looking forward to seeing her contributions on the Mozilla Developer Center.
NVDA and Firefox for website accessibility testing
Marco Zehe has published an article on how to use NVDA (Non-visual Desktop Access) and Firefox to do website testing. “The article is meant as an introduction, not as a replacement for the NVDA user guide, and it is certainly not meant to replace other accessibility testing tools you might use for your website testing, just as an additional tool to help you get a feel for how blind users interact with your web sites or web applications.” Marco’s article is available through his weblog, and he welcomes comments and feedback.
Developer calendar
For an up-to-date list of the coming week’s Mozilla project meetings and events, please see the Mozilla Community Calendar wiki page. Notes from previous meetings are linked to through the Calendar as well.
About about:mozilla
about:mozilla is by, for and about the Mozilla community, focusing on major news items related to all aspects of the Mozilla Project. The newsletter is written by Deb Richardson and is published every Tuesday morning. If you have any news or announcements you would like to have included in our next issue, please send them to: about-mozilla[at]mozilla.com.
If you would like to get this newsletter by email, just head on over to the about:mozilla newsletter subscription form. Fresh news, every Tuesday, right to your inbox.