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.
Related posts:
- about:mozilla – Firefox 3.5, Firefox Hacks, add-ons, Design Challenge, community scaling, Fennec, Camino, Firebug, and more…
- about:mozilla – Meetups, demos, Fennec, JavaScript 3.1, Bespin, accessibility, BrowserCouch, Thunderbird, and more…
- about:mozilla – Design Challenge, Personas, Fennec, SUMO, Labs, Mobile, MozEdu, hybrid orgs, and more…
- Spread Firefox Education Toolkit Launched!
- about:mozilla – Firefox 3.5, open video, Jetpack, web games, website testing, Weave tutorial, launch events, and more…