Easy Firefox

about:mozilla – Firefox 3.5, Firefox Hacks, add-ons, Design Challenge, community scaling, Fennec, Camino, Firebug, and more…

June 9th, 2009

In this issue…

Firefox 3.5 preview release
The 800,000+ users of Firefox 3.5 Beta 4 will be receiving an update to a “Firefox 3.5 Preview” release in order to assist us with further testing and feedback. This update contains many fixes for stability bugs, correctness fixes for our JavaScript engine, and improvements to our built-in support for open Ogg based video and audio playback.

While this release has not yet completed the testing required to be declared a release candidate, it is considered stable for daily use and we appreciate your assistance in helping us test and evaluate this preview release. Please note that this release is intended for developer testing and community feedback. We recommend that most users wait for the official Firefox 3.5 release, which is coming soon.

Please see the release announcement for more information.

Firefox hacks: Firefox 3.5 in 35 days
The upcoming release of Firefox 3.5 is a big upgrade for users, but what it really represents is a huge upgrade to the web itself. New features include support for open audio and video, threads in JavaScript, new canvas features, tons of new CSS features, downloadable fonts, geolocation, and more. Over the next 35 days, the Mozilla Evangelism team will be posting new articles every day that talk about and demonstrate all of these new features. The first articles have been posted, and you can check them out over at the brand new Firefox Hacks weblog.

Improving the add-on install experience
Dave Townsend has been spending a lot of time thinking about how to improve the add-on install experience for both users and add-on developers. He has written a blog post discussing one idea in particular, including mockups and an explanation. “The goal is both to let users know that new add-ons have been installed and let the add-on help the user move forward without needing to show popup dialogs or inundate the user.” Dave is looking for feedback and further discussion, so head over to his weblog if you would like to help.

Design Challenge update
The Summer 09 Design Challenge started a couple of weeks ago, and already there have been more than 30 submissions and lots of discussion taking place in the forum. Pascal Finette has also announced this Challenge’s panelists: Janna DeVylder (IxDA), Kevin Silver (IxDA), Jeroen van Geel (Johnny Holland), Steve Baty (Johnny Holland), Aza Raskin (Mozilla), and Ecaterina Valica, Amine Zafri & Valentin Laube (”Best in Class” honorees from the Spring 09 Design Challenge). The submission deadline for this Design Challenge is June 21st.

Scaling the Mozilla localization community
Between the release of Firefox 3 and the upcoming release of Firefox 3.5, Mozilla has added twenty-six new localizations for Firefox, meaning that the new version will ship in a total of 75 locales. Seth Bindernagel, who heads up the Mozilla localization effort, has recently written an article where he talks about the magic behind scaling up the Mozilla localization project this quickly and effectively.

Firefox Mobile start page discussion
Madhava Enros, the Fennec (Firefox Mobile) user-experience lead, has been thinking a lot about start pages and what they should do in Fennec. “In Firefox, by default, we show a Google search field when you start the browser, but also give you the option to change it to whatever homepage you want. Occasionally, as on the very first time to run the browser, we show you a welcoming message instead. Recently, there’s also been work to try to further refine what shows up when you open a new tab. All of these ’start page’ variants are attempts to speed you on your way to whatever it is you’d like to do with the web. What should we do in Fennec? Where does the usage landscape differ from how Firefox works on the desktop?” See Madhava’s blog for the full article.

Camino 2.0 beta 3 available
After months of hard work following the release of Camino 1.6, the Camino Project is proud to announce the fourth preview release of Camino 2. Camino 2.0 Beta 3 contains several notable improvements, including enhanced AppleScript capabilities, a new crash reporting system that works on all Macs, Growl notifications for completed downloads, and a lot more. Camino 2.0 Beta 3 also has all of the improvements in version 1.9.0 of Mozilla’s Gecko rendering engine, leading to better performance with popular plug-ins and enhanced support for web standards. For more information and to download, visit the Camino Preview site.

Firebug 1.4 beta 1 on AMO
The Firebug team has pushed Firebug 1.4 beta 1 to addons.mozilla.org (AMO). “Currently, we’ve only turned it on for users of 3.5b4 and later, but this version is fully-compatible with Firefox 3.0 as well. Users of Firefox 3.0 who want to try out Firebug 1.4 should download it from GetFirebug.com, or disable version checking on AMO. When we ship the final version of Firebug 1.4.0 we will set the compatibility for all users of Firefox 3.0 and 3.5.” For more information see Rob Campbell’s announcment about this beta release.

Firefox Mobile add-ons
Brian King has posted a great overview of the Mozilla/Maemo meetup recently held in Copenhagen. “Present were a large chunk of the Fennec development team, add-on developers, localisers, and community members. The weekend was a mix of sessions and hacking, with the focus more on the latter. We ported add-ons, made new ones, found bugs, and had discussions on best practices and ways to improve the user experience.” For Brian’s full report, see his weblog.

Upcoming events
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, Jun 17 – Munich, Germany – Munich Mozilla meetup
* Fri, Jun 19 – Online – Website Testing testday (rescheduled!)
* Wed, Jun 24 – Mountain View, CA – Testing Mozilla web properties
* Fri, Jun 26 – Online – Fennec web compatibility testing
* Fri, Jul 10 – Online – Firefox 3.5 Security Testday

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.

Go to Source

Easy Firefox

about:mozilla – Firefox 3.5, Firefox Hacks, add-ons, Design Challenge, community scaling, Fennec, Camino, Firebug, and more…

Leave a Reply