Easy Firefox

about:mozilla – Meetups, demos, Fennec, JavaScript 3.1, Bespin, accessibility, BrowserCouch, Thunderbird, and more…

May 31st, 2009

In this issue…

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.

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Easy Firefox

about:mozilla – Meetups, demos, Fennec, JavaScript 3.1, Bespin, accessibility, BrowserCouch, Thunderbird, and more…

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