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about:mozilla – Service Week, New AMO, Community store, 3.5 demos, FSOSS, audio/video, Design Challenge, Weave, Jetpack, Personas, and more…

June 17th, 2009

In this issue…

Mozilla Service Week launches!

Yesterday marked the launch of the very first Mozilla Service Week. During the week of September 14-21, 2009, we’re asking people to step up and make a difference by using the Web to better their community. We’re looking for people who want to share, give, engage, create, and collaborate by offering their time and talent to local public benefit organizations, non-profits, and people who need their help. “We’re inviting people to get involved with Mozilla in an active way, even if they can’t code, test or localize. It lets anyone and everyone feel like they are contributing to the cause of building a better internet.”

For all the details about what you can do and how to get started, see the announcement blog post or the Mozilla Service Week website.

New AMO and Add-on collections

Last week the Add-ons team rolled out a major redesign of the addons.mozilla.org (AMO) website. This is a huge release that improved both the overall user-interface for the site, and the organization and discoverability of add-ons. One of the coolest new features is Collections. With Collections, you can create a list of your favorite add-ons and publish it to the web for others to use. This makes it really easy to expose your friends and family to really useful add-ons by organizing them using this tool. For more information about the new AMO site and its Add-on Collections feature, see Rey Bango’s blog post about the launch.

Show us your speed

Firefox 3.5 will be here soon, and its shaping up to be by far the fastest Firefox yet: more than twice as fast as Firefox 3 and 10 times as fast as Firefox 2. We’re asking for your help to spread the word by making a short (30 seconds, max) video of you doing your speediest skill. It doesn’t matter if it’s making a sandwich, changing a tire, or mowing your lawn…it just has to be fast. Then head over to www.fastestfirefox.com and submit your video. We’ll be editing the best submissions into a compilation video that really shows off what our community is capable of, so check back about a week after the Firefox 3.5 release. If we use your clip, you’ll get a Firefox 3.5 t-shirt!

Get creative with the Firefox 3.5 launch

The Mozilla Community Store is looking for your help in promoting the launch of Firefox 3.5 with new t-shirt designs, and Tara has posted a quick summary of how to get started on her weblog. If you’re interested in learning more about this and other design initiatives at Mozilla (such as the Creative Collective), be sure to read John’s and Tara’s weblogs for details. You can also join the Creative Collective mailing list, or follow their tweets for updates.

Firefox 3.5 feature demos

As promised, the Firefox Hacks team has been posting articles and demos for new Firefox 3.5 features every day. Recent posts include: Pushing pixels with canvas, Content aware image resizing, Geolocation in Firefox 3.5, Add some ambiance to your videos, Stylish text with text-shadow, Beautiful fonts with @font-face, What does tracemonkey feel like?, and Geolocation with open street maps. This is just the beginning of the series of hacks and demos the team plans to post, and you can read all these articles and more over at the Mozilla Hacks weblog.

Update to Firefox 3.0.11 now available

As part of the Mozilla Corporation’s ongoing security and stability process, Firefox 3.0.11 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, or this update can be applied manually by selecting “Check for Updates…” from the Help menu. For a list of changes and more information, please see the Firefox 3.0.11 release notes.

FSOSS 2009 accepting proposals

David Humphrey writes, “This year’s Free Software and Open Source Symposium (FSOSS) is now accepting presentation proposals. In addition to the regular talks and workshops at FSOSS, there will also be a one-day Teaching Open Source Summit. If you’re working in open source or open source education, consider submitting a talk proposal to one of these two amazing events.

Commit access policy revised

Mozilla’s policy on obtaining commit access to our main mercurial and CVS repositories has been updated. The discussion leading to this can be found in mozilla.governance. The revised policy has been posted and is official as of today. A log of the changes can be found in bug 495867.

Audio and video elements and assistive technologies

Marco Zehe, part of Mozilla’s Accessibility effort, writes that the Firefox 3.5 Preview release included “exposure of the HTML5 audio and video elements through the MSAA/IAccessible2 and ATK/AT-SPI accessibility interfaces, further strengthening our commitment to Open Video. What this means is that, using NVDA or Orca, you now have access to an HTML5 audio or video file embedded in a web page. If the ‘controls’ attribute is specified within the audio or video tag, Firefox 3.5 creates its own set of playback controls. These are now exposed to screen readers using MSAA or AT-SPI to traverse our trees. Exposure through iSimpleDOM interfaces on Windows will come at a later stage. Previously, these controls were unreachable.” For more information about these new features, see Marco’s post.

Design Challenge submission deadline: June 21st

The submission deadline for the Design Challenge Summer 2009 is right around the corner! All ideas must be submitted to conceptseries@mozilla.com by Sunday, June 21st. Please note that your submission must consist of a mockup and a video explaining your concept and the thinking behind it. The theme for this design challenge is “Reinventing Tabs in the Browser — How can we create, navigate, and manage multiple web sites within the same browser instance?” For further information about the Design Challenge, see the Challenge website.

Weave update

The Weave project team has posted a quick status update. “Over the last few weeks, we’ve been busy with the usual hacking making Weave more useful and stable for our users. We’ve also been doing some hard thinking on where we would like to see Weave go next. Most of this thinking is still in the very early stages.” Two major concepts the team has been thinking about include increasing Weave stability and scalability, as well as possibly revising the initial vision for Mozilla Weave that was written in 2007. “While the core concepts outlined in that vision still remain true and continue to guide the project, we are also increasingly aware of rapid change and innovation across the open, social web. We feel that this is a good time for us to revise some aspects of the original vision.” For more information, including the announcement of three new Weave team members, see the Mozilla Labs weblog.

Personas reaches 5 million downloads

The Mozilla Labs team has announced that only ten weeks since the Personas launch, the add-on has been downloaded more than 5 million times. The downloads have been worldwide, with approximately 60% coming from outside the United States. The 9,000-strong artist community has also produced more than 13,000 designs. Check out the post on the Mozilla Labs blog for more details, and to find out what’s next for Personas.

Major Jetpack update

The Labs team recently released Jetpack 0.2, adding an experimental new UI element to Firefox as well as a number of useful APIs. In the few weeks since launch, people have created Jetpacks that do everything from extend the capabilities of the web to adding a Cylon to the browser. Even though Jetpack is still primarily a technology preview, it has been downloaded over 40,000 times and more than 40 Jetpacks have been created by people who previously had only written for the Web. To find out what’s new, including the new “slidebars” UI element, see the Mozilla Labs weblog.

How Firefox gets grass-roots marketing right

Advertising Age magazine has published an article talking about Firefox and the ongoing Mozilla Community marketing efforts. “Mozilla Corp. practices grass-roots marketing at its finest. Last month I had the opportunity to meet with Paul Kim, Mozilla’s VP-marketing, and some of his team to discuss Firefox’s unique approach to marketing — one where T-shirts have more cultural currency than 30-second spots and where accomplishments of the Obama and Howard Dean campaigns are far more admired than the latest efforts from Nike or Apple.” The full article is available on the Advertising Age website.

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.

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Easy Firefox

about:mozilla – Service Week, New AMO, Community store, 3.5 demos, FSOSS, audio/video, Design Challenge, Weave, Jetpack, Personas, and more…

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