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about:mozilla – Webby, Design Challenge, Prism, Weave, Firefox 3.5, QMO, add-ons, Thunderbird, and more…

May 31st, 2009

In this issue…

Download Day gets a Webby!

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 1.0 beta available

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.

The future of Add-ons

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.

AMO: Contributions pilot

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

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 – Webby, Design Challenge, Prism, Weave, Firefox 3.5, QMO, add-ons, Thunderbird, and more…

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