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As part of Mozilla Corporation’s ongoing stability and security update process, Thunderbird 2.0.0.16 is now available for Windows, Mac, and Linux as a free download from www.getthunderbird.com.

Due to the security fixes, we strongly recommend that all Thunderbird users upgrade to this latest release.

If you already have Thunderbird 2.0.0.x, you will receive an automated update notification within 24 to 48 hours. This update can also be applied manually by selecting “Check for Updates…” from the Help menu.

For a list of changes and more information, please review the Thunderbird 2.0.0.16 Release Notes.

Please note: If you’re still using Thunderbird 1.5.0.x, this version is no longer supported and contains known security vulnerabilities. Please upgrade to Thunderbird 2 by downloading Thunderbird 2.0.0.16 from www.getthunderbird.com.

Today from 11:00 a.m. - 12:00 p.m. PDT (UTC-07:00) Asa Dotzler hosts Air Mozilla Live. Join us at http://air.mozilla.com.

Asa’s guests this week will be Mitchell Baker and Mark Surman. Here’s how Mitchell introduced Mark on her blog:

I’m thrilled to report that we’ve identified the person we believe should lead the Mozilla Foundation into a new stage of activity. That person is Mark Surman, the role is Mozilla Foundation Executive Director. “We” in this case is the Executive Director Search Committee, the Mozilla Foundation Board of Directors, Mozilla Foundation staff, plus a set of other Mozilla contributors who have spoken with Mark.

Who: The Mozilla community, host Asa Dotzler, and guests Mitchell Baker and Mark Surman.
When: Wednesday, July 23, from 11:00 a.m. - 12:00 p.m. PDT (UTC-07:00)
Where: View the webcast and join the chat at air.mozilla.com and on IRC server irc.mozilla.org, channel #airmozilla.

In this issue…

• Mark Surman and the Mozilla Foundation
• Air Mozilla, this Wednesday
• Mozilla Labs Meetup, this Thursday
• Firefox screencast contest winners
• Control-Tab: A new (future) feature for Firefox
• Firefox 3.1: Support for text attributes and spell checking
• Mozilla Community Calendar
• Firefox 3.0.1 released
• Firefox 2.0.0.16 released
• SeaMonkey 1.1.11 security release
• Developer calendar
• Subscribe to the email newsletter

Mark Surman and the Mozilla Foundation
Mitchell Baker writes, “I’m thrilled to report that we’ve identified the person we believe should lead the Mozilla Foundation into a new stage of activity. That person is Mark Surman, the role is Mozilla Foundation Executive Director. The Mozilla Foundation Board of Directors and Mark would like the Mozilla community and Mark to meet before we make a final decision. We’re inviting interested parties to talk with Mark about the Mozilla Foundation and the Executive Director role, to develop a feel for how well Mark and the Mozilla project fit together.” More information is available at Mitchell’s weblog.

Air Mozilla, this Wednesday
Asa Dotzler will be hosting another exciting edition of Air Mozilla Live on Wednesday July 23rd at 11:00am Pacific time. The guests this week will be Mitchell Baker and Mark Surman. The Air Mozilla broadcast is your opportunity to meet Mark and ask questions about the Mozilla Foundation and the Executive Director role he is currently slated to fill. If you can’t make it to the live broadcast, you can still send your questions in ahead of time by email. More details are available at Asa’s weblog.

Mozilla Labs Meetup, this Thursday
It’s time for another Mozilla Labs Monthly Meetup. This month’s meetup will be held this Thursday, July 24th, 6pm at Mozilla’s office — 1981 Landings Drive, bldg K in Mountain View, California. There will be informal lightning talks and progress updates on the various Labs projects, as well as plenty of opportunity for discussion and hacking. We will be streaming the evening out to the Labs site. If you are in the Bay Area and would like to attend, please take a moment to RSVP by leaving a comment on the Mozilla Labs blog post.

Firefox screencast contest winners
The Firefox screencast contest is over, and there are now 50 new videos to accompany the articles in the SUMO Knowledge Base. The contest team is very happy with the result and is excited to finally announce the winners. For his work on “How to customize the toolbar,” the contest judges chose Cameron Roy as the grand prize winner. Other winners (one for the best sceencast for each article) will be contacted shortly about their prizes. Thank you to everyone who participated in the contest — you’ve helped improve the knowledge base immesurably, and your work will have a lasting impact on Firefox’s 180+ million users. Check out the SUMO weblog post for more information.

Control-Tab: A new (future) feature for Firefox
Jennifer Boriss writes, “Dao Gottwald has been working for a while on his Ctrl-Tab Firefox add-on. Ctrl-Tab has two parts: a filmstrip that allows the user to quickly jump to recently used tabs, and a tab preview mode. These features have been widely used, and lately we at Mozilla have been working to give them a home as a Firefox feature. We’re happy to announce the filmstrip of recently-viewed tabs landed today and will show up in tomorrow’s nightlies as a new Firefox feature.” It is currently expected that this feature will first appear in Firefox 3.1, and there’s lots more information about this new feature and how it will affect Firefox users’ workflow at Jennifer’s weblog.

Firefox 3.1: Support for text attributes and spell checking
Marco Zehe writes, “Friday’s nightly build will include one big new feature in accessibility for Firefox 3.1: Text attributes and spell checking support.” This means that assistive technologies will now be able to get information about the font-family, font-weight, underline style, style, color, and background color of text, and also the language that the text is in, among other things. Additionally, when editing, if a word is misspelled, that word will now include an “invalid:misspelling” attribute. These new features will be fine-tuned over the next few weeks, but the team is looking for feedback if you’re able to help. For more details, please see Marco’s weblog post.

Mozilla Community Calendar
Deb Richardson is putting together a comprehensive list of weekly/regular public project meetings and other events. The wiki page for it is “Community Calendar” on the Mozilla public wiki. The plan is to eventually publish a consolidated version as a shared public calendar that everyone can subscribe to. Please check the wiki page and make any changes or additions necessary.

Firefox 3.0.1 released
As a part of Mozilla Corporation’s ongoing stability and security update process, Firefox 3.0.1 is now available for Windows, Mac, and Linux as a free download from getfirefox.com. It is strongly recommended that all Firefox users upgrade to this latest release. If you already have Firefox 3, you will receive an automated update notification shortly. For more information, including a list of changes, please see the Mozilla Developer News weblog.

Firefox 2.0.0.16 released
In addition to the release of Firefox 3.0.1, Firefox 2 has also been updated, and Firefox 2.0.0.16 is now available for Windows, Mac, and Linux as a free download from http://www.mozilla.com/firefox/all-older.html. It is strongly recommended that all Firefox 2 users upgrade to this latest release. If you already have Firefox 2, you will receive an automated update notification. This update can also be applied manually by selecting “Check for Updates…” from the Help menu.

Please note that 2.0.0.x will be maintained with security and stability updates until mid-December 2008. All users are encouraged to upgrade to Firefox 3.

SeaMonkey 1.1.11 security release
SeaMonkey Project News reports that the SeaMonkey project released a new version of its all-in-one internet suite on July 15th, 2008. “SeaMonkey 1.1.11 closes several security vulnerabilities and fixes several smaller problems found in previous versions. With that, SeaMonkey stays at the same level of security as its sibling Firefox 2, which is issuing updates for the same problems this week as well.” The SeaMonkey team urges users of older SeaMonkey versions to upgrade to this latest release. For more information, see the SeaMonkey Project News page.

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.

Subscribe to the email newsletter
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.

As discussed for the past two weeks in our usual developer meetings, we’ve frozen the mozilla-central repository as of 23:59 PDT in order to prepare Firefox 3.1 Alpha 1 for delivery. The tree will be held frozen to allow several build cycles to run through our automatic tests, and the build team will begin the process of tagging and building tomorrow morning at 09:00 PDT. Once tagging is complete, the repository will re-open.

The first minor update to Mozilla Firefox 3 has been released. Firefox 3.0.1 fixes three critical security vulnerabilities, improves stability and resolves a handful of other small bugs.

The security fixes are detailed in the Firefox 3.0.1 section of the Security Advisories for Firefox 3.0 page. Two of the issues — one related to how Firefox handles command-line URLs to open multiple tabs and another allowing remote code execution by overflowing a CSS reference counter — were also present in Firefox 2 and fixed in Tuesday's Firefox 2.0.0.16 release. Security improvements in Firefox 3 mean that it's not vulnerable to some of the Firefox 2 variants of the command-line multiple tab exploit but it can still be compromised by combining the attack with a script injection flaw.

The final flaw only affects Mac OS X and allows an attacker to crash Firefox with a malformed GIF file, potentially gaining the ability to execute arbitrary code on the victim's computer. This vulnerability is not present in Firefox 2.

The non-security fixes include an issue where the phishing and malware database did not update on first launch and a problem that could cause Firefox to not save the security certificate exceptions list properly. A bug that could result in missing output when printing a selection from a page (bug 433373) was resolved and a Linux issue causing Firefox to always start in offline mode when using a PPP connection (bug 424626) was also fixed. The Public Suffix list has also been updated (bug 438585).

The Firefox 3.0.1 Release Notes have more details about the fixes in this minor upgrade. The new version can be downloaded from the Firefox product page or the Firefox 3.0.1 directory on releases.mozilla.org but most Firefox 3 users are expected to get it via the software update feature built in to the browser or their own operating system's update facility.

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Firefox is more than just a program it's a whole new world! and we need to show planet earth that's I.E. is not the internet it's just a program that can browse it, and that firefox is the only real way to enjoy the web!

Firefox is more than just a program it's a whole new world! and we need to show planet earth that IE is not the internet it's just a program that can browse it, and that firefox is the only real way to enjoy the web!

Mozilla Firefox 2.0.0.16 was released this week. The stability and security update to Firefox 2 fixes two security bugs, which are detailed in the Firefox 2.0.0.16 section of the Security Advisories for Firefox 2.0 page. Both are rated Critical, the highest of the four ratings.

One flaw is related to how Firefox handles command-line URLs to open multiple tabs and allows an attacker to open potentially malicious URLs in Firefox from another application. One variant of this attack exploits the widely-reported Safari carpet-bombing vulnerability but others also exist. Somewhat ironically, the exploit relies on Firefox not being open at the time of the attack.

The other vulnerability allows an attacker to crash and run arbitrary code on a victim's computer by overflowing a CSS object reference counter. The detailed bug reports for both issues are currently access-restricted to avoid assisting attackers but will be fully opened after users have had some time to install Firefox 2.0.0.16.

Although Firefox 3 was released in June and all users are encouraged to upgrade, Firefox 2 will be maintained with security and stability upgrades until mid-December 2008, according to the Mozilla Developer News weblog, which reported on the release of Firefox 2.0.0.16 on Tuesday. Version 2.0.0.16 is the second Firefox 2 update to be released since the launch of Firefox 3 and follows on from Firefox 2.0.0.15, which fixed twelve security issues.

Existing Firefox 2 users will be offered 2.0.0.16 via the browser's built-in software update feature if enabled. It can also be downloaded from the older Firefox releases page or the Firefox 2.0.0.16 directory on releases.mozilla.org, where it is available in over forty localizations for Windows, Mac OS X and Linux. The Firefox 2.0.0.16 Release Notes contain more general information about the upgrade.

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The official Mozilla Blog has confirmation that Mozilla Firefox 3 now holds the official Guinness World Record for the largest number of software downloads in twenty-four hours. On Download Day, there were 8,002,530 downloads of Firefox 3 between 6:16pm UTC/GMT on Tuesday 17th June 2008 and 6:16pm UTC/GMT on Wednesday 17th June 2008.

Gareth Deaves, Records Manager for Internet and Technology at Guinness World Records, presented the official Guinness World Record certificate to Mozilla Europe President Tristan Nitot at a ceremony in London on Wednesday 9th July. While this official certificate is held by Mozilla, anyone who contributed to the record attempt can download their own personalized Firefox 3 Download Day certificate from Spread Firefox.

In a weblog post, Gervase Markham explains that the actual Download Day figure should be 8,002,529, as a Guinness World Records representative downloaded Firefox 3 during the twenty-four period, which cannot count as he is an official. Meanwhile, Mary Colvig has posted some details about the behind-the-scenes efforts that went into organizing Download Day and Asa Dotzler has published responses to some criticisms of the Guinness World Record attempt.

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