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Air Mozilla Live: Meet Mark Surman

July 23rd, 2008 | Category: About Mozilla, Mozilla Community

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.

about:mozilla - Executive Director, Air Mozilla, Labs meetup, Firefox 3.1, Community Calendar, and more…

July 22nd, 2008 | Category: About Mozilla

In this issue…

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.

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about:mozilla - Firefox marketing, Guinness record, Colbert bump, Fx3 features, community calendar, and more…

July 15th, 2008 | Category: About Mozilla

In this issue…

Firefox marketing and community

“Mozilla is currently deep in the heart of its celebration over officially setting a new Guinness World Record for the largest number of software downloads in 24 hours for its Firefox 3 browser. But the company isn’t cheering alone — it’s enjoying this victory with the community it rightfully credits for helping it succeed.” Jennifer Leggio’s ZDNet article is an interesting examination of Mozilla’s non-traditional marketing strategies, where social networking and word-of-mouth engagement has generally ruled the day. Interviewing Paul Kim, Mozilla’s VP of Marketing, Jennifer digs into the methods used to promote the recent Firefox 3 Download Day activities which include: Spread Firefox, Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube among others. The full article is available at ZDNet.

Mozilla’s Guinness World Record certificate

Mozilla received the official Guinness World Record certificate for the “largest number of software downloads in 24 hours” on July 9th, 2008. The final and official number that appears on the certificate is 8,002,530, which is an incredible achievement and one of which our entire community should be proud. Tristan Nitot accepted the certificate on behalf of the Firefox Community, receiving it from Gareth Deaves, Records Manager for Internet and Technology at Guinness World Records. The certificate was awarded in front of a 300-strong community gathering in central London to celebrate the release of Firefox 3 and the World Record achievement. A photo from the ceremony and further details are available at the Mozilla Blog.

Colbert Bump - Firefox 3 proves its existence

On the evening of Firefox 3 Download Day, Stephen Colbert of “The Colbert Report” gave Firefox 3 his “Colbert Bump”, further buoying the already giddy and exhausted crowd of folks involved with the launch efforts. The Mozilla Metrics team has since combed through the download logs looking to see if the “Colbert Bump” actually had any effect on the traffic to the website. “Download Day was a wild success, and we were happy to share some thanks and credit with Stephen. However, a few questions naturally arose, e.g., what was the direct impact of the Colbert Bump? and could the effect be precisely measured?” It turns out that there was a significant spike in the downloads exactly one and two minutes after “the Bump”. For the details, read the full post at the Blog of Metrics.

Firefox 3 features you may not know

Percy Cabello has published an article at Mozilla Links that outlines some of the lesser-known features you can find in Firefox 3. “While the awesome bar, download pause and resume, malware protection, the new themes, and serious performance improvements are perhaps the most representative features introduced with Firefox 3, here are some other useful ones…” Percy’s list includes how to duplicate a tab, move tabs between windows, resize the search bar, add a keyword search, and several others. Read the full article over at the MozillaLinks weblog.

Video and Audio element patch has landed

Chris Double writes, “The patches to add support for the WHATWG video and audio elements has been applied to the Firefox mozilla-central repository. This means you can get the source for Firefox and build it with support for “video” and “audio” by using the configure flag ‘-enable-media’. The patch that landed does not yet include a backend decoder. It won’t play any videos as a result. That will be fixed as various backends are landed.” For more information, see Chris’ 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 here: Community Calendar. 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.

Party in Taiwan - July 19

MozillaTW.org, the wonderful Mozilla community in Taiwan, is hosting a “Firefox Party 3.0” on July 19th in Taipei. If you are in Taiwan, don’t miss it! Gen Kenai’s blog post includes some cute Firefox party banners.

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.

about:mozilla — Official World Record, Firefox 2.0.0.15, security metrics, Weave, JavaScript, and more…

July 08th, 2008 | Category: About Mozilla

In this issue…

Official Guinness World Record!

The Firefox community is the proud holder of a new Guinness World Record. On July 2nd, Mozilla received confirmation from Guinness that we’ve officially achieved the record for the “largest number of software downloads in 24 hours,” with a final total of 8,002,530 downloads. This is another in a long line of wonderful accomplishments for our community. Ever since Firefox was launched in 2004 we’ve relied on Firefox supporters to help spread the word, and we now have over 180 million users in more than 230 countries. It’s an amazing accomplishment, and we’re all extremely grateful. Don’t forget to get your very own personalized Download Day certificate!

Firefox 2.0.0.15 released

As part of Mozilla Corporation’s ongoing stability and security update process, Firefox 2.0.0.15 is now available for Windows, Mac, and Linux. Please note that Firefox 2.0.0.x will be maintained with security and stability updates until mid-December 2008. We encourage you to upgrade to Firefox 3, which is now available at GetFirefox.com. For more information, please see the DevNews blog post.

Mozilla security metrics project

Mozilla has been working with security researcher and analyst Rich Mogull on developing a metrics model to measure the relative security of Firefox over time. The team is trying to develop a model that goes beyond simple bug counts and more accurately reflects both the effectiveness of secure development efforts and the relative risk to users over time. The goal for the first phase of the project is to build a baseline model that can evolve over time. A preliminary version of the project goals and a spreadsheet of the model have been published by the team. These, along with more information about the project, are available through the Mozilla Security blog.

Weave 0.2 development milestone

Weave is a Mozilla Labs project focused on building online services into the browser. The project’s goals are to enhance the new Firefox user experience and increase your control over how you share your personal information between computers, and with other people. Version 0.2 is a major update to the Weave client and to the servers than control it, and has significant new features. For more information, including details about the changes, or to try it out for yourself, check out the Mozilla Labs’ weblog post.

Two new members of the about:* newsletter family

Mozilla has started two new newsletters: about:addons and about:mobile. Strictly dealing with add-on related news and development information, about:addons is targeted at our increasingly large and vibrant addon development community. The more recent addition, about:mobile, is all about Mozilla’s nascent mobile project. Both newsletters plan to publish on a monthly basis, and both are available by email, web, and RSS feed. For more information, including how to sign up, see Mark Finkle’s blog post for about:addons, and Chris Blizzard’s blog post for about:mobile.

Help test-drive the new Mozilla Developer Center!

Eric Shepherd, Mozilla’s Developer Documentation lead and MDC project coordinator, is looking for help testing the new Mozilla Developer Center system and design. Before diving in to help out, it’s important to note that changes made on the test server will not be ported back into the real database. The test version of the site is available at http://devmo.dekiwiki.mozilla.org. For further information and up-to-date details about the state of the server and testing, see Eric’s weblog.

Next generation JavaScripting

Mozilla Labs’ Aza Raskin has posted about “next generation JavaScripting” over on the Labs’ weblog. In it he points to three very interesting recent JavaScript-related projects by folks in the Mozilla community: John Resig’s Processing.js, a port of the Java-based Processing programming language; Atul Varma’s Parchment project, which is a JavaScript-based interpreter for the Z-Machine; and Aza’s own ContextFree.js, a project focused on drawing striking images and making art with minimal amounts of code. Check out the full blog post for more details.

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about:mozilla - Firefox 3 launch day edition!

June 17th, 2008 | Category: About Mozilla

In this issue…

Firefox 3: Launch Day is Today!
We’re done! Firefox 3 is being launched today after having been in development for roughly three years. Contributed to by thousands of people — developers, designers, localizers, testers, marketers, user supporters and documentation writers — Firefox 3 has been produced by one of the greatest open source communities in the world. We’re all extremely proud of it and incredibly excited to finally get it into the hands of millions of people.

For the past few weeks, the folks in the Mozilla community have been writing extensively about the new and improved features you’ll see in the browser. The new features run the gamut from huge and game-changing to ones so subtle you may not notice them until you realize that using Firefox is just somehow easier and better. The range of improved features is similar — whole back-end systems have been rebuilt from scratch, while other features have been tweaked slightly or redesigned in small ways. Overall, the result is the fastest, safest, slimmest, and easiest to use version of Firefox yet. To find out more, read the Field Guide to Firefox 3.

If you haven’t yet, you should also go to the Firefox Download Day site and help set a new Guinness World Record for the most software downloaded on a single day. Once you’re done there, head over to Mozilla Party Central and find or set up an event to take part in. We hope you’ll all join in helping us celebrate the release of the best Firefox ever.

Walt Mossberg reviews Firefox 3
On June 5th, Walt Mossberg — columnist for the Wall Street Journal — published an extensive review of Firefox 3, declaring it “the best Web browser our there right now.” “[I]t tops the current versions of both IE and Safari in features, speed and security. It is easy to install and easy to use, even for a mainstream, non-technical user.”

Obviously we’re pretty excited about getting such a great review from such a high-profile reviewer. The full article, and an accompanying video podcast, are available at the Wall Street Journal online.

Mitchell Baker in Korea - June 17-19
On June 17th and 18th, Mitchell Baker will be speaking in Korea at the OECD Ministerial Meeting on The Future of the Internet - “Shaping Policies for Creativity, Confidence and Convergence in the Digital World.” Mitchell will also have a dinner with the Mozilla Korea community on June 18th to celebrate their efforts alongside the worldwide release of Firefox 3. Finally, Mitchell will keynote the Future Web Forum 2008: Global Web Technology Workshop on June 19th. Please visit Gen Kanai’s Mozilla in Asia blog for more details.

Support Firefox Day - June 20
The SUMO (support.mozilla.com) community is organizing a special event as part of the release of Firefox 3: Support Firefox Day on June 20th. They’ll be hosting interactive demonstrations on how to make the most of Firefox 3’s new features so you can get rolling right away with your new browser. This is your chance to get tips and facts directly from the people who wrote the code. Plus, they’ll be showcasing the new user-based online support system and show you just how easy it is to jump in, be a part of the Mozilla Support team and put your own mark on the world’s best browser.

For more information, registration and some great video of some folks from the SUMO community, check out the Support Firefox Day page.

All about SUMO: An interview with David Tenser
SUMO (support.mozilla.com) is our new community-powered Firefox user support site. If you have any questions about or problems with Firefox, SUMO is the place to go to find documentation, answers to frequently asked questions, a bustling community forum, and incredibly helpful folks in the new Live Chat facility.

David Tenser has been part of the Mozilla community for many years, and is now heading up the SUMO project. He took some time out of his increasingly busy schedule to answer a few questions for Deb Richardson. The full interview is available at Deb’s weblog.

Johnathan Nightingale on Firefox 3’s security features
CNET’s Robert Vamosi spoke last week with Johnathan Nightingale, Mozilla’s “Human Shield” (aka security user interface designer). During the interview, Johnathan discusses the new security features that are part of Firefox 3. More information and a link to the audio-only podcast are available at CNET’s Security Bites weblog.

Firefox Mobile concept video
Aza Raskin, head of user experience at Mozilla Labs, has put together a video demonstrating some user interface concepts for Firefox Mobile. “User experience is the most important aspects of having a compelling mobile product. Every bit of interaction and pixel of presentation counts when typing is laborious and screen sizes are minuscule. Many of the standard interaction models, like menus, always-present chrome, and having a cursor, don’t necessarily make sense on mobile. It’s a wickedly exciting opportunity but there are myriad challenges to getting it right.” There’s an extensive post that goes along with the video, both of which you can find at Aza’s weblog.

Brendan Eich interviewed by Eweek: The New Browser War
“You could argue that Brendan Eich has had much, if not more, influence on modern-day browsers than anyone. At Netscape Communications, he created JavaScript for the Netscape Navigator browser. He was co-founder of Mozilla.org and helped spin out the Mozilla Foundation, where he served as lead technologist and a member of the board of directors. In 2005, Eich became chief technology officer of Mozilla Corp. Eich sat down with Senior Editor Darryl K. Taft at Mozilla’s headquarters in Mountain View, Calif., earlier this sprint to talk about a range of topics. This excerpt from their discussion focuses on JavaScript and where it is going.” Read the four-page interview at Eweek.

Developer calendar
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about:mozilla - Firefox 3 RC2, Governance, Accessibility, Bugdays, Acid3, T-shirts, and more…

June 10th, 2008 | Category: About Mozilla

In this issue…

Firefox 3 RC 2 released
Firefox 3 Release Candidate 2 was made available for download and testing on June 4th. This is a public preview release that is intended for developer testing and community feedback. We recommend that you read the release notes and known issues pages before installing the software. More information about the Firefox 3 RC2 release is available at the Developer News weblog.

Governance and module ownership
As part of the Mozilla Project’s ongoing efforts to manage and maintain the health of its module ownership system, Mitchell Baker posted a proposal in March for updating the way that system is managed. That proposal has now been implemented, and Mitchell has posted the details on her weblog.

Jesse Ruderman answers your questions
As part of the “Ask a Developer” interview series, Asa Dotzler recently solicited questions for Jesse Ruderman, one of Mozilla’s security experts. Jesse has since answered those questions, and Asa has posted the responses on his weblog. Read the full interview on Asa’s blog.

Accessibility testcases now in Litmus
Litmus is Mozilla’s community testing platform that allows anyone to test Firefox or other Mozilla products by running a set of testcases and giving us feedback about whether the test passed or failed. The Mozilla QA team uses these test runs to do basic functionality tests (run before every beta release), full functionality tests (run before releases or release candidates), or at other times to ensure that certain areas of the product behave as expected.

Marco Zehe, Mozilla’s Accessibility QA guru, has created testcases for accessibility features in Firefox 3. If you’re interested in helping test Firefox accessibility, you should check out Marco’s blog post.

Applying SVG effects to HTML content
One problem Robert O’Callahan has been working on recently is that it’s currently hard to use SVG’s features to enhance HTML content. “For example, there is no reasonable way to clip an HTML element to a non-rectangular region, or to apply an alpha mask to an HTML element, or to apply image processing effects such as color channel manipulation to HTML elements. SVG has these features, but they can only be applied to SVG elements.” Robert has been experimenting with better ways to apply SVG effects to HTML content, the first step of which is to make SVG’s “clip-path”, “mask” and “filter” properties work when applied to HTML content. Robert has posted all the details in a full write up on his blog.

Help test Firefox and join the QA bugdays
Carsten Book has written an article talking about Mozilla’s QA Bugdays. We see a huge number of bug reports filed every day by our community of users and testers, and Bugdays are where unconfirmed bugs are either verified or closed. They’re a great way to get involved with Mozilla’s development efforts, and it doesn’t matter if you’ve ever been involved with the project before — anyone can participate and become a valuable contributor. Bugdays are held regularly, and the focus of the work changes from week to week. To find out more about QA’s Bugdays, see Carsten’s blog post.

Five points gained on Acid 3
Now that mozilla-central, the source code repository for the release of Firefox after 3.0, is open, a bunch of patches fixing bugs affecting our score on the Acid3 test have landed:

  • We pass test 30 since we now allow DOM events to be dispatched multiple times (bug 412567, Olli Pettay)
  • We pass test 38 since we now implement the replaceWholeText method and the wholeText attribute from DOM Level 3 Core (bug 421765, Jeff Walden)
  • We pass test 39 since we now implement the :nth-*() selectors (bug 75375, David Baron)
  • We pass test 40 since we now implement the :*-of-type selectors (bug 128585, David Baron)
  • We now pass test 68 (and show the results correctly when Shift-clicking on the A) thanks to a UTF-16 surrogate handling fix (bug 421576, Jeff Walden)

Mozilla T-shirt history project
John Slater is working on a new project, The T-Shirt History of Mozilla. As anyone who’s spent much time around the Mozilla community knows, t-shirts are an important part of our culture. John is working to collect photos of as many different Mozilla or Mozilla-related t-shirts as possible, and has collected 53 so far. Go to Flickr to view the whole collection and if you have a t-shirt that isn’t included yet, send John a note.

Help Mozilla set a Guinness World Record
The Firefox community is always up to some cool, collaborative way to declare their passion for Firefox. What better way to do this than to band together to set a Guinness World Record for the most software downloaded in 24 hours?

All you have to do is download Firefox 3 when it goes live on Download Day — some time in June. In the meantime, check out Download Day Headquarters and pledge to download Firefox 3. We’ll let you know when Firefox 3 goes out the door, kicking off the 24-hour attempt.

Firefox Screencast contest continues
The Firefox screencasts contest launched on May 19th, and is a great chance for you to use your talents and passion for Firefox to help create screencast support videos for SUMO. The SUMO team has compiled a list of the 100 most popular support articles from the knowledge base and are looking for help creating screencasts for all of them. There will be a prize awarded for the best screencast submitted for each article, and one grand prize for the best video overall. The contest only runs until June 15th, so you should head over to the SUMO blog for more information and to get involved!

Developer calendar
Monday

Tuesday

Wednesday

Thursday

Friday

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.

about:mozilla - Guinness world record attempt, Firefox 3 RC2, Add-ons update, Screencast contest, and more…

June 03rd, 2008 | Category: About Mozilla

In this issue…

Help us set a Guinness World Record!

The Firefox community is always up to some cool, collaborative way to declare their passion for Firefox. What better way to do this than to band together to set a Guinness World Record for the most software downloaded in 24 hours?

All you have to do is download Firefox 3 when it goes live on Download Day — some time in June. In the meantime, check out Download Day Headquarters and pledge to download Firefox 3. We’ll let you know when Firefox 3 goes out the door, kicking off the 24-hour attempt.

Firefox 3 Release Candidate 2

The Firefox 3 development team has decided to produce a new Release Candidate of Firefox 3 before shipping. This should not change the final shipping date, still estimated for mid-June, but will allow a small number of additional fixes for issues discovered during the RC1 cycle. Many of the issues to be fixed in RC2 have already been patched, reviewed, approved and landed. Several localization updates have also been accepted. Release Candidate 2 is currently expected to be available on Wednesday, June 4th. For more information about this, please see Mike Beltzner’s post on mozilla.dev.apps.firefox, and the notes from the May 27th Firefox 3 status meeting.

New York Times article features Firefox

The New York Times featured Firefox in a recent article about the increasing competition and innovation in browser development. “[A]fter three years of development and six months of public testing, Mozilla, the insurgent browser developer that rose from the ashes of Netscape, will release Firefox 3.0. It will feature a few tricks that could change the way people organize and find the sites they visit most frequently. In addition to giving Microsoft a kick in its competitive pants, Firefox has also reinforced for the high-tech industry the financial and strategic value of the browser.” The full article is available at the NYTimes website.

Latest Firefox 3 add-ons update

Alex Polvi is teaming up with Gina Trapani of Lifehacker to get the word out about Firefox 3 add-on compatibility. Lifehacker plans to report the weekly “State of the Add-ons” every Friday.

Currently there are 800+ add-ons that are compatible with Firefox 3 on addons.mozilla.org (AMO). This accounts for roughly 60% of the total usage of add-ons. Five recently updated add-ons are: ForecastFox, FoxMarks, Firefox Companion for eBay, Gmail Manager, and translator. Five add-ons that still need to be updated are: Mouse Gestures, Greasemonkey, Tab Mix Plus, FoxyTunes, and ColorfulTabs. To read more, and to get more information about how to help, head over to Alex’s weblog.

Firefox screencasts contest continues

The Firefox screencasts contest launched on May 19th, and is a great chance for you to use your talents and passion for Firefox to help create screencast support videos for SUMO. The SUMO team has compiled a list of the 100 most popular support articles from the knowledge base and are looking for help creating screencasts for all of them. There will be a prize awarded for the best screencast submitted for each article, and one grand prize for the best video overall. The contest only runs until June 15th, so you should head over to the SUMO blog for more information and to get involved!

Developer calendar

Monday

Tuesday

Wednesday

Thursday

Friday

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.

about:mozilla - Survey, about:addons, malware protection, screencasts contest, Firefox 3 add-ons, and more!

May 27th, 2008 | Category: About Mozilla

In this issue…

Newsletter survey - last call!

Today is the last day you can take part in the first about:mozilla reader survey! If you haven’t yet had the opportunity to respond, now’s your (final) chance! After today we’re shutting the survey down so we can start analysing results. Please take a couple of minutes of your time today and help us make this newsletter better. Thanks, and thanks to everyone who has already participated!

New about:addons newsletter

Mozilla has started a new newsletter, about:addons, strictly for add-on related news items and information. A lot of changes have been made to the way add-ons are built and hosted during the last Firefox release cycle, and there are lots of changes going on over at addons.mozilla.org (AMO) as well. It can be hard to keep track of it all with all the other information coming out of Mozilla, so we’re now putting together this dedicated newsletter. To sign up, head over to the about:addons subscription form, and for more information, check out Mark Finkle’s weblog. The first issue of about:addons has already been published, which you can read at the DevNews weblog.

Firefox 3’s malware protection explained

Johnathan Nightingale, Mozilla’s Security UI lead, has written a blog post wherein Firefox 3’s new malware protection system is explained. “In Firefox 3, we have juiced up your protection in a couple of pretty hard core ways. First of all, we’ve added a second list, tracking all reported malware sites live on the net, in addition to the forgeries we blocked in Firefox 2. Second, we now block the page right up front, before it even loads, so that your computer is not at risk. And third, for people who are curious, we provide a report for malware sites that explains exactly what badness is going down.” You can read the full article over at Johnath’s weblog.

Firefox screencasts contest continues

The Firefox screencasts contest launched on May 19th, and is a great chance for you to use your talents and passion for Firefox to help create screencast support videos for SUMO. The SUMO team has compiled a list of the 100 most popular support articles from the knowledge base and are looking for help creating screencasts for all of them. There will be a prize awarded for the best screencast submitted for each article, and one grand prize for the best video overall. The contest only runs until June 15th, so you should head over to the SUMO blog for more information and to get involved!

Firefox 3 add-ons compatibility update

Alex Polvi has posted yet another Firefox 3 add-ons compatibility report, outlining the current state of add-ons that are not currently compatible with Firefox 3. This week’s listing includes: Firebug, MinimizeToTray, Tab Mix Plus, Noia 2.0, FireFTP, Foxmarks Bookmark Synchronizer, and RedShift V2. For details and information about how to help, read the full post at Alex’s blog.

20 top add-ons that are ready for Firefox 3

In further Firefox 3 add-on compatibility news, Deb Richardson has blogged about 20 top add-ons that are ready for Firefox 3. “I know a lot of folks are waiting for add-ons to get updated before diving in to help test the Firefox 3 release candidate, but how’s your chance. Dozens of add-ons are being updated every day, and there are hundreds already set to go.” The list of add-ons Deb talks about include: Adblock Plus, Faviconize Tab, Flashgot, Forecastfox, ScribeFire, Shareaholic, and more. Read the full post at Deb’s weblog.

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about:mozilla - New contest, Support Firefox day, Firefox 3, AMO, LiMo, Shredder, and more

May 20th, 2008 | Category: About Mozilla

In this issue…

about:mozilla reader survey

Last week we launched the first about:mozilla reader survey. If you haven’t had an opportunity to respond yet, now’s your chance. The survey will stay open until May 27th, at which point we’ll shut it down and start analysing the results.

Please help us make this newsletter better by giving us your feedback through the survey.

Firefox screencasts contest has started!

The Firefox screencasts contest is now on! This is a great chance for you to use your talents and passion for Firefox to create screencast support videos for the Firefox Support knowledge base (SUMO).

The SUMO team has compiled a list of the 100 most popular support articles from the knowledge base and are now asking YOU to create screencasts for one, two, three, or all of them! There will be 100 winners in all — one for each article — and every winner will receive a unique Firefox Screencast Contest t-shirt. This is the only way to get this exclusive collector’s item shirt, so start working on your screencasts today!

There will also be a Grand Prize awarded to the best entry from the 100 winning videos. Not to give anything away, but this prize will likely be something that you can use to take even more pictures and videos.

The contest will run from May 19 until 11:59pm June 15, 2008 (GMT-7). The team is looking forward to watching all of your submissions! For more information, check out the official contest announcement post.

Support Firefox day: this Friday!

On Friday, the SUMO team will be hosting a “Support Firefox” day in the #sumo IRC channel. They’ll be holding Q+A sessions with some Mozilla “celebrities” (John Lilly, Asa Dotzler, Mike Beltzner, Mike Connor) who will be talking about specific Mozilla topics and how they relate to the user-to-user support project SUMO. In addition, they’ll be hosting three workshops — how to help out through the SUMO Live Chat system, how to troubleshoot Firefox, and a guest workshop by Dietrich Ayala about the new Places (Bookmarks and History) system.

These sessions are always a whole lot of fun, and are a really great way to get involved with the Mozilla project. So head on over to the #sumo channel on irc.mozilla.org on or before Friday so you can get set up and meet some of the great folks who are working on Firefox and the SUMO project. More information is available over on the SUMO weblog.

Firefox 3 Release Candidate 1 now available

The first Firefox 3 Release Candidate is now available for download. This milestone is focused on testing the core functionality provided by many new features and changes to the platform. Ongoing planning for Firefox 3 can be followed at the Firefox 3 Planning Center, as well as mozilla.dev.planning and on irc.mozilla.org in #granparadiso.

Some new features and changes in this milestone include: Improvements to the user interface; changes and fixes for new features such as the location bar, bookmark backup, and full page zoom; further security, compatibility, and stability fixes; and continued performance improvements including to the JavaScript engine. More information about this release is available in the release notes. See the official announcement for more information and links for downloading the software.

Add-on developers: Firefox 3 final MaxVersion update

Now that Firefox 3 Release Candidate 1 is available, addons.mozilla.org (AMO) has been modified and will now accept the final production version numbers for Firefox 3. In particular, we have added “3.0″ and “3.0.*” as valid Firefox compatible versions. The full application compatibility list is available at AMO.

What this means for add-on authors is that after you test with the Firefox 3 release candidates, you can use the Developer Tools section on AMO to bump your add-on version number without having to upload a whole new version. For more information see Basil Hashem’s and Mark Finkle’s blog posts.

Mozilla joins LiMo Foundation

Jay Sullivan has blogged about the Mozilla Corporation recently joining the LiMo Foundation. “Linux has great potential as a mobile platform, but it’s been hampered by fragmentation over the last several years. LiMo brings together many major device manufacturers, network operators and others in the mobile ecosystem to cooperate on building a Linux-based mobile middleware platform. We intend to participate actively in all aspects of the LiMo platform that relate to Web browsing, Web widgets/runtimes and security. We also plan to share our experiences with building successful open-source communities.” For more detail, see Jay’s blog post.

Thunderbird “Shredder” alpha 1 available

Shredder alpha 1, the first alpha release of the next version of Thunderbird, is now available for download. There are very few feature changes, so don’t expect it to be significantly different than Thunderbird 2, but Shredder is built on a substantially revised codebase that provides a great foundation upon which future feature changes can be built. Please be aware that this is an early alpha release and is intended for development and testing purposes only — this release is not for production use as it will contain significant bugs and should be handled with care. For more information about this alpha release, see David Ascher’s weblog post.

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about:mozilla - First reader survey, Party in Japan, Offline demo, all about SUMO, Site ID button, and more

May 13th, 2008 | Category: About Mozilla

In this issue…

about:mozilla reader suvey

Mozilla has been publishing the about:mozilla newsletter since November of last year. Having been at this for almost six months, we figure it’s time to gather some reader feedback which is why we’re running an “about:mozilla Newsletter” community survey.

If you are a regular reader of this newsletter, we would really appreciate it if you could take the time to respond to the survey which you can find over at the Mozilla Europe site. At the end of the survey, there’s a place for you to enter whatever additional comments, ideas, thoughts, or criticisms you may have. The more feedback you can give us about the newsletter, the better the newsletter will be in the future.

Please take the time to help us out by responding to the about:mozilla newsletter survey. Thanks!

Mozilla Party JP 9.0

The Japanese Mozilla community, the Mozillagumi, will have their 9th annual party event on Saturday, May 31st in Tokyo, Japan. Speakers include Taro Matsuzawa of the Mozillagumi, John Daggett (platform developer) and David Tenser (SUMO manager) of Mozilla Corporation, Channy Yun of the Mozilla Korea community, Nakamoto-san of Open Office Japan Project, and Dr. Hiromitsu Takagi of the (Japan) National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology, among others. The event will be free and open to the public. Information in Japanese is available at the Mozillagumi site.

Firefox 3: Offline app demo

Mark Finkle has put together a simple demo that demonstrates the new offline capabilities of Firefox 3. “Offline mode” or “offline caching” is a new feature in HTML 5 that allows web applications to work even when Firefox 3 is on a machine that isn’t currently connected to the Internet. Finkle’s demo is called “Task Helper” and you can read more about it on his weblog. For more information about using offline resources in Firefox 3, see the article on the topic over at the Mozilla Developer Center.

Tristan, Firefox 3 and the BBC’s dot.life blog

Tristan Nitot was recently in London giving a keynote speech at Internet World called “The dangers of the proprietary web - Future of the Internet and Open Source”. While in the UK, Tristan also met with Rory Cellan-Jones, the BBC technology correspondent who writes for the BBC’s tech blog “dot.life”. Rory interviewed Tristan about open source, the background of Mozilla, and the new Firefox 3. Read the article and check out Rory’s video of Tristan’s Firefox 3 demo at the BBC dot.life weblog.

The slow death of the press release

Melissa Shapiro, Mozilla’s indefatigable Public Relations lead, has written an interesting article talking about why Mozilla doesn’t put out more press releases and how Public Relations is changing (or needs to change) as an industry. “The PR industry needs to revisit the concept of the next generation press release more than once every few years. Media is always changing. PR needs to keep pace or it will go the way of fax blasting: still around but completely out of touch with the modern era.” Melissa’s post provides a fascinating glimpse the inner workings of Mozilla’s PR efforts, making those processes more transparent and accessible. Check out the full post over at Melissa’s weblog.

Firefox 3 Add-ons compatibility update

Alex Polvi has posted another Firefox 3 Add-ons compatibility report, outlining the current state of the top add-ons that are not yet compatible with Firefox 3. This week’s list includes: Firebug, Tab Mix Plus, FireFTP, Foxmarks, FoxyTunes, Blue Ice, RedShift V2, and ColorfulTabs, among others. Alex is looking for some help, so if you would like to get your feet wet helping out with a Firefox release, head on over to his blog and see how you can get started.

All about SUMO: Mozilla’s second community survey

The Community Survey team has started publishing the results of Mozilla’s second community survey that focuses on learning more about the community that is helping with SUMO (support.mozilla.com). In these first two articles, they outline the process behind preparing the survey, publishing the survey, and some initial analyses of the results. More will be published from this survey, but for now check out the first two articles — part 1 and part 2 — over at the Mozilla Community Survey weblog.

Firefox 3: Site Identification button

One of the most exciting new security features of Firefox 3 is the Site Identification button. The button replaces and builds upon the ubiquitous “padlock” icon that has for so long been the primary security indicator used in browsers. Rather than just displaying a padlock, Firefox 3 finds out as much as it can about the sites being browsed, and makes that information easily accessible through a single click of a button. Through this feature Firefox 3 presents users with information that covers a range of different security levels. For lots more information about the new Site Identification button, check out the full article over at Deb Richardson’s weblog.

Processing.js

John Resig, part of Mozilla’s Evangelism team, has (in his spare time, no less) ported the Processing visualization language to JavaScript using the Canvas element. This project was launched last Thursday on John’s weblog, and his write up includes details about the project’s development and the Processing API, a host of demos, links to the full source code, and instructions on how to use it. The demos all work in the latest Firefox 3 beta, which you can download from the Firefox beta page. Lots more information is available at John’s weblog.

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