John Lilly, the new CEO of Mozilla Corporation, doesn't want you to pay attention to his new charge. The for-profit arm of the nonprofit Mozilla Foundation produces the Firefox browser and makes... [[ This is a content summary only. Visit my website for full links, other content, and more! ]]... lire la suite
John Lilly, the new CEO of Mozilla Corporation, doesn't want you to pay attention to his new charge. The for-profit arm of the nonprofit Mozilla Foundation produces the Firefox browser and makes... [[ This is a content summary only. Visit my website for full links, other content, and more! ]]
John Lilly, the new CEO of Mozilla Corporation, doesn't want you to pay attention to his new charge. The for-profit arm of the nonprofit Mozilla Foundation produces the Firefox browser and makes... [[ This is a content summary only. Visit my website for full links, other content, and more! ]]
· Mozilla Messaging launches · Firefox 3 Beta 3 released · Extend Firefox 2 contest winners · Firefox 3 features article Mozilla Messaging launches Mozilla Messaging, the new mail focused subsidiary of the non-profit Mozilla Foundation, today announced that it has begun operations. The initial focus for Mozilla Messaging is the development of Thunderbird 3 which will deliver significant improvements, including integrated calendaring, better search and enhancements to the overall user experience. Thunderbird is a free, open source email application that is used by millions of people around the world and is built using the same open source development model as Firefox. For more information about the Mozilla Messaging launch, see the press release. Firefox 3 Beta 3 released Firefox 3 Beta 3 is now available for download. This is the eleventh developer milestone focused on testing the core functionality provided by many new features and changes to the platform scheduled for Firefox 3. Ongoing planning for Firefox 3 can be followed at the Firefox 3 Planning Center, as well as in mozilla.dev.planning and on irc.mozilla.org in #granparadiso. For an outline of new features that require feedback, please see the DevNews blog post announcing the Beta. Extend Firefox 2 contest winners Extend Firefox 2 has wrapped up and the winners have been announced! The contest received well over 100 entries, representing hundreds of hours of hard work from people all over the world. The three Grand Prize winners are: the Minimap Sidebar Exension by Tony Farndon (UK); SamePlace by Massimiliano Mirra (Italy); and Shareaholic by Jay Meattle (USA). For more information about the contest, including the 12 runners up and the various prize packages, see the Mozilla Labs blog post. When version 3.0 of the Flickr Uploadr came out, Flickr users got a significantly more useful tool for getting their photos online. Things changed significantly behind the scenes as well, as the Flickr Uploadr is now built on top of Mozilla technology — the XULRunner Mozilla runtime package, to be specific. The Yahoo Developer Network (YDN) has put together an Experts at Work video in which Jeremy Zawodny discusses the Flickr Uploadr development with Richard Crowley. Check out the video on the Yahoo Developer Network. The FOSDEM ‘08 conference is taking place in Brussels on Feb 23-24. Mozilla will be hosting a series of talks in the Mozilla Developer Room, and that schedule is now available on the FOSDEM site. More detailed descriptions of the talks can be found on the Mozilla wiki. An extensions workshop will also be happening on Sunday, led by Mark Finkle and Carsten Book, and Philipp Kewisch will be holding a hands-on workshop encouraging developers to participate in the Mozilla Calendar Project. Brian King blogs about this upcoming event, and more information is available through the Mozilla Wiki FOSDEM ‘08 page. Firefox 3 features article Percy Cabello, author of the extremely useful Mozilla Links weblog, has written a great and very detailed article outlining many of the new features in Firefox 3 and the underlying Gecko rendering engine. Percy takes a look at the Visual Refresh, Places (the new History/Bookmarks feature), the Location bar changes, Tabbed Browsing, and Search engines, among other features. The four page article, A deep look into Firefox 3 Beta 3, is definitely worth checking out if you’re curious about what new features Firefox 3 is going to include. Mitchell Baker embarked on a whistle-stop European tour last week, having been invited to speak at the French Senate on February 14th on the topic of “Software - a source of technological and social innovation”. While traveling to Paris, Mitchell decided to visit two other countries in the days beforehand to meet with journalists. Jane Finette and Tristan Nitot have both blogged about Mitchell’s visit, and Tristan has also posted some pictures. · Mozilla 2 Meeting 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 reader survey · Firefox screencasts contest has started! · Support Firefox day: this Friday! · Firefox 3 Release Candidate 1 now available · Add-on developers: Firefox 3 final MaxVersion update · Mozilla joins LiMo Foundation 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. 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. 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. 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. · Mozilla 2 Meeting 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.
· Firefox 3 Launched! · Official Firefox 3 t-shirt now available · Mozilla Developer Resource Kit · The new mozilla.com · Monthly Mozilla Labs meet ups Firefox 3 Launched! Firefox 3 was released last Tuesday, June 17th. Part of our launch-day festivities included “Download Day 2008” where we asked for your help in setting a new Guinness World Record for the most software downloaded in a single day. By the end of the 24 hour period, the unofficial count clocked in at more than 8 million Firefox 3 downloads! The Guinness judges still have to validate the record attempt, and the Spread Firefox team is standing by to announce the results when they’re available. Since then, another 10 million copies of Firefox 3 have been downloaded, bringing the total to over 18m in the first week. Official Firefox 3 t-shirt now available The official Firefox 3 t-shirt, selected through a community-wide design contest earlier this year, is now available in the Mozilla store in both men’s and women’s styles. The store is also holding a survey where you can help select the next item to be added to the store! Vote on it here. SecurityFocus contributor Federico Biancuzzi tracked down two key members of Mozilla’s security team, Window Snyder and Johnathan Nightingale, to learn more about the security features included in Firefox 3. They discussed malware protection, safer add-ons updates, bug bounties, JavaScript hardening, and the Mozilla security process, among other topics. Read the full interview at SecurityFocus. Mozilla Developer Resource Kit David Humphrey has blogged about his Mozilla Developer Resource Kit (MDRK) project. “After spending three years helping students get started in the Mozilla world I've had a few ideas how to make life for new developers coming to Mozilla a bit easier. The MDRK is something we'll be working on into the fall, but I wanted to share one piece of it now.” It’s a super interesting project, and you can check out David’s full introduction to it over on his weblog. The New Mozilla.com: Beware of Ninjas John Slater, part of Mozilla’s crack Marketing team, has blogged about the new Mozilla.com site, and introduces a new Firefox 3 promotional video. “One of our biggest goals for the Mozilla.com redesign was to kick our presentation of Firefox 3 up a few notches, so to speak. With that in mind we really expanded the Firefox section fo the site, adding a detailed features page, tips and tricks, information about security and add-ons, and more. We also figure that, since some concepts are more easily shown than explained, it would be a good time to add our first-ever video to the site.” Read the whole post, and watch the video, at John’s weblog. Monthly Mozilla Labs meet ups The Mozilla Labs team announces, “Starting this month we’re going to begin hosting regular monthly meetings to bring together people interested in learning more about and getting involved in Labs’ projects as we work to build and scale an innovation lab as a public resource. The first meet up will be this Wednesday, June 25th at 6pm. The location will be Mozilla’s office at 1981 Landings Drive in Mountain View, California.” If you’re interested and able to attend, please RSVP by leaving a comment on the Labs blog post. The about:mozilla newsletter is going on a short hiatus, and there will be no newsletter next Tuesday, July 1st. We will return to a regular publishing schedule on July 8th. · Mozilla 2 Meeting 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 holiday hiatus · Firefox 3 Beta 2 shipping · Ensuring compatibility of add-ons and themes for Firefox 3 · A first look at Firefox 3’s icons · Get Firefox Video Awards · Mozilla Firefox for “goo Green Label” · Mozilla gfx architecture · Canada’s largest college standardizes on Firefox and Thunderbird about:mozilla holiday hiatus Firefox 3 Beta 2 shipping The process of building and testing release candidates for Firefox 3 Beta 2 began last week, with control handed off to the build and QA teams. If all goes well, the beta will be released by December 21st. If you would like to track the ongoing process, you can do so at the Firefox 3 Beta 2 Release Checklist. For more information, see the DevNews post. Ensuring compatibility of add-ons and themes for Firefox 3 As we get closer to the release of Firefox 3, extension and theme compatibility with the new browser is an important issue. We all want to ensure that when Firefox 3 is launched, users do not find that all of their extensions have been disabled because of incompatibility or insecure updates. For more about add-on and theme updates and some new features and versioning information, see this DevNews post. A first look at Firefox 3’s icons Alex Faaborg has written an interesting post about the ongoing work related to the new Firefox 3 icon sets that are being developed. Firefox 3 will contain roughly 120 icons (190 if you count different sizes) on each of the four platforms. Many of these new icons are still drafts, many are still missing, and there are some inconsistencies across platforms. For more information and discussion see Alex’s blog post. Get Firefox Video Awards For those of you who remember the Firefox Flicks contest, Mozilla Japan has been working with the artists' network Loftwork and Sony's video hosting service eyeVio to create a similar contest in Japan: the Get Firefox Video Award. The contest opened at the beginning of October and registration closed on Dec. 10th. For more information (and links in English) see Gen Kenai’s blog post. Mozilla Firefox for “goo Green Label” Earlier this week, Mozilla Japan announced a new partnership with a leading portal site in Japan, NTT Resonant’s “goo” portal. “goo” has been a supporter of Firefox in Japan for some time and a few months ago they came to us with a proposal for a new distribution of Firefox to support their “goo Green Label” search service, which donates a portion of the funds generated by the search advertising to an environmental not-for-profit. Mozilla Japan was honored to work with NTT Resonant on such a project and we debuted the Mozilla Firefox for goo Green Label last Tuesday. If you are using Firefox currently, you can try the goo Green Label add-on for Firefox in English. It involves an eco/green theme, a new search plugin, and a small tree next to the home button that grows with the number of searches you do. Mozilla gfx architecture Vlad Vukicevic has put together a presentation about the new graphics architecture in Mozilla, and what the gfx team has been working towards with Thebes and Cairo. In it he goes over the reasoning behind switching Gecko’s rendering engine to Cairo, what purpose Thebes serves, and how it all interacts with the rest of the layout engine. The full presentation, with commentary, is available on Vlad’s blog. Canada’s largest college standardizes on Firefox and Thunderbird David Humphrey has posted some fantastic news: Seneca College’s IT department has chosen to support Mozilla Firefox and Mozilla Thunderbird. “What does it mean for Canada's largest college to switch to Firefox and Thunderbird across the organization? It means that 100,000 students (our programming students are a small fraction of this) will be exposed to the open web as part of their education. Thousands of professors, admin staff, and other employees will use it too, from HR to payroll to the president's office.” More details and information are available through David’s blog post. Camino 1.6 Alpha 1 is now available, and is a preview release of what will become Camino 1.6. This is alpha software and may be unstable and unsuitable for day-to-day use. Please download Camino 1.5.4 if you wish to use the stable version of Camino. · Mozilla 2 Meeting If you would like to get this newsletter by email, just head on over to the about:mozilla newsletter subscription form. Fresh news, every Monday, right to your inbox.
· Extend Firefox 3 contest launches · Firefox 3 T-shirt contest voting begins · New languages shipping with Firefox 3 Beta 5 · Mozilla at FISL · Updated mozilla.org license policy draft available for review Extend Firefox 3 contest launches Extend Firefox 3 is a global developer contest with prizes awarded for developing new Firefox Add-ons for the upcoming production release of Firefox 3. Entries will be judged by a panel of experts, with Grand Prize and Runners’ Up prize packages awarded for add-ons that take advantage of the new capabilities being introduced in Firefox 3 and that demonstrate excellence in user experience, innovation, and the use of open standards. For more information about the contest, see the Mozilla Labs announcement. Firefox 3 T-shirt contest voting begins With the submission deadline now past, the five finalists have been chosen in the Firefox 3 T-shirt design contest. Now the voting begins, and you’re invited to participate! Head over to the Mozilla Store’s Firefox 3 T-shirt contest voting page and pick your favorite of the final five. Voting will run for 7 days and the winner will be featured in the Mozilla Store as the official Firefox 3 T-shirt. For more information about the contest, check out the Official Contest site. New languages shipping with Firefox 3 Beta 5 The upcoming Firefox 3 Beta 5 will include five new languages — Afrikaans, Indonesian, Mongolian, Norwegian nynorsk, and Serbian. Any help you can provide towards reviewing and testing these new localizations would be much appreciated. They will be available for download from the “all-beta download page” for Firefox 3 Beta 5. If you find a problem, please file a bug or send feedback to Mic Berman through her blog post. The “How Software is Built” site has posted an extensive interview with Mozilla’s Chief Evangelist, Mike Shaver. The interview covers a wide range of topics, including governance of the project, how people get involved, changing contributors who fill key roles, ensuring high usability in an open-source project, and reflections on open and closed development models, among other things. Read the full interview at How Software is Built. Mozilla at FISL Mozilla is going to be taking part in the Forum Internacional Software Livre (International Free Software Forum) that is being held in Brazil from April 17 to April 19, 2008. Mitchell Baker will be giving a talk about the Mozilla Project; Felipe Tassario Gomes will be talking about XULRunner, JavaScript, and SQLite; Chris Hofmann, Marcio Galli, and Christopher Blizzard will hold a panel on Firefox in Brazil; and there will be a Mozilla room and workshop. For more information see the FISL website, the Mozilla wiki, or Chris Blizzard’s blog post. The student application period for the Google Summer of Code opened earlier this week. The Mozilla list of suggested projects is now pretty much complete, although students should of course feel free to propose ideas outside that list. Mozilla community members should encourage students they know to apply to us. For more information about Mozilla’s participation in the Google Summer of Code, see Gervase Markham’s weblog. Updated mozilla.org license policy draft available for review Gervase Markham has been working on an updated mozilla.org License Policy, of which a draft is now available. You are strongly encouraged to review the draft document, particularly if you are the owner of a mozilla.org project such as Bugzilla, Rhino, Tinderbox, etc. For more information about the draft and what review is needed, please see Gerv’s weblog. · Mozilla 2 Meeting 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.
· Mozilla Labs in Europe next week · New Mozilla public relations weblog · Firefox accessibility team needs your help · Help wanted: QA Companion Firefox add-on · MozAfterPaint: new experimental API Mozilla Labs in Europe next week Aza Raskin writes, “Mozilla Labs will be making its way to Europe next week to meet with community members, hackers, bloggers, media types, and general feasance doers. We’ll be spending time in London, Berlin, and Barcelona. We’ll be having Labs nights, Hack sessions, or drinks in each of the cities. They are open to everyone, so we hope you can join us!” More details, including a rough schedule of events, are available at Aza’s weblog. Geode is a new add-on that allows developers to begin experimenting with geolocation technologies and concepts in Firefox 3. Future versions of Firefox plan on supporting the new W3C Geolocation Specification, which adds the native ability for Web sites to request, and for you to optionally grant access to, your location. These should be available for users to play with in upcoming beta releases of Firefox 3.1, as well as alpha releases of Mobile Firefox (Fennec). Geode provides an early implementation of this new technology so developers can work on and test concepts that include location-aware experiences using Firefox 3 today. The add-on includes a single experimental geolocation service provider so that any computer with WiFi can get accurate positioning data. The initial Mozilla Labs blog post includes lots of information about how Geode works, where to download it, some ideas of how it could be used, and how to participate in discussing ideas and possible experiments. Aza Raskin has also written a follow up post about Geode that delves into some of the questions that have emerged about the add-on since its initial release. New Mozilla public relations weblog Mozilla’s PR team has unveiled a brand new weblog called “Above the Fold: Mozilla in the News”. “Above the Fold is a place where the community can come to gain insight into public relations at Mozilla. We will keep track of news cycles around announcements, competitor news and general industry trends. We’ll then provide context around why particular articles and dialogues are important to Mozilla.” If you’ve ever been interested in public relations, how it works and what it all means, you should keep an eye on Above the Fold. The team over at support.mozilla.com (SUMO) is looking for ideas about how to improve the SUMO Knowledge Base editor system. Discussion and feedback is happening over on the SUMO Contributors forum, and there is still time for you to post your thoughts and ideas about the problems you have with the current editor and possible ways to fix those issues. A list of some of the problems and solutions that have already been posted is available over on the SUMO blog. Firefox accessibility team needs your help Marco Zehe writes, “If you’re not afraid to get your hands dirty a bit and would like to help the Firefox accessibility team, now would be a good time to get involved. The code that calculates the names for any created accessibles has been growing over time and became largely unmaintainable. New features such as adding the aria-label property support requires code duplication for HTML and XUL, and in general the code has many stylish un-niceties. Our team has started a code cleanup and code refactoring series to get the code into better shape.” As with any refactor, there is a risk of regressions that cannot be discounted. The team is looking for help in testing for these possible regressions and for help filling in any gaps that exist in the suite of available testcases. This is a really great way to get involved with Mozilla development efforts, so if you’re interested in helping out you should read Marco’s blog post to get started. In a post over at the Web Tech weblog, it has been announced that SVG external document references have landed on trunk in time for the second beta of Gecko 1.9.1 and Firefox 3.1. “What this means is that the SVG element being used as fill, clip path, mask, filter, svg:use target, or marker no longer needs to be in the same document as the element being filled, masked, filtered, etc. In particular, what this means is that the preceding post about SVG effects in HTML content now applies to HTML documents, not just XHTML.” For further details and a link to a small demo, see the Web Tech blog post. Robert O’Callahan has also written about recent SVG development on his weblog. Eric Shepherd has been hard at work documenting some of the exciting new web technologies that are slated for inclusion in Firefox 3.1. The first of these is the HTML 5 audio element that is used to embed sound content in an HTML or XHTML document. Similarly, the HTML 5 video element documentation is available, explaining how to use this element to embed video content. Eric has also put together a “Using geolocation” article that introduces the new geolocation API that is being developed for Firefox 3.1. Finally, the documentation for CSS media queries — allowing different style sheets to be selected based on very precise criteria — has been finished. Help wanted: QA Companion Firefox add-on Clint Talbert writes, “Zach Lipton and Ben Hsieh created the QA Companion Add-on. This is an extension that sits in a little window outside Firefox or Thunderbird and helps you run litmus tests against the application. It has helped hundreds of people when testing Firefox, and has become a central part of our QA Test Day events. The QA Companion has great potential, lots of poeple have thought about ways to do more interesting mash-ups with it, including integrating some of the Nightly Tester Tool functionality, integrating Mozilla automation UI, etc. If you’ve always wanted to work on an Add-on but it seemed like too big of an undertaking, this is a great opportunity. The base code is already written, and it’s all pretty straightforward. Together, we can design a new direction for the tool and make it a really useful item for all the testers out there in Mozilla Land.” If you’re interested in helping the QA team out with the development and maintenance of the Companion, Clint asks that you leave a comment over on his blog post. A release candidate for Ubiquity 0.1.2 has been made available, and the team is asking for help with testing. 0.1.2 contains a preliminary version of the parser-localization API that Jonathan DiCarlo discussed in an earlier blog post, and that he has described in detail in his parser localization API tutorial. Complete release notes are available for 0.1.2, and further information about and download links for the release candidate are available at Jonathan’s weblog. Matthew Middleton, the new leader of the SUMO Live Chat project, has written an interesting article about the Live Chat facility and its contributor community. “One great thing about support as a community is that the line between user and helper is blurred. Many of the current support volunteers got started by asking a question themselves, staying around to help other people using information learned solving their own problems. While most users don’t have time to commit regularly, many users have spent extra time to troubleshoot an issue, to let us know what finally fixed a problem, or to post advice in the forum. The support community allows new helpers to learn about Mozilla and support in general, while actively helping users solve problems.” As always, the SUMO team could use more help, and if you think Live Chat might be right for you, you should read Matthew’s post to find out how to get started. MozAfterPaint: new experimental API As posted on the Web Tech blog, the Firefox 3.1 team has created a very experimental API for Firefox 3.1 that fires an event every time content is repainted. “The event is called MozAfterPaint and is fired at the document, bubbling up to the window. The event offers two attributes, clientRects and boundingClientRect, which tell you what was repainted, using the same objects and coordinate system as the getClientRects and getBoundingClientRect methods. This is very useful for Firefox extensions and other ‘chrome’ code that might be using the canvas.drawWindow method to capture the contents of windows. It might also be useful for tools like Firebug. But it’s also potentially useful for regular content, for example if you want to add some lightweight JS instrumentation to a page to measure what gets painted by Firefox, and when.” For more information about this new API, read the post over on Web Tech. For an up-to-date list of the coming week’s Mozilla project meetings and events, please see the Mozilla Community Calendar wiki page. 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.
· Mozilla: celebrating the first ten years · Firefox 3 Beta 3 code freeze today! · EV certs being displayed in Firefox 3 nightlies · Mozilla Mobile prototype user-interfaces posted · Mozilla Europe will be at Solutions Linux and OpenSource 2008 in Paris, Jan 29-31 · Firefox 2.0.0.12 scheduled for release on February 12 · New APNG portal site · Add-on developers: time to start updating for Firefox 3! Mozilla: celebrating the first ten years On January 22nd 1998, Netscape first announced plans to release the source code for Netscape Communicator, laying the foundation for the Mozilla Project. Now, ten years later, Mitchell Baker writes, “2008 is a year to celebrate — Mozilla turns 10 this year. 10 years of open source history, commitment, product development, community building and accomplishments. An open source project of astonishing scope and diversity. A portion of the Internet that is more open and participatory than almost anyone imagined. A strong voice for what the Internet can be. That’s 10 amazing years.” Read the rest of Mitchell’s post on her blog. Firefox 3 Beta 3 code freeze today! Just a reminder that the Firefox 3 Beta 3 code freeze is today, with the string freeze for localization last Friday. The plan is to have a quiet freeze for the rest of the week before starting builds, on the same timeline as used for Beta 2. With this schedule, builds should begin the morning of Monday, February 4th. For further information see Mike Connor’s and Mike Beltzner’s posts to mozilla.dev.planning. EV certs being displayed in Firefox 3 nightlies EV support has been turned on in the nightly Firefox 3 builds, and the Verisign EV root has been activated for testing purposes. What this means is that when you go to sites that have Verisign-issued EV certificates — as, for example, the British Airways site — the site-identity button will pick up the name of the site owner and display it with a green background. For more information, screenshots, and a request for feedback and testing, see Johnathan Nightingale’s blog post. Mozilla Mobile prototype user-interfaces posted The Mozilla Mobile team has posted two prototype mobile user-interfaces for you to play with, one for button-driven devices, and one for touch screen devices. Now is a great time to get involved with the mobile project, as the team would like feedback on these UIs. More information is available on Doug Turner’s weblog, and Ars Technica has published a short article about the prototypes. Mozilla Europe will be at Solutions Linux and OpenSource 2008 in Paris, Jan 29-31 Mozilla Europe will be at the Solutions Linux and OpenSource 2008 conference in Paris from January 29th (today) through January 31st. Drop by the Mozilla Europe booth to say hello, or attend the conferences they’ll be involved with during the event. Firefox 2.0.0.12 scheduled for release on February 12 Firefox 2.0.0.12 is in code freeze and is currently scheduled for a February 12th release. More information about the release and schedule is available on the Firefox 2.0.0.12 release wiki page. Join Mozilla hackers and hobbyists at Mozilla HQ in Mountain View for pizza and drinks tonight at 6:00pm. They’ll be giving an overview of what it is like to be an editor on addons.mozilla.org, and from there will be reviewing and testing unreleased extensions. More information is available on the Upcoming events page, where you should RSVP if you’re planning to attend! “In a Super Techies interview, Mozilla CTO Brendan Eich talks to ZDNet Editor in Chief Dan Farber about his career as a programmer in Silicon Valley. Eich discusses his early work at Netscape creating the JavaScript programming language, battling Microsoft in the browser wars, and his current role at Mozilla, overseeing new technology enhancements for the company’s flagship Firefox browser.” View the video at ZDNet. New APNG portal site Stuart Parmenter blogs, “I received word recently from Brendan Sera-Shriar at Seneca College about this APNG portal site that he, along with folks from PHUG, got off the ground recently. The site looks great and should help provide a wealth of information about a great new feature in Firefox 3 (and Opera 9.5 and other products to follow). They’ve got several cool samples up and I’m sure they’d love to add more if you’ve got them.” Add-on developers: time to start updating for Firefox 3! Mark Finkle writes, “We have been putting out the call for extension developers to start the process of updating their extension to work in Firefox 3. It’s never fun when your extension breaks because of changes in Firefox, but everyone wants to make the platform better. In doing so, we had to break some eggs.” There’s lots of information available to help you get your add-ons ready for Firefox 3, including: Firefox 3 for Developers, Updating extensions for Firefox 3, Ensuring compatibility of add-ons and themes for Firefox 3, and Mark’s blog posts, among others. There’s also an IRC channel where you can get help: #extdev on the irc.mozilla.org server. · Mozilla 2 Meeting 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.
· Firefox 3 Beta 4 and current tree status · New weekly Thunderbird meetings · Mozilla China profiled in Reuters · Firefox, Miro, and Joost are Webware 100 finalists Firefox 3 Beta 4 and current tree status As discussed in last week’s Firefox/Gecko meeting, Firefox 3 Beta 4 has been code frozen for several days and has since been handed to the Build Team for tagging and release. For up to date information on the release process, see the Firefox 3 Beta 4 release tracking page. Note that the tree has been reopened for blockers and approved patches, as outlined in a post to DevNews. Current tree status is, as always, available through the Tree Status wiki page. As part of Mozilla Corporation’s ongoing stability and security update process, Thunderbird 2.0.0.12 is now available for Windows, Mac, and Linux as a free download from www.getthunderbird.com. Due to the security fixes included, it is strongly recommended that all Thunderbird users upgrade to this latest release. For more information, see the Thunderbird 2.0.0.12 release announcement and notes. New weekly Thunderbird meetings Starting today (Mar 4), weekly status meetings will be held for the Thunderbird Project. These meetings are currently scheduled for 9:30am Pacific time, with weekly agendas and dial in details posted to the mozilla.dev.planning newsgroup. More information is available through the Thunderbird status meeting wiki page. Gervase Markham blogs, “The Google Summer of Code 2008 has been launched, and the Mozilla Project intends to submit a request to take part again. This requires us to produce a list of suitable projects in the next two weeks. As last year, we are collecting ideas for Firefox, Thunderbird, Camino, Seamonkey, Bugzilla, and L10n. If you have a proposal, head over to the Brainstorming page.” For more details and information, see Gerv’s blog post and the Google Summer of Code 2008 site. Mozilla China profiled in Reuters Reuters has put together a profile of the Mozilla China team led by Li Gong: Mozilla seeks growth and tie-ups in China market. Gen Kenai blogged about this very interesting article, and suggests some links for further reading. From NPR’s website, “Remember when Firefox was the little browser that could? Mozilla’s Firefox just celebrated its 500 millionth download. [This show takes a] look at what the future holds for the orange fox with Mozilla’s Community Development Director.” To listen to the 8 min piece, head over to NPR’s site. Miro, Firefox and Joost are Webware 100 finalists Percy Cabello of Mozilla Links writes, “Just like last year, Firefox is a finalist in the browsing category of Webware 100’s, a yearly award to the favorite Web 2.0 applications. This year, two other Mozilla-based products are nominated in the video category: Miro, the open source video player and aggregator; and Joost, a proprietary Internet TV offering. Voting is open until March 31.” · Mozilla 2 Meeting 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.