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about:mozilla - Impact Mozilla, FSOSS, Mobile Firefox, SFX, Public Relations, SUMO, Add-on survey results, and more…

In this issue…

Impact Mozilla: Community marketing challenge
Last week Mozilla’s marketing team launched a new community-focused marketing challenge called Impact Mozilla. The idea is to further open Mozilla’s marketing process to the community, and to see who can come up with the best ideas. This challenge is specifically focused on gathering and developing ideas that will help increase Firefox’s user retention rate — increasing the number of people who continue using Firefox after downloading and installing it.

“We’re looking for innovative ways to make sure people who download Firefox become regular users. Interested? Start by sending us a summary of your ideas and an oveview of how you and your team will carry them out. If your initial strategy makes the cut, we’ll ask for a complete plan detailing your solution. If your plan is selected as the winner, you’ll have the opportunity to manage a marketing campaign for one of the top brands in the technology world. We’ll give you the resources to enact your solution, plus $3,000 for the winning proposal.” For all the details, including how to get started and where to submit your plans, see the Impact Mozilla website.

Free Software and Open Source Symposium (FSOSS)
David Humphrey writes, “The Free Software and Open Source Symposium (FSOSS) is scheduled for Oct 23 and Oct 24, and online registration is open. There are various early bird rates, so register early. This year’s line-up includes many familiar Mozilla faces. The list of speakers is long and diverse, and represents the best of the web, the open source desktop, open source business, policy, law, etc. We’re also going to be running a track on Teaching Open Source, which will bring together professors, students, administrators, and community leaders to discuss the potential and challenges of taking students into open source projects.” For more information, check out David’s full blog post, and check out the FSOSS web site.

Mobile Firefox: User Experience developments
Mobile Firefox (code-named “Fennec”) recently hit its milestone 8 (M8) release. Mark Finkle blogged about the release at the time, and Madhava Enros has since blogged about the user-experience changes and additions to the mobile browser. “This is an exciting time from a user-experience perspective because, along with functionality and stability improvements, this milestone brings with it the beginnings of Fennec’s look and feel. In a sense, we have some UI worth playing with, evaluating, and improving.” Madhava’s post includes a bevy of screenshots that you can check out, and if you would like to take part in the discussion about the Mobile Firefox UI, you should do so over in the Mobile development group.

Spread Firefox Affiliates program
David Rolnitzky recently announced a number of improvements to the Spread Firefox Affiliates program. The Affiliates program is designed to make it easier for our community to spread the word about Firefox by providing website buttons and banners, as well as quarterly prizes for the top Firefox referrers. “Some of the improvements are user-facing and some of them are back-end improvements which, while not immediately obvious, will be of great benefit to the program. You can find the initial details for this improvement plan here.” Improvements include clearer information about how to get started and how the points system works, better organization of buttons and banners, a new selection of international buttons, the ability to create custom buttons, and a new incentive system. Read David’s blog post for full details, and then head over to the Affiliates program site to sign up and learn how you can help make Firefox even better.

Next steps for SpreadFirefox.com
A number of improvements have been made to SpreadFirefox.com (SFX) over the summer, and Alix Franquet has been closely involved with that work. Alix has now blogged about the next steps for SFX, outlining a three-part redesign that will be undertaken towards improving the homepage and overall site navigation. These three parts include: creating a simplified homepage that better explains what SFX is about and that includes a community spotlight and a call to action; a new page for SFX members to track activity so they can better see what’s happening on the site including events, new groups, and new posts; and updating the site navigation to improve overall usability. There are lots more details about the planned changes in Alix’s blog post, and you can read the full plan over on SFX itself. We’re always looking for more help with SFX, so this could be a great opportunity to dive in and get involved with Mozilla’s community marketing projects.

Mozilla Public Relations metrics
Mozilla’s Public Relations team has been working on opening up the PR process, making it more transparent and more in fitting with Mozilla’s open source DNA. Their most recent foray is a post written by Melissa Shapiro, in which she discusses PR metrics. “How do we know if we’re getting better if there’s no baseline indication of impact? The answer isn’t a pure science. True PR metrics are not just quantitative but qualitative as well. Quantitative analysis explores things like total number of articles, mentions in the press, coverage by country, etc. Qualitative analysis includes message penetration as well as audience and tone analysis. It turns out they are equally important in evaluating the success of Mozilla’s major PR initiatives.”

The article goes on to discuss the various types of quantitative and qualitative analysis we explore as part of our PR process at Mozilla, outlining use cases for each and giving examples comparing the public relations activities around the Firefox 2 and Firefox 3 releases. If you’re interested in learning more about the normally opaque world of public relations, you should check out Melissa’s blog for this and other articles.

The vision for SUMO - Part 8: Live Chat
David Tenser has published an extensive series of blog posts where he has been discussing a comprehensive vision for the scope and role of the Support.mozilla.com (SUMO) project. He has recently published the eighth post in the series, this one focused on the innovative and incredibly useful “Live Chat” feature. “If a problem isn’t yet covered in the Knowledge Base, or if the instructions in the article are too hard to understand, Live Chat is a powerful way for users to get in touch with Firefox experts and get hands-on assistance in solving their problems. Live Chat can also be a very fun way for contributors to provide support. Contributors helping out with Live Chat don’t just help users, they talk to each other in the backchannel as well, providing assistance to other helpers whenever needed. This means that although you’re usually the only one interacting with the user you’re helping, you’re never alone.”

David further discusses some possible future improvements for the service, including a fully integrated chat client, a simple scheduling solution, support for languages other than English, and automatically saving chat logs and associated user happiness ratings, among other things. If you’re interested in the Live Chat feature of the SUMO project and would like to see how the team is thinking about improving it in the future, read the full post over at the Firefox Support Blog.

Add-on developers survey: raw results
The team responsible for the Addons.mozilla.org (AMO) site recently conducted a survey of the add-on developer community. A total of 265 people responded to the survey, and the initial results have been published. “The general summary is that most respondents were individual developers with 2 or more years of add-on development experience. Naturally they felt comfortable with JavaScript and XUL. They primarily built add-ons for Firefox and hosted them on their own.” The full results have been published, but they are simply the raw results. The team will be applying some correlation analysis to draw out more interesting findings and conclusions. To view and discuss these initial results, see the post on Basil’s weblog.

Two Mozillians make BusinessWeek’s “25 Most Influential”
It was recently announced that Mitchell Baker and Joi Ito were both included on BusinessWeek’s list of the 25 most influential people on the Web. “Each year, we turn to readers and BusinessWeek staff for the Best of the Web list, asking them to contribute names for a list of the Internet’s movers and shakers.” Watch the full slideshow, which includes all 25 honorees, over at BusinessWeek.

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.

Posted October 7th, 2008 by dria in about-mozilla | Comments Off

about:mobile - Fennec M8, Camera Input Tag and more…

In this issue…

Fennec M8
Mark Finkle has written about Fennec M8 being released. M8 is the latest
pre-alpha milestone release of the Fennec mobile browser which will
eventually become Firefox Mobile. M8 includes a new set of icons that Sean
Martell and Madhava Enros wrote about, improved rendering performance, UI
improvements and a pile of other items. You can find a full summary in
Mark’s post.

Camera Input Tag
As discussed on a post on Ajaxian, Brad Lassey has put up a screenshot of
Fennec taking input from a camera and making it available to web
applications. This kind of functionality would work much like a file input
tag that uploads pictures instead of files off your hard drive. This means
that web sites could easily include support for uploading pictures directly
from the browser instead of having to go through a cumbersome gallery and
file upload procedure. Read Brad’s post for full details.

TraceMonkey for Fennec
Vladimir Vukićević has posted about the work that he did to bring
TraceMonkey to the ARM platform. TraceMonkey is Mozilla’s fast JavaScript
implementation that will be included in Firefox 3.1. The speedup on ARM is
similar to what was measured on x86-based systems. Some operations are 30x
faster with a roughly 2x speedup on the whole of the SunSpider test. These
speedups will offer many user-perceptable improvements for web sites. But
because much of Fennec is written in JavaScript, it will also improve the
performance of the browser as a whole. Read Vlad’s post for more
information.

Add-ons for Mobile
Extensions are one of the best parts of Firefox on the desktop and Mozilla
has been working hard to bring that same extension experience to Fennec.
Early initial support for extensions was included in Fennec M7 and has been
improved in M8. Mark Finkle has a post up about what’s going to be required
by extensions authors and a couple of sample add-ons that people can build
off of.

Posted September 30th, 2008 by blizzard in about-mobile | Comments Off

about:mozilla - Mobile Firefox, Weave, Data, Logos, FAQs and more…

In this issue…

Mobile Firefox: milestone 8 released
Mark Finkle posts that Fennec (the code-name for Mobile Firefox) has reached a milestone 8 (M8) release, which you can install and test on a Nokia N8×0. “One of the big improvements during this milestone was the addition of several Mozilla QA team members. Fennec is being tested pretty hard now, and by people who love to find bugs. We are finding and fixing lots of issues now. Probably the biggest visible change in M8 is the new theme. It’s not entirely landed yet and will likely get some tweaks as we iterate on the design.” The post goes on to talk about some upcoming changes for Fennec. “Although Fennec is still only targeted for the Nokia N8×0, that should be changing fairly soon. Work on Windows Mobile has heated up quite a bit.” For more information, including a list of M8 highlights, see Mark’s full article.

Weave: the story so far
Dan Mills has written an extensive update about the status of the Mozilla Labs “Weave” project, outlining the project’s background, its current state, and setting up some questions about its potential future. “We think Weave still has a long way to go, and the real questions are: What do we need to do to get closer to our vision? What are the main problem areas right now? And, do we need to revisit any old decisions? Now that we’ve been running this experiment for a while, I think we can begin answering those questions.” Dan’s post goes on to discuss some of the major issues facing the project, which he’ll continue to expand upon in an upcoming post. You can read the full text of his current post over on his weblog.

Usage data: some basic examples
Mitchell Baker has written before that she believes there is a need to make basic, aggregate, anonymized information about Internet usage more widely available. “If everything that is known about the basic usage of the Internet is closed and proprietary then the Internet as an open platform will suffer.” Mitchell has now posted some examples of what she means by “usage data”, most of which we’re quite accustomed to seeing in aggregated, anonymized forms. These include a site’s bandwidth usage, site “traffic” in a day or month, and software download numbers. “These examples are clearly very general. I use them precisely for this reason — to demonstrate that we already understand the usefulness of this type of data and that it can be presented in an aggregate, anonymous form. There are other forms of aggregate, anonymous data that can be equally useful in understanding how the Internet is being used and ultimately, understanding what the Internet really is.” To read Mitchell’s full post, visit her weblog.

Help design the new SUMO logo
The support.mozilla.com (a.k.a. SUMO) project has been underway for over a year now, and has become an amazing community-powered support channel impacting millions of Firefox users around the world. The SUMO team has been working on envisioning the future of SUMO, conceptualizing the service’s evolution as it grows both in scope and participation. As part of this evolution, Tara Shahain and David Tenser hope to develop a strong visual identity for the project that encompasses SUMO and its ongoing mission. Part of this involves creating a new logo for the project, but they need your help. “More specifically, we need your help in brainstorming ideas around the design concept and how best to represent SUMO visually. In the past SUMO has dedicated its resources to Firefox and is therefore primarily known as ‘Firefox Support’. But as David notes in his blog, SUMO aspires to be much more.” To learn more about the project and how to participate in the logo design process, see Tara’s weblog post.

New Firefox logo style guide
John Slater and Tara Shahain have been working on developing a new and improved style guide for the Firefox logo, with the aim of refining existing guidelines and communicating those out to the widest possible audience. Last Friday, John announced that the new style guide has been released. “Our hope is that this guide will answer many of the commonly asked questions about how (and how not) to use the logo. We’ve also included a section where people can download the various configurations so there won’t be any confusion about what the official versions are. [W]e’re calling this style guide a beta launch for now because we want to make sure the community at large has a chance to review and weigh in before we officially declare it final. So, if you have any questions, thoughts or comments please let me or Tara know, or post your feedback on the Spread Firefox discussion page.” For full details, see the complete post on John’s weblog.

Powered by Mozilla FAQ
David Boswell has been working on creating some guidelines to determine how the “Powered by Mozilla” logo can be used as part of projects and products. He has recently posted a Powered by Mozilla FAQ that answers the questions he’s seen asked during the ongoing conversation about the logo. “Some more information (guidelines about the logo and an application to request using the logo) still need to be posted and those pieces will be coming soon. For now though, I’m posting the FAQ to let people give us some more feedback before the other pieces are finished up.” More information about the FAQ and the Powered by Mozilla project is available through David’s weblog post.

Mozilla Community Store: opening soon!
Part of the Firefox 3 launch included a t-shirt contest in which we “open sourced” the design process to create the official Firefox 3 t-shirt. Not only did we get a fantastic winning shirt, we also received a huge number of other great designs. There’s been a growing demand to make more of these community designs available for purchase, so for the past few months the Marketing team has been sorting out the legal and logistical challenges to make this possible. Tara Shahain has recently announced the good news that “we’ve partnered with Zazzle.com to create the ‘Mozilla Community Store’ — a sidekick to the original Mozilla Store which will serve as a new and open channel for community generated products. The Community Store isn’t quite finished yet, but I hope to have it ready in the next month or so. Make sure to start thinking of your designs! Once it launches, we’ll have plenty of details to help guide you through the entire process. Stay tuned!” More information about this project is available on Tara’s weblog.

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.

Posted September 30th, 2008 by dria in about-mozilla | Comments Off

Firefox 3.0.3 now available for download

In order to repair a problem experienced by some users with the Password Manager feature in Firefox 3.0.2, and as part of Mozilla Corporation’s ongoing stability and security update process, Firefox 3.0.3 is now available for Windows, Mac, and Linux as free downloads at http://getfirefox.com/

We strongly recommend that all Firefox users upgrade to this latest release. If you already have Firefox 3 or Firefox 2, 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 Firefox 3.0.3 Release Notes.

Posted September 26th, 2008 by beltzner in Releases | Comments Off

Firefox 2.0.0.17 and 3.0.2 security updates now available for download

As part of Mozilla Corporation’s ongoing stability and security update process, Firefox 3.0.2 and Firefox 2.0.0.17 are now available for Windows, Mac, and Linux as free downloads:

We strongly recommend that all Firefox users upgrade to this latest release. If you already have Firefox 3 or Firefox 2, 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 Firefox 3.0.2 Release Notes and the Firefox 2.0.0.17 Release Notes.

Note: All Firefox 2.0.0.x users are encouraged to upgrade to Firefox 3.0.2 by downloading it from http://getfirefox.com/.

Posted September 23rd, 2008 by beltzner in Releases | Comments Off

about:mozilla - Labs meetup, AMO dev tools, SVG and HTML, CSS, color profiles, L10N, Mozdev, and more…

In this issue…

Labs Meetup this Thursday in Mountain View
Mozilla Labs is holding its monthly meetup this Thursday, Sept 25, at Mozilla HQ in Mountain View (1981 Landings Drive, Bldg K). This month the conversation will focus on the future of the Web — “We want to hear from you! What is your big idea for the future of the Web? Do you have thoughts to add to the Concept Series? We are anxious to hear what inspires you!” Everyone is welcome to drop by and participate in the meetup, so if you’re in the Bay Area you should take the time to stop by and join the conversation. If you’re planning to attend, please RSVP in the comments over at the Mozilla Labs Meetup post.

AMO developer tools ready for testing
Justin Scott has been writing about the development of new tools for addons.mozilla.org, and has now announced that those tools are ready for testing. “On the en-US Developer Tools index, you should now see an invitation to try out the new tools, which will take you to the new ‘Developer Dashboard’. Using the old index will continue using the old tools until the next update when we intend to make the tools the default and only tools.” There’s also a test site available, where you can play around with the new tools without causing changes on the live AMO database. For details about the various new tools, you should read Justin’s previous posts, all of which are linked in his blog post.

SVG effects for HTML content
Robert O’Callahan has been working on adding features to Firefox that allow SVG effects to be applied to HTML content. He originally posted about this work back in June, discussing his experiments with making SVG’s “clip-path”, “mask”, and “filter” properties work when applied to HTML content. Last week Robert announced that this work has been added to the main Mozilla code base, and further that he has submitted his proposal to the SVG working group for standardization. For more information about these new features, including screenshots of them in action and working demos, see Robert’s post on the Web Tech weblog.

CSS transforms
The folks over at the Web Tech weblog have posted that Gecko (Mozilla’s layout engine) nightly builds now support a new “-moz-transform” CSS property. This property — a version of which is similarly supported by WebKit — is described as a “CSS property that accepts a list of transform functions (generic affine linear transforms) and then applies those transforms, in order, to the HTML elements the property is applied to.” Several examples of how to use the property and descriptions of what it does are available in the Web Tech post. “It will be interesting to see what uses developers find for CSS transforms. Much of the functionality once reserved for plugins can now be directly integrated into CSS and JavaScript.” More information and code samples are available in the Web Tech article.

Color profile support changes
Bobby Holley has been refining Mozilla’s color management backend, working to improve performance and polish the feature so it’s ready for “prime time”. These efforts have clearly paid off, as color profile support has now been turned on by default for tagged images in the latest Firefox nightly builds. In this context, “tagged images” are any images displayed in the web browser that have an embedded ICC color profile — in other words, images that contain the information needed to do a specific and accurate color transformation. Bobby’s post goes into all the technical aspects of these changes in detail, and also discusses why color management hasn’t been enabled for everything at this time. Percy Cabello has also posted about these changes over at Mozilla Links.

nsITraceableChannel, intercept HTTP traffic
Jan Odvarko writes, “Since bug 430155 (’new nsHttpChannel interface to allow examination of HTTP data before it is passed to the channel’s creator’) is now fixed, it’s possible to intercept HTTP traffic from within a Firefox extension!” Jan estimates that this fix will be part of Firefox 3.0.3, and points out that this feature is crucial for Firebug as one of that add-on’s features is the ability to display the response of any HTTP request made by a page. To this point, Firebug has been making use of the Firefox cache and XHR monitoring to implement this feature, but there are several issues with this approach that make it suboptimal. For more information about this new feature, including examples of how to make use of it in Firefox add-ons, read Jan’s article at his Software is hard weblog.

Localization Drivers visibility
Seth Bindernagel, Mozilla’s Director of Localization, recently blogged about some steps the Localization Drivers team is taking to increase the visibility of localization activities and improve project communications. The two primary tools they’re using are the Localization Dashboard and the team’s new weekly triage meetings where they ensure that high priority issues are dealt with quickly. Additionally, the team has created a new Firefox 3 l10n release trackers bug, and are working to make it easier for new localization teams to navigate through the early stages of our process. The results of some of these efforts are clear, as Seth announces that there are likely to be 13 more languages added to Firefox in the 3.0.2 and 3.0.3 releases, which is a huge accomplishment in the span of two minor updates. For more about Mozilla’s localization work, see Seth’s full blog post.

New Mozilla Foundation t-shirt
David Boswell writes, “I’d like to let people know that there is a new Mozilla shirt available in the Mozilla store. This new design is heavily influenced by the old school Hack shirts.” As with all Mozilla Store purchases, proceeds directly benefit the Mozilla Foundation. You can check out (and order!) the t-shirts at the Mozilla Store.

Mozdev turns eight
The Mozdev team writes, “In September 2000 mozdev.org was launched as a site dedicated to supporting Mozilla application and extension developers. Over the last year we have continued to provide hosting for hundreds of active projects and there are now add-ons for over a dozen Mozilla-based applications. There are also new features and more updates coming that will make developing projects even easier. We would like to thank everyone who has contributed time, energy or money over the past 8 years and we look forward to another year of serving the Mozilla community.”

Latest about:addons newsletter
The Mozilla Add-ons team has published the latest issue of the monthly about:addons newsletter, bringing you the latest and greatest news and information from the world of Mozilla Add-on development. You can read the full newsletter at the Mozilla Developer Center and sign up to have future issues sent directly to your mailbox using the handy subscription form.

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.

Posted September 23rd, 2008 by dria in about-mozilla | Comments Off

about:mozilla - 2010 goals, Add-on survey, TraceMonkey, SUMO, Benchmark quality, chaos, and more…

In this issue…

Mozilla: Defining our 2010 goals

Mitchell Baker is leading the effort towards defining the 2010 goals for Mozilla and has recently posted a draft version of the proposed goals. Setting these sorts of wide-reaching aspirational goals is critical because “[a]rticulating a broad, commonly shared set of aspirations helps many disparate groups of people organize themselves and work towards very practical, concrete tasks that make our aspirations real.” The 2010 goals “should be concrete enough that people can respond to them and provide a means for evaluating the scope of progress. Perhaps even more importantly, these goals should express important ideas rather than specifying implementation plans.”

Mitchell’s initial post outlines the background and purpose of the goal setting process, and her second post includes the draft set of proposed 2010 goals that have emerged from various discussions including feedback gathered during the Firefox Summit. If you’re interested in the longer-term goal setting and direction of the Mozilla project, Mitchell asks that you “[p]lease take some time and review the proposed goals, make suggestions, ask questions, and make alternative proposals.” You are invited and encouraged to take part in this conversation, as these goals form the foundation of what it is that Mozilla does and aspires to become. Everyone is welcome to participate.

To take part in this conversation you should watch Mitchell’s weblog, as well as the mozilla.governance newsgroup, where further discussion topics will be posted. There’s also a new “#2010goals” channel in IRC (irc.mozilla.org) where you are welcome to engage in real time discussion regarding these goals.

Firefox add-ons developer survey

The addons.mozilla.org (AMO) team is looking for help as they work on improving the add-on development experience. “If you’ve developed or tried to develop an add-on for Firefox (or other applications), we’d like your feedback to know what we can do to improve that experience through documentation, tools, and features. Please take a few minutes to complete our survey. Your responses will be anonymous, and every response will be read. We’ll summarize the findings in a few weeks.” Add-ons are a vital part of the Firefox ecosystem, so any help you can provide here would be hugely beneficial to the project as a whole — Add-ons Developer Survey.

TraceMonkey and Firefox Mobile

Over the past few weeks, Vladimir Vukicevic has been working on getting TraceMonkey working on the ARM architecture which is frequently used in mobile and handheld devices. “[M]obile and handheld platforms are going to quickly become consumers of the full web, and core performance gains will often yeild much more significant user-perceptible performance improvements. The result of all this work will be a richer web experience on mobile and embedded devices, by allowing those users to take advantage of modern web applications that do much of their work on the browser instead of server side.” Vlad’s TraceMonkey work will be available for testing in the next alpha release of Fennec (the code name for Firefox Mobile) by enabling a configuration setting the same way testers can enable TraceMonkey in Firefox nightly builds. For more information, including a host of technical details, see Vlad’s weblog.

Firefox support: Envisioning the future

David Tenser, Mozilla’s SUMO project lead, has been writing a multi-part weblog post outlining a working vision for the future of the Firefox support project. “Since the SUMO team was formally created, we have grown from a fairly buggy web site managed by a tight group of people, to a truly community-powered support channel with over 70 active contributors per week. This is an amazing achievement that really shows the strength of the Mozilla community.” Even so, SUMO’s mission is not complete. David continues, “From my perspective, we’ve just started. I’ve thought a lot about what we should do to take SUMO to the next level, something I playfully called ‘SUMO 2.0′ when discussing this with the team at the Summit.” David has written five posts outlining the vision for SUMO so far: Part 1: Listen as hard as we can, Part 2: Understanding the bigger picture, Part 3: Increasing community participation, Part 4: Having our finger on the pulse, Part 5: Localization.

If you’re interested in volunteering to help with the SUMO project, you should keep an eye on David’s weblog and read the How to contribute page in the SUMO Knowledge Base. Helping out with user support is a great and easy way to get involved with the Mozilla project.

Polishing Firefox

In an effort to improve the level of Firefox’s visual and interactive polish, Alex Faaborg will be posting a short list of top-priority user experience bugs every Monday morning between now and the Firefox 3.1 launch. He writes, “These bugs will involve fixing some rough areas of Firefox 3’s UI, landing icons that we meant to land before shipping, and trying to make sure every last pixel is perfect.” The team could use some help getting these bugs finished up and closed off, so if you have the time and are interested in helping out, you are encouraged to dive in and get started. Additionally, if there are polish issues you think need to be addressed, Alex asks that you file bugs for those and leave a note in the comments of his post.

Developing guidelines for “Powered by Mozilla”

David Boswell has been working on creating some guidelines to determine how the “Powered by Mozilla” logo can be used as part of projects and products. “Guidelines need to be specific since we don’t want someone to be able to check out just one file from our repositories and then claim that their application is Powered by Mozilla. The problem is that there doesn’t seem to be an existing list of reusable technologies that the Mozilla community creates.” This being the case, David has taken the time to put together draft lists of these technologies and criteria, but is unsure whether the lists are complete or entirely makes sense. He has posted the lists on his weblog, and if you have feedback or suggestions about these he asks that you leave a comment on the blog post or edit the wiki page directly.

Firefox logo style guide progress

As mentioned previously, Tara Shahain and John Slater have been working on a new Firefox logo style guide with the help of the Royal Order and a small team of community volunteers who are acting as an informal panel of advisors. Lots of progress has been made, and Tara has written a new blog post talking about the initial logo inventory (there were 32) and the thought processes that went into narrowing that down to a core set of eight. You can read Tara’s post over at her weblog and join the discussion there.

JavaScript benchmark quality

While JavaScript engine performance has been undergoing a renaissance, JavaScript benchmark tests haven’t been keeping pace and aren’t adapting well to the rapid performance increases we’ve been seeing. John Resig has put together a post analysing the problem, looking at three different benchmark suites — SunSpider, Dromaeo, and V8 Benchmark — and what they are doing to counter-act the problem of error levels increasing as browsers are able to run the tests more and more quickly. It’s a detailed and interesting peek into the world of JavaScript benchmarking, and you can read John’s full post on his weblog.

Managing in/with/around/by chaos

John Lilly recently gave a talk at Stanford about Mozilla’s structure and decision-making processes. “[I]t’s about how Mozilla is organized, and how we push decision-making to the edges of any organization we have — it’s really an organization design and behavior talk.” The presentation is an interesting look into the thinking and blended system of chaos and order behind Mozilla. John has posted his slides over on Slideshare, which you can view here: Stanford Presentation on Mozilla.

Ars Technica on Firefox, Gecko, and WebKit

Ryan Paul of Ars Technica posted an interesting two-page article last week explaining why Mozilla remains committed to Gecko while WebKit popularity is increasing. As WebKit has been adopted by more browsers, Ryan writes, “some technology enthusiasts are beginning to wonder if the days are numbered for Mozilla’s Gecko rendering engine.” This is not at all the case, however, and “those who understand the differences between the two rendering engines and have an appreciation of Gecko’s technical strengths recognize that there is no basis for speculation about the possibility of Mozilla adopting [WebKit] for future versions of Firefox.” In the article, Ryan discusses WebKit’s strengths, why Apple opted for WebKit over Gecko in 2003, how Gecko has evolved and improved since, why Gecko is preferred by a host of third-party developers, and more.

In writing the article, Ryan spoke with Mike Shaver, Mozilla’s VP of Engineering. “Although [Shaver] respects the technical achievements of WebKit, he believes that the WebKit development model and fragmentation in the WebKit ecosystem would create serious challenges that make it unsuitable for Firefox.” Shaver goes into much more detail in the article, which you can find over on the Ars Technica site.

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.

Posted September 16th, 2008 by dria in about-mozilla | Comments Off

about:addons - Survey, Roadmap, Mobile Add-ons, DevDay & more

In this issue…

  • Add-on Developers: Tell us what you think
  • AMO Roadmap & Direction
  • Extend Firefox 3 winners announced!
  • Extensions for Fennec (Mobile)
  • Upcoming Toronto MozCamp/Developer Day
  • Mozilla Labs announces Ubiquity

Add-on Developers: Tell us what you think
If you’re a Firefox add-on developer, please consider taking this brief survey to help us improve the experience of developing and hosting add-ons through documentation, tools, and features. All responses are anonymous and will be read. Take the survey.

AMO Roadmap & Direction
Basil Hashem, Mozilla’s Director of Add-ons, has published some slides on the addons.mozilla.org Roadmap and Editor Community. You can check them out at his blog.

Extend Firefox 3 winners announced!
The winners of the Extend Firefox extension competition for Firefox 3 have been announced. The grand prize winners of Best New Add-on were Pencil, Tagmarks, and HandyTag. The Best Updated Add-on grand prize winners were Read it Later, TagSifter, and Bookmark Previews. The Best
Music Add-on was Fire.fm. You can see a list of all winners and runners up at the announcement post.

Extensions for Fennec (Mobile)
The Add-ons Manager in Fennec is coming along, and Mark Finkle made a post explaining some important things add-on developers will need to know for developing Fennec extensions.

Upcoming Toronto MozCamp/Developer Day
Mozilla is hosting a Developer Day in Toronto on September 15 & 16. Check out Mark Finkle’s post for a description of the event, or take a look at the schedule and sign up if you’ll be able to attend.

Mozilla Labs announces Ubiquity
Ubiquity, “an experiment into connecting the Web with language”, was announced by Mozilla Labs and a prototype Firefox extension is now available. Read the announcement and try it out!

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Posted September 13th, 2008 by mfinkle in General | Comments Off

Participate in the Add-on Developer Survey

If you’ve developed or tried to develop an add-on for Firefox (or other applications), we’d like your feedback to know what we can do to improve that experience through documentation, tools, and features. Please take a few minutes to complete our survey. Your responses will be anonymous, and every response will be read. We’ll summarize the findings in a few weeks.

Thank you.

Posted September 12th, 2008 by basil in General, add-ons | Comments Off

about:mozilla - Firefox 3.1, TraceMonkey, Mobile Firefox, Language-based interfaces, Drag and drop, and more…

In this issue…

Firefox 3.1 Alpha 2 now available

The second alpha version of Firefox 3.1 is now available for download. Firefox 3.1 Alpha 2 is built on a pre-release version of the Gecko 1.9.1 platform, and it is important to note that this release is intended for developers and testers only.

Firefox 3.1 Alpha 2 introduces several new features to the browser, including: support for the HTML5 “video” element, initial support for web worker threads, support for dragging and dropping tabs between browser windows, a new selector to create areas of Aero-style “glass” in XUL, support for new CSS 2.1 and CSS 3 properties, and performance improvements and new preference values for color management profile support.

Please note that this alpha release of Firefox 3.1 does not include the new TraceMonkey JavaScript engine — TraceMonkey is available in nightly builds and is currently disabled by default. For more information, see the TraceMonkey wiki page.

If you’re planning to download and test Firefox 3.1 Alpha 2, you should first read the release notes and the Firefox 3.1 for developers article. More information and download links are available in the DevNews release announcement.

Drag and Drop is here

Neil Deakin has posted a development update about the inclusion of the HTML5 drag and drop API in Mozilla nightly builds. “This is the API that IE and Safari have supported for a while. Now Firefox will support it as well so you can create content in your web pages that can be dragged and dropped elsewhere. The same API is also used for Firefox extensions and XUL applications.” For more information, including examples about how to make things draggable, see Neil’s weblog post. Drag and drop documentation is available at the Mozilla Developer Center.

Mozilla, Firefox and Google Chrome

As most browser-industry watchers know, Google has launched a beta version of a new web browser called “Google Chrome”. John Lilly posted about it at the time, and Mitchell Baker has written about it since, discussing how and why Mozilla and Firefox continue to be unique and vital in an increasingly healthy browser market where competition and innovation are again the norm.

Mitchell writes, “Mozilla exists to build portions of the Internet where individual human benefit, social benefit, and civic benefit are the most important things. [We] recognized long ago that an independent browser dedicated only to the public good is a necessary piece for building a healthy internet. Firefox is our first step in building that Internet. Clearly we need to continue to build great products, and to lead in a competitive market. Mozilla created this competitive environment through the success of Firefox, and I’m as confident as John is about Mozilla’s future.”

“We’ll continue to compete in the browser world, and we’ll continue to do well. We’ll continue to produce a product that people choose and trust and understand is theirs. We’ll continue to do this as part of our overall mission — building an Internet where individual, civic and social value are paramount.” Read Mitchell’s full post on her weblog.

Andreas Gal on the TraceMonkey JavaScript engine

For the past two months Andreas Gal has been working with the Mozilla team creating a just-in-time (JIT) compiler for the JavaScript engine in Firefox. On August 22nd the project (code named “TraceMonkey”) was added to the main Firefox development code base.

Andreas writes, “TraceMonkey is a trace-based (.zip PDF) JIT compiler and it pushes the envelope on JavaScript performance. On average, we speed up Apple’s popular SunSpider benchmarks by a factor of 4.6 over the last release of Firefox. For the SunSpider ubench suite, which focuses on core JavaScript language features, we achieve a speedup of 22x. Whichever metric you chose to apply, Firefox now has the fastest JavaScript engine in the world.” Andreas’ post goes on to discuss the concepts and background behind TraceMonkey in detail, including dynamic compilation with traces, trace trees and nested trace trees, and type specialization. You can read the full article at Andreas’ weblog.

TraceMonkey vs. V8: JavaScript performance

JavaScript is an increasingly vital aspect of web browser performance since many web applications (web mail, online word processors, and so forth) rely heavily on complex JavaScript programs for their core functionality. In the past year, JavaScript performance has gone through somewhat of a renaissance, with massive strides being made by JavaScript developers working on several different projects. The two most recent developments come from Mozilla and Google — Mozilla’s new TraceMonkey engine that is part of Firefox 3.1 development, and Google’s new V8 engine that is part of the Google Chrome beta.

Brendan Eich has run some performance tests, and has posted the results of the head-to-head showdown in which he pitted the engines against each other using the SunSpider test suite on Windows XP and Windows Vista (Google Chrome is not currently available for either Mac or Linux). Brendan writes, “[TraceMonkey] win[s] by 1.28x and 1.19x respectively,” but adds that SunSpider is “one popular yet arguably non-representative benchmark suite.” He finishes by pointing out that “this contest is not a playoff where each contending VM is eliminated at any given hype-event point,” going on to sketch the rough outlines of the approach the team is taking to further improve TraceMonkey performance.

Brendan’s complete test results and commentary are available on his weblog. Further information about TraceMonkey and JavaScript performance is available through web posts by Mike Shaver, Andreas Gal, and John Resig.

Mobile Firefox, now with add-ons

The recent release of Fennec (the code name for Mobile Firefox) Milestone 7 included the revolutionary addition of an Add-ons manager for the mobile browser. Mark Finkle has written a detailed post that talks about developing add-ons for Fennec, explaining its various similarities and differences to Firefox. “Fennec is a XULRunner application and gives extension developers access to the same underlying XPCOM system that is used in Firefox. The process of building extensions is the same as for any other Mozilla based application.”

There are significant differences, as well. “Fennec is not Firefox. It is a completely different application. Fennec’s UI is also very different than Firefox. This means you can’t just plop a Firefox (or Thunderbird or Songbird) extension into Fennec and expect anything to work. There are some basic things an extension developer will need to handle when making or porting extensions to Fennec.” These differences include: a different application id, a very different XUL UI, and different JavaScript objects and functions in the UI code, among other things.

Mark suggests that currently the best way to figure out what’s available is to look at the source code. If you have questions, jump into Mozilla IRC’s #mobile channel, and someone there should be able to help you out. Mark also includes some example Fennec extensions, which you can find linked in his blog post.

Designing a theme for Mobile Firefox

Madhava Enros and Sean Martell have been working on creating a default theme for the Fennec web browser (”Fennec” is the code name for Mobile Firefox). Madhava writes, “We’re trying for something that nods back in the direction of Firefox on the desktop while still striking out in a direction that’s appropriate for a small-screen finger-directed device. [Sean]’s posted some recent work to his blog, and he’ll be posting more there as we go. This is an effort still very much in progress, so please jump in with your suggestions. There’s a Fennec UI discussion thread ripe for contribution.” For more information and some mockups of the theme, see Madhava’s blog post.

Language-based interfaces

Jonathan DiCarlo has been writing a series of blog posts discussing language-based interfaces — interfaces that allow you type commands in real language and the right stuff happens. “What would the web be like if you could tell it what you want to do as easily as you currently tell it where you want to go?”

Mozilla Labs has started experimenting with linguistic interfaces that are designed to do just that, the first of which is the recently-launched Ubiquity project. Jonathan’s posts are an extensive look into the concepts, questions, and thinking behind the experiments, and he has written three so far — Language-based interfaces: The problem, Language-based interfaces: Where do we stand now?, and Language-based interfaces: Report card for Ubiquity. If you’re at all interested in these approaches and ideas you should read Jonathan’s blog then head over to the Ubiquity project to get involved with the growing community working on these experiments.

Upcoming events

Toronto, Sep 15-16, MozCamp: Two-day developer event full of talks, tutorials, and workshops. See the Toronto MozCamp wiki page for more information.

Paris, Sep 20, Add-ons workshop: A one-day event to bring together French-speaking XUL developers, hackers, and Web developers to discuss Mozilla technologies. See the Mozilla wiki MAOW page for more information.

Barcelona, Oct 25-26, MozCamp: A large, two-day Mozilla conference being held in Barcelona on the weekend of Oct 25-26, 2008. See the Mozilla Camp Europe wiki page for more information.

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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Posted September 9th, 2008 by dria in about-mozilla | Comments Off