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about:mozilla - SUMO, Thunderbird, Weave, Embedding, Add-ons, Labs, Summer of Code and more!

In this issue…

Firefox Screencasts Contest!

SUMO (support.mozilla.com) and Spread Firefox are joining forces and putting on a Firefox Screencasts contest! “Starting the morning of May 19th on Spread Firefox, we will present the 100 most popular support articles from the SUMO knowledge base and ask YOU to create screencasts for one, two, three, or all of them!” You will be allowed to submit screencasts for as many articles as you like, but only one per article. The contest will run until June 15th.

The most exciting part? There will be a winner for each of the 100 articles, and each of the 100 winners will receive a special Firefox Screencast Contest t-shirt. Only 100 of these t-shirts will be made, so this contest is the only way to get this exclusive collector’s item. For more information, head over to the SUMO blog and read the full contest announcement.

Thunderbird 2.0.0.14 Released

As part of Mozilla’s ongoing stability and security update process, Thunderbird 2.0.0.14 is now available for Windows, Mac, and Linux as a free download from www.getthunderbird.com. Due to the security fixes, we strongly recommend that all Thunderbird users upgrade to this latest release. For a list of changes and more information, please review the Thunderbird 2.0.0.14 Release Notes.

If you already have Thunderbird 2.0.0.x, you will receive an automated update notification, or you can apply the update manually by selecting “Check for Updates…” from the Help menu.

If you’re still using Thunderbird 1.5.0.x, this version is no longer supported and contains known security vulnerabilities. Please upgrade to Thunderbird 2.0.0.14 as soon as possible.

New Weave weekly meetings

Starting this week, the Weave project will be holding public meetings once per week. The first meeting will be Wednesday May 7th at 1:00pm Pacific (4:00pm Eastern, 21:00 UTC). Meeting agendas and dial-in information can be found on the Mozilla wiki’s Weave Meetings page.

Mozilla Embedding meet-up, May 8th + 9th

Chris Blizzard would like everyone to know that there is going to be another Mozilla Embedding meet-up in Mountain View on May 8th and 9th (this Thursday and Friday). The goal is to start scoping a new Embedding API and getting some actual code put together. This will be run as an open meeting, so if you’re in the area and you want to attend, please contact Chris. For more information, see Chris’s blog post about this meeting, and his earlier post about the previous meet-up.

Pascal Chevrel speaking at University of Sevilla, May 9th

On Friday May 9th, Pascal Chevrel will be speaking about the organization of the Mozilla project at the Concurso Universitario de Software Libre, organized by the University of Sevilla in Spain.

Add-ons compatibility update

Alex Polvi has started posting a weekly “State of the Add-ons” report wherein he talks about the status of the top 10 add-ons that are not yet compatible with Firefox 3. This week’s list includes: Skype Toolbar for Firefox, Foxmarks Bookmark Synchronizer, FoxyTunes, Firebug, and PicLens, among others. For the full list, further details, and information about how to help, read Polvi’s blog post.

Mozilla Labs, Higher Education, and New Opportunities

Aza Raskin has posted some of Mozilla Labs’ goals for this year, which are centered around bringing the open-Web innovation process to a wider community. They’re working on a number of new programs, one of which is a more formal way for engaging with higher education. The Labs team is really excited to find new groups in academia to collaborate with, and this blog post outlines a few of their early efforts. Read the full post at the Mozilla Labs weblog.

MozillaLinks interviews MicroB developer, Antonio Gomes

Antonio Gomes, a MicroB developer, has been interviewed by Percy Cabello of MozillaLinks. Percy writes, “While Mozilla is gradually turning more attention to mobile platforms to expand its presence in the web, there’s another project, MicroB, that is already providing a Mozilla based solution for the Nokia Tablet PC platform.” In the interview, Antonio talks about the MicroB project, the interactions between MicroB and the Mozilla project, MicroB’s relationship to Mobile Firefox, and more. Read the full interview over at the excellent MozillaLinks weblog.

Mozilla Summer of Code project information

The Google Summer of Code (SoC) 2008 is in progress. Over the past three years, SoC has brought together 1500 students and 2000 mentors from 90 countries worldwide. Mozilla has a number of SoC projects underway, ranging from “Natural language parsing for automatic calendar event creation” to building OpenID support into Bugzilla. With eleven projects in all, it’s going to be another exciting and productive summer for Mozilla projects. For more information, including detailed descriptons of all the projects, check out the Mozilla SoC information page.

2008 Linux Journal Reader’s Choice Awards

Both Thunderbird and Firefox have won 2008 Linux Journal Reader’s Choice Awards in the categories of “Favorite E-mail Client” and “Favorite Web Browser”, respectively. Nearly 6000 readers voted this year, so these are really great awards. The official announcement was made on May 1st, and the article announcing the winners can be found over at Linux Journal.

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Posted May 6th, 2008 by dria in about-mozilla | Comments Off

Thunderbird 2.0.0.14 security and stability release now available

As part of Mozilla Corporation’s ongoing stability and security update process, Thunderbird 2.0.0.14 is now available for Windows, Mac, and Linux as a free download from www.getthunderbird.com.

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

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

For a list of changes and more information, please review the Thunderbird 2.0.0.14 Release Notes.

Please note: If you’re still using Thunderbird 1.5.0.x, this version is no longer supported and contains known security vulnerabilities. Please upgrade to Thunderbird 2 by downloading Thunderbird 2.0.0.14 from www.getthunderbird.com.

Posted May 1st, 2008 by ss in Releases | Comments Off

about:mozilla - Mitchell’s keynote, Firefox in Europe, AMO changes, Marketing news, Firefox bookmarks, and more

In this issue…

Mitchell Baker’s Web 2.0 Keynote

On April 24th, Mitchell Baker gave a keynote talk at the Web 2.0 conference. Doug Turner has written up some of the highlights, and provides an embedded video of the talk on his weblog. From the talk: “[T]here is only one web. Firefox is the best and most effective platform for getting to that one web. We are building Firefox for mobile to spark innovation and excitement. We need an open web based development platform to do this. We view Firefox as this platform.” For more, watch the full video, head over to Doug’s weblog, or check out some of the other media articles:

Firefox progress in Europe

Tristan Nitot has blogged about some of the latest statistics available regarding Firefox market share in Europe. “According to Xiti, Firefox is getting close to 29% in Europe. The increase is 4.5 percentage points on the past 12 months.” Also, “According to Gemius (Rankings.hu), Firefox 2 is now the leading browser version in Hungary.” For more market share news and links to these stories, see Tristan’s blog post.

Changes to Featured and Recommended Add-ons on AMO

Basil Hashem has written a post about the recent changes to the “Featured and Recommended” add-ons part of the addons.mozilla.org (AMO) website. “One of the changes that was introduced with the latest AMO redesign is the ability to highlight a wider variety of add-ons. Instead of a single list, recommendations are now on a per-application, per-category and a per-locale basis. This gives the community greater flexibility and increases the face time and exposure that an add-on can have.” For more information and details about these recent changes, see Basil’s weblog.

Getting ready for the launch of Firefox 3

Paul Kim has blogged about the plans for marketing Firefox 3. “As with every previous version launch, we will be utilizing a combination of traditional marketing and PR programs with community and grassroots outreach. This combination has served us well over the past four years to drive adoption to over 160 million people worldwide, build the Firefox brand, and provide meaningful opportunities for participation at launch.” For more about the Firefox 3 launch marketing plans, check out Paul’s post.

Firefox 3 Bookmarks

Last week Deb Richardson wrote a great introduction to Firefox 3’s new bookmarking features. Like most people, she talks about being frustrated with the state of bookmarks in older browsers, where they end up as a junk-drawer of forgotten links. “Firefox 3 introduces a few new features to bookmarks that make them much, much easier to use, more useful in general, and much more useful in particular for catastrophically disorganized folk like me.” If that sounds like you, check out the whole article.

Flickr Uploadr, a developer’s story

Richard Crowley, the developer of Flickr’s XUL-based cross-platform uploader utility, has written a great article outlining the reasons they chose XUL and the hurdles he’s had to overcome throughout development. Included is a list of links to detailed blog posts he wrote during (and about) the development of the project. It’s a great article and well worth a look — check it out over at the Flickr developer blog.

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Posted April 29th, 2008 by dria in about-mozilla | Comments Off

about:mozilla - Firefox 2.0.0.14, Camino 1.6, Privacy policy, AMO, Security metrics, and more

In this issue…

Firefox 2.0.0.14 released

As part of Mozilla Corporation’s ongoing stability and security update process, Firefox 2.0.0.14 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 2.x, you will receive an automated update notification. This update can also be applied manually by selecting “Check for Updates…” from the Help menu.

If you are still running Firefox 1.5.0.x, you are highly encouraged to upgrade to Firefox 2, as Mozilla ceased supporting Firefox 1.5.0.x in May 2007. Simply choose “Check for Updates…” from the Help menu to begin the upgrade process. For more information about this release, see the DevNews blog post.

Camino 1.6 released

The Camino Project is proud to announce Camino 1.6, a major update to the Camino web browser. This release includes a number of new features and improvements, including a customizable toolbar search field, a find bar, software update, a scrolling tab bar, and enhanced AppleScript support. For more information about this release, see the release notes and the official release announcement.

Proposed changes to Mozilla’s privacy policy

In February, Basil Hashem blogged about some proposed changes to Mozilla’s privacy policies. After considering the feedback and commentary that arose then, the proposed policy has been revised, and Basil has blogged about it again. “The new policy conforms to the commitments laid out in the earlier discussion. Absent any major objections, we plan to update the policy as proposed and implement the web analytics tool immediately. [The] most notable difference this time around is that Google Analytics is not in the picture. Only Omniture is under consideration.” For more information, and for a copy of the revised policy, see Basil’s latest blog post on the topic.

AMO 3.2: The Road Ahead

Madhava Enros, User Experience lead for the addons.mozilla.org (AMO) redesign, has posted a detailed discussion about the reasoning behind and road ahead for the AMO 3.2 release. “In the 3.2 redesign, our goal was to improve the experience for people new to the idea of add-ons as well as the large and growing set of people who want to stop in, quickly find something to improve their online experience, and be on their way again. All of that said, … [a] successful AMO must support add-on developers and those advanced users who are at the forefront of add-on testing and reviewing.” To read more, see Madhava’s blog post.

Community Survey results

At the end of 2007, Stats Malolepszy and Seth Bindernagel closed Mozilla’s first community survey and began analyzing the responses and drawing some conclusions from the data collected. They have finally reached a point where they are ready to publish some results. Much of the raw data has been presented earlier, at FOSDEM in February, but they have taken the time to refine what they have learned. These refined conclusions are being published as a series of blog posts, the first four of which are: Measuring the Temperature of the Community Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, and Part 4.

Security metrics that matter

Asa Dotzler, as part of the For the Record project, has written a detailed blog post discussing security metrics, and what security metrics actually matter. “A number of press articles…are offering the confusing and incorrect conclusion that the effective security and safety of web browsers can be measured by simply counting the number of vendor disclosed software flaws. This kind of measuring is flawed for several reasons, all related in that they make it more difficult for consumers to make informed decisions about their online safety.” For more of this article, please see Asa’s post at For the Record.

Firefox wins “Browser” category of the Webware 100

The 2008 Webware 100 Awards recognize the best Web 2.0 sites, services, and applications available today. After receiving more than 5,000 nominations for inclusion in the Webware 100, the editors selected 300 finalists which were then voted on by Web users, who voted nearly two million times to select the 100 top products — 10 each in 10 categories — from the list of 300 finalists. We are proud to announce that Firefox has been voted as the winner of the “Browser” category this year. For more information about the award, check out the Firefox Webware 100 web page.

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Posted April 22nd, 2008 by dria in about-mozilla | Comments Off

Firefox 2.0.0.14 security and stability update now available for download

As part of Mozilla Corporation’s ongoing stability and security update process, Firefox 2.0.0.14 is now available for Windows, Mac, and Linux for free download from http://getfirefox.com.

We strongly recommend that all Firefox users upgrade to this latest release. If you already have Firefox 2.x, you will receive an automated update notification within 24 to 48 hours. This update can also be applied manually by selecting “Check for Updates…” from the Help menu.

For a list of changes and more information, please review the Firefox 2.0.0.14 Release Notes.

If you are still running Firefox 1.5.0.x, you are highly encouraged to upgrade to the Firefox 2 series as Mozilla ceased supporting Firefox 1.5.0.x in May 2007. Simply choose “Check for Updates…” from the Help menu to begin the upgrade process.

Posted April 16th, 2008 by ss in Releases | Comments Off

about:mozilla - Firefox 3 RC1, New tinderbox trees, Fennec reviewed, Web analytics, AMO, and more

In this issue…

Firefox 3: Tree in lockdown for RC1

On April 8th, the Firefox tree entered a lockdown period in preparation for delivering Firefox 3 Release Candidate 1. The same process will be used for this release as for past betas — the blocker lists will be driven to zero, and only patches with explicit approval will be allowed to land in order to more tightly control potential for regressions. For more information, please see the DevNews blog post.

New Tinderbox trees for LeakTest and UnitTest

Chris Cooper and Dave Miller recently added two new trees to tinderbox.mozilla.org: UnitTest and LeakTest. As you might guess, these new trees will house the staging environments for the unittest machinery, JavaScript test machines, and the leaktest machinery. You should look there if you’re looking for something on MozillaTest that is missing.

While he was at it, Chris added two new machines to to the Firefox tinderbox tree to improve our unittest coverage on Windows. Named qm-win2k3-02 and qm-win2k3-03, these new machines should provide added information and help diagnose single-machine failures. For more information, see Chris’ weblog post.

Ars Technica reviews Fennec

Ars Technica has reviewed the first pre-alpha test builds of Fennec, Mozilla’s initial mobile Firefox prototype. “With Firefox 3 right around the corner, Mozilla’s top lizard wranglers are turning their attention to the next step in their plans for world browser domination. The Mozilla Mobile initiative, which was first announced last October, has reached the functional prototype stage. The developers have released pre-alpha test builds of a mobile Firefox prototype, codenamed Fennec, which we tested and discussed with Mozilla Mobile director Jay Sullivan.” Read the rest of article over at Ars Technica.

Mitchell Baker video interview in Paris, part 1/2

A couple of weeks ago, Mitchell Baker was in Paris for a keynote she gave at the French Senate. After the conference, she and the Mozilla Europe crew did a series of press interviews, and in the time between Tristan Nitot recorded two video interviews with Mitchell. The first of these interviews has now been posted to Tristan’s weblog.

Mozilla websites, web analytics and privacy

Mitchell Baker has written an article about the application of web analytics tools to Mozilla websites. “We live in a world of data; we should be thinking carefully about that data and its impact. [A] core of the Mozilla community is intensely focused on privacy and the individual person’s ability to understand and control personal information. With this in mind, I’ve put together a discussion of a particular data-gathering proposal, together with the safeguards that make me comfortable with it.” You can read the rest of this article at Mitchell’s weblog.

Feedback on the recent AMO release

Since the release of addons.mozilla.org 3.2, the AMO team has been actively reviewing the feedback users have sent in through a number of channels. In response to some of that feedback, Mike Morgan has posted an explanation of the rationale and trade-offs made with the new design and its attempts to balance the needs of various audiences AMO has to address — first-time users, seasoned experts, and add-on authors and publishers. Basil Hashem has also written a post about the feedback the team has received, summarizing the top concerns they’ve heard and outlining plans for the next iterations of the AMO site.

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Posted April 15th, 2008 by dria in about-mozilla | Comments Off

Tree is entering lockdown for Firefox 3 Release Candidate 1

As discussed at today’s Firefox 3 / Gecko 1.9 meeting, as of 11:59pm PDT tonight, the tree entered a lockdown period in preparation for delivering Firefox 3 Release Candidate 1.

We’ll be using the same process that has been used for the past betas. The blocker lists will be driven to zero, and only patches with explicit approval will be allowed to land in order to more tightly control potential for regressions. After taking the final blocker, we will likely enter a short bake period before handing over to build.

The tree rules have been updated to reflect that at this time the only patches that may land are:

  • patches with approval1.9+
  • patches that do not affect the Firefox build (tests, NPOTB changes)

The approval queue will be monitored frequently, but if you feel like you’re not getting the response time you require, feel free to find one of the “endgame drivers” on IRC or poke them over email.

We encourage interested parties to follow along with the progress of the Firefox 3 RC1 release.

Posted April 8th, 2008 by beltzner in General, Releases | Comments Off

about:mozilla - Firefox 3 Beta 5, SUMO Day, Thunderbird Bugdays, Labs updates, and more

In this issue…

Firefox 3 Beta 5 released
Firefox 3 Beta 5 is now available for download, and you should read the Release Notes and Known Issues before installing. This milestone is 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 or on irc.mozilla.org in #granparadiso. For more information about the release, see the DevNews blog post.

Get involved with Firefox 3!
Hearing all the great things about the upcoming Firefox 3 release and wishing you’d been a part of it? It’s not too late! Even when all the development and testing is done, there’s still a very important job left to do. Providing user support can help make sure the release goes smoothly for users who are updating or trying Firefox out for the first time.

On April 11th the SUMO (support.mozilla.com) team will be hosting a day all about getting to know SUMO and how to use the site to help other Firefox users enjoy their favorite browser. If you’ve ever thought about helping out with Firefox user support but haven’t been sure where to start, this day is for you. For more information and details see the SUMO blog post and the SUMO Day information page.

New Thunderbird Bugdays
As part of its growing focus on users and quality, the Thunderbird team has announced that Thunderbird Bugdays will be held every Thursday. The purpose of these bug days is: 1) to reduce the number of bugs in the bugzilla database to a more manageable level, 2) to respond to and assist bug reporters in a more timely manner, and 3) to improve the quality of bugs in the database so they can be acted on more easily by developers.

Bug day brings together both new and veteran Thunderbird users for a day of bug squishing. #bugday on irc.mozilla.org is where experienced bug hunters will mentor new participants, and is where everyone can help each other, gang up on bugs, and have fun.

The Thunderbird team needs your help to make bug days effective and fun, so please take a look at our planning document and add your thoughts to the wiki or post to the developer newsgroup.

Mitchell Baker interview at The Guardian
Earlier this year, Jack Schofield interviewed Mitchell Baker in London for an article in the Technology section of the Guardian. He has now posted a longer rough transcript of that interview on the Guardian Technology blog. In it he and Mitchell discuss Mozilla and Microsoft, things that are more important than chasing market share, why Mozilla isn’t using Firefox to push Thunderbird more, and why Mozilla is taking a serious look at mobile. Read the full article at the Guardian blog.

David Baron on the Acid3 test
The Acid Tests are a series of “web standards compliance” tests put out by the Web Standards Project. The most recent of these is Acid3, which tests JavaScript, DOM, and SVG compliance (amongst other things). David Baron, prominent Mozilla developer and member of the W3C CSS working group, has blogged his opinions about the Acid3 test, how he thinks the test should be used as a measure of the various browsers, and what Mozilla’s strategy is as to completing the tests. You can read more at David’s blog.

Mozilla Labs updates
Chris Beard, head of Mozilla Labs, has posted a short update about what’s going on over in the laboratory. Last week saw the launch of major updates for a number of Labs projects, including Weave and Personas. They have also introduced the new Test Pilot project, aimed at strengthening the user testing framework and community around Labs projects. Additionally, Chris has been interviewed a few times recently, resulting in two articles that are worth checking out: Firefox 4 will push out the edges of the browser, and Mozilla wants to put a Firefox in the cloud and in your pocket. For more details, check out Chris’ blog post.

Crash reporting system changes
The Mozilla WebDev team has recently pushed some important updates to the crash reporter system (codename: Socorro) aimed at improving both system usability and performance. These changes include a widespread refactoring of the processor code (1/3rd of the Breakpad server architecture) and an update allowing for instant queuing of requested reports. For more details, see the post at the WebDev blog.

10th Anniversary party pictures
On March 31st, the date of the original Netscape source code release, we marked the 10 year anniversary of the beginning of the Mozilla Project. While we’re celebrating “10 years of Mozilla” throughout all of 2008, there were a few parties on the 31st to help celebrate the occasion, and naturally there were more than a few digital cameras present. Pictures from the events have been posted to Flickr, including under the “Mozilla Anniversary” keyword, the “mozillaturns10” keyword, and directly to David Rolnitzky’s account. It would appear that a good time was had by all.

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Posted April 8th, 2008 by dria in about-mozilla | Comments Off

Firefox 3 beta 5 now available for download

Please note: Firefox 3 Beta 5 is a public preview release intended for developer testing and community feedback. It includes new features as well as dramatic improvements to performance, memory usage and speed. We recommend that you read the release notes and known issues before installing this beta.

Firefox 3 Beta 5 is now available for download. This milestone is 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.

New features and changes in this milestone that require feedback include:

  • Improvements to the user interface based on user feedback, including changes to the look and feel on Windows Vista, Windows XP, Mac OS X and Linux.
  • Changes and fixes for new features such as the location bar autocomplete, bookmark backup and restore, full page zoom, and others, based on feedback from our community.
  • Fixes and improvements to platform features to improve security, web compatabilty and stability.
  • Continued performance improvements: changes to our JavaScript engine as well as profile guided optimization continues to improve performance over previous releases as measured by the popular SunSpider test from Apple, and in the speed of web applications like Google Mail and Zoho Office.

(You can find out more about all of these features in the “What’s New” section of the release notes.)

Testers can download Firefox 3 Beta 5 builds for Windows, Mac OS X and Linux in 45 different languages. Developers should also read the Firefox 3 for Developers article on the Mozilla Developer Center.

Note: Please do not link directly to the download site. Instead we strongly encourage you to link to this Firefox 3 Beta 5 milestone announcement so that everyone will know what this milestone is, what they should expect, and who should be downloading to participate in testing at this stage of development.

Posted April 2nd, 2008 by beltzner in General | Comments Off

about:mozilla - Mozilla turns 10, Foxkeh news, Toronto moves, AMO redesign, Firefox announcement, Freerice, and more

In this issue…

Mozilla turns 10

March 31, 1998 is the date that Mozilla was officially launched. It’s the date the first Mozilla code became publicly available under the terms of an official open source license and a governing body for the project — the Mozilla Organization — began its public work. Ten years ago a radical idea took shape. The idea was that an open source community could create choice and innovation in key Internet technologies where large, commercial vendors could not. This idea took shape as the Mozilla project.

During the years since 3/31 we have taken that radical idea and proved its power. We have broadened the idea beyond anything imagined at our founding. And in the next ten years we’ll continue to be radical about building fundamental qualities such as openness, participation, opportunity, choice and innovation into the basic infrastructure of the Internet itself. See Mitchell’s blog post to read more about this anniversary, the things we’ve accomplished in the past ten years, and the incredible opportunities that lie ahead.

Foxkeh joins Disney

In conjunction with the recent news of the American animation giant developing movies with Japanaese animation studios, Mozilla Japan announces the sale of Foxkeh, the popular mascot character for Firefox in Japan, to the Walt Disney Company’s new Japanese animation joint venture for an unannounced price. Mozilla Japan marketing manager, Kaori Negoro, stated, “We are delighted that Foxkeh will have a global stage for this next stage of growth.” Foxkeh is the mascot character for Firefox in Japan and was named in a contest of over 7000 community members in Japan.

Paul Kim interviewed by TreeHugger

Last week, TreeHugger (a one-stop shop for green news, solutions, and product information) interviewed Paul Kim, Mozilla’s VP of Marketing. “[T]he Mozilla corporation, creator of the superb Firefox web browser, has declared their software to be 100% organic. No, it’s not to be eaten; but in this interview with Paul Kim…he explains why the term is relevant.” Check out the full interview at TreeHugger.

Mozilla Toronto offices move

After significant planning and heavy lifting, the Mozilla Toronto offices have moved to 301 Front Street, which is the CN Tower, in the heart of downtown Toronto and one of the tallest buildings in the world. Visitors to the new office will take a 70-second elevator ride up to the 128th floor, where the Mozilla offices have quite a view. For our more athletic visitors, there is also a stairwell! Several of the local Mozillians have blogged about the move, including Johnathan and Mike.

addons.mozilla.org (AMO) redesigned and relaunched

For the past several months, the AMO team has been hard at work on a major site redesign, and they’re pleased to announce the availability of the new AMO site. This is a significant release for the site, and is chock-full of goodies for end users and add-on developers alike. The focus has been predominantly to provide a visual refresh, but that isn’t all that’s been done. A full rundown of the numerous changes is available at Basil’s weblog. Other folks have blogged about the new site, including John Slater, Mike Morgan, and Madhava Enros.

New feature in Firefox 3 Beta 5

Firefox 3 Beta 5 includes support for users wishing to know more about the robotic web technologies included in Gecko 1.9. These advanced technologies, which are indistinguishable from magic, have been hidden from the primary user interface as an anti-tamper measure. Should tampering be detected, the page will take steps to protect its own existence. We are working on ways of securing this page, but in the meantime, users should exercise caution.

Firefox Gold Edition announced

Firefox Gold 1.0 is the next-generation software tool that will enable users of all experience levels to easily create, edit, and navigate live online documents. In addition to the rich set of World Wide Web capabilities and the electronic mail, threaded discussion group, and file transfer features, Firefox Gold will also integrate powerful WYSIWYG document creation capabilities into the core Firefox environment, making composing for the Web, email, or newsgroups a simple cut-and-paste, drag-and-drop process.

The document creation capabilities in Firefox Gold are designed to provide both experienced and beginning content creators with a simple yet powerful solution for editing and publishing online documents. Firefox Gold will also support inline plug-ins for Adobe Acrobat, Macromedia Director, Progressive Networks RealAudio, and many others, allowing rich multimedia content to be incorporated into Internet sites.

Module ownership proposal

In a two-part blog post, Mitchell outlines her new proposal to create a group to take responsibility for the Mozilla project’s module ownership system. The group wouldn’t do a large amount of work on a daily basis, but would be responsible for module ownership oversight, including reviewing and updating the module owners list, and dealing with other related issues when they come up. To date, these tasks have been handled by a various individuals (David Baron, Brendan, Stuart), but have been under-owned of late. Mitchell’s blog goes over the proposal and reasoning in detail, which you can read in her Module Ownership - Part 1, and Module Ownership - Part 2 posts.

Paperwork mix-up: 500 million grains of rice

The Mozilla project was a victim of its own success last week when 500 million grains of rice donated by the community through freerice.com arrived at Mozilla HQ in Mountain View. Arrangements have been made with the United Nations World Food Program to collect the rice for its intended recipients, but in the meantime, it is creating some complications. Paul Kim, Mozilla’s VP of Marketing & Foodstuffs, comments, “There’s rice everywhere. We can’t get the door open, so we’re using ground floor windows to get in and out. No one’s seen Stuart since Thursday, but our memory numbers keep getting better, so we think he’s fine.”

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Posted April 1st, 2008 by dria in about-mozilla | Comments Off