about:mozilla - Beta 2 shipping, Firefox 3 icon preview, Add-ons compatibility, gfx Architecture, and more
In this issue…
- 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
- Camino 1.6 alpha released
- Developer Calendar
- Subscribe to the email newsletter
about:mozilla holiday hiatus
The holiday season is upon us, and this newsletter will not be published for the next two weeks. Regular publishing will resume on January 7th, 2008. Happy holidays!
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 released
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.
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