about:mozilla - NVDA grant, Fx3b3 schedule update, SUMO, Tamarin, Add-ons, and more
In this issue…
- Mozilla Foundation NVDA grant
- Schedule updates for Firefox 3 Beta 3
- SUMO importing Firefox help content
- Firefox 3 Add-on Compatibility Workshop at FOSDEM
- Tamarin Tech Summit - February 1st, San Francisco
- Developer.com Award for Firefox
- Developer calendar
- Subscribe to the email newsletter
Thanks to the generosity and support of the Mozilla Foundation, NV Access has been able to hire James Teh as a full-time developer to work on NVDA (NonVisual Desktop Access). The Mozilla Foundation has taken a keen interest in NVDA as one of the project’s goals is to provide excellent support for Mozilla products, such as Firefox and Thunderbird.
The grant, which provides NV Access with US$80,000 over 2008, allows NV Access to employ James Teh full-time to work on improving and maintaining NVDA, with a major focus on Mozilla products. Together NV Access and Mozilla hope to ensure that blind users will always have both a free choice when it comes to access to applications on the Microsoft Windows Operating System, and a choice to move forward with the rest of the community in using free and open source products. For more information see the post at the NVDA Project blog.
Schedule updates for Firefox 3 Beta 3
At the Firefox 3 meeting on January 15th it was decided to push the freeze date for Beta 3 back to January 29th. The plan is to have a quiet freeze for the rest of that 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. All localization changes will need to be checked in by 8:00am UTC if they are to be included in Beta 3. For further information, see Mike Connor’s post to mozilla.dev.planning.
SUMO importing Firefox help content
All localizers should be aware that the support.mozilla.com (SUMO) team has started to import the current in-product help content from Firefox into the SUMO website. They will be moving the content into SUMO first, and then updating it there for Firefox 3. Firefox 3 is going to be pointing directly at the SUMO website from the Help menu, so getting the content migrated and updated is a top priority.
Since the help content will be living on SUMO rather than in Firefox, all localizers should avoid making big content checkins to the old location, as those changes may have to be re-imported into SUMO. For the latest news about this project, please see the mozilla.dev.l10n newsgroup.
Firefox 3 Add-on Compatibility Workshop at FOSDEM
If you’re an add-on developer in Europe or will be attending the FOSDEM conference in Brussels, join us on February 23rd and 24th for a workshop/hacking session to get your add-on compatible with Firefox 3. Mark Finkle (mfinkle) will be on hand to explain the new APIs and techniques for taking advantage of the improvements in Firefox 3. Carsten Book (tomcat) will be on hand to explain and lead some testing efforts to check your add-on’s memory use and performance.
This workshop will be a great opportunity to meet up with other add-on developers to exchange ideas and to give us feedback on how add-on documentation and development can be improved. There’s a signup sheet available on the Mozilla Wiki if you are interested in attending. We are also looking for feedback whether this session should be planned for the Friday before the conference. For more information on the event, please contact chofmann-at-mozilla.org.
Tamarin Tech Summit - February 1st, San Francisco
Adobe Systems is holding a Tamarin Tech Summit on February 1st, at Adobe San Francisco. The purpose of this meeting is to bring together active and potential contributors of Tamarin to share tools, progress reports and plans for the project. Topics of discussion will include profiling tools, ES3 compatibility and performance, Firefox integration (ActionMonkey), and trace-based compilation. More information is available at the post on the tamarin-devel mailing list, and an evolving agenda is posted to the Mozilla Wiki.
Camino 1.6 Beta 2, the latest preview of what will become Camino 1.6, is now available. This version contains support for OpenSearch search engines, a new Find toolbar, and enhanced support for Spotlight and Quarantine metadata. This release is beta software and may be unstable and unsuitable for day-to-day use; please downloand Camino 1.5.4 if you wish to use the stable version of Camino.
Developer.com Award for Firefox
On January 15th the winners of the Developer.com Product of the Year Awards were announced, and Mozilla Firefox was honored as the “Development Utility of the Year”. A complete list of winners and finalists is available at Developer.com.
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