What Is Firefox
Brian King provides a brief look at Firefox's origins and evolution, and then dives into its support for web standards like CSS and XML, its debugging and extension capabilities, and some cool new features in the upcoming 1.5 release. If you're considering a switch to Firefox, this article may help make the decision for you.
Mozilla as a Development Platform: An Interview with Axel Hecht Axel Hecht is a member of Mozilla Europe's board of directors, and a major contributor to the Mozilla project. At O'Reilly's European Open Source Convention (October 17-20), Dr. Hecht will be talking about Mozilla as a development platform. O'Reilly Network interviewed Dr. Hecht to find out if the long-held dream of Mozilla as a development platform was about to come true. [O'Reilly Network]
A Firefox Glossary Brian King, with some help from Nigel McFarlane, covers everything from about:config to "zool" in this fun, fact-filled Firefox glossary. It's by no means exhaustive, but you'll find references to specific chapters or hacks throughout the glossary to Nigel's book, Firefox Hacks. When you're ready to dig deeper, check out his book. [O'Reilly Network]
Important Notice for Mozilla DevCenter Readers About O'Reilly RSS and Atom Feeds O'Reilly Media, Inc. is rolling out a new syndication mechanism that provides greater control over the content we publish online. Here's information to help you update your existing RSS and Atom feeds to O'Reilly content. [Mozilla DevCenter]
Hacking Firefox This excerpt from Firefox Hacks shows you how to use overlays (essentially hunks of UI data) to make something you want to appear in the Firefox default application, perhaps to carry out a particular function of your extension. For example, you might want to add a menu item to the Tools menu to launch your extension. Overlays allow existing Firefox GUIs to be enhanced. [O'Reilly Network]
Mozile: What You See is What You Edit
Most modern browsers don't allow you to hit "edit" and manipulate content as easily as you view it, WYSIWYG-style. Mozile, which stands for Mozilla Inline Editor, is a new Mozilla plug-in for in-browser editing. This article by Conor Dowling provides an overview of Mozile and what in-browser editing means.
[ Mozilla DevCenter]
The Future of Mozilla Application Development Recently, mozilla.org announced a major update to its development roadmap. Some of the changes in the new document represent a fundamental shift in the direction and goals of the Mozilla community. In this article, David Boswell and Brian King analyze the new roadmap, and demonstrate how to convert an existing XPFE-based application into an application that uses the new XUL toolkit. David and Brian are the authors of O'Reilly's Creating Applications with Mozilla. [Mozilla DevCenter]
Remote Application Development with Mozilla, Part 2 In their first article, Brian King, coauthor of Creating Applications with Mozilla, and Myk Melez looked at the benefits of remote application development using Mozilla technologies such as XUL and web services support. In this article, they present a case study of one such application, the Mozilla Amazon Browser, a tool for searching Amazon's catalogs. [Mozilla DevCenter]
Remote Application Development with Mozilla This article explores the uses for remote XUL (loaded from a Web server), contrasts its capabilities with those of local XUL (installed on a user's computer), explains how to deploy remote XUL, and gives examples of existing applications. [Mozilla DevCenter]
Mozdev.org Made Easy Now that mozilla.org is about to release Mozilla 1.2 and Netscape has come out with the latest version of their own Mozilla-based browser, Netscape 7, this is a great time to see what other people are building with Mozilla's cross-platform development framework. Here's a little history about, and a roadmap to, mozdev.org. [Mozilla DevCenter]
XML Transformations with CSS and DOM Mozilla permits XML to be rendered in the browser with CSS and manipulated with DOM. If you're already familiar with CSS and DOM, you're more than halfway to achieving XML transformations in Mozilla. This article demonstrates how to render XML in the browser with a minimum of CSS and JavaScript. [Mozilla DevCenter]
Roll Your Own Browser Here's a look at using the Mozilla toolkit to customize, or even create your own browser. [Mozilla DevCenter]
Let One Hundred Browsers Bloom In this article, David Boswell, coauthor of Creating Applications with Mozilla surveys some of the more interesting, and useful, Mozilla-based browsers available now. [Mozilla DevCenter]
Using the Mozilla SOAP API With the release of Mozilla 1.0, the world now has a browser that supports SOAP natively. This article shows you how Web applications running in Mozilla can now make SOAP calls directly from the client without requiring a browser refresh or additional calls to the server. [Web Development DevCenter]
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Mozilla Firefox 3.5 Released [Source: MozillaZine] Eric Shepherd: MindTouch 2009 progress report I’m still hoping that we’ll be able to upgrade next week; my goal is to have it done during Tuesday’s maintenance window. The next handful of days should determine whether or not that schedule will fly. MindTouch continues to assure me that they fully expect to release 9.02.2 by the end of this week. Last time I blogged about this update, I listed a number of items that were of special interest, mentioning that many of them weren’t yet actually fixed. That’s changed; most of the stuff is now marked off as “fixed” in MindTouch’s database. This is very good news! In addition, MindTouch has investigated the problem we’ve had with the editor’s user interface appearing in the wrong language (often in Czech or Polish for our English users, for example), and they believe this is a caching bug that is fixed in MindTouch 2009, so we should be in good shape there once the upgrade is done. I continue to be very excited to get this upgrade out; I think the improvements will make a lot of MDC’s users very happy. Plus the cool new stuff we’ll be able to do building on top of the MindTouch application platform is going to be very fun to work on.  Daniel Glazman: Taking micro-blogging to the next step #2 Let's say the project is divided in 5 parts. The first part is already done, the second is half-done. Stay tuned... BTW, I just want to congrat again my former colleague Laurent Jouanneau for the SQLite-based XUL templates. I have just trashed roughly 120 lines of rather complex JS in favor of a rather simple SQLite-based template, and that way turned something potentially painful to maintain into something so automatic that there is nothing else to do. Wow. [Source: Planet Mozilla]QMO: Firefox 3.5 RC 1 Testday on Friday 5/29!! MozQA is holding a Testday for the rollout of Firefox 3.5 RC 1 which is as close to a release as possible! I don't need to remind everyone of how important this phase is, so we're going to need your awesome testing skills to make sure its as polished as possible. Our community representatives will be available through IRC Chat ( channel #testday on irc://irc.mozilla.org ), QMO forums as well as the dev-quality newsgroup to help with any of your questions/comments/suggestions.
For more information, check out the event page: http://quality.mozilla.org/events/2009/may/29/firefox-35-rc-1-test-day or join the facebook event: http://www.facebook.com/event.php?eid=84250567199&ref=nf
Hope to see you there, aakashd [Source: Planet Mozilla]QMO Events: Firefox 3.5 RC 1 Test Day!!! Mozilla QA needs your help with Firefox 3.5 RC 1 Test Day!
In this issue…
The Mozilla Labs team has launched another Design Challenge. “In collaboration with IxDA and Johnny Holland, we once again invite designers, students and design-focused people from all around the world to develop new ideas and mockups for the future of the Web.” This Design Challenge is focusing on finding creative solutions to the question: “Reinventing Tabs in the Browser - How can we create, navigate and manage multiple web sites within the same browser instance?” Participating in the Design Challenge is easy: just create a mockup of your proposed solution (anything from a napkin drawing to a polished Photoshop masterpiece) and a short video explanation, upload those somewhere on the Web, then send an email with links to both to conceptseries@mozilla.com. For more information, see Pascal Finette’s original announcement on the Labs weblog. Since the Personas project launched about six weeks ago, the team has been working with the community to improve the Personas user experience through three quick website releases and one extension update. Details about the changes can be found in Suneel Gupta’s post on the Labs weblog. “The Personas project will continue to evolve quickly with your ideas and feedback. If you have thoughts on how to make Personas better, please discuss and debate them in our discussion group or add a solution to our newly created support wiki.” Fennec Alpha 1 for Windows Mobile Fennec (aka: Firefox Mobile) Alpha 1 has been released for Windows Mobile 6 and is available for download by developers and testers. It’s important to note that this is an early developer release, and is not intended for regular use at this time. As with previous releases, Madhava Enros has created a video walk through of this release. For more information, including installation instructions and a list of known issues, see the release announcement. SUMO: Part of Mozilla’s periscope David Tenser, Mozilla’s SUMO project lead, has written an interesting article that talks about how SUMO is a vital tool in quickly spotting and dealing with emerging problems Firefox users are encountering. “The background of this story is the problem many Firefox users experienced with anti-virus program BitDefender a few weeks ago, where BitDefender would quarantine one of Firefox’s program files, treating it as a malicious trojan.” The team first became aware of the issue through SUMO’s Live Chat system, and the Release Rapid Response Team flew into action. In less than two hours, BitDefender released an update and the problem was solved. For the full story, see David’s weblog post. Subscribe to the SUMO newsletter! Chris Ilias writes, “The about:SUMO newsletter is coming! You can subscribe now. If you are not actively involved in SUMO, but are still interested in knowing what is going on in the SUMO world, this is a great way to keep in the know. Just use the online subscription form.” The Labs team is constantly on the lookout for better ways to do things, better tools, and better infrastructure. Recently they realized that the project forum system wasn’t working as well as it could, so it has been replaced. With the new system, discussions can now be read via Web, RSS feeds and email, and responded to by email or on the Web. The hope is that this will make it easier for everyone to participate in and become part of the Labs community. A full list of the Labs discussion groups and RSS feeds is available on the Mozilla Labs website. The Mobile team has set up a new mailing list to help coordinate and discuss Fennec testing. “In the mobile environment, there are several different operating systems, hundreds of different devices, and thousands of cellular networks across the globe. The only way we can begin to test these complicated real-world scenarios is with your help. We need you to check out our milestone releases, run them on your devices, and let us know what is working and what isn’t.” You can sign up for the Mobiletesters mailing list to stay informed about ways you can help test Fennec for the upcoming 1.0 launch. This is a great way to get involved in the future of the mobile web. Growing the community of people working on education in a Mozilla context is one of the primary goals of the Mozilla Education project. “Many of the lessons Mozilla has learned building world-class software products can be applied to how we enable and support those in education: be open, be collaborative, share in community, leverage the open web. Another lesson we’ve learned from Mozilla is that people contribute in different ways, and there is no one size fits all approach. The same is true for Mozilla and education.” David Humphrey writes about various ways the project is working to build the Mozilla Education community, discussing a number of things that we can each do to get involved and help with the project. Mark Surman, Frank Hecker, and David Humphrey have all been thinking about and posting about “hybrid organizations” lately. Mark started the ball rolling with his “What is a hybrid organization?” post, followed by “Hybrid orgs. What’s old? What’s new?” and “Why do hybrid orgs matter?“. Frank and David followed these with “Hybrid organizations and maximizing public benefit” and “Mozilla, Education…Hybrid“. If you’re at all interested in this sort of “meta discussion” about the Mozilla Project, these posts are a great way to get involved with this growing and ongoing conversation. Suneel Gupta has outlined a number of ideas the Personas team is looking at towards increasing the ratio of original art (vs. repurposed art) in the gallery, and providing the emerging community of Personas artists with better support and visibility. These “actionable concepts” include: adding a designer profile and dashboard, improving preview functionality, expanding the definition of a “popular” design, collaborating with other design communities, and working with other add-on authors. The Personas commuity has grown rapidly, and the gallery now contains over 5,000 designs from over 3,500 contributors. Get the full story from Suneel’s blog post. The Mozilla community is organizing an increasing number of events and meetups all the time, so we’re going to start including a list of these every week. If you have events you would like included here, send them along to: about-mozilla*at*mozilla.com. * Wed, May 20 - Online - Firefox 3.5 launch workshop * Thu, May 21 - Online - Test Dev Thursday * Fri, May 22 - Online - New AMO site sneak peek and testing * Tue, May 26 - Mountain View, CA - Add-ons Meetup * May 30-31 - Copenhagen, Denmark - Mozilla Maemo Danish Weekend * Fri, Jun 5 - Online - Website testing testday * Wed, Jun 24 - Mountain View, CA - Testing Mozilla web properties For an up-to-date list of the coming week’s Mozilla project meetings and events, please see the Mozilla Community Calendar wiki page. Notes from previous meetings are linked to through the Calendar as well. about:mozilla is by, for and about the Mozilla community, focusing on major news items related to all aspects of the Mozilla Project. The newsletter is written by Deb Richardson and is published every Tuesday morning. If you have any news or announcements you would like to have included in our next issue, please send them to: about-mozilla[at]mozilla.com. 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. [Source: Planet Mozilla]Doug Warner: New Site and Domain - No Long silfreed While I've owned (and will continue to own) silfreed.net for about 9 years now, I think it's time I reasses my online personality. "silfreed" will probably be a part of me for a long time, but more and more in online and open source circles I'd like people to know who I really am, not some pseudonym. This will make it easier to communicate with people and make connections. So, as of today, I'm beginning my migration away from silfreed.net. I'll probably the old domain for a long time, but I'm looking forward to the new personality I can offer from the new one. As usual with these things, please let me know if you know anything broken. [Source: Planet Mozilla]Since I arrived in Mozilla last year, it has been impossible not to notice that women's presence is almost non-existent among the community, the employees, and in Mozilla and Free Software events. So I started wondering about this, and did a bit of research on women's implication in the FLOSS world. The numbers I found astounded me: only 2% of women work in FLOSS communities, against more than 25% in proprietary software. In the development field, numbers are even lower: the percentage of Open Source women developers falls down to almost 1% (European Commission FLOSSPOL 2002-2005) From that point on, I started wondering: Why? What are the reasons for this? And should Mozilla do anything about it? I thought all these questions over, and made some more research. That's when I realized that many FLOSS projects already had women's groups: Ubuntu Women, PHP Women, GNOME Women, DrupalChix, and many others. So I took the opportunity at the Paris Ubuntu party to give a conference about this. I wanted to engage a discussion with the audience, in order to gather their ideas and points of view about women's involvement and visibility in Mozilla as well as in other FLOSS projects. Here is a summary of what I talked about: * Slight increase in number of women since 2000, but too slow to be really noticeable yet * Satoko Takita (Chair of the Board of Directors, Mozilla Japan) * Women's groups: Ubuntu Women, DrupalChix, PHP Women, etc. * More women also means more potential contribution in FLOSS communities and in Mozilla Hey, just as an explicit example: check out what happens if you search for "girls linux" in Google (same thing happens in French, in case you're wondering), or again if you mistype LinuxChix (linuxchicks, I'll remember that one! ...) However, when you type "girls mac/macintosh", "girls windows" or "girls maths", the first 10 answers aren't links with naked girls (and ridiculous fake Tux tattoos added with GIMP or Photoshop) ... I'm wondering if this doesn't reflect something ... * How can we incite more women to participate in FLOSS projects? * What keeps you (women) from participating? * How can we help women integrate an overly masculine field? * In your opinion, is there something missing, and that could explain such a low feminine participation? The audience gave great feedback, and a few people gave their opinion on all these questions. Reactions ranged from one extreme to the other: from the ultra-feminist position, to the "we shouldn't do anything, I don't think there's even a problem" one. I must say that I feel in between the two: something should be done, but I don't think we should start a "women's only group". It would be great if it could stay something open in all senses. Women's group already exist, why start yet another one that might end up dividing us even more? When I hear things like "*All* the girls I know just want their computers to turn on when they press the power button -and that's it. There's no need for a women's project in computing", that just proves to me that something should be done. So if you think the same -or not!- please feel free to leave your comments and feedback here. I'm really curious to know what you think, in order to create a project that will make as much sense as possible. Some pictures of the conference at the Paris Ubuntu party:
Picture taken by Maurice Svay
Picture taken by Maurice Svay [Source: Planet Mozilla]David Boswell: Meditating On The Future Of The Mozilla Store I’ve been spending some time helping with the Mozilla Store. It has been rewarding to work on making a wider range of community items available, but I’ve noticed that there are some issues with the store that go beyond adding one new shirt or other item.  Clint, Nicole and David thinking deep thoughts about the store. Photo by David Rolnitzky I’m interested in getting feedback about what we could be doing to make the store better and to find out what people like or don’t like about the current store. If you have thoughts, please comment (be honest—we know there’s room for improvement). There are concrete things we can do to make the existing store better but it is worth thinking about some blue sky options too. For example, can we look at the vibrant community around Threadless and learn lessons that could build on how we’re engaging people on the Mozilla Community Store? Note: Although I’m referring to the Mozilla store, there are three stores—one in the United States, one in the UK and a community store that features art posted by community members. One thing we could do to improve things is to clarify the roles of these different stores and make them feel more connected.       matthew zeier (mrz): How can IT reduce Firefox adoption/retention barriers? (Part II) Nearly a month and a half ago I posted my first post on trying to figure out how IT can reduce adoption/retention barriers. Over the past month we’ve worked out a different path than I originally thought we’d take. Instead of targeting the Uninstall survey, I’ve been focusing my energies on point to explore #2:
I’ve been working closely with with David Tenser, Ken Kovash, and Seth Bindernagel (and all the l10n folks) to add a Kamplye survey to I decided to target two major geographic regions (South America & Asia-Pacific) and have gotten help from our l10n community in translating the survey. You can follow our progress in bug 493096. I’m including a sample mock-up below. I’m interested in any feedback you might have.
Dan Mosedale: Thunderbird 3 beta 4 added As discussed at a few recent meetings, we're adding a fourth beta to the Thunderbird 3 cycle. This will give us more baking time after GloDa search lands, and it will allow us to sand off some rough edges on various new features. We'll draw up a schedule for the rest of beta 3 and the subsequent work shortly after bug 474701 lands.... [Source: Planet Mozilla] APNG is a good thing. Some people think it’s not, that it’s just Mozilla carving its own course. It’s not Mozilla just being difficult, it’s that MNG missed the mark by a mile. Don’t believe me? Turns out other companies have encountered similar situations, as Raymond Chen explains why it’s ok to reimplement a subset of functions as a simple solution to a simple problem. [Source: Planet Mozilla]Meeting Notes from the Mozilla community: Places Meeting Minutes: 2009-05-18 Places/Status Meetings/2009-05-18From MozillaWiki« previous week | index | next week » Places Team Meeting Details
Meeting Notes from the Mozilla community: Mozilla Project Meeting Minutes: 2009-05-18 WeeklyUpdates/2009-05-18From MozillaWiki« previous week | index | next week » Suneel Gupta writes in, “I’d like to nominate Toby Elliott and Donna Macomber (a personas community member) for their hard work in diligently filtering through submitted designs to the approval gallery and approving those that meet the community guidelines. thanks to Toby and Donna, Mozilla has welcomed over 10,000 pieces of art to the Personas gallery and over 7,000 new artists to the Mozilla community.” Cheng Wang writes in to nominate “Laura Thompson, Stephen Donner, Trevor Hardcastle, and Eric Cooper for staying up past 3:30 (at least for Laura) working on pushing SUMO 1.0.2 to production. I know they didn’t get all the kinks ironed out but staying up ’till then and then dragging yourself into work the next day is MAD PROPS worthy if I’ve ever seen it.”
Firefox Front End Work
Test Execution Web Dev Testing, Metrics, Accessibility, Localization, Community
Test Development
No updates. Firefox 3.5 Launch
Mozilla Service Week
Community Marketing Call
PR
Events
No update
Firefox 3.5
Web
Tools
Please join me in welcoming 2 new interns who just started today: - Simon Krueger will be working in the Metrics group
Melissa Shapiro: A year in the life... Updating some Mozilla slides from just about a year ago.  |
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