In this issue…

Add-ons contributions pilot
Do you have a favorite add-on that you can’t live without? Do you want to show your appreciation to its author and support future development? Well now you can.

The most recent update to the Addons.mozilla.org (AMO) site includes a new feature called “Contributions”. This pilot project allows developers to request an optional dollar amount for their Firefox Add-on. Contributions are completely voluntary, so no one is required to give money for an add-on — the aim is to help further build and develop the growing add-ons ecosystem by giving users a way to support their favorite add-on developers.

The AMO team is looking for feedback about this new feature from both users and developers, and they’re also working with PayPal to provide a secure and international solution for facilitating these sorts of payments. For more information and a brief FAQ about the new Contributions feature, see the AMO weblog.

Firefox 3.5.1 update
The Firefox team released the first update for Firefox 3.5 last Thursday. This update fixes a number of security and stability issues and all users are encouraged to update as soon as possible. You can apply the update manually by selecting “Check for Updates…” in the Help menu, or accept the automated update when it is offered. For a list of changes and other information, please see the Firefox 3.5.1 release notes.

Firebug 1.4 now available
Firebug 1.4 has been released by the Firebug development team, and it is now available through addons.mozilla.org. Firebug is a Firefox add-on that puts a wealth of web development tools at your fingertips while you browse. You can edit, debug, and monitor CSS, HTML, and JavaScript live in any web page. The team has blogged about this release extensively, with posts by Jan Orvarko, Rob Campbell, and John Barton. The team is going to be writing more about the new features in Firebug 1.4 this week, so stay tuned for further updates and posts.

Jetpack 0.4 release
Jetpack is a Mozilla Labs project that is building an experimental framework for lightweight browser extensions. “Aligned with Mozilla’s goal of enabling open video and audio on the Web, we are pleased to announce the release of Jetpack 0.4, which includes experimental support for recording audio directly to Ogg-Vorbis. These new audio recording APIs will allow developers to build Jetpacks that record high-quality audio directly from within the browser, which can then be played back using Firefox 3.5‘s new audio tag support”. Download Jetpack and read the release notes at the Mozilla Labs weblog.

Mozilla Foundation: July update
Mark Surman has posted the Mozilla Foundation update for July. “The last two months have been very outwardly focused — adding new schools to Mozilla Education, making partnerships around open video, gathering other hybrid orgs at our new offices in Mountain View. All of this brought in new ideas and energy to drive our messaging and visioning efforts.” Mark goes on to talk about the highlights and some details around recent program, communications, community, and organizational development work going on at the Foundation.

Billion downloads campaign
In celebration of the upcoming billionth download of Firefox, the Spread Firefox team has started a new Billionth Download campaign, and you can get involved! “Your task is to take a picture of yourself proudly sporting Firefox apparel (t-shirt, hat, etc) or poster. You can go to a famous landmark, your favorite place nearby, or anywhere you think will make for a great photo.” The team has also created some celebration posters that you can download from the site and print for use in your pictures. Deadline for submissions is July 31st!

Building communities with Tyler Bleszinski
John Slater writes, “Following up on last week’s Q+A with Markos Moulitsas, our latest chat about building communities online features sports blogging legend Tyler Bleszinski. After creating the highly influential Athletics Nation site, which became an overnight success when it launched in 2003, he went on to co-found SB Nation, a network of more than 200 popular sports blogs.” John’s has posted his full chat with Tyler on his weblog.

Poetry + Pragmatics: the Weave version
John Lilly recently gave a talk about the poetry and pragmatics of Mozilla, where “the pragmatics of an organization are how you do things; the poetry of an organization is why you do them.” Ragavan Srinivasan, Weave’s project lead, has blogged about the specific poetry and pragmatics of that project. “We want to reclaim the vision of the browser acting as a true user-agent on the web. We want to help broker user data in a secure and private manner. We want to build the foundational, open source building blocks upon which an entire new generation of web applications will be built. We want to enable the poetry so succinctly captured by Mitchell when she says: ‘I am not a number‘.” For more, see Ragavan’s post at the Mozilla Labs weblog.

Help wanted: writing and refining Web testcases
Stephen Donner and the Mozilla Web QA team are looking for help. Stephen recently started to write Litmus testcases for SUMO (support.mozilla.org), and has also created products in Litmus for AMO and Spread Firefox. “I would love your help in creating testcases for any of the above, so please contact us at webqa@mozilla.org if you’re interested in helping out. The plan is to write testcases and build basic functionality tests and run those every release, in addition to verifying a good portion of fixed bugs for each milestone” in order to reduce regressions and increase development speed. If you would like to learn more, see Stephen’s post and the WebQA group’s wiki page.

Design Challenge honorees announced
The Mozilla Labs Summer ’09 Design Challenge has been completed. In cooperation with IxDA and Johnny Holland, the Labs team invited UX-interested people from around the world to design their solution to the question: “Reinventing Tabs in the Browser – How can we create, navigate and manage multiple web sites within the same browser instance?” Participants submitted over 130 concepts (each including a mockup and accompanying video explanation), which were then combed through by a panel of nine experts who selected four “Best in Class” honorees. Additionally, the wider community was invited to vote on their favorites, resulting in the Challenge’s “People’s Choice” award. Find out which concepts were selected in Pascal Finette’s blog post.

An overview of TraceMonkey
David Mandelin, part of Mozilla’s JavaScript team, has written a post for the Firefox Hacks weblog about TraceMonkey, the new Firefox JavaScript engine. “TraceMonkey runs many JavaScript programs 3-4x faster than Firefox 3, speeding up existing web apps and enabling new ones. This article gives a peek under the hood at the major parts of TraceMonkey and how they speed up JS. This will also explain what kinds of programs get the best speedup from TraceMonkey and what kinds of things you can do to get your program to run faster.” Check out the full post over at Firefox Hacks.

HTML5 drag and drop in Firefox 3.5
Firefox 3.5 includes a host of new features of interest to web developers, one of which is drag and drop, one of the most fundamental interactions afforded by graphical user interfaces. Les Orchard has written an extensive and detailed article about the new HTML5 drag and drop feature, how it works, and how to use it (including sample code). “The new first-class drag and drop events in HTML5 and Firefox make supporting this form of UI interaction simple, concise, and powerful in the browser. But beyond the new simplicity of these events, the ability to transfer content between applications opens brand new avenues for web-based applications and collaboration with desktop software in general.”

Upcoming events
* Fri, Jul 24 – Munich – Open Source Meeting
* Fri, Jul 24 – Online – Testing a Mozilla Web Property
* Fri, Aug 7 – Online – Testscripting with MozMill 1.2
* Sept 14-21 – Everywhere! – Mozilla Service Week

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. Notes from previous meetings are linked to through the Calendar as well.

About about:mozilla
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.

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