In this issue…

• Mozilla Creative Collective launches
• Mozilla Service Week: Act now!
• Extend Firefox 3.5 contest
• New Mozilla Labs website
• BBC experimenting with open video
• Web accessibility and CSS3 transforms
• Jetpack developer contest
• Fennec 1 beta 3 for Maemo
• AMO upcoming projects
• Multitouch in Firefox
• Firefox accelerometer support
• Mozilla Drumbeat
• Thunderbird 3 beta 4 schedule
• Proposed Microsoft-EC settlement
• Upcoming events
• Developer calendar
• About about:mozilla

Mozilla Creative Collective launches
John Slater and Tara Shahian have announced the launch of the new Mozilla Creative Collective (MCC). “Building communities is a big part of what Mozilla is all about and key to our success as an organization. We have dedicated communities that contribute to nearly every aspect of Mozilla — from software development, to extensions, to localization, to marketing, and more — but an idea that’s traditionally lacked an organized community is visual design. And because art is such a powerful form of communication, we’re harnessing that with the Creative Collective.”

On the Mozilla Creative Collective website, users can create profiles, share their visual design work in a public gallery, mark various designs and artists as favorites, earn achievement badges, connect and collaborate with others from around the world, and much more.

The Creative Collective is also working with the Mozilla Service Week team on a Design Challenge. “We’re hoping your creativity and artistic skills can help inspire action and ultimately better the Web experience for people and organizations around the world.” The Design Challenge announcement has some ideas to spark your creativity and all the information you need to get involved now.

Mozilla Service Week: Act now!
Mozilla Service Week — a week during which the Mozilla Community is rallying to donate their time and skills to help change people’s lives and make the Web better for everyone — is taking place Sept 14-21 and coming up soon! Mary Colvig, the organizer and driving force behind the project, has written up a quick guide to what you can do right now to get involved and get started, including: register for the event, pledge some hours, share your story, blog, tweet, invite your friends to the Facebook event, put an affiliate button on your weblog, and more. If you’ve ever wanted to get involved with the Mozilla project or give back to the community and support the open web, Service Week is a perfect opportunity. Check out the site and get involved today.

Extend Firefox 3.5 contest!
The Extend Firefox contest is back, challenging developers to make the next great web experience. The contest awards prizes for developing new Firefox add-ons for the latest production release of Firefox. Last year’s contest received over 100 submissions and, with Firefox 3.5 raising the bar in terms of features, you can expect this year’s competition to be intense. For more information, see the original Extend Firefox 3.5 contest announcement. The contest is currently open and runs through October 2nd, 2009.

New Mozilla Labs website
Mozilla Labs unveiled a new website last week, including a whole new look and feel and new independent sites for each active Labs project. It’s easier than ever to stay up to date on Labs development, get involved with the projects, contribute to the design discussions, and participate by writing patches, doing testing, or helping with documentation. Mozilla Labs is always working on new and innovative projects, and is a fantastic way to get involved with the Mozilla project.

BBC experimenting with open video
The Mozilla Hacks team reports, “The BBC has a post up describing an experiment that they have put together that uses HTML5 video that works in Firefox 3.5 and Safari. The demo uses jQuery and drives a simple carousel that shows the current chapter as the video plays. It also shows subtitles as the video plays.”

Web accessibility and CSS3 transforms
Marco Zehe, part of the Mozilla Accessibility team, has posted an interesting fact about CSS3 transforms. “If you’re one of those people who likes to visually twist, rotate or tweak some text, in previous years the only real choice was to use pictures to achieve such visual effects. However, thanks to CSS3 transforms — supported in Firefox 3.5, Safari 3, and Opera 10 beta — it is now possible to use plain text and rotate, twist and tweak its looks via CSS. The big advantage: Screen readers will still read the text OK because their reading order is not influenced by the visual appearance of the text. So even text rotated by 45 or 90 degrees will appear correctly in a screen reader’s virtual buffer.”

Jetpack developer contest
Mozilla Labs is hosting a new developer contest, this time focused on the Jetpack project. “Jetpack is an experiment in using open Web technologies to enhance the browser, with the goal of allowing anyone who can build a Web site to participate. In preparation for the [upcoming 0.5] release, we are launching a Jetpack contest. For making the coolest or most interesting Jetpack, we are offering a brand new netbook (the ASUS Eee PC 1000HE). For the runner-up, we’ll send you a big package of Mozilla swag.” For more information about the upcoming Jetpack release, the contest, and how to get involved, see the contest announcement over at Mozilla Labs.

Fennec 1 beta 3 for Maemo
The Firefox Mobile team has announced the release of Fennec beta 3 for Maemo. “This release features major improvements to performance and a fancy new theme. We’ve made big improvements to kinetic panning and added the ability to scroll iframes. A lot of work has been done to make the theme more robust, taking advantage of things like media queries to support various devices, orientations, and platforms which you’ll see more of in the next Windows Mobile release.” In addition to the Maemo build, you can also download desktop builds for Windows, Mac, and Linux. If you would like to see some screenshots, Madhava Enros has put together a slideshow over on his weblog.

AMO upcoming projects
The addons.mozilla.org (AMO) team has been hard at work cranking out features like Collections and Contributions, and they have now posted about some upcoming projects. These include Collections Phase II, a new Add-on Developer Hub, Disclosure of add-on practices, and an Add-on compatibility reporter. For more information about these projects and more, see the AMO weblog.

Multitouch in Firefox
Felipe Gomes has posted an article, including a video, demonstrating the progress he’s made on developing multitouch support for Firefox during his summer internship here at Mozilla. “We’re working on exposing the multitouch data from the system to regular web pages through DOM Events, and all of these demos are built on top of that. They are simple HTML pages that receive events for each touch point and use them to build a custom multitouch experience.” Read more about Filipe’s amazing work, view the video demonstration, and see an API example over at his weblog.

Firefox accelerometer support
Doug Turner has recently added support for an orientation event to recent trunk builds of Gecko. “This new event will allow you to build applications and listen for changes in orientation.” This takes advantage of accelerometers that are a feature of many modern devices. “Right now, there is only support for the Macbook Pro. It is pretty easy to add support for different OSs. We have code for Samsung Windows Mobile devices, and for the HTC Windows Mobile devices. We still need support for Linux and for Windows. If you are interested in adding support, file a bug and start looking at the code. The API isn’t fixed and may change.”

Mozilla Drumbeat
Mark Surman has posted about the feedback and discussions around the “next million Mozillians” thread that he started last month. “Some are saying: ‘let’s clarify and communicate what we’re actually trying to achieve here.’ The best clarification so far: ‘we’re starting a drumbeat for the open web.’ Based on this, I am proposing we use ‘Drumbeat’ as an umbrella code name for the collection of new community engagement ideas being developed.” Mark has also posted the first of a series of follow-up articles around the “Drumbeat” theme.

Everyone is encouraged to read through these posts (and the “next million Mozillians” posts before them) and take part in the developing conversation. This is an essential part of the evolution of the Mozilla project, and having more people help guide and shape that future is critical for its success.

Proposed Microsoft-EC settlement
Mitchell Baker and Harvey Anderson have both posted their reactions to Microsoft’s proposed settlement in the European Commission’s tying investigation. “Asa Dotzler did an evaluation of the proposal, noting both items that appear promising and those that appear weak. In all things the implementation details — all the way to the most mind-numbing level of specificity — will have an immense impact on the proposal’s effectiveness, so we’ll have to wait and see what those details turn out to be.” Mitchell goes on to outline a few aspects where the proposal could use improvement.

“The overall point that may get lost is that — even if everything in the proposed settlement is implemented in the most positive way — IE will still have a unique and uniquely privileged position on Windows installations.” For more, see Mitchell’s and Harvey’s weblogs.

Thunderbird 3 beta 4 schedule
The Thunderbird development team has posted the freeze schedule for the upcoming Thunderbird 3 beta 4 release. “We’ve still got a lot of blockers in the list, some of them are currently un-owned. If you wish to write a patch for a bug please do so. If you can, help out with bug triage, writing test cases and test days. See the QA page for more information.” The team is also working on their documentation, and point you to Jen’s blog to find out how you can help.

Upcoming events
The Mozilla community is organizing an increasing number of events and meetups all the time, and we include a list of these here every week. If you have events you would like listed, send them along to: about-mozilla*at*mozilla.com.

* Thu, Aug 27 – Mountain View – Labs Night
* Fri, Sep 4 – Online – Firefox 3.5 Testday
* Sept 14-21 – Everywhere! – Mozilla Service Week
* Fri, Oct 2 – Everywhere! – Extend Firefox contest deadline
* Oct 3-4 – Prague – Mozilla Camp Europe
* Oct 15 – Everywhere! – Jetpack contest deadline
* Nov 7-8 – Sofia, Bulgaria – DevGarage

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.

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.

In this issue…

• Major update coming to Firefox 3
• Mozilla VP on Firefox Mobile
• Become a Mozilla Test Pilot!
• Bespin 0.4 released
• Tomorrow! Service Week online workshop
• Community marketing and Firefox 3.5
• MozCamp Europe: call for speakers
• Improving Mozilla Web localization
• How many Firefox users use add-ons?
• Tim Roberts on building communities
• Camino: phishing and malware protection
• Firefox startup performance
• Recent press
• Upcoming events
• Developer calendar
• About about:mozilla

Major update coming to Firefox 3
Users with the latest version of Firefox 3 will now be getting an offer to update to Firefox 3.5. If you’re running Firefox 3.0.13 you will see the offer in the next couple of days, or you can manually request the update by selecting “Check for Updates” in the “Help” menu. For more information about Firefox 3.5 and this major update, please see the original DevNews announcement.

Mozilla VP on Firefox Mobile
Lifehacker recently published an extensive interview with Jay Sullivan, Mozilla’s VP of Mobile and the person heading up the Firefox Mobile (aka “Fennec”) project. The interview covers topics ranging from how he organizes his day, the connection between Fennec and the Mozilla Labs’ Weave project, the state of Fennec development, to working with various device manufacturers. You can read the full interview at Lifehacker.

Become a Mozilla Test Pilot!
Mozilla Labs has announced the new Test Pilot project, which includes the release of the first Test Pilot add-on for Firefox 3.5. “We are looking for Firefox users of all levels of skill and technical knowledge to help improve Firefox and Labs experiments. If you are interested in helping Mozilla make your Web experience better, join the Test Pilot team now!” As a Test Pilot, you will try out the newest features and user interface ideas before anyone else, and your input will contribute back to the product design. The Test Pilot project announcement includes all the details about the program and how you can get started.

Bespin 0.4 released
The Bespin team has released a new version of the service, which now includes social and collaboration features. “We have worked with many remote teams during our coding careers and trying to do code reviews and pair programming has always been painful. Since Bespin’s all about coding in the cloud, how about using the cloud to make this a little easier?” Joe Walker did the majority of the work on these features, and he has posted about the implementation and how to use it.

Tomorrow! Service Week online workshop
Mozilla Service Week — a week during which the Mozilla Community is rallying to donate their time and skills to help change people’s lives and make the Web better for everyone — is taking place Sept 14-21 and coming up soon! Join us tomorrow, Wednesday August 19th at 9am Pacific, and take part in our online workshop where we will show you how you can get involved and contribute to or promote Service Week. The workshop will be held online, and you’ll be able to dial in by phone, Skype, or watch on Air Mozilla. All the details are available over on Mary’s weblog. We hope to see you there!

Community marketing and Firefox 3.5
The Marketing team spent some time early this year figuring out new ways to grow the community of marketing contributors and how to make engagement in that community more interactive and meaningful. They used the Firefox 3.5 launch as an opportunity to jump start the team, kicking off the year with a set of activities focused on these two primary goals. Now that the Firefox launch is done, Mary Colvig has posted an article examining the success of these efforts, asking for further feedback about how things could be improved even more in the future.

MozCamp Europe: call for speakers
Brian King is helping organize the Developer track for Mozilla Camp Europe, being held this year in Prague on October 3-4. The team is still looking for people to give talks at the conference, and now is your chance to step forward and secure a speaking slot. There are a number of ways to do this, either by leaving a comment on Brian’s post, adding yourself to the wiki page, or emailing Brian directly. If you don’t see any topics on the wiki page that interest you, you can also suggest other possible topics for inclusion.

Improving Mozilla Web localization
Frédéric Wenzel took part in a recent meeting in Berlin, Germany, where the Mozilla localization drivers team met to talk about localization on the Web. “In a small series of three blog posts, I would like to point out what the ‘pain points’ are for Web L10n at Mozilla, and start a discussion on how to fix them.” Frédéric has published all three of these blog posts, and they’re available here: Part 1 – What’s Wrong?, Part 2 – Organizational Challenges, and Part 3 – Challenges for Tools. If you’ve ever been part of or just interested in Mozilla’s localization efforts, you should read these posts and take part in the discussion around them.

How many Firefox users use add-ons?
Simon Krueger, while working with the Mozilla Metrics team over the summer, was presented with the challenge of answering the question, “how many Firefox users have one add-on or more installed on their Firefox?” Simon’s research, which he has blogged about at length, has lead to the conclusion that fully one-third of Firefox users use add-ons. Justin Scott has also written about these findings. “A minimum of 33% of users having chosen to install add-ons is great news, and is higher than our previous estimates. It’s especially exciting that we have a new metric to track the success and adoption of add-ons as we launch new features and campaigns encouraging users to customize Firefox and make it their own.”

Tim Roberts on building communities
John Slater has posted another in his Q&A series with online community builders. “I chatted with Infectious founder and CEO Tim Roberts. Before starting Infectious, one of the best and most interesting design community sites around, Tim worked at companies like Odeo (where he was part of the team that created Twitter), Yahoo and Bigstep.com. As someone who knows the ins and outs of building an online community of artists, Tim’s advice was particularly relevant to what we’re trying to do with the Mozilla Creative Collective.” John’s IM chat with Tim, held a few weeks ago, is available on John’s blog.

Camino: phishing and malware protection
Recent Camino 2 nightly builds include new phishing and malware protection features. “Phishing, or criminals attempting to trick people into providing personal and financial information by using fake copies of trusted websites, and malware, or malicious software designed to take over a computer and/or steal information from a computer, are two common dangers for users of the web.” Like Firefox, Safari, and Google Chrome, Camino uses the Safe Browsing service from Google for these features. For more information about these advancements, see the Camino project weblog.

Firefox startup performance
The Firefox team is doing a lot of performance improvement work lately, and they have started posting weekly updates on status and progress of the related projects. Dietrich Ayala is leading these efforts, and has written a round up of the week’s progress which includes optimization work, dead code hunting, start up timeline investigations, XPCOM work, and testing/measurement discussions. Dietrich also links to other developer blog posts, including Ryan Flint, David Dahl, and Drew Willcoxon, among others.

Recent press
Mozilla’s PR team has posted another update to their “Above the Fold” weblog, outlining recent coverage about Firefox 3.5 and the upcoming Firefox 3.6. “While we received the bulk of coverage around the Firefox 3.5 launch in June, some great pieces are still being written. Last week, Financial Times writer Paul Taylor published a positive review of Firefox 3.5. In other news…last Friday, Mozilla released Firefox 3.6 alpha. There have been several positive press articles emphasizing speed improvements and new features.” Get all the links and more over at Above the Fold.

Upcoming events
The Mozilla community is organizing an increasing number of events and meetups all the time, and we include a list of these here every week. If you have events you would like listed, send them along to: about-mozilla*at*mozilla.com.

* Wed, Aug 19 – Online – Mozilla Service Week workshop
* Wed, Aug 19 – Mountain View – Firefox code coverage
* Fri, Aug 21 – Online – Fennec 1.0 beta Testday
* Fri, Sep 4 – Online – Firefox 3.5 Testday
* Sept 14-21 – Everywhere! – Mozilla Service Week
* Fri, Oct 2 – Everywhere! – Extend Firefox contest deadline
* Oct 3-4 – Prague – Mozilla Camp Europe

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.

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.