In this issue…

Extend Firefox 3.5 winners
Extend Firefox 3.5 has wrapped up and the winners have been announced. “With so many great entries, choosing winners was difficult and these add-ons represent some of the best thinking in add-ons today.” The three grand prize winners are FireFound by Chris Finke, Multifox by Jeferson Hultmann, and Voyage by Hsiao-Ting Yu. For links, details, and other winners in specific categories, see the Extend Firefox weblog.

Art competition winners
Mozilla Labs has announced the winners of the first-ever Student Signatures Art Competition. “The competition was designed to give artists at all levels, and from all areas of the world, the opportunity to share their creations with millions of Firefox users.” Selected as the top design is “Space Station Holiday” by John LeMasney, and runners up are “Electro Muse” by Manuel Alejandro Regalado Solis and “Splatters” by Ben Rollins.

New Firefox 3.6 beta available
Firefox 3.6 beta 4 has been released and is available for free download. This update contains over 100 fixes from the previous beta, and includes many improvements for web developers, add-on developers, and users. “Almost 70% of the thousands of Firefox add-ons have been upgraded by their authors to be compatible with the Firefox 3.6 beta.” For more information about this latest beta, see the release announcement.

Thunderbird 3 release candidate
The Mozilla Messaging team has announced the release of the first release candidate for Thunderbird 3.0. This release candidate is a “public preview release intended for developer testing and community feedback. It includes many new features as well as improvements to performance, web compatibility, and speed. We recommend that you read the release notes before installing this release candidate.”

Identity in the browser
Aza Raskin has posted an interesting article discussing the concept of “identity” in the browser. “Identity will be one of the defining themes in the next five years of the Web. Nearly every site has a concept of a user account, registration, and identity. And yet, the browser does nothing to make this experience better save for some basic auto form filling. The browser leaves websites to re-implement identity management, and forces users to learn a new scheme for every site.” Aza’s blog post goes on to propose a potential solution and next steps.

Firebug 1.5 beta 5
The Firebug development team has made Firebug 1.5 beta 5 available on getfirebug.com. “We are just fixing bugs now, and filing off the rougher edges of our new features. All tests pass on Firefox 3.5.5. One test fails on Firefox 3.6, and two tests fail on Firefox 3.7.”

Second beta of Weave Sync add-on
A new beta of the Weave Sync add-on has been released by the Mozilla Labs team. “If you’re using Weave Sync, you should have already received an update notification. For those who are new to the project, check out the main features of Weave and see what we’ve been preparing for these beta releases. To start syncing your data, just install Weave Sync on Firefox 3.5 or newer.” There’s more information in the release announcement, including a short list of what’s changed for beta 2.

User feedback after a Firefox update
In a new blog post, the Mozilla Metrics team has released data from another of their current outreach efforts. “When people visit the Firefox Whatsnew page — which users automatically hit after each Firefox update — they have the option of providing feedback and comments. More than 16,000 people have been kind enough to provide feedback over the past six weeks.” Find out what they’ve had to say at the Metrics team weblog.

Fennec: nightly updates on Maemo
“Desktop versions of Firefox have nightly update channels. New versions are automatically downloaded as they become available. Each morning, a Firefox user can quickly and easily update to the newest nightly version. Thanks to the release engineering team, the same easy nightly updates are now available for Firefox on Maemo.” For instructions about how to start receiving these nightly updates for your Maemo device, read Mark Finkle’s blog post.

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.

* Dec 4 – Online – Testday: Weave
* Dec 13 – Online – Jetpack 50-line challenge deadline

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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