In this issue…

Thunderbird 3 released!
Mozilla Messaging, the wholly owned subsidiary of Mozilla dedicated to developing products that encourage choice, innovation, and opportunity in messaging on the Internet, has announced the launch of Thunderbird 3, the latest version of its free and open source email application. Available in over 49 languages on Windows, Mac OS X and Linux, Thunderbird 3 has more than 2,000 improvements including new tabbed email, a radical new search engine, built-in message archiving and smart folders. Get started with Thunderbird 3 at GetThunderbird.com.

Mobile add-on challenge winners
The Firefox Mobile team has wrapped up their first add-on challenge, announcing the winners yesterday. The judges from the AMO and Mobile teams have chosen the ten best, the authors of which will each receive a brand new Nokia N900 device. The winning entries are: AutoPager by Wind Li, Flux by Marcio Galli, Geoguide by Fabice Desre, Hold4Tab by Almog B, Lazy Click by Tamas Marki, Mobilize by Attila Csipa, NearMe by Richard Klein, Fastest Scroll in the West by Enrico Previdi, TwitterBar by Chris Finke, and Yummy by Nicolas Martin. Descriptions and links for each of these add-ons are available in Caitlin Looney’s blog post.

Five Years of Firefox: vote now!
The Five Years of Firefox poster design challenge is now closed to submissions, so now it’s time to vote for your favourites. Sarah Doherty and John Slater have both blogged about how to vote, so check out their posts to get started. But vote soon! Voting ends tomorrow, Wednesday December 16th.

New features on AMO
As an early holiday present, the Add-ons team has added a a trio of new features to the AMO website. Beta Channels give add-on developers a way to release beta or prerelease versions of their add-ons without pushing updates to their entire user base. Get Satisfaction integration allows developers to integrate their support communities directly in AMO. Finally, Localized Browse is a first step towards making add-ons more accessible to the non English speaking world. For further details and screenshots, see Nick Nguyen’s blog post.

Three new Firefox 3.6 demos
Paul Rouget, part of the Mozilla Hacks team, has a trio of demos for new features available in Firefox 3.6. The first demo is for multiple file input. “This new capability allows you to get several files as input at once, using standard technologies. This is a big improvement since you used to be constrained to one file at a time, or needed to use a third party (proprietary) application.”

The second demo is for the new W3C File API, “which specifies the ability to asynchronously read the selected file into memory, and perform operations on the file data within the web application. This is a new API, and replaces the file API that was introduced in Firefox 3.”

Finally, Paul has built a file drag and drop demo using the Drag and Drop API and the File API. “In Firefox 3.6, you can let your users drag and drop files directly into your web page, without going through the file picker.”

Canvas + SVG on mobile
Arun Ranganathan has put together a video in which he demos SVG and canvas on Firefox Mobile on a Nokia N900 device. Check it out on Caitlin’s weblog.

SVG game demo
Daniel Holbert writes, “Marek Raida has come up with another beautiful demo that shows off the power of SVG. This one’s called SVG Cavern Fighter, and it’s a classic side-scrolling shoot-em-up type game, with enemies and items that pulse and wiggle. The game logic is written in Javascript, and the enemy/item animations are all done with SMIL.” The demo requires the most recent mozilla-central nightly builds for full animations and features, but will still mostly work in earlier Firefox versions without SMIL support.

SUMO 1.5 launch
The Firefox Support team recently launched version 1.5 of the SUMO website. “In addition to having a much more powerful back-end search where we can now index the full database every 15 minutes rather than once a day, we’ve added a bunch of new search options and features available through an advanced search interface.” Additionally, over 70 reported bugs have been fixed since the previous version. Read all about this new release at the Firefox Support Blog.

WebGL draft goes public
Vlad Vukićević has posted that the WebGL draft specification is now available. “I’m pretty excited to have the WebGL draft spec available for review and comments. There’s still plenty of time for feedback, but we’re far enough along to be able to solicit meaningful feedback. There are multiple implementations, which is a much better state than the early Canvas 3D work. We’re actively working through remaining warts and edge cases. Take a look at the official Khronos WebGL landing page and Arun’s blog post for more information, including where to go to sign up for the public mailing list and for a set of resources about WebGL.”

Identity design lunch video
Every so often the Mozilla Labs team hosts a “design lunch”, where they get a group of people together to discuss design ideas and strategies for various things — browser features, Labs projects, add-ons, and so forth. The most recent design lunch was about Identity management in the browser, and the team has posted a video of that discussion. “The video is almost an hour long, so I don’t know if you have the patience to watch the whole thing…but it does open with [Jono] wearing a funny hat and narrating an imaginary legal drama. Then it proceeds to the showing off of screen mockups, followed by vigorous discussion of what the right thing is for Firefox to do in various tricky situations.” If you’re interested in this discussion, you should also see Aza Raskin’s blog post and the Mozilla wiki page on the Identity project.

Test Pilot: new study
The Test Pilot team is launching a second study called “A Week in the Life of a Browser”. This test is designed to run periodically and collect a wide range of basic data about browser performance: session lifetimes, crashes, bookmarks, downloads, searches, and so on. A detailed list of the data to be collected has been posted along with some of the questions the team hopes to answer through this study. More information about Test Pilot is available at Jono’s weblog.

Updated Bespin roadmap
The Bespin team has released an update to the Bespin Embedded preview along with a revised roadmap for the project. “Bespin Embedded 0.5.1 is the second preview release of our new embedded package which makes it easy to incorporate Bespin into your own sites and applications. Take a look at the blog post for the first preview release for more background. We’ve been working on big changes to Bespin over the past few weeks, and these will be rolling out in the coming weeks. You can take a look at the newly updated roadmap to get an idea of what’s up next for Bespin.”

Software releases
* Thunderbird 3
* Weave 1.0 beta 3
* Bespin Embedded 0.5.1
* Add-ons website
* SUMO website

Upcoming events
* Dec 18 – Destroy Firefox 3.6 (testday)

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, announcements, events, or software releases you would like to have included in our next issue, please send them to: about-mozilla[at]mozilla.com.

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