In this issue…

Choice matters
Mozilla launched the Open to Choice campaign last week, aimed at raising awareness among web users in Europe about the importance of making an informed choice when selecting the software and services they use to access the Internet. Over the coming weeks Opentochoice.org will provide further information about browser basics, with the hope of becoming a hub for conversations related to the importance of choice of browsers and other Internet-related tools and technology. Please take the time to visit the site and participate in the conversation.

Mozilla 2010 T-shirt Design Challenge!
The Mozilla Creative Collective has launched an exciting new Design Challenge in which you are invited to submit a design for the official Mozilla 2010 t-shirt. The goal is to create a cool design to be printed as the official Mozilla shirt which will then be made available as an exclusive item to contributors. “Creating a design that represents the multi-faceted nature of Mozilla, its mission and its values is certainly no easy task, but we know that our amazing design community is up to the challenge. The last time we gave our t-shirt design process an open-source flavor like this was with the Firefox 3 t-shirt contest, which resulted in thousands of submissions from around the world.”

Home Tab design challenge results
After two rounds of voting and nearly 3000 votes, the People’s Choice award for the Mozilla Labs Home Tab Design Challenge has been bestowed upon Yatrik Solanki. Yatrik describes his concept as “identities, a website launcher, browsing sessions, and a task-oriented ultrasmart search box”. Honorable mentions go to Chad Pommiss, the NorCal Design Council, Alecsandru Grigoriu, and Amine Zafri. Check out the Mozilla Labs post to view Yatrik’s winning design.

Several Drumbeat project updates
Mark Surman and the Drumbeat project team have posted a few updates. First, there’s a fantastic new Drumbeat project site at drumbeat.org. “If you’ve got an idea that will make the open web better, we’re ready to hear it. And if you just want to learn about Drumbeat or help out for a couple of hours, we’re ready for that too.” Next, the team has posted a rundown on how Drumbeat projects work, with the ultimate goal being to find and support ideas that will make the open web better in very concrete ways. Finally, Mark has posted a second draft of “remixable Drumbeat slides” that people can use to give presentations about Drumbeat, along with an updated slide deck and voiceover based on feedback he received about the initial draft.

New JägerMonkey JavaScript project
David Mandelin writes, “About 2 months ago, we started work on JägerMonkey, a new ‘baseline’ method JIT compiler for SpiderMonkey (and Firefox). The reason we’re doing this is that TraceMonkey is very fast for code that traces well, but for code that doesn’t trace, we’re stuck with the interpreter, which is not fast. The JägerMonkey method JIT will provide a much better performance baseline, and tracing will continue to speed us up on code where it applies.” For all the details about this new project, see the posts by David Mandelin and David Anderson.

Life of a Personas approver
The GetPersonas.com site now boasts over 50,000 designs and that number is growing every day. Each of these designs is checked by an “approver” before hitting the live site, but what that means has never been explained. Until now. Ryan Doherty has written up a quick post explaining what it means to be an approver, what Personas are reviewed for, and how you can get involved and help out with this phenomenal new project and Firefox feature.

Redesigning the support forum
“With the rewrite of the SUMO platform underway, this is a great time to rethink how we want to handle our support forum. While the existing forum format is good for promoting discussions and interaction, it isn’t optimized for getting users to the answers to their problems.” Cheng Wang, part of our amazing user support team, has written about the current proposal to redesign the forums at support.mozilla.com, and he’s looking for feedback. “What do you think? What kinds of features do you think are necessary in this kind of new support system? We’ve got ideas like tagging, custom dashboards, as well as savable views. However, we’d love to hear your thoughts and ideas to make sure we aren’t missing something.” To check out the proposal and take part in the discussion, head over to Cheng’s blog.

46 Firefox features you may not know about
Ever since the release of Firefox 3 we’ve been doing a lot of work to add new capabilities for web developers. Paul Rouget has written up 46 of these features that you may or may not know about. Included are features related to CSS, XMLHttpRequst, offline storage, content, interaction elements, and JavaScript and APIs.

Browser choice in South Korea
Gen Kanai has posted an article about the price of having a “Microsoft monoculture” in South Korea. “South Korea is a sad example of a Microsoft monoculture where the course of history and the lack of anti-monopoly oversight have created a nation where every computer user is a Windows user and banking or ecommerce or any secure transaction on the Internet with South Korean entities must be done with Internet Explorer on a Windows OS. So when people ask you, ‘why is the choice of a web browser important?’ tell them that in South Korea, people don’t get a choice of what operating system to use or what web browser to use. After you explain to them that a place without choice is South Korea, ask them again if they’d like to not have a choice and why the choice of a web browser is important.”

Software updates
* Thunderbird 3.0.3
* Processing.js 0.6
* XULRunner 1.9.2
* Camino 2.0.2

Upcoming events
* Mar 2-6 – Mozilla @ CeBIT 2010
* Mar 5 – Learn how to testscript your add-ons
* Mar 19 – Improve the quality of QMO
* Apr 2 – Litmus 2 development review

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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