In this issue…

Firefox, safe from plugin crashes
Mozilla has released the first Mozilla Developer Preview that includes multi-process plugins on Windows and Linux. This feature means that future versions of Firefox will be safe from plugin crashes. Benjamin Smedberg has written about this release, including where to get the Developer Preview, how you can help, how it all works, and some answers to common questions about the project. There is more information available on the Mozilla Developer News site, as well: “The main feature of this release is out-of-process plugins: on Windows and Linux, plugins such as Flash and Silverlight run in a separate process from the browser. If a plugin crashes it will not crash the browser, and unresponsive plugins are automatically restarted. (Note that we are working on this for Macs as well, but is not part of this preview release.)”

SUMO: writing help wanted
The Firefox Support team is looking for help updating some Knowledge Base articles. “It’s likely we will see an increase of Firefox users in Europe visiting the Firefox Support website because of the browser ballot, and it’s also important to note that many of these users will probably be less experienced with computers. As a result, support is going to play a key role in helping these new users understand how to use Firefox.” For more information about this sprint to get articles updated (including their localizations), see Chris Ilias’ blog post on the Firefox Support Blog.

MDN logo finalized
John Slater writes, “The other day I posted some work-in-progress versions of the potential new Mozilla Developer Network logo. As part of that, I asked for feedback and got a ton of great input. All the options had their fans, but the two that rose above the rest were #3 and #8. We were also gravitating towards #8, but there was something about it that didn’t feel quite right…the skull was a bit too rounded, and we realized that it didn’t look all that different from the original Mozilla dino. We asked Studio Number One to take the style of #8 but use more of the overall shape and elements from #3 and present some new mockups for us. After a bit of debate, we finally settled on the new Mozilla Developer Network logo.”

New MDN logo

Mozilla design webstream
Mozilla’s designers have put together a new shared weblog where they’re posting ideas, sketches, links, articles, designs, and other interesting bits and pieces from projects they’re working on or that they have found around the web. While brand new — launched just yesterday — it promises to be a fascinating insight into how designers involved with Mozilla projects think, work, and go about doing what they do. See the magic in action (and some of the nitty gritty behind the scenes stuff) over at the sparkly new From the Bikeshed weblog.

Future of Personas
“Personas in Firefox 3.6 has been a phenomenal success. In the past month we’ve seen millions of Firefox users discover Personas for the first time and create over 30,000 personas. With this new-found success comes new responsibility. Personas was a Mozilla Labs experiment that has matured and graduated from Labs. Much of its process and code was for a prototype and is beginning to suffer from the overwhelming popularity in Firefox 3.6. In order for Mozilla to give Personas the support it rightly deserves, changes are in order.” Ryan Doherty’s post continues on to outline what these changes entail and what you can expect with the future of Personas.

Raindrop updates
Andy Chung of the Raindrop team has posted an update about their project. “We have recently built our search and navigation system which we mocked up previously. There have also been some great conversations going on about how we want to manage contacts in Raindrop, and how to create rich contact profiles. It seems like the ability to merge and associate different emails as the same person in Gmail and Yahoo mail have been largely ignored, and Raindrop wants to find the best way to remedy this problem of multiple personalities. Check out the Flickr Group to see what people have been saying about this topic.” Head over to Andy’s full post for some screenshots and other news.

Drumbeat roadmap
Mark Surman has posted an outline of the Drumbeat project roadmap, including what the team hopes to accomplish month-by-month between now and the end of June. “The basic idea: build up Drumbeat projects and events in the open and with a small community for a few months, and then make a lot of noise once we’ve got great content in place. Of course, we’ve got plans well beyond June, and beyond 2010.”

Website optimization update
The Mozilla Metrics team has been hard at work coordinating a set of 5 A/B tests that are now being implemented, as well as expanding the scope of their testing efforts to include support.mozilla.com and addons.mozilla.org. Recent experiments have been run for the Getting Started page, First Run design pages, a StumbleUpon promotion, and some simple surveys. The team’s most recent update discusses the results of these as well as outlining the new experiments they’ll be running soon. It’s a really fascinating look into how Mozilla goes about designing, testing, and tweaking its web properties.

Software releases
* Mozilla Developer Preview
* Bespin Embedded 0.6.2

Upcoming events
* Mar 19 – Improve the quality of QMO
* Mar 20 – Jetpack Workshop, Kaohsiung, Taiwan
* Apr 2 – Litmus 2 development review
* Apr 3 – Jetpack Workshop, Taichung, Taiwan

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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