In this issue…

The future of crash reporting
Laura Thomson is looking for feedback on the current draft of plans for Socorro 2.0. Socorro is the server that accepts and processes Breakpad crash reports. “In 1.9, we will enable pulling data from HBase for the webapp via a web services layer. In 2.0 we will expose HBase functionality to the end user. We also have a number of other improvements planned for the 2.x releases including: full text search of crashes, faceted search, ability for users to run MapReduce jobs from the webapp, better visibility for explosive and critical crashes, and better post-crash user engagement via email. Full details can be found in the draft PRD.” Laura has also published the slide deck from her Mozilla Summit presentation about Socorro.

Firefox Home Design Challenge deadline!
There’s just a week left to get your entry in for the Firefox Home launch celebration Design Challenge! “The goal of this challenge is to create a design that may be made into official Mozilla iPhone skins. The top 5 designs will be highlighted on the Creative Collective homepage, blogs, and may have a chance to be featured on the Mozilla website as official merchandise.” Read more about this challenge and how to participate on the Creative Collective weblog. Deadline for entries is August 15th!

Thunderbird Mailing List Manager
The Thunderbird team has created a Mailing List Manager add-on with the goal of helping Thunderbird users find, organize, and manage messages from mailing lists. “We need more help to make the mailing list manager a success. We’re looking to find issues with the current system, and answers to questions like: Are all of your mailing lists being detected correctly? Are your mailing list filters working? Are you able to find all your mailing list messages again? This and other feedback will help us evaluate how this feature should work inside Thunderbird and if this feature should be included by default.” You can read more about the Mailing List Manager, install the add-on, or watch an intro video.

Thunderbird Contacts
Another new Thunderbird-related project is the Contacts add-on. “Thunderbird Contacts was started by the Mozilla Labs team as Firefox Contacts, an experiment with contacts in the browser. We’ve adapted their add-on to work inside of Thunderbird and added some new features. The goal of the add-on is to experiment in evolving the address book of Thunderbird beyond what it currently is today. Thunderbird Contacts isn’t a standalone address book, instead it understands that your contacts live on the web as much as they do inside Thunderbird. The add-on can pull in contact data from various services where your contacts already exist. Currently it connects with the following services: Thunderbird Address Book, Native Address Books, Facebook, GMail, LinkedIn, Plaxo, Twitter, and Yahoo!” Read more at the Mozilla Labs weblog.

Open Subtitles Design Summit
The Universal Subtitles project is organizing the first Open Subtitles Design Summit, hosted in NYC on September 29 & 30. “The summit marks an incredible opportunity for a diverse group of stakeholders in the caption/subtitle orbit to come together and make real steps towards increasing availability and user friendliness of captions and subtitles. The meeting will be high-level, yet technically anchored and goal-oriented.” You can read more about the Summit and its goals at the Universal Subtitles weblog.

Add-on Icon Makeover Contest winners
The winners have been announced! “The 2300 votes have been tallied and I’m pleased to announce the 5 winners of the Add-on Icon Makeover Contest: Adblock Plus, WiseStamp, Facebook Translate, Webmail Notifier, and Youtube Music Player. Over the next few weeks our designer will work with these authors to create new icons, and we’ll be sure to share the results! Thanks to everyone who participated in the contest.”

Data theft with CSS
“Mozilla has released security updates to Firefox 3.5 and 3.6 that include defenses for an old, little-known, but serious security hole: cross-site data theft using CSS. These defenses have a small but significant chance of breaking websites that rely on ‘quirks mode’ rendering and use a server in another DNS domain for their style sheets.” Zack Weinberg has written an article that explains this attack in detail, what Mozilla has changed to fix the issue (this fix is in Firefox 4 as well, of course), and what you need to know as a web developer to deal with these changes. The short version is that if your website works in the Firefox 4 beta, you’re fine.

Jetpack Gallery’s final flight
“With the deprecation of the Jetpack prototype in favor of the new Mozilla Add-ons SDK, it is time that the Jetpack Gallery take its final flight into the sunset. All add-ons developed with the Mozilla Add-ons SDK can be conveniently hosted on addons.mozilla.org. We invite anyone who developed an add-on with the Jetpack prototype to update their add-on(s) with the SDK or the new Add-ons Builder, then submit them to AMO. Over the gallery’s short lifespan it amassed hundreds of Jetpack-based add-ons, nearly a thousand contributors, and advanced the Jetpack project enormously.”

Software releases
* Thunderbird 3.1.2

Upcoming events
* Aug 14-15, Taipei, COSCUP/GNOME.Asia
* Oct 1-2, New York City, Open Video Conference
* Oct 28-29, Toronto, FSOSS
* Nov 4-6, Barcelona, Drumbeat Festival 2010
* Nov 5-7, Free Society Conference and Nordic Summit (FSCONS)

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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