• Jetpack 50-line code challenge
• Launching the Jetpack gallery
• Jetpack contest winner
• AMO welcomes self-hosted add-ons
• New AMO Contributions options
• Download source tracking on AMO
• WebGL updates + Planet WebGL
• University design challenge mockups
• User feedback after Firefox install
• Web developer survey
• Planet Mozilla survey
• Upcoming events
• Developer calendar
• About about:mozilla

Jetpack 50-line code challenge
The Mozilla Labs team, along with the release of Jetpack 0.6, has announced a new Jetpack contest. The contest runs until Dec 13, and the challenge is to create the “most awesome Jetpack” that uses less than 50 lines of code. Prizes include a brand new netbook (ASUS Eee PC 1000HE) and a big package of Mozilla swag. For more details, check out the original contest announcement.

Launching the Jetpack gallery
Mozilla Labs recently launched the Jetpack Gallery, a “community for developers and add-on users: Users get innovative add-ons that add functionality to Firefox, while developers receive valuable feedback and visibility in the Jetpack community.” You can browse Jetpacks by tag, author, and popularity, as well as vote on and review the ones you try. See the Mozilla Labs blog post for more information.

Jetpack contest winner
“We are happy to announce that we have a winner for the Jetpack 0.5 contest. Given the fantastic group of entrants, with Jetpacks that did everything from Twitter to a one-click text translator, it was hard to pick a winner. Alexander Meltsev of Moscow created a prototype for allowing Jetpacks to process large amounts of data on your computer’s graphical co-processor. Alex’s work is both creative and unusual. It digs deep into what a potential future use of Jetpack can be — allowing for high-performance computing that is accessible to casual developers.” Read more at the contest blog post.

AMO welcomes self-hosted add-ons
The AMO team recently launched a pilot program to allow self-hosted add-ons to be listed on AMO alongside thousands of Mozilla-hosted add-ons. “One of the staples of the Mozilla add-ons platform is the choice developers have to host and distribute their add-ons on any website they’d like, not just addons.mozilla.org. Yet, as the largest gallery of add-ons, Mozilla Add-ons is where users come to search for and discover new add-ons, which leaves add-ons hosted on a personal or business website out of sight and usually out of mind.” Self-hosted add-ons won’t have all the same AMO site features as Mozilla-hosted add-ons, but they will appear in search and browse listings, collections, and can be reviewed and rated.

New AMO Contributions options
The Mozilla Add-ons website has allowed add-on developers to request voluntary contributions from their users as part of a pilot project that has been running over the past few months. The team has added some new options to that project which they hope will make a difference in the way users make contributions. “Pledge drives” allow add-on developers to do focused, short-term drives to raise funds through their add-ons, and “Subscriptions” allow users to provide a regular monthly contribution to an add-on developer for 12 months. Contributions are a simple and effective way to support your favourite add-on developers and help them continue their work — visit the AMO website and consider making a contribution today.

Download source tracking on AMO
With the recent AMO update, the team made a tiny change to every add-on download button on the website that now allows them to see from what parts of the site add-ons are downloaded. “With the help of Daniel Einspanjer on our metrics team, we’re now able to analyze whether an add-on download came from an AMO search results page, the add-on’s display page, the Firefox Add-ons Manager, or one of around 12 predefined sources we are tracking.” Add-on developers can also see this data for their add-on as part of the Statistics Dashboard. “Our source tracking system also allows developers to add their own tracking codes for external links to their add-on. By simply adding a src parameter to any add-on’s URL or download URL, that source will start being tracked and appear in the Statistics Dashboard.”

WebGL updates + Planet WebGL
Mark Steele has posted a short update on WebGL-related goings on. Included is a link to a fully-playable WebGL game demo that works in Minefield (Cube Defense), and links to a couple of libraries that simplify writing applications that use WebGL. “Since there isn’t any real documentation on WebGL so far, getting even this far takes some digging and patience. Giles Thomas created a blog about WebGL with very detailed lessons based on the NeHe OpenGL lessons.” Additionally, a planet site for WebGL has been set up to aggregate blog posts from people posting about WebGL — they’re looking for more people to include, so if you write about WebGL, contact Chris Blizzard to be added.

University design challenge mockups
Pascal Finette has posted an update about the Fall ‘09 Mozilla Labs Design Challenge. “We challenged students from universities around the world to develop concepts and solutions to the question: Browsing History – how can we make sense of this rich source of data and how do we best present this data to the user? Students from four schools took the challenge and worked intensively on their ideas — some in the form of a Design Jam next to their normal course work, others as part of their university assignments.” All the design concepts have been submitted, and you can review them via the Labs website.

User feedback after Firefox install
Mozilla’s Metrics team has been working in integrating user outreach into the mozilla.com website. Most recently, they posted about comments left by users during their visit to the Firefox “First Run” page, which brand new users hit after downloading and installing Firefox for the first time. “About 1,200 people left feedback over the past month. Overall, the feedback looks really amazing. For such a high percentage of people to go out of their way to say something positive is incredible. On the downside, there were two issues identified by users that we weren’t previously aware of. Thanks to this insight, we’ve been able to prioritize a fix, and we’re hoping to ship it in the next release of Firefox!”

Web developer survey
A few weeks ago the Mozilla Evangelism and Marketing teams announced the beginnings of the new Mozilla Developer Network (MDN). If you’re a Web developer, they need your help in understanding who you are, what you’re interested in, and what resources would be most valuable for you on MDN. To do this, they have created a short survey for which they’re hoping to get a total of 5000 responses. Take the survey today!

Planet Mozilla survey
Planet Mozilla is a central and vital resource for the Mozilla Community, and the team is looking for ways to improve it. They’re seeking your input on what you think Planet should be for, how well it’s fulfilling that purpose, and how it could be improved or augmented to better serve our community.

If you use Planet Mozilla at all, please take a few minutes of your time to answer three short questions about it. The team is hoping to get as much feedback as possible, so you can also leave other comments and insights about Planet or other Planet-related things on the original blog post. Respond to the Planet Mozilla survey at SurveyMonkey.

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.

* Nov 20 – Online – Testday: Firefox 3.6
* Dec 4 – Online – Testday: Weave

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.

If you would like to get this newsletter by email, just head on over to the about:mozilla newsletter subscription form. Fresh news, every Tuesday, right to your inbox.

• Celebrating five years of Firefox
• How to light the world with Firefox
• Firefox hits 25% market share
• Web developer survey!
• Jetpack for Learning design challenge
• Firefox Goes Mobile challenge winner
• Important API changes
• Advancing Web Typography presentation
• Test Pilot 0.3 and a new study
• Accessibility features in Firefox 3.6
• Firefox 3.5.5 update
• Weave 0.8 released
• Upcoming events
• Developer calendar
• About about:mozilla

Celebrating five years of Firefox

Five years ago yesterday, Mozilla launched Firefox 1.0 with the belief that, as the most significant social and technological development of our time, the Internet is a public resource that must remain open and accessible to all. Since then, Firefox has gained over 330 million users worldwide; almost a quarter of Internet users in the world. We’ve come so far in the past five years, and we’re incredibly excited about the next five. For a more comprehensive look at where we’ve been and where we’re headed, check out the post on hacks.mozilla.org. Mitchell Baker has also posted about this event.

This is not a simple one day celebration — Mozilla communities are hosting parties all over the globe in a special campaign called “Light the World with Firefox” — shining the Firefox logo from Tokyo to Rome, from Paris to San Francisco, and more. For full details on the parties in your area or to check out other ways to join in the celebration, head over to the Firefox Five Years website.

How to light the world with Firefox

Mary Colvig has written a great post in which she gives more information and inspiration for the Light the World with Firefox event, launched as a way for people around the globe to help Mozilla celebrate Firefox’s fifth birthday. Head over to Mary’s blog to get ideas for mobile, mash-ups, shadow play, stencils, and more.

Firefox hits 25% market share

Ken Kovash, head of Mozilla’s number-crunching metrics team, writes, “At the very same moment in time that Firefox celebrates its 5th birthday, Firefox has also surpassed 25% worldwide market share for the very first time. This news comes from Net Applications’ report for the week of November 1st.” Further details, including “before” and “after” pie charts, are available on Ken’s blog.

Web developer survey!

Two weeks ago the Mozilla Evangelism and Marketing teams announced the beginnings of the new Mozilla Developer Network (MDN). If you’re a Web developer, they need your help in understanding who you are, what you’re interested in, and what resources would be most valuable for you on MDN. To do this, they have created a short survey for which they’re hoping to get a total of 5000 responses. With 3600 responses so far, the teams have posted an initial set of results at the Mozilla Hacks weblog. Take the survey today!

Jetpack for Learning design challenge

The Mozilla Labs and Mozilla Foundation teams have joined together to host the Jetpack for Learning design challenge, which is already underway. “We invite you to help turn the open Web into a rich learning environment and explore new possibilities for using Firefox add-ons to support learning online. We’re looking for designers, educators and software developers who want to turn their innovative ideas into working prototypes. Participants creating the best prototypes will be invited to the Jetpack for Learning Design Camp and the SXSW Interactive conference in March 2010.” There’s still time to make submissions (deadline is Nov 27th), and all students and educators are encouraged to participate. “The Mozilla project is a great place to be a student, and this is just one more reason why.”

Firefox Goes Mobile challenge winner

The results from the Mozilla Creative Collective’s “Firefox Goes Mobile” design challenge are in, and we’re pleased to announce that the winner is “Pocketfox”, by Yaroslaff Chekunov. As the official emblem of the upcoming mobile version of Firefox, we’ll be using this image as an avatar on social networking sites, on mozilla.com, on t-shirts and more. Yaroslaff, who is based in Krasnodar, Russia, cites as his design inspiration, “the Firefox itself, your approach to the web-site execution, and of course my wife who always brings up new ideas.” Be sure to check out his other Mozilla work as well as his general portfolio. For further details about the results, including the four runners-up, see Caitlin Looney’s blog post.

Important API changes

The Mozilla Hacks team has written a post outlining some important API changes of interest to Web developers. These include removing the media element “load” event, and changing our CSS gradient syntax. For details, you can read the original posts at Robert O’Callahan’s weblog: media element, CSS gradient.

Advancing Web Typography presentation

John Daggett writes, “Last week Jonathan Kew and I went down to attend and present at ATypl 2009, a typography conference that took place in Mexico City. There was an entire day of sessions on web fonts. Jonathan and I presented a session on ‘Advancing Web Typography’.” You can read more and download the presentation slides at John’s weblog.

Test Pilot 0.3 and a new study

The Mozilla Labs team has announced a new version of Test Pilot and a new upcoming study. “For this study, which will be launching at the beginning of December, we would like to explore what a browser does to facilitate using the Web through a year. We will periodically collect usage information about the browser for a week and run the same study again every 60 days. The main goal is to explore if the browser has been used differently over time, which may help us design a better product that works adaptively.” For more information about this release, see the original announcement post. You can download Test Pilot from addons.mozilla.org.

Accessibility features in Firefox 3.6

Marco Zehe has posted a fantastic round up of the accessibility features that will be in Firefox 3.6. These include: support for voice dictation software in Windows, Windows 7 task bar integration, more consistent focus handling, support for the IAccessibleTable2 interface, more consistent and maintainable naming rules, notifying screen readers when an object attribute’s value changes, and “tons of bug fixes”. For details on all of these and links to more information, see Marco’s weblog.

Firefox 3.5.5 update

As part of Mozilla’s ongoing stability and security update process, Firefox 3.5.5 is now available for Windows, Mac, and Linux as a free download from Firefox.com. We strongly recommend that all Firefox users upgrade to this latest release. If you already have Firefox 3.5, you will receive an automated update notification within 24 to 48 hours. This update can also be applied manually by selecting “Check for Updates…” from the Help menu. For a list of changes and more information, please see the Firefox 3.5.5 Release Notes.

Weave 0.8 released

Mike Connor, part of the Mozilla Labs Weave team, has announced the release of Weave 0.8. “We’ve been hard at work over the last month on the next milestone on our path to 1.0, and we’ve just released version 0.8. In this last pre-beta release we have made a number of changes based on feedback from users around tighter integration with Firefox and Fennec, and improvements to the incremental sync behaviour introduced in 0.7. For more details about Weave 0.8, please check out the details over at the Weave blog.”

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.

* Nov 13 – Online – Testday: Fennec
* Nov 20 – Online – Testday: Firefox 3.6
* Dec 4 – Online – Testday: Weave

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.

If you would like to get this newsletter by email, just head on over to the about:mozilla newsletter subscription form. Fresh news, every Tuesday, right to your inbox.

• Firefox 3.6 beta 1 available
• Updating add-ons for Firefox 3.6
• Light the world with Firefox
• Jetpack Design Challenge
• Firefox privacy and security
• On open source and education
• Multi-process Fennec
• SUMO and Firefox 3.6 progress
• New features in Firebug 1.5
• Mozilla Drumbeat: pilot mode
• Mozilla.org: new “Get involved” page
• Building the Mozilla Developer Network
• Upcoming events
• Developer calendar
• About about:mozilla

Firefox 3.6 beta 1 available
Firefox 3.6 beta 1 was released last week. This beta is built on the Gecko 1.9.2 rendering engine and introduces several new features including built in Personas, automated plugin update notifications, full screen video, support for a new open font format, improved responsiveness and performance, and support for new CSS, DOM, and HTML5 technologies. Further information about this release is available at the Mozilla Developer Center and at the Mozilla Hacks weblog. You can download the beta through Mozilla.com.

Updating add-ons for Firefox 3.6
The AMO team has put together a quick five step program that developers can use to check compatibility with Firefox 3.6 and update their add-ons if necessary. “The add-on review queues are normally very busy during update times, so you should follow these guidelines to make sure your add-on stays up to date and doesn’t have to wait too long for review.” The team has also launched a new AMO forum if you have any questions or comments, and a new Compatibility Reporter tool is available to help developers know which add-ons work with Firefox 3.6.

Light the world with Firefox
“We’re coming up on a pretty incredible milestone,” writes Mary Colvig, “Five Years of Firefox on November 9, 2009! In order to celebrate we’re kicking off a special campaign called ‘Light the World with Firefox.’ We’re putting a call out for the most creative use of the Firefox logo and light.” To read more about participating in this world-wide event, see Mary’s blogpost over at the Mozilla Blog.

Jetpack Design Challenge
Mozilla Labs and the Mozilla Foundation, with support from the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, are sponsoring a Jetpack for Learning Design Challenge. “We are looking for designers, educators and software developers who want to turn their innovative ideas about learning online into working prototypes in the form of Firefox add-ons. We’ll help you refine your designs and teach you how to create Firefox add-ons using Jetpack and other Mozilla technologies. Participants creating the best prototypes will be invited to the Jetpack for Learning Design Camp and the SXSW Interactive conference in March 2010.” Read the full post at the Mozilla Labs weblog.

Firefox privacy and security
Johnathan Nightingale and Drew Willcoxon have put together two new videos in which they talk about the security and privacy features of Firefox. The security features video covers phishing protection, malware protection, master passwords, the site identity button, and Firefox’s world-class software update system. The privacy video talks about the great new privacy features that were introduced with Firefox 3.5. You can view these at Johnath’s weblog, or through YouTube: Security, Privacy.

On open source and education
Professor David Humphrey, from Seneca College in Toronto, has an
excellent blog post about teaching with open source, and the
incredible impact it has on the value and quality of his students’
education. The article is in response to Joel Spolsky’s post lamenting the general quality of computer science programs and arguing for the inclusion of real-world projects in these programs. This is, of course, exactly what David has been working on at Seneca for five years, and the results have been astonishing. Read David’s full post on his weblog.

Multi-process Fennec
Joe Drew, Olli Pettay, and Benjamin Smedberg have modified Mobile Firefox (aka: Fennec) so it now has a separate process for rendering. “Getting Fennec working was difficult partly because the mobile Firefox code uses a different drawing system. Now that it’s working, we hope to be able to bring additional developers in to fix up the features we hacked around, fix DOM features, and start getting much better measurements for interactive performance and memory usage.” If you’re interested in reading more, seeing a screencast of Fennec in action, or getting involved with Fennec development, head over to Ben’s weblog.

SUMO and Firefox 3.6 progress
Chris Ilias, part of the Firefox Support (SUMO) team, writes, “For the past few weeks we have been gathering a list of changes from Firefox 3.5 to 3.6. The next step is to go through the list of articles and determine which need to be updated, and everyone can help.” Chris’ post goes on to explain exactly what you need to do if you would like to pitch in to get SUMO ready for the upcoming Firefox 3.6 release.

New features in Firebug 1.5
Jan Odvarko has been blogging about some of the new features in Firebug 1.5, including HTTP time monitor, XML explorer, and Net Panel column customization. In his most recent post, Jan talks about the new Break On Next functionality. “This feature extends the idea of breakpoints, which is one of the cornerstones of today’s debugging tools. Its primary goal is breaking the JavaScript execution at a required place in the code that is unknown to the developer beforehand.”

Mozilla Drumbeat: pilot mode
Mozilla Drumbeat is moving into pilot mode. Be a part of Drumbeat and dial in to the weekly Drumbeat Community call. The call is Mondays at 8 a.m. PST. Further information about the call and new Drumbeat newsgroup is available on the Mozilla wiki.

Mozilla.org: new “Get involved” page
The Mozilla.org site has a brand new “Get involved” page, and is looking for help figuring out what steps to take next. “We’ve had a good response so far, but getting the page up is only the beginning for what we could be doing. How do we get more people to this page? What’s the best way to help people get started when they express interest? Would having mentors for different community areas be useful? If you’re interested in these questions, please come by our next contribute group call.”

Building the Mozilla Developer Network
Mozilla’s Marketing and Evangelism teams need your help. “We’re looking for developers from all over the Web to help us build the Mozilla Developer Network. Firefox is an important tool for many developers and as the Web continues to evolve as a platform, we need your input to enable better communication and collaboration to push the Mozilla project forward and make the Web better for everyone.” The first thing you can do is take the MDN Survey, then head over to the Mozilla Hacks weblog to get more information about what the team is working on and how you can help.

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.

* Nov 7-8 – Sofia, Bulgaria – DevGarage

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.

If you would like to get this newsletter by email, just head on over to the about:mozilla newsletter subscription form. Fresh news, every Tuesday, right to your inbox.

• Announcing Raindrop
• Personas now part of AMO
• Web Open Font Format for Firefox 3.6
• Fennec and add-ons
• New Firefox switch page
• Help update SUMO for Firefox 3.6
• FSOSS 2009 starts Friday
• Firefox in 10 African languages
• Five years of Firefox celebrations
• SeaMonkey 2.0 released
• Mozdev project changes
• Upcoming events
• Developer calendar
• About about:mozilla

Announcing Raindrop
Mozilla Messaging and Mozilla Labs announced the new Raindrop project last week. Raindrop is an experiment in messaging on the open Web, hosted by Mozilla Labs. Raindrop’s mission: to make it enjoyable to participate in conversations from people you care about, whether the conversations are in email, on Twitter, a friend’s blog or as part of a social networking site. “You should definitely go over to the introductory post, and check out the first few pages we’ve put up describing the goal of the project, how we’ve built it so far, and how we’re hoping to engage designers as well as developers to participate in the ongoing effort.”

Personas now part of AMO
“About a year ago, Mozilla Labs launched Personas, a way to easily create and install lightweight themes for Firefox and Thunderbird. Over 9 million downloads and 30,000 Personas later, we’ve included them on AMO as a new way to personalize your browser.” Personas support will be part of the final Firefox 3.6 release, but in the meantime you can make use of these lightweight themes by installing the Personas extension. For further information, see Nick Nguyen’s blog post.

Web Open Font Format for Firefox 3.6
John Daggett has written a high-level overview of the new Web Open Font Format (WOFF) that will be part of Firefox 3.6. WOFF has two primary advantages over (the already supported) TrueType and OpenType fonts: WOFF is compressed so font download sizes are smaller, and the fonts can include information about where the font came from. “The WOFF format originated from a collaboration between the font designers Erik van Blokland and Tal Lemin with help from Mozilla’s Johnathan Kew. Each had proposed their own format and WOFF represents a melding of these different proposals.”

Fennec and add-ons
“One of the most interesting parts of adapting the design of Firefox for a mobile device has been in trying to pare down and simplify the Add-ons Manager,” writes Madhava Enros, Fennec’s user experience design lead. “Having stripped it down to essentials, though, we found that we wanted to add some new abilities as well. As we tried to find places in Fennec’s UI for some existing Firefox capabilities, the Add-ons Manager started presenting itself as a sensible home.” Madhava’s article goes on to discuss the various additions and changes made to Fennec’s Add-ons Manager, and includes copious screenshots and explanations.

New Firefox switch page
The Spread Firefox team recently unveiled a brand new “Firefox Switch” page. “If you’re passionate about Firefox and want to tell others about it, this is the page for you. It has lots of information and tools for a switch campaign of your own.”

Help update SUMO for Firefox 3.6
With the release of Firefox 3.6 coming up fast, the Firefox Support (SUMO) team is planning updates to the Firefox Support knowledge base. “The plan itself is not set yet. First, we would like to gather a list of changes from 3.5 to 3.6 that affect user support.” Once the team has an idea of what has changed, they will be assessing what changes need to be made to the knowledge base and will then draft an update plan. Chris Ilias has started a page on the Mozilla wiki to list the changes in Firefox 3.6, and is looking for help compiling that information.

FSOSS 2009 starts Friday
The annual Free Software and Open Source Symposium, held at Seneca College in Toronto, starts this Friday, Oct 30th, and for which the final set of presentations has been posted. There’s also the Teaching Open Source Summit on Thursday, and the Mayor of Toronto has proclaimed the full week as Toronto Open Source Week. David Humphrey’s weblog has more information about these events.

Firefox in 10 African languages
Dwayne Bailey has posted about a new project to localize Firefox into 10 African languages. ANLoc (the African Network for Localisation) is working through a process to try to create the skills and support needed to get more Africans localising Firefox, with target languages including Akan, Northern Sotho, Shona, Krio, Wolof, Songhai, Swahili, Lingala, Luganda, and Zulu. For more information, and to get involved with the project, see Dwayne’s blog post.

Five years of Firefox celebrations
“With Firefox’s 5 year anniversary just around the corner (Monday November 9th) preparations for the birthday celebration are in order.” William Quiviger has put together a list of ideas for how you can help mark the occasion. “If you’re planning on organizing a party in your town or just want to share some ideas, make sure to drop a line on Mozilla’s marketing mailing list, or join the conversation on IRC in #marketing.”

SeaMonkey 2.0 released
The SeaMonkey project today released SeaMonkey 2.0, now available for free download. SeaMonkey combines an internet browser, email & newsgroup client, HTML editor, IRC chat and web development tools into a single all-in-one internet suite. For further information, you can read the SeaMonkey 2.0 release notes and the SeaMonkey project site.

Mozdev project changes
The Mozdev project has announced some organizational changes that are under consideration. “The Mozdev board is seriously considering dismantling the non-profit Mozdev Community Organization that runs the site. The overhead of running a legal organization is no longer justified and is distracting attention away from the site itself. We want the site to continue to serve the needs of the community and think that handing things to a new group of people who are passionate about Mozdev is the best way to make this happen. We need you! First, this does not mean that Mozdev is shutting down. We are looking into creating a community council to replace the board of directors and welcome you to join that group and help shape Mozdev’s future.”

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.

* Today! – Mountain View – Bay Area Add-ons Meetup
* Oct 29-30 – Toronto – Free Software and Open Source Symposium
* Oct 30 – Online – Testscripting with MozMill
* Nov 7-8 – Sofia, Bulgaria – DevGarage

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.

If you would like to get this newsletter by email, just head on over to the about:mozilla newsletter subscription form. Fresh news, every Tuesday, right to your inbox.

• Firefox plugin checker launched
• New Firefox demos
• Vote now: Firefox Goes Mobile
• TestPilot tab data analysis
• Firebug features polls
• Women in Mozilla project
• Predicting Firefox growth
• New device API for Firefox 3.6
• Weave and cryptography
• Upcoming events
• Developer calendar
• About about:mozilla

Firefox plugin checker launched
Mozilla recently launched a new Plugin Checker to help users find and install updates for their browser plugins. This is an important new service because an estimated 30% of all Firefox crashes are caused by third-party plugins, and many major security vulnerabilities exploit out of date plugins. In the future this service will be integrated into Firefox itself, but for now the service is available as a web page.

New Firefox demos
Paul Rouget has put together three new demos of features that will be in an upcoming Firefox release. The first shows off the new “orientation” events in web content, but only works in devices that have accelerometers. The next shows the power of WebGL when combined with CSS3 and SVG. Finally, Paul demonstrates CSS Transition in combination with the video tag. To view these demos you will need to have the latest nightly build.

Vote now: Firefox Goes Mobile
John Slater writes, “The submission period in our Firefox Goes Mobile Design Challenge ended, and now it’s time to pick a winner. Your votes will help decide what image ends up being used on websites, t-shirts and more so be sure to scan through the full gallery between now and October 23rd.”

TestPilot tab data analysis
Andy Edmonds has been working on Mozilla Test Pilot tabs data analysis, and has published another article about his findings regarding time and the event sequencing of tab usage. Included is information about timing and event sequences, timing and sessions, and an examination of a single user’s four hour browsing session. See Andy’s article for more information.

Firebug features polls
Rob Campbell recently did some informal polling via Twitter and Rypple asking users about their favorite and least favorite features of Firebug. “The results were interesting in that they confirmed what I suspected about the majority of people using Firebug.” Rob has posted results for both the favorite features and least favorite features polls on his weblog.

Women in Mozilla project
Delphine Lebedel has announced that the new Women and Mozilla community project website has been created and launched. “The mission of WoMoz is to promote women in Mozilla and FLOSS. Amongst other tools, we have created a dedicated wiki, blog, and mailing list in order to achieve this. All three can be accessed from our main website. If you are interested in promoting women in free software and wish to help this project grow, head on over to WoMoz.”

Predicting Firefox growth
Blake Cutler, part of Mozilla’s Metrics team, has posted an article talking about some work that Eric Hergenrader did in analyzing fluctuations in Firefox usage, and how that analysis is proving useful in predicting future usage. “I have plotted actual against predicted usage. The correlation between these two lines is remarkable. Since September, the average prediction was off by just 1.63%!”

New device API for Firefox 3.6
Chris Blizzard writes, “One new feature we’re including as part of Firefox 3.6 is support for webpages to access machine orientation information if it’s available. Using the API is very simple. All you have to do is add a simple event listener.” Blizzard’s post also includes links to further information from Doug Turner, and a link to the full documentation for this new API.

Weave and cryptography
The Mozilla Labs Weave project makes use of cryptography to protect users’ data and privacy. Anant Narayanan has written an article that explains this cryptographic system in detail. “While the specs for the Weave server are available, it may take someone new a while to wrap their head around the whole scheme.” Anant goes over some basic definitions, what happens when a user first signs up for Weave, what happens when a particular “engine” is synchronized, and more.

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.

* Oct 27 – Mountain View – Add-ons meetup
* Oct 29-30 – Toronto – Free Software and Open Source Symposium
* Oct 30 – Online – Testscripting with MozMill
* Nov 7-8 – Sofia, Bulgaria – DevGarage

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.

If you would like to get this newsletter by email, just head on over to the about:mozilla newsletter subscription form. Fresh news, every Tuesday, right to your inbox.

• Add-on Developer Hub launched
• New PluginCheck page needs more testers
• Lightweight themes now in Firefox 3.6
• Tab matching in the location bar
• First Test Pilot study results
• A glimpse into the future of browser security
• Processing.js project back underway
• Device orientation documentation
• Building online communities: Jen Burton
• Upcoming events
• Developer calendar
• About about:mozilla

Add-on Developer Hub launched
The addons.mozilla.org team has announced the launch of the new Add-on Developer Hub. The Hub is a one-stop-shop for add-on developers to find out why they’d want to make an add-on, how to make an add-on, and to manage their add-on listings. The Hub includes new documentation, a search system that lets you search all the best add-on development resources from one convenient spot, developer tools, and new community features. If you’ve ever wanted to learn how to create a Firefox add-on, the Developer Hub should be all you need to get started.

New PluginCheck page needs more testers
Following up on the new Flash Detection on the What’s New page, the Webdev team is developing an upgrade to the Plugin Finder Service (PFS2). An initial version of the new service is available, and the team needs your help. “Please hit our testing server’s PluginCheck. We will be able to capture information about plugins and help fill out the PFS2 database. See an issue? Look through current bugs and leave feedback in Bugzilla.”

Further, Blair McBride writes, “Firefox 3.6 will have this integrated to make sure users know when they have an outdated plugin installed, without having to manually visit the PluginCheck page. Whenever you load a page that uses a plugin that is out of date, you’ll get a warning. Additionally, the Plugins tab of the Extension Manager will indicate which of your plugins are out of date.”

Lightweight themes now in Firefox 3.6
Mozilla Links has posted a great story about the new lightweight theme feature that has been added to Firefox 3.6. Lightweight themes are based on the extremely successful Mozilla Labs Personas project, and allow you to customize your Firefox toolbar and status bar backgrounds. Most exciting is that the GetPersonas.com site, which hosts tens of thousands of themes by thousands of artists, now fully supports the new system in Firefox 3.6. If you would like to play with this new feature, you’ll have to download and install the latest nightly version of Firefox 3.6 and then head over to GetPersonas.com.

Tab matching in the location bar
Alexander Limi, part of the Firefox user experience team, has written an article about a new feature currently slated for inclusion in Firefox 3.7. “One of the minor tweaks we want in Firefox is the ability to switch tabs using the location bar. This proposal is based on existing work from Alex Faaborg and thoughts from Madhava Enros and Aza Raskin around putting tabs in the location bar, and doesn’t stray very far from their proposals.” Alexander’s post goes on to talk about some additional tweaks and changes they want to try. If you have any further suggestions for improvements or additions to the proposal, you are welcome to leave comments on the Tab Matching wiki page.

First Test Pilot study results
“Over the past weeks, we’ve been sifting and analysing the data from the Test Pilot tabs study, and working with Blake Cutler from the Mozilla Metrics team to generate graphs of interesting statistics about tab usage.” The Test Pilot team recently posted an analysis page showcasing a few of those graphs. “We should be cautious about drawing conclusions too quickly from this data. For instance, just because it’s very common for someone to have three tabs open doesn’t mean that we need to start optimizing the browser for the three-tabs use case. These visualizations are just a starting point. We hope that looking at them will spark some ideas which can be turned into hypotheses. The next step is not to jump into designing interfaces, but rather to design experiments to test our hypotheses.”

A glimpse into the future of browser security
The Mozilla Security team has been working on turning the Content Security Policy (CSP) specification into working Firefox code. The CSP is a framework to protect websites from cross-site scripting and other related attacks. “We are happy to report that the work is nearly finished, and we have some preview builds available for you to try out. We’re thrilled to have received so much great feedback from other browser vendors, web site administrators, and security researchers and we’re very proud of the design that has come out of that discussion.” For further information about CSP, see Brandon Sterne’s full blog post.

Processing.js project back underway
David Humphrey recently blogged about some ongoing projects at Seneca College, one of which is focusing on completing the work John Resig started to port the Processing language to JavaScript (aka “processing.js“). David and his team are looking for help, and he invites anyone who would like to get involved to contact him. “The most exciting aspect remains that it’s all community developed, from Mozilla to C3DL to processing to processing.js. That’s how you build the software stack of the future.”

Device orientation documentation
Eric Shepherd has finished writing the documentation for the new device orientation support that has been added to Firefox 3.6. “This is going to be a very cool technology. Obviously it’s especially useful for mobile users, but laptop users may get some use out of it as well. It has a lot of potential both for user experience improvements (such as rotating the user interface based on the orientation of a mobile device) and for web gaming.”

Building online communities: Jen Burton
In John Slater’s ongoing Q&A series with notable online community builders, he spoke with Jen Burton, the community manager at Digg. “In her job wrangling thousands of Digg community members and their daily interactions with the site, Jen has accumulated quite a bit of wisdom that she was kind enough to share.”

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.

* Oct 8 – San Francisco – Labs Night
* Oct 13 – Mountain View – Bay Area Add-ons Meetup
* Oct 15 – Online – Jetpack contest deadline
* Oct 16 – Online – Firefox Goes Mobile design deadline
* Oct 29-30 – Toronto – Free Software and Open Source Symposium
* Oct 30 – Online – Testscripting with MozMill
* Nov 7-8 – Sofia, Bulgaria – DevGarage

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.

If you would like to get this newsletter by email, just head on over to the about:mozilla newsletter subscription form. Fresh news, every Tuesday, right to your inbox.

• Weave Web UI concepts due tomorrow
• Extend Firefox contest ends Oct 2nd
• Mobile emblem design challenge extended
• 10,000,000 Firefox users upgrade Flash
• New about:support page in Fx 3.6
• WebGL in Firefox nightly builds
• Theora 1.1: what you should know
• Firefox 3.7 and 4.0 design directions
• Snowl 0.3 released
• Describing the “Open Web”
• Drumbeat: questions and scenarios
• Mozilla Catalyst: grantmaking framework
• Interview with SeaMonkey project lead
• Upcoming events
• Developer calendar
• About about:mozilla

Weave Web UI concepts due tomorrow
The Weave Web UI Design Challenge is looking for your ideas around the question: “How can we provide intuitive and useful visual representations of your browser data (such as bookmarks, history, tabs, stored credentials, etc.) on a web page?” Read more about this design challenge at its landing page, and submit your concept on the ChallengePost page.

Extend Firefox contest ends Oct 2nd
The October 2nd deadline for the Extend Firefox 3.5 contest is coming up fast. If you have a great idea for a Firefox add-on but haven’t got around to creating it, now is the perfect time. The AMO team has posted links to useful resources that will help you get started, including the Mozilla Developer Center, add-on development documentation, and add-on development tutorials. Check out the Mozilla Add-ons Blog for these links and more.

Mobile emblem design challenge extended
John Slater has posted that the Firefox Goes Mobile design challenge deadlines have been extended by a couple of weeks. “Submissions are now due on Friday, October 16 and voting wraps up on Friday, October 23. As I noted in my earlier post, this is a great way to get involved with one of the biggest things going on in the world of Mozilla right now. We need an official emblem to represent mobile in a variety of places, and are looking to our community to help us out. If you’re interested, head over to the Creative Collective and upload your design.”

10,000,000 Firefox users upgrade Flash
With the releases of Firefox 3.5.3 and Firefox 3.0.14, Mozilla started warning users if their version of the popular Adobe Flash Player plugin was out of date. In the first week, 10,000,000 people clicked on the “Flash update” link on the warning page. The Metrics team has posted some initial analysis of the data. “Beyond the total impact of 10,000,000 clicks, the most impressive pattern that stands out is the click through rate. While the Firefox whatsnew page generally sees a click through rate below 5%, the flash update link alone has generated a click through rate north of 30%. Phenomenal!”

New about:support page in Fx 3.6
Percy Cabello of Mozilla Links has written about the new “about:support” feature in Firefox 3.6 Beta 1 nightlies. This new page lists important information about your Firefox installation making it easier for support people to help you with Firefox problems. “Enter ‘about:support’ in the location bar, hit Enter, and you will get a simple web page that includes details like your current profile location, exact Firefox version, links to plugins and build configuration details, a list of all your current extensions, and all modified preferences which could signal some incompatibility or forgotten customization.” Curtis Bartley has posted further information about this new feature, its status, and next steps.

WebGL in Firefox nightly builds
“WebGL is the evolution of work that Mozilla started a few years ago with experiments called Canvas 3D — essentially a way of accessing OpenGL from within the browser, through the HTML5 canvas tag. Earlier this year, we started a standardization effort within the Khronos Group which oversees OpenGL, and have made very rapid progress.” For more information about this new feature and the project behind it, see Vladimir Vukicevic’s blog post. There are also various demos available, but you will need to be running the Firefox nightly builds — changing the “webgl.enabled_for_all_sites” about:config value to “true” — in order to see them.

Theora 1.1: what you should know
Xiph has released Theora 1.1 less than a year after the release of Theora 1.0. This is a software-only release that does not include any changes to the Theora format, and is largely an improvement to the encoder. Chris Blizzard has written up an extensive post on Mozilla Hacks that provides a high-level overview of the changes in the software and what they mean to web developers and other people who are thinking about deploying Theora to support HTML5 video. Theora is an important technology to web developers because it’s the only competitive codec that currently complies with the W3C patent policy.

Firefox 3.7 and 4.0 design directions
Stephen Horlander and Alexander Limi have been working on new designs for Firefox 3.7 and 4.0. A wiki page has been started that describes what’s being planned, the result of months of hard work, idea generation, and discussions within Mozilla. If you’re interested in the future design plans for Firefox, you should read through the page and also check out Alexander’s blog post that includes an interesting video of the (occasionally messy) design process at work.

Snowl 0.3 released
Mozilla Labs has released Snowl 0.3, the third major release of the messaging-in-the-browser experiment. “This release features closer integration with Firefox’s existing feed functionality and many improvements to the list view to make it easier to subscribe to and follow feeds.” For more details, see the release announcment at the Mozilla Lab’s weblog.

Describing the “Open Web”
Jono DiCarlo has sparked an interesting conversation over on his blog, asking: What is “The Open Web” and why should you care? “Here at Mozilla we talk about ‘The Open Web’ a lot. We talk about it all the time. It’s one of our causes. The word ‘open’ appears seven times in our (very short) Manifesto. We have a proposal for a project called Drumbeat which aims to get people acting as ’stewards of the open web’. But what does ‘open web’ actually mean?” As Jono points out, there is no single answer to this question, but many answers. Atul Varma has written two blog posts on the topic, Jono has written down some of this thoughts, and Mitchell Baker has also written about this on her weblog.

Drumbeat: questions and scenarios
Mark Surman and the Mozilla Foundation crew have been fleshing out ideas around a new project called “Drumbeat“. The fifth of these posts has been published that “lists the five biggest questions that need to be answered about Drumbeat right now and proposes the use of scenarios to answer these questions.” The most common questions about Drumbeat fall into a handful of general categories: Framing, Audience, Campaigns, Geography, and Partnership. Read more at Mark’s weblog and get involved with the discussion.

Mozilla Catalyst: grantmaking framework
Frank Hecker has been working on a “one Mozilla” approach to bestowing grants and helping Mozilla’s grantmaking become “more strategic and less ad hoc” that has resulted in a proposed framework he’s calling “Mozilla Catalyst”. “The goal is for Mozilla to be a catalyst in spurring innovations and addressing problems in areas relevant to the Mozilla mission that are important for the future of the open web but have been relatively neglected by us or others who share our vision and values.” Frank’s post goes into a lot more detail about the framework and thinking behind it, and concludes with some questions and a request for your thoughts and feedback.

Interview with SeaMonkey project lead
Mozilla Links has posted a recent interview with Robert Kaiser, the SeaMonkey project coordinator. “Ricardo Palomares from Mozilla Hispano, had an interview with Robert Kaiser on what’s going on with SeaMonkey, the motivations, and other activities including promotion and t-shirts.”

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.

* Tomorrow – Online – Weave Web UI design deadline
* Oct 2 – Online – Extend Firefox contest deadline
* Oct 3-4 – Prague – Mozilla Camp Europe
* Oct 8 – San Francisco – Labs Night
* Oct 15 – Online – Jetpack contest deadline
* Oct 16 – Online – Firefox Goes Mobile design deadline
* Oct 29-30 – Toronto – Free Software and Open Source Symposium
* Nov 7-8 – Sofia, Bulgaria – DevGarage

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.

If you would like to get this newsletter by email, just head on over to the about:mozilla newsletter subscription form. Fresh news, every Tuesday, right to your inbox.

• “Firefox Goes Mobile” design challenge
• Extend Firefox contest ends soon!
• Mozilla Service Week challenge
• OneWebDay: Sep 22
• Design Mozilla’s OneWebDay poster
• Join our Test Pilot program
• Designing apps for mobile devices
• Fennec: API changes + add-on prefs
• Building add-ons for Fennec
• Firefox: Helping users keep plugins updated
• Chicago add-ons meetup: Sep 29
• about:mozilla hiatus
• Upcoming events
• Developer calendar
• About about:mozilla

“Firefox Goes Mobile” design challenge
The Mozilla Creative Collective has launched its first design challenge. The goal of the new Firefox Goes Mobile challenge is to create the official promotional emblem of the mobile version of Firefox (which is getting closer and closer to release). The winning image will be used on everything from websites like mozilla.com and addons.mozilla.org to schwag like t-shirts and stickers. If you’re a designer, this is a great way to get involved and make a big impact on a really important project. To find out more, see John Slater’s blog post.

Extend Firefox contest ends soon!
The October 2nd deadline for the Extend Firefox 3.5 contest is coming up fast. If you have a great idea for a Firefox add-on but haven’t got around to creating it, now is the perfect time. The AMO team has posted links to a host of different resources that will help you get started, including the Mozilla Developer Center, add-on development documentation, and add-on development tutorials. Check out the Mozilla Add-ons Blog for these links and much more.

Mozilla Service Week challenge
Mozilla Service Week starts in just a few days, and the momentum continues to build. “The community has stepped up to pledge over 8,400 hours of service and our localization community just rolled out the Korean, Polish, and Shqip versions of mozillaservice.org. We also now have volunteer opportunities posted in 79 countries.” Mary Colvig has posted all the details about Mozilla Service Week, inviting everyone to take part. Don’t forget to pledge your hours on the Mozilla Service Week site!

OneWebDay: Sep 22
Chelsea Novak is heading up Mozilla’s OneWebDay efforts. “OneWebDay is a chance to reflect on how amazing the web is and to think about how we can move it forward, making it awesome for everyone. The web has a profound effect on how we live and work. As a OneWebDay partner, Mozilla and Mozilla Service Week want you to take action. Mozilla Service Week was created with the goal of helping not-for-profit organizations in need. OneWebDay is a great opportunity to extend those good deeds to anyone who could use a hand experiencing a better web. Everyone can help.”

Design Mozilla’s OneWebDay poster
The OneWebDay team is looking for help in designing Mozilla’s 2009 OneWebDay poster. Chelsea has posted instructions and further details on her weblog, including the deadline which is this Friday, Sep 11. “Not only will the winning design have the glory of having their art plastered all over cubicles, workspaces, local stores, coffee shops, community centres and libraries, but we’ll also send some Mozilla swag your way. Please help us out.”

Join our Test Pilot program
The Mozilla Labs Test Pilot project is launching its first test very soon, and we need more people to join the program and take part. The upcoming test is to understand user behaviors after opening or closing a tab. “Tabbed browsing is now the standard interface offered by all major web browsers, and it has been argued that the browsing experience becomes difficult to manage when more than a handful of tabs are opened.” For this study, you will contribute to the design of a key feature of Firefox, helping us determine the best default behavior for tabs. “When you interact with tabs, Test Pilot will automatically record what you do and when you do it. (It will not record which websites you visit.)” For more information and to get involved with this exciting new project, see the Mozilla Labs weblog.

Designing apps for mobile devices
“Designing a portable application to run on many different mobile devices is a challenge. Screen sizes and pixel densities are different, making it difficult to create the One Great Layout. In addition, mobile devices can change screen orientation, from portrait to landscape and back again.” Mark Finkle writes about how using a markup-based UI language like XUL, with it’s support for CSS, comes in handy in this situation. Fennec (Firefox Mobile) is being designed and tested to run on a wide variety of different devices, which include several screen sizes, pixel densities, and orientation requirements. “Layout support in XUL and media query support in CSS really do the heavy lifting for us. The Fennec UI is the same on all these devices, but we have some layout constraints and CSS rules that allow us to morph the UI as the screen changes.” Mark’s post continues on to explain how the team does this, and includes some code samples.

Fennec: API changes + add-on prefs
Some of the Mozilla platform APIs have been reimplemented for use with Fennec (Firefox Mobile). “There are times when the default platform behavior is not desirable on mobile devices. When that happens, we could hack up our own system, or we could re-implement the platform APIs to suit our needs. We try to do the latter.” Mark’s post talks about nsIAlertsService, nsIPromptService, nsIDownloadManagerUI, and window.openDialog(), all of which have been reimplmented for use in Fennec. Mark goes on to discuss add-on options handling in a follow up post, which also needs to be handled slightly differently in Firefox Mobile.

Building add-ons for Fennec
Fennec (Firefox Mobile) 1.0 is going to be released soon, and while there has been a lot of great testing and feedback, there’s one area where these are still lacking: add-on development for the mobile browser. “We need more developers working on Fennec add-ons. We have a small but growing collection of Fennec-specific add-on developer resources. These documents have been, and will continue to be updated. Fennec for Maemo and Fennec for Windows Mobile both support add-ons. In fact, the same add-on could be used on both platforms. So get out there and start building.”

Firefox: Helping users keep plugins updated
“Starting with the upcoming releases of Firefox 3.5.3 and Firefox 3.0.15, Mozilla will warn users if their version of the popular Adobe Flash Player plugin is out of date. Old versions of plugins can cause crashes and other stability problems, and can also be a significant security risk. For now our focus is on the Adobe Flash Player both because of its popularity and because some studies have shown that as many as 80% of users currently have an out of date version.” For further information about this new initiative, see the Mozilla Developer News weblog.

Chicago add-ons meetup: Sep 29
In addition to the upcoming meetup in Miami, Florida on September 15th, the Mozilla Add-ons team has announced another meetup that will take place in Chicago on September 29th. There’s no cost for these meetups and both will be packed with great sessions. Full details are available on the Mozilla wiki.

about:mozilla hiatus
This will be the last about:mozilla newsletter for two weeks, as publication will be halted while I’m on vacation. Regular weekly publishing will resume on September 29th, 2009.

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.

* Sep 10 – Online – Tbird 3 beta 4 test day
* Sep 11 – Online – OneWebDay poster design deadline
* Sept 14-21 – Everywhere! – Mozilla Service Week
* Sep 15 – Miami, FL – Add-ons meetup
* Sep 16 – Mountain View, CA – Firefox 3.6 live testing
* Sep 22 – Everywhere – One Web Day
* Sep 29 – Chicago, IL – Add-ons meetup
* Oct 2 – Everywhere! – Extend Firefox contest deadline
* Oct 3-4 – Prague – Mozilla Camp Europe
* Oct 15 – Everywhere! – Jetpack contest deadline
* Nov 7-8 – Sofia, Bulgaria – DevGarage

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.

If you would like to get this newsletter by email, just head on over to the about:mozilla newsletter subscription form. Fresh news, every Tuesday, right to your inbox.

• Two new Design Challenges
• New Mozilla.org website
• Mozilla Service Week: Sept 14-21
• Mozilla Drumbeat: topics, overview + forum
• Labs: TestSwarm alpha open
• New addons.mozilla.org updates
• Add-on development tutorials
• Mozilla add-ons meetup: Miami
• Weave 0.6 released
• Upcoming events
• Developer calendar
• About about:mozilla

Two new Design Challenges
The Mozilla Labs team has announced two new design challenges for the fall. The first is the University Design Challenge Fall ‘09, where the Labs team will be working with students specializing in User Experience and Human-Computer Interaction studies to develop concepts around the question: “Browsing and Search History — How can we make sense of this rich source of data and how do we best present this data to the user?” The second challenge will focus on the Weave Web UI, aiming to answer the question, “Visualizing your browser data — How can we provide intuitive and useful visual representations of your browser data on a web page?” For more information about the Design Challenges, see the Labs weblog.

New Mozilla.org website
The Mozilla.org website has been relaunched with an all new look and feel, overall structure, and an even deeper focus on community development and engagement. David Boswell, who led the project, writes, “This is the community’s site and it’s truly been a community effort to create a new look as well as a new vision. Many people were involved with the redesign, but several community members have been doing a lot of less-visible work (modernizing the server, dealing with abandoned content…).” The new site is just a beginning, and there’s always more work to do — if you would like to get involved and help work on the site, contact David through his weblog.

Mozilla Service Week: Sept 14-21
Mary Colvig writes, “We’re getting close to Mozilla Service Week! We’ve had over 6,200 hours pledged and over 2,200 volunteer opportunities posted. We’re in the process of rolling out action templates for Service Week and OneWebDay for those that would like to create their own opportunities or need a little more flexibility. They’re sets of actions and resources that you can use to help non-profits, organizations and individuals improve their experience online and allow them to better leverage the Web.” Check them out on Mary’s weblog.

Mozilla Drumbeat: topics, overview + forum
The Mozilla Drumbeat project is taking shape, and Mark Surman has posted a trio of articles about it, including a core concept and framework, possible topics to be covered, and an overview of the project as a whole. In addition to Mark’s slide deck, Drumbeat also now has a wiki and a mailing list that you are welcome to join. If you’re not sure what Drumbeat is all about, Mark suggests starting with his “I heart the open web” talk that he gave at this year’s OSCON.

Labs: TestSwarm alpha open
John Resig has been working on a new project called TestSwarm for the past six months, which he has now opened as a public alpha. TestSwarm “provides distributed continuous integration testing for JavaScript. The primary goal of TestSwarm is to take the complicated and time-consuming process of running JavaScript test suites in multiple browsers and to simplify it. It achieves this by providing all the tools necessary for creating a continuous integration workflow for your JavaScript project.” A walkthrough of the project is available as a screencast, and more information is available on John’s weblog and the TestSwarm site.

New addons.mozilla.org updates
The AMO team recently released a new version of the website with several new features and a host of bugfixes. Included are new Add-on Recommendations which matches and lists add-ons that are often grouped together in user-created Collections. The Contributions, Collections, and Statistics Dashboard features have received facelifts based on feedback from developers and users. Finally, there’s a new Add-on Validation suite — this new testing tool will automatically be run when a new add-on is uploaded to the site, with the hope that this will help developers catch common problems before add-ons are sent into the review queue. For information on all these new features and improvements, see Justin Scott’s blog post.

Add-on development tutorials
If you’ve never built an add-on but would like enter the Extend Firefox 3.5 add-on development contest, Rey Bango has posted a handful of extension development tutorials on his blog. Included are “How to develop a Firefox extension” by Robert Nyman, an “Extension Development 101” video, and an “Extension Bootcamp” presentation from earlier this year. “Don’t forget that we’ve created an Extend Firefox 3.5 discussion group to answer any questions you have about the contest.” The contest deadline is Oct 2, 2009.

Mozilla add-ons meetup: Miami
The Mozilla add-ons team has announced that they will be holding another meetup in Miami, FL on September 15, 2009. “If you’re in the South Florida area, this will be a great opportunity to get familiar with add-on development and have an opportunity to share your ideas with the AMO team.” The full event details are available on the Mozilla wiki.

Weave 0.6 released
The Mozilla Labs team has released Weave 0.6, a prototype add-on that “lets you securely take your Firefox experience with you to all your Firefox browsers, including our mobile browser, codenamed Fennec.” Weave currently supports continuous synchronization of your bookmarks, browsing history, saved passwords and tabs, and form-field history and preferences. To get more information about Weave and this latest release, see the announcement on the Mozilla Labs weblog.

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.

* Sep 4 – Online – Firefox 3.5 Testday
* Sep 15 – Miami, FL – Add-ons meetup
* Sept 14-21 – Everywhere! – Mozilla Service Week
* Fri, Oct 2 – Everywhere! – Extend Firefox contest deadline
* Oct 3-4 – Prague – Mozilla Camp Europe
* Oct 15 – Everywhere! – Jetpack contest deadline
* Nov 7-8 – Sofia, Bulgaria – DevGarage

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.

If you would like to get this newsletter by email, just head on over to the about:mozilla newsletter subscription form. Fresh news, every Tuesday, right to your inbox.

• Mozilla Creative Collective launches
• Mozilla Service Week: Act now!
• Extend Firefox 3.5 contest
• New Mozilla Labs website
• BBC experimenting with open video
• Web accessibility and CSS3 transforms
• Jetpack developer contest
• Fennec 1 beta 3 for Maemo
• AMO upcoming projects
• Multitouch in Firefox
• Firefox accelerometer support
• Mozilla Drumbeat
• Thunderbird 3 beta 4 schedule
• Proposed Microsoft-EC settlement
• Upcoming events
• Developer calendar
• About about:mozilla

Mozilla Creative Collective launches
John Slater and Tara Shahian have announced the launch of the new Mozilla Creative Collective (MCC). “Building communities is a big part of what Mozilla is all about and key to our success as an organization. We have dedicated communities that contribute to nearly every aspect of Mozilla — from software development, to extensions, to localization, to marketing, and more — but an idea that’s traditionally lacked an organized community is visual design. And because art is such a powerful form of communication, we’re harnessing that with the Creative Collective.”

On the Mozilla Creative Collective website, users can create profiles, share their visual design work in a public gallery, mark various designs and artists as favorites, earn achievement badges, connect and collaborate with others from around the world, and much more.

The Creative Collective is also working with the Mozilla Service Week team on a Design Challenge. “We’re hoping your creativity and artistic skills can help inspire action and ultimately better the Web experience for people and organizations around the world.” The Design Challenge announcement has some ideas to spark your creativity and all the information you need to get involved now.

Mozilla Service Week: Act now!
Mozilla Service Week — a week during which the Mozilla Community is rallying to donate their time and skills to help change people’s lives and make the Web better for everyone — is taking place Sept 14-21 and coming up soon! Mary Colvig, the organizer and driving force behind the project, has written up a quick guide to what you can do right now to get involved and get started, including: register for the event, pledge some hours, share your story, blog, tweet, invite your friends to the Facebook event, put an affiliate button on your weblog, and more. If you’ve ever wanted to get involved with the Mozilla project or give back to the community and support the open web, Service Week is a perfect opportunity. Check out the site and get involved today.

Extend Firefox 3.5 contest!
The Extend Firefox contest is back, challenging developers to make the next great web experience. The contest awards prizes for developing new Firefox add-ons for the latest production release of Firefox. Last year’s contest received over 100 submissions and, with Firefox 3.5 raising the bar in terms of features, you can expect this year’s competition to be intense. For more information, see the original Extend Firefox 3.5 contest announcement. The contest is currently open and runs through October 2nd, 2009.

New Mozilla Labs website
Mozilla Labs unveiled a new website last week, including a whole new look and feel and new independent sites for each active Labs project. It’s easier than ever to stay up to date on Labs development, get involved with the projects, contribute to the design discussions, and participate by writing patches, doing testing, or helping with documentation. Mozilla Labs is always working on new and innovative projects, and is a fantastic way to get involved with the Mozilla project.

BBC experimenting with open video
The Mozilla Hacks team reports, “The BBC has a post up describing an experiment that they have put together that uses HTML5 video that works in Firefox 3.5 and Safari. The demo uses jQuery and drives a simple carousel that shows the current chapter as the video plays. It also shows subtitles as the video plays.”

Web accessibility and CSS3 transforms
Marco Zehe, part of the Mozilla Accessibility team, has posted an interesting fact about CSS3 transforms. “If you’re one of those people who likes to visually twist, rotate or tweak some text, in previous years the only real choice was to use pictures to achieve such visual effects. However, thanks to CSS3 transforms — supported in Firefox 3.5, Safari 3, and Opera 10 beta — it is now possible to use plain text and rotate, twist and tweak its looks via CSS. The big advantage: Screen readers will still read the text OK because their reading order is not influenced by the visual appearance of the text. So even text rotated by 45 or 90 degrees will appear correctly in a screen reader’s virtual buffer.”

Jetpack developer contest
Mozilla Labs is hosting a new developer contest, this time focused on the Jetpack project. “Jetpack is an experiment in using open Web technologies to enhance the browser, with the goal of allowing anyone who can build a Web site to participate. In preparation for the [upcoming 0.5] release, we are launching a Jetpack contest. For making the coolest or most interesting Jetpack, we are offering a brand new netbook (the ASUS Eee PC 1000HE). For the runner-up, we’ll send you a big package of Mozilla swag.” For more information about the upcoming Jetpack release, the contest, and how to get involved, see the contest announcement over at Mozilla Labs.

Fennec 1 beta 3 for Maemo
The Firefox Mobile team has announced the release of Fennec beta 3 for Maemo. “This release features major improvements to performance and a fancy new theme. We’ve made big improvements to kinetic panning and added the ability to scroll iframes. A lot of work has been done to make the theme more robust, taking advantage of things like media queries to support various devices, orientations, and platforms which you’ll see more of in the next Windows Mobile release.” In addition to the Maemo build, you can also download desktop builds for Windows, Mac, and Linux. If you would like to see some screenshots, Madhava Enros has put together a slideshow over on his weblog.

AMO upcoming projects
The addons.mozilla.org (AMO) team has been hard at work cranking out features like Collections and Contributions, and they have now posted about some upcoming projects. These include Collections Phase II, a new Add-on Developer Hub, Disclosure of add-on practices, and an Add-on compatibility reporter. For more information about these projects and more, see the AMO weblog.

Multitouch in Firefox
Felipe Gomes has posted an article, including a video, demonstrating the progress he’s made on developing multitouch support for Firefox during his summer internship here at Mozilla. “We’re working on exposing the multitouch data from the system to regular web pages through DOM Events, and all of these demos are built on top of that. They are simple HTML pages that receive events for each touch point and use them to build a custom multitouch experience.” Read more about Filipe’s amazing work, view the video demonstration, and see an API example over at his weblog.

Firefox accelerometer support
Doug Turner has recently added support for an orientation event to recent trunk builds of Gecko. “This new event will allow you to build applications and listen for changes in orientation.” This takes advantage of accelerometers that are a feature of many modern devices. “Right now, there is only support for the Macbook Pro. It is pretty easy to add support for different OSs. We have code for Samsung Windows Mobile devices, and for the HTC Windows Mobile devices. We still need support for Linux and for Windows. If you are interested in adding support, file a bug and start looking at the code. The API isn’t fixed and may change.”

Mozilla Drumbeat
Mark Surman has posted about the feedback and discussions around the “next million Mozillians” thread that he started last month. “Some are saying: ‘let’s clarify and communicate what we’re actually trying to achieve here.’ The best clarification so far: ‘we’re starting a drumbeat for the open web.’ Based on this, I am proposing we use ‘Drumbeat’ as an umbrella code name for the collection of new community engagement ideas being developed.” Mark has also posted the first of a series of follow-up articles around the “Drumbeat” theme.

Everyone is encouraged to read through these posts (and the “next million Mozillians” posts before them) and take part in the developing conversation. This is an essential part of the evolution of the Mozilla project, and having more people help guide and shape that future is critical for its success.

Proposed Microsoft-EC settlement
Mitchell Baker and Harvey Anderson have both posted their reactions to Microsoft’s proposed settlement in the European Commission’s tying investigation. “Asa Dotzler did an evaluation of the proposal, noting both items that appear promising and those that appear weak. In all things the implementation details — all the way to the most mind-numbing level of specificity — will have an immense impact on the proposal’s effectiveness, so we’ll have to wait and see what those details turn out to be.” Mitchell goes on to outline a few aspects where the proposal could use improvement.

“The overall point that may get lost is that — even if everything in the proposed settlement is implemented in the most positive way — IE will still have a unique and uniquely privileged position on Windows installations.” For more, see Mitchell’s and Harvey’s weblogs.

Thunderbird 3 beta 4 schedule
The Thunderbird development team has posted the freeze schedule for the upcoming Thunderbird 3 beta 4 release. “We’ve still got a lot of blockers in the list, some of them are currently un-owned. If you wish to write a patch for a bug please do so. If you can, help out with bug triage, writing test cases and test days. See the QA page for more information.” The team is also working on their documentation, and point you to Jen’s blog to find out how you can help.

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.

* Thu, Aug 27 – Mountain View – Labs Night
* Fri, Sep 4 – Online – Firefox 3.5 Testday
* Sept 14-21 – Everywhere! – Mozilla Service Week
* Fri, Oct 2 – Everywhere! – Extend Firefox contest deadline
* Oct 3-4 – Prague – Mozilla Camp Europe
* Oct 15 – Everywhere! – Jetpack contest deadline
* Nov 7-8 – Sofia, Bulgaria – DevGarage

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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