about:mozilla » Firefox development

Localization schedule for Firefox 3.1 beta 2

deb — Mon, 20 Oct 2008 17:48:08 +0000

Seth Bindernagel has posted the localization schedule for Firefox 3.1 beta 2. The string freeze is going to be on Thursday, October 30 at 11:59pm (Mountain View time), which is just over two weeks from now. Code freeze will be Tuesday, November 4 at 11:59pm (Mountain View time). If you did not make Firefox 3.1 beta 1, we would love for you to participate in this next beta release. We have a goal of releasing a fully localized beta, so please let us know what we can do to help you get into the second beta. For more information and links to the localization team tools, please see Seth’s weblog post.

Clearing up confusion about Geolocation in Firefox 3.1 beta 1

deb — Mon, 20 Oct 2008 16:30:56 +0000

Chris Blizzard has written a post that tries to clear up some of the confusion that has emerged around the Geolocation functionality that is included in Firefox 3.1 beta 1. The three points he covers are: First, out of the box, Firefox 3.1 beta 1 doesn’t include any back-end providers of location information; Second, we don’t know what we’re going to include with Firefox 3.1 for location information; Third, the browser is providing location information, not information about where you live. Blizzard’s blog post goes into detail on each of these points and is worth a read if you’re unclear about the Geolocation feature as it currently exists in Firefox 3.1 beta 1.

Add-on developers: It’s that time again

deb — Mon, 20 Oct 2008 16:25:16 +0000

Justin Scott writes, “With the release of the first beta of Firefox 3.1 comes everyone’s favorite release-time festivity: extension compatibility updates! If you’re an extension developer using a maxVersion of 3.0.* or less, please test your extension before declaring 3.1b1 compatibility. Some of the changes for extension developers are listed [at the Mozilla Developer Center]. 3.1.b1 is an allowed version on AMO, but 3.1.* will not be added until closer to final release. Keep in mind that you can always look at the Developer Statistics Dashboard to see how many of your users are on 3.1 betas and may be marked as incompatible/disabled.” For more information you should check out Justin’s blog post.

Firefox 3.1 beta 1 now available

deb — Mon, 20 Oct 2008 16:18:50 +0000

Firefox 3.1 beta 1 is now available for download. This milestone is focused on testing the core functionality provided by many new features and changes to the platform that are scheduled for Firefox 3.1. Ongoing planning for this release can be followed at the Planning Center, as well as in the mozilla.dev.planning discussion group, and on IRC in the #shiretoko channel.

New features and changes in this release include: web standards improvements, added support for CSS 2.1 and CSS 3, a new tab-switching shortcut that shows previews of the tab you’re switching to, improved control over the Smart Location Bar, support for the new video and audio elements, the addition of the W3C Geolocation API, JavaScript query selectors, web worker threads, SVG transforms, and improved support for offline applications.

More information about these features are available in several places including the Mozilla Developer Center’s Firefox 3.1 for Developers article, and in the Web Tech blog’s Overview of features for Web Developers post.

The vision for SUMO – Part 8: Live Chat

deb — Mon, 06 Oct 2008 13:45:21 +0000

David Tenser has published an extensive series of blog posts where he has been discussing a comprehensive vision for the scope and role of the Support.mozilla.org (SUMO) project. He has recently published the eighth and final post in the series, this one focused on the innovative and incredibly useful “Live Chat” feature. “If a problem isn’t yet covered in the Knowledge Base, or if the instructions in the article are too hard to understand, Live Chat is a powerful way for users to get in touch with Firefox experts and get hands-on assistance in solving their problems. Live Chat can also be a very fun way for contributors to provide support. Contributors helping out with Live Chat don’t just help users, they talk to each other in the backchannel as well, providing assitance to other helpers whenever needed. This means that although you’re usually the only one interacting with the user you’re helping, you’re never alone.”

David’s blog post goes on to discuss some potential future improvements for the service, including a fully integrated chat client, a simple scheduling solution, support for languages other than English, and automatically saving chat logs and associated user happiness ratings, among other things. If you’re interested in the Live Chat feature of the SUMO project and would like to see how the team is thinking about improving it in the future, read the full post over at the Firefox Support Blog.

More visibility into the Localization drivers

deb — Mon, 22 Sep 2008 15:16:44 +0000

Seth Bindernagel, Mozilla’s Director of Localization, recently blogged about some steps the Localization Drivers team is taking to increase the visibility of localization activities and improve project communications. The two primary tools they’re using are the Localization Dashboard and the team’s new weekly triage meetings where they ensure that high priority issues are dealt with quickly. Additionally, the team has created a new Firefox 3 l10n release trackers bug, and are working to make it easier for new localization teams to navigate through the early stages of our process. The results of some of these efforts are clear, as Seth announces that there are likely to be 13 more languages added to Firefox in the 3.0.2 and 3.0.3 releases, which is a huge accomplishment in the span of two minor updates. For more about Mozilla’s localization work, see Seth’s full blog post.

SVG effects for HTML content

deb — Mon, 22 Sep 2008 15:15:02 +0000

Robert O’Callahan has been working on adding features to Firefox that allow SVG effects to be applied to HTML content. He originally posted about this work back in June, discussing his experiments with making SVG’s “clip-path”, “mask”, and “filter” properties work when applied to HTML content. Last week Robert announced that this work has been added to the main Mozilla code base, and further that he has submitted his proposal to the SVG working group for standardization. For more information about these new features, including screenshots of them in action and working demos, see Robert’s post on the Web Tech weblog.

Color profile support changes

deb — Fri, 19 Sep 2008 15:56:45 +0000

Bobby Holley has been refining Mozilla’s color management backend, working to improve performance and polish the feature so it’s ready for “prime time”. These efforts have clearly paid off, as color profile support has now been turned on by default for tagged images in the latest Firefox nightly builds. In this context, “tagged images” are any images displayed in the web browser that have an embedded ICC color profile — in other words, images that contain the information needed to do a specific and accurate color transformation. Bobby’s post goes into all the technical aspects of these changes in detail, and also discusses why color management hasn’t been enabled for everything at this time. Percy Cabello has also posted about these changes over at Mozilla Links.

CSS transforms

deb — Fri, 19 Sep 2008 15:54:17 +0000

The folks over at the Web Tech weblog have posted that Gecko (Mozilla’s layout engine) nightly builds now support a new “-moz-transform” CSS property. This property — a version of which is similarly supported by WebKit — is described as a “CSS property that accepts a list of transform functions (generic affine linear transforms) and then applies those transforms, in order, to the HTML elements the property is applied to.” Several examples of how to use the property (and descriptions of what it does) are available in the Web Tech post. “It will be interesting to see what uses developers find for CSS transforms. Much of the functionality once reserved for plugins can now be directly integrated into CSS and JavaScript.” More information and code samples are available in the Web Tech article.

nsITraceableChannel, Intercept HTTP traffic

deb — Fri, 19 Sep 2008 15:52:00 +0000

Jan Odvarko writes, “Since bug 430155 (”new nsHttpChannel interface to allow examination of HTTP data before it is passed to the channel’s creator”) is now fixed, it’s possible to intercept HTTP traffic from within a Firefox extension!” Jan estimates that this fix will be part of Firefox 3.0.3, and points out that this feature is crucial for Firebug as one of that add-on’s features is the ability to display the response of any HTTP request made by a page. To this point, Firebug has been making use of the Firefox cache and XHR monitoring to implement this feature, but there are several issues with this approach that make it suboptimal. For more information about this new feature, including examples of how to make use of it in Firefox add-ons, read Jan’s article at his Software is hard weblog.