In this issue…

• 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.

In this issue…

• 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.