The Mozilla Blog

Editor’s Note: Today we bring you a guest post from Felipe Gomes of Brazil, a winner of the Extend Firefox 3 contest.  Felipe is a newer, but very active Mozilla contributor. We asked him to share how he came to be involved with Mozilla.  Congrats again and thanks for all of your hard work, Felipe!

Hi all!  I’m Felipe Gomes, a computer science student from Brazil. As a geek, I’ve always appreciated and believed in open-source, and have tried to get more involved since going to college.  I began using Firefox add-ons when I started with web development, and that led me to learn more about the technologies behind Firefox and its platform. I learned XUL and JavaScript by reading, practicing and trying to run random ideas and experiments in the browser.

I had been following the Mozilla project for a while, but discovered how fruitful it is to be an active member earlier this year when I joined the Brazilian community.  I discovered that there are many passionate members all over the world who love Firefox and want to promote the culture and the browser, regardless of their city or country.  I’ve had the opportunity to interact with many community members this year when I gave talks about XUL and add-ons development.

It’s been very fun and rewarding to be involved.  During the frenzy of the Firefox 3 launch, I created a Download Day Countdown add-on, helped spread the World Record in Brazil and organize our local launch party! I also had the opportunity to work on the programming side, when I did some Processing.js demos and, more recently, submitted an add-on to the Extend Firefox contest.

I got involved with the Extend Firefox contest because when the betas came out it was clear that the browser was growing to a whole new level. There was just so much potential to explore in basically every aspect of the browser. And the Extend Firefox 3 contest was the perfect fit, encouraging developers to leverage the new potential that Firefox 3 brings.

To be one of the contest winners was a very special moment for me, and an honor, especially because of the number of great extensions that were submitted and chosen (I’m already using many of them!). The great responses, comments and suggestions that people have been sending in the last week made me realize that when you have an idea that you believe in, you really should work on it. Turns out, other people might like it and believe in your idea as much as as you do!

I’d like to thank all the nice people I got in touch with this year in Mozilla Brazil and the greater community: Marcio, Mario, Clauber, Fernando, Andrea, Mary and Chris. And congratulations to every developer who joined the contest! Let’s keep spreading the love for Firefox!

Editor’s note: Mozilla announced that Firefox 2 will get a major update on Monday, August 25, 2008 at 6:10 pm PST. See Mike Beltzner’s comprehensive post on Mozilla Developer News, crossposted below.

Starting a little later tonight, users with the latest version of Firefox 2 will be getting an offer to update to Firefox 3. If you’re running Firefox 2.0.0.17 you will see the offer in the next couple of days, though if you’re eager you can always “Check for Updates” in the “Help” menu. This is what the offer will look like:

Clicking the “Learn More” link will open a new tab with more information about Firefox 3 to help you make your decision about upgrading. From there, you have a choice:

• select Later if you don’t want to decide now; Firefox will ask again in 24 hours
• select Never if you don’t want to accept this upgrade offer; we might send you another offer again in the future, but it won’t be for several weeks or months
• select Get the new version to continue on with the upgrade process!

Some of the updated features in Firefox 3 – like malware protection – required us to update our End User License Agreement (EULA), so we have to ask you to accept the new one:

Once you’ve accepted that, Firefox will download and install the update, then offer to restart the browser. When you restart, you’ll be rolling with Firefox 3!

Now, although over 90% of Firefox Add-Ons have been updated to be compatible with Firefox 3, in some cases the authors have created entirely new versions. If that happens with your favorite Add-On, you might see the following screen:

You can see exactly which Add-Ons are being flagged as potentially incompatible by clicking on Show List. As mentioned above, for most popular Add-Ons, there probably is an update available, but you’ll need to install Firefox 3 first in order to check. If you continue with the update process, when Firefox 3 starts up for the first time you’ll see the following screen:

By all means, Check Now to see if there’s a version of that Add-On which works with Firefox 3. If there is, you’ll see the following:

You’ll want to Install Now which will fetch the update and then continue loading Firefox 3.

If an update isn’t available, Firefox will check every day and let you know once the Add-On author has created one. If you’ve come this far and decide that you can’t live without your favorite Add-On, you can always go to www.getfirefox.com and click on “Other Languages and Systems”, and click on the link to download an older version of Firefox.

Note: Please do not link directly to the update site. Instead we strongly encourage you to link to this announcement so that everyone will know what this milestone is, what they should expect, and who should be downloading to participate in testing at this stage of development.

Editor’s note: Mozilla announced the Mozilla Labs Concept Series on Monday, August 4, 2008.  See Chris Beard’s comprehensive post on the Mozilla Labs blog, excerpted here:

The concept series is a new initiative by Mozilla Labs to make it easy to contribute to the development of the online experience.  You don’t have to be a software engineer to get involved, and you don’t have to know how to program computers.  Everyone is welcome to participate.  We’re particularly interested in engaging with designers who have not typically been involved with open source projects.  And we’re biasing towards broad participation, not finished implementations.

We’re hoping to lower the barrier to participation by providing a forum for surfacing, sharing, and collaborating on new ideas and concepts. Our goal is to bring even more people to the table and provoke thought, facilitate discussion, and inspire future design directions for Firefox, the Mozilla project, and the Web as a whole.

Three inaugural concepts have been launched – the  Aurora Concept Video, Bookmarking and History Concept Video, and the Firefox Mobile Concept Video – with the intent to not evolve directly into new products, but rather to provoke thought, facilitate discussion and provide inspiration to a global community in an open design process.

Everyone is welcome to participate!  Have ideas on how to make the Web a better place?  Submit your ideas, sketches, or videos!