The Mozilla Blog

Tonight we unveiled a new design for Spread Firefox, Mozilla’s community marketing home. With the new layout and design, we’re striving to make the site more engaging and reflective of the great personalities behind Firefox grassroots marketing. The inspiration behind the design is a community bulletin board, appropriately! At the same time, we’re trying to make it more straightforward for users to figure out what to do and where to go next when they come to the site. Here’s a recap of the major improvements.

This was a massive group effort and a huge thanks is owed to:

• Alex Buchanan
• Jamey Boje
• Stephen Donner
• Krupa Raj
• Akash Desai
• Paul Booker
• Otto de Voogd
• Lucy Connor
• Alix Franquet
• Neil Lee
• Ken Saunders
• Paul Kim
• Jay Patel
• Aravind Gottipati
• Matthew Zeier
• Jeremy Orem
  
• The Royal Order (our designers!)

Do you want to help too? Here’s how:

• Join Spread Firefox or get your friends to
• Start or contribute to a project
• Become a Spread Firefox affiliate
• Join the Spread Firefox team list for updates and opportunities to help with the site

Enjoy and stay tuned for opportunities to participate in the Firefox 3.5 launch on Spread Firefox!

Editor’s note: Mozilla released Firefox 3.5 beta 4 on Monday, April 27, 2009 at 5:22 pm PT. Check out the Mozilla Developer News announcement reposted below for more details.

Please note: Firefox 3.5 Beta 4 is a public preview release intended for developer testing and community feedback. It includes many new features as well as improvements to performance, web compatibility, and speed. We recommend that you read the release notes and known issues before installing this beta.

Firefox 3.5 (formerly known as Firefox 3.1) Beta 4 is now available for download. This milestone is focused on testing the core functionality provided by many new features and changes to the platform scheduled for Firefox 3.5. Ongoing planning for Firefox 3.1 can be followed at the Firefox 3.5 Planning Center, as well as in mozilla.dev.planning and on irc.mozilla.org in #shiretoko.

New features and changes in this milestone that require feedback include:

* This beta is now available in 70 languages – get your local version.

* Improved tools for controlling your private data, including a Private Browsing Mode.

* Better performance and stability with the new TraceMonkey JavaScript engine.

* The ability to provide Location Aware Browsing using web standards for geolocation.

* Support for native JSON, and web worker threads.

* Improvements to the Gecko layout engine, including speculative parsing for faster content rendering.

* Support for new web technologies such as: HTML5 and elements, downloadable fonts and other new CSS properties, JavaScript query selectors, HTML5 offline data storage for applications, and SVG transforms.

Testers can download Firefox 3.5 Beta 4 builds for Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux in 64 different languages. Developers should also read the Firefox 3.5 for Developers article on the Mozilla Developer Center.

Note: Please do not link directly to the download site. Instead we strongly encourage you to link to this Firefox 3.5 Beta 4 milestone 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 released a security and stability update for Firefox 3.x users on Monday, April 27, 2009 at 3:05 pm PT. Check out the Mozilla Developer News announcement, reposted below, for more details.

As part of the Mozilla Corporation’s ongoing security and stability process, Firefox 3.0.10 is now available for Windows, Mac, and Linux users as a free download from getfirefox.com.

We strongly recommend that all Firefox users upgrade to this latest release. If you already have Firefox 3, 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 3.0.10 release notes.

Please note: If you’re still using Firefox 2.0.0.x, this version is no longer supported and contains known security vulnerabilities. Please upgrade to Firefox 3 by downloading Firefox 3.0.10 from getfirefox.com.

Editor’s note: Mozilla released a security and stability update for Firefox 3.x users on Tuesday, April 21, 2009 at 7:08 pm PT. Check out the Mozilla Developer News announcement, reposted below, for more details.

As part of the Mozilla Corporation’s ongoing security and stability process, Firefox 3.0.9 is now available for Windows, Mac, and Linux users as a free download from getfirefox.com.

We strongly recommend that all Firefox users upgrade to this latest release. If you already have Firefox 3, 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 3.0.9 release notes.

Please note: If you’re still using Firefox 2.0.0.x, this version is no longer supported and contains known security vulnerabilities. Please upgrade to Firefox 3 by downloading Firefox 3.0.9 from getfirefox.com.

Getting help when you have a problem with your browser is great. Getting this help from a community of volunteers around the world is Mozilla!

Earlier this week, we launched version 1.0 of Mozilla’s community support project called SUMO — this is the project behind the popular support site Firefox Support. Driven by the Mozilla community, SUMO has already made a big difference to Firefox users around the world.

Currently, support.mozilla.com answers approximately 2,000 users’ questions every week through the Support Forum and Live Chat features. And over 1,000 users per day are reporting that the Knowledge Base solved their problem.

What makes this all the more interesting is that all the answers in the forum and Live Chat are provided by Mozilla volunteers. These people are passionate about the Mozilla project and the Firefox browser, and are not paid customer support agents — which is very different to a traditional support helpdesk. All translations for Knowledge Base articles are provided by volunteers, making SUMO a global support site.

Version 1.0 of SUMO includes improvements to localization, which will allow more volunteers to get involved, helping translation of support articles and ultimately, solving more user problems.

SUMO aims to create a centralized support channel, and has initially focused on supporting the Firefox browser. However, the platform is designed to be used by other Mozilla projects, and other community-driven software projects in the future.

Aside from support.mozilla.com, there are also a number of independent community sites around the world dedicated to supporting Mozilla’s products, for example Gecko Zone, Mozilla Hispano and Mozilla Italia.

Check out the SUMO blog for the full story and the road to SUMO 1.0 — and please visit http://support.mozilla.com/ to give us your feedback, get support or to provide support for other Firefox users!