The Mozilla Blog

The Mozlla mobile team has released Fennec 1.0 beta 4 for Maemo. This release brings noticeable improvements the user experience and UI of the browser. Specifically you’ll see:

• Improved touch-friendly theme
• Improved panning and zooming performance and behavior
• Add search providers from the site identity panel
• Manage search providers from the Add-ons Manager
• Simplified the Download Manager (removed searching and find file on disk)
• Streamlined the bookmarking process
• Simplified the bookmark management
• Popup notification when background tabs open
• Bookmark list now displays the URL and tags associated with a bookmark
• Added a product information page (about:fennec or use the button in Preferences)
• Support for add-ons options in the Add-on Manager
• Support for updating add-ons
• Support for the HandheldFriendly meta-tag (support for the viewport meta-tag is coming)

You can find more information on Mark Finkle’s blog, Mozilla’s mobile developer and platform evangelist.  The team has also spent time making sure Fennec runs well on Nokia’s N900 device.

Today the Snowl team released Snowl 0.3, the third major release of the messaging-in-the-browser experiment. The 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.

Visit the announcement blog post to see the Snowl discussion group, or join them for discussion in the #labs IRC channel on irc.mozilla.org.

Recently the Personas team has welcomed seven new exciting designers to the community, including Bob Marley, Project Runway (Lifetime Entertainment), Fame (MGM), Lilly Pulitzer, H&M and Yoga Journal. Each design is now available on the Personas gallery. To learn more, see the Mozilla Labs blog post and see these exciting new designs.

You can also click here for a tutorial on how to create a Persona design, and join the discussion how to make the process better.

Editor’s note: Mozilla released a security and stability update for Firefox 3.5.x and 3.0.x users on Wednesday, September 9, 2009 at 3:011 pm PT. Check out the Mozilla Developer News announcement, reposted below, for more details.

As part of Mozilla’s ongoing stability and security update process, Firefox 3.5.3 and Firefox 3.0.14 are now available for Windows, Mac, and Linux as free downloads:

• Firefox 3.5.3 is available at http://firefox.com/
• Firefox 3.0.14 is available at http://www.mozilla.com/firefox/all-older.html

We strongly recommend that all Firefox users upgrade to this latest release. If you already have Firefox 3.5 or 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 review the Firefox 3.5.3 Release Notes and the Firefox 3.0.14 Release Notes.

Note: All Firefox 3.0.x users are encouraged to upgrade to Firefox 3.5.3 by downloading it from http://firefox.com/ or by selecting “Check for Updates…” from the Help menu.

Today the Mozilla mobile team announced the availability of Fennec Alpha 3 for Windows Mobile. The release brings lots of great features and fixes, including improved start time, panning, compositor work, and support for a wider range of screen resolutions. For more details, see Brad Lassey’s blog post, excerpted below, or see the release notes or a cab installer here.

The first thing you’ll notice is the improved start up time. Brian Crowder took Vladimir Vukicevic’s original dabblings for Firefox on Windows CE and produced a cross platform fast start daemon for Mozilla… One caveat is that this faster start up time doesn’t take effect until after you reboot your phone (hey, this is Windows after all).

The next thing you’ll probably notice is the much improved panning. We’ve implemented a tile cache rendering system (much like you see on Google maps) that allows us to cache previously rendered content and avoid duplicating the work.  This has also allowed us to switch over to native scrolling surfaces which has greatly improved panning performance. Roy Frostig goes into much greater detail on this in his blog post on the tile cache.

Also helping out panning performance has been Robert O’Callahan’s compositor work, which reduces the amount of native widgets we have to deal with when rendering or scrolling and a change to keep track of the invalidated regions ourselves rather than rely on the system do it.

As for what’s next, Brad notes:

There is plenty more work to do (after all this is an Alpha release), but in writing this blog post I realize just how much progress we’ve made since Alpha 2. I hope you’ll give it a try, put it through its paces and enjoy. Oh, and file bug reports.

The Add-ons team is hosting a meetup in Chicago, IL on September 29th! For more details, see the AMO blog post, cross-posted below:

If you’re in Chi-town, this will be a great opportunity to get to familiar with add-on development and have an opportunity to share your ideas with the AMO team.

The full details of the event are up on the Mozilla wiki:

Mozilla Add-ons Meetup: Chicago, IL – Sept. 29th 6-9PM EST

There’s no cost for the meetup and it will be packed with great sessions. Look forward to seeing you there!

The Mozilla Labs team today announced two new design challenges for the fall, via the Mozilla Labs blog.

The first is the University Design Challenge Fall ‘09. For this challenge, the team will  work together with students from universities and schools specializing in User Experience and Human-Computer-Interaction studies around the world to find innovative concepts to 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?”

Over the course of 10 weeks, students will work together in teams, with each university deploying a different solution approach — from a semester-long integration of the Design Challenge into the course to shorter Design Sprints and high-energy 24 hour Design Jams. For more information visit Mozilla Labs, here.

The  second design challenge will focus on Weave Web UI, and will aim to answer the question: “Visualizing your browser data – How can we provide intuitive and useful visual representations of your browser data (such as your contacts, bookmarks, browsing and search history, tabs, stored credentials etc.) on a web page?”

The Labs team, together with IxDA, a network dedicated to the professional practice of Interaction Design and Johnny Holland, an open collective, talking, sharing and finding answers about all aspects of interaction design, will invite the wider community to join them in this challenge to develop concepts and submit them to their site.  The full design brief and background information can be found here.

For more information see the Mozilla Labs blog post and learn how you can get involved!

The Mozilla Add-ons team has release AMO 5.0.9, with updates to Recommendations, Collections, and Contributions! For more information, read the AMO blog post, excerpted below:

Add-on Recommendations

Some things go great together: peanut butter and jelly, popcorn and movies, Firebug and YSlow. Starting today, when you’re looking at an add-on’s listing, you’ll see several other add-ons that are often used together. We base these recommendations on the add-ons our users have grouped together in collections.

Contributions

Last month we launched our Contributions pilot, a way for add-on authors to accept monetary donations from users of their add-ons. We’ve gotten great feedback from users and developers, and are now expanding the reach of contributions on AMO. Add-ons that have turned on Contributions will now have contribution boxes in search results and category browse listings, where many installations take place.

While these new boxes help surface the existence of contributions, some users aren’t likely to make a donation without first testing the add-on to ensure it’s useful to them. With this release, developers have a new way to accept donations after a user has tried the add-on by simply pointing users to their add-on’s new about page.

Collections

Since the launch of Collections in June, add-on fans have created almost 30,000 collections, resulting in more than 6.5 million add-on downloads. This release includes many new features to make Collections even more useful.

Logged-in users can now rate collections and sort by those ratings to help the best collections bubble to the top.

To help determine the popularity of a collection, authors can now access a collection statistics dashboard that shows information on the number of subscribers, ratings, and downloads over time.

We’ve also added a treat for users of browsers that support localStorage (including Firefox 3.5): recently viewed collections. When browsing through the collection directory, users can now easily get back to a collection they saw, without having to log in.

Public Stats

In early 2008, we gave add-on developers their first look at the shiny new Statistics Dashboard for each add-on hosted on AMO. Currently some dashboards are public and some are private, but we’ve never offered an in-depth look at the aggregate statistics for all add-ons hosted on AMO.
Today we’ve launched a detailed view of AMO as a whole, with data on add-ons, downloads, active users, users, reviews, and collections. Go on, check it out!

Add-on Validation

Earlier this month, we announced the arrival of the new add-on verification suite on AMO. At the time it was an optional tool developers could choose to run for their files. With this release, the tool will automatically be run when uploading a new file, and the results of the tests will affect the submission process. Editors will see the test results and any flags when reviewing the add-on. We hope to help developers catch common problems before an editor’s review.

Today the Mozilla mobile team announced the release of Fennec 1.0 Beta 3 for Maemo!   Stuart Parmenter, Mozilla’s director of mobile engineering, explains more about the exciting new features and improvements to performance in his blog post, excerpted below.

We’ve made big improvements to kinetic panning and added the ability to scroll iframes.  A lot of work has been done to make our 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.  Overall, this beta is a major improvement to previous Fennec betas.

Moving forward, we’re going to focus on fixing polish bugs, rough edges, and taking advantage of things like our new tile system to help avoid the user seeing a checkerboard while panning.

For more information, check out the developer release notes.

Editor’s note: Mozilla released a major update for Firefox 3.0.x users on Thursday, August 13th, 2009. Check out the Mozilla Developer News announcement, reposted below, for more details.

Users with the latest version of Firefox 3 will be getting an offer to update to Firefox 3.5. If you’re running Firefox 3.0.13 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 “Upgrade to Firefox 3.5″ link will open a new tab with more information about Firefox 3.5 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!

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 3.5!

Now, although over 90% of Firefox add-ons have been updated to be compatible with Firefox 3.5, 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 3.5 first in order to check. If you continue with the update process, when Firefox 3.5 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 3.5. If there is, you’ll see the following:

You’ll want to Install Now which will fetch the update and then continue loading Firefox 3.5.

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.firefox.com and click on “Other Languages and Systems”, and click on the link to download an older version of Firefox.