The Mozilla Blog

We are excited to launch Rock Your Firefox today as a place where Firefox users can learn how to customize their Web experience and discover cool new add-ons.

The first add-on featured on Rock Your Firefox is Yoono, the most popular social networking add-on that nearly 4 million people use today. Yoono is a cool sidebar that integrates all of your social networks and displays them in one stream.  There are thousands of Firefox Add-ons to choose from and hundreds of millions of people worldwide have already downloaded nearly 2 billion add-ons.

Get ready to Rock Your Firefox every Monday, Wednesday and Friday to see what Firefox Add-on is featured next!

Editor’s note: On Feb 5, Mozilla Labs released new Weave Sync APIs and resources for developers. For more details, check out Ragavan Srinivasan’s blog announcement, reposted below.

Last week we announced that the Weave Sync add-on for Firefox is now generally available to seamlessly bridge your desktop and mobile Firefox experiences.

Using this free browser add-on from Mozilla Labs, you can use secure mechanisms to access all of your personal data (including your bookmarks, saved passwords, browsing history, and open browser tabs) across all of your supported devices, making your Web experience instantly more personal and useful.  And all of your data is encrypted end-to-end to help ensure your privacy.

This week we’re launching the first set of developer resources including Weave Sync & User APIs, documentation, and Python & Javascript client libraries — to increase the number of places where you can securely access, and have your personal data readily available to you, independent of whether or not Firefox is available.

This first set of APIs focuses on enabling Weave clients to provide user’s access to their stored data from other devices and environments.

Future APIs will provide third-party web sites and applications the ability to request permission and obtain explicit access only to specific user data to augment a users’ Web experience, e.g. providing personalized recommendations based upon a user’s bookmarks or search history.

We’re also releasing a number of early prototypes and sample code that have been developed alongside the Weave APIs, including:

• Web-based Weave client: A complete Weave data viewer implemented in Javascript.
  
• iPhone Weave client: A complete Weave data viewer on the iPhone, including support for a Firefox-like URL bar as a standalone application.

• commandline Weave client: Command-line application and library written in Python.
• WebOS Weave client: A complete Weave data viewer for Palm’s WebOS.

How to Get Involved

• Dive into the Weave Services Developer Resource site
• Post your design and early prototypes to Weave developers discussion group
• Join us in #labs on irc.mozilla.org

We’ve also tried to anticipate your questions, and have posted an FAQ .

– Ragavan Srinivasan and Mike Hanson, on behalf of the Weave team

Editor’s note: Today, the GNOME Foundation announced a $10,000 grant from Mozilla to advance accessibility. See the full press release for full details. Included below is an excerpt from the release:

The GNOME Foundation and Mozilla are committed to open source, open standards, and open formats. Both organizations and their contributors contribute to numerous projects to ensure an open Web and open desktop platform for all users. Part of that effort is working hard to ensure users with physical disabilities are able to make use of a free desktop and Web browser.

“The GNOME Foundation’s commitment to accessibility improves the desktop and Internet experience for millions of people, and Mozilla is proud to support this work,” said Mitchell Baker, Chair of the Mozilla Foundation.

We’re pleased to announce that Firefox is now available for Nokia’s Maemo platform. Starting today, Nokia N900 owners can enjoy many of the same Firefox features they know and love on the desktop on their mobile device.

Bringing Firefox to mobile devices is the next step toward fulfilling Mozilla’s mission of providing one Web that everyone can access, regardless of device or location. Secure, powerful, and customizable, Firefox is the most modern mobile Web browser available and is optimized for a mobile experience. Key design principles are at the heart of the mobile browsing experience including minimal typing, seamless synchronization with desktop Firefox and the ability to take your Firefox with you, to name a few.

Firefox for mobile is packed with your favorite features, including:

• Awesome Bar – Go to your favorite sites in just a couple of keystrokes with intelligent and personalized searching
• Weave Sync – Sync your Firefox tabs, history, bookmarks and passwords between your desktop and mobile device for a seamless browsing experience
• Add-ons – Customize your Firefox by adding small pieces of functionality, like games and news readers, that help make the mobile Web browser your own
• Location-Aware Browsing – Get maps and information relevant to your location
• Tabbed browsing – View open tabs as thumbnails to easily identify and select the Web page you’d like to go to next
• Safe Browsing – Get an Instant Web Site ID and easily access and edit security settings
• Available in more than 30 languages and counting

Firefox is the first mobile Web browser to support add-ons. With add-ons, you can customize your Firefox by adding features that help make your browser your own. Add-ons like AdBlock Plus, URL Fixer, TwitterBar, language translators, and geo guides become especially handy when you’re out and about on your mobile device. You can both discover and install add-ons directly from your Nokia N900. There are currently more than 40 Firefox add-ons available for mobile and the number is growing every day.

We strongly recommend that you install the YouTube Enabler add-on from within the Add-ons Manager.  Tap on the install button, restart Firefox, and you’re all set to watch YouTube videos.

Just as Firefox does for the desktop, Firefox for mobile provides a platform for developers to create rich applications. Developers can use the latest Web technologies like HTML5, CSS and JavaScript to improve, modify and customize the browser. Visit the Develop for mobile page to learn more.

Firefox is currently supported on Nokia’s Maemo5 platform and is available for download on the Nokia N900. Users can download and learn more by visiting Firefox.com/mobile. Visit the FAQ for more information.

This is an exciting entrance into the mobile ecosystem and Firefox for Maemo5 is just the beginning – look out for lots more to come from Firefox for mobile this year.

Editor’s note: On Jan 28, Mozilla Labs released Weave 1.0. For more details, check out Ragavan Srinivasan’s blog announcement, reposted below.

Get Up and Go! – With Weave Sync, open web sites on your desktop are instantly available on your mobile device.

• Learn more about the Mozilla Labs Weave project
• Read the Release Notes for the 1.0 release for important information.
  
• Get technical support and help
• Report bugs
• Get the source code
• Discuss, debate and add to the design in the Weave discussion group
• Join us in #labs on irc.mozilla.org

Editor’s note: Cross-posted from Julie Deroche’s Blog.

Over the years, Mozilla went from hiring only a handful of interns to now having over 30 students during the summer. They come from different academic backgrounds and different countries, with the shared objective of improving the web. At Mozilla, our goal is to expose the students to our open source environment, and therefore demonstrate the importance of a community-driven project.

What Mozilla offers is more than a summer internship: it’s an open invitation to becoming a meaningful contributor to the project. And when we say that your work matters, we actually mean it. Let’s take the recent release of Firefox 3.6 for example. All of our 2009 engineering interns actually committed code that became part of Firefox 3.6! Where else can you say that your work positively impacted more than 350 million users?

But don’t take my words for it, go to our interns website and check out our interns presentations.

We also have both full-time and internship positions available on our careers page. Don’t be shy, check it out and send us your resume! .

Starting next week, we’ll be attending a few career fairs and also hosting some info sessions, and we hope to meet you then! For more information regarding our program, you can always drop by #interns on IRC (irc.mozilla.org).

Editor’s note: Today, Mozilla released the third Firefox for Maemo Release Candidate. Check out Director of Mobile, Stuart Parmenter’s blog post reposted below.

We’re excited to bring you the third release candidate of Firefox for Maemo.  Since RC2, we fixed several usability bugs that were found, as well as addressed a number of performance issues.  Based on feedback we’ve received so far, we were able to find and fix several crash bugs.  To improve page load times and responsiveness, we tuned a number of preferences and improved several algorithms.  We’ve sped up zooming and made our panning even better.

If you’ve already got RC2 installed on your N900 or N810, you will be receiving a software update shortly.  Otherwise, if you’re viewing this on your device, you can install it from here.

We’ve decided to disable plugin (not to be confused with add-ons, which are supported) support for this release.  The Adobe Flash plugin used on many sites degraded the performance of the browser to the point where it didn’t meet our standards.  If you wish to enable our experimental plugin support, you will be able to manually via about:config, but do so at your own risk.  We are working on an add-on that will allow the user to have control of which sites to enable plugins for, as some sites, like YouTube, do work quite well.

As always, we’re looking for feedback and suggestions.

We want to make sure that Firefox t-shirts (and other Mozilla swag) are always readily available to community members around the world who want them. So, as we think about the future of the Mozilla Store it’s really important that we get ideas and input from as many people as possible.

If you have a minute, please take this short survey about the Mozilla Store. Your feedback will be a huge help!

Mozilla, a public-benefit organization dedicated to promoting choice and innovation on the Web, today released Firefox® 3.6, an update to its popular, free and open source Web browser. The latest version of Firefox introduces cutting-edge features, support for a wide variety of Web standards, and access to more than 6,000 free add-ons that allow users to customize their browser to their liking.

Firefox 3.6 is more than 20 percent faster than Firefox 3.5 and includes extensive under the hood work to improve performance for everyday Web tasks such as email, uploading photos, social networking, and more. It also delivers new features like customizable browser themes called Personas, a ground-breaking Plugin updater, improved JavaScript performance, and enhancements to familiar favorites like the Awesome Bar for a better, more personal Web experience.

Firefox 3.6 was built by Mozilla’s global community of passionate contributors, including thousands of experienced developers, security experts, localization and support communities, and hundreds of thousands of active testers. More than 350 million users worldwide enjoy Firefox’s fast, secure browsing experience and unparalleled customization.

What’s new in Firefox 3.6:

Below are some of the coolest features of Firefox 3.6:

• Personas: Personalize the look of your Firefox by selecting new themes called Personas in a single click and without a restart
• Plugin Updater: To keep you safe from potential security vulnerabilities, Firefox will now detect out of date plugins
• Stability improvements: Firefox 3.6 significantly decreased crashes caused by third party software – all without sacrificing our extensibility in any way
• Form Complete: When filling out an online form, Firefox suggests information for fields based on your common answers in similar field
• Performance: Improved JavaScript performance, overall browser responsiveness, and startup time
• Open Video and Audio: With the world’s best implementation of HTML 5 audio and video support, now video can be displayed full screen and supports poster frames

What’s New Under the Hood for Developers

• Support for the latest HTML5 specification, including the File API for local file handling
• Font Support: In addition to OpenType and TrueType fonts, 3.6 now supports the new Web Open Font Format (WOFF)
• CSS gradients: Supports linear and radial CSS gradients which allow for a smoother transition between colors
• Device orientation: Firefox 3.6 exposes the orientation of the laptop or device to Web pages

How to get Mozilla Firefox 3.6:

Firefox 3.6 is available for Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux in more than 70 languages – more platforms and languages than any other browser! You can download Firefox 3.6 at www.firefox.com.

EDITOR’S NOTE:

For screenshots and logos, visit http://www.mozilla.com/press/images.html.

For a video tour of Firefox 3.6, visit http://www.mozilla.com/en-US/firefox/video/?video=whatnew-3.6.

Further details on Firefox 3.6 features can be found in the Reviewer’s Guide.

For more information about Mozilla Firefox 3.6 and how it provides a better and faster online experience, visit www.firefox.com.

Web developers are encouraged to check out the Firefox 3.6 for developers page and the full release notes.

We’re excited to share that Firefox 3.6 is scheduled to arrive tomorrow morning Pacific time!

You can click below to watch the What’s New in Firefox 3.6 video starring Director of Firefox, Mike Beltzner:

You can also help us build excitement by Tweeting/Facebooking/Sharing this message:

Firefox 3.6, the world’s best web browser, will be available Thursday, Jan 21st. See what’s new at http://bit.ly/8a0Kux #firefox

Stay tuned to the Mozilla Blog for tomorrow’s announcement!