Planet Mozilla

Planet Mozilla Interns: Adrian Kalla: Koala - Release Schedule

Thu, 02 Jul 2009 23:45:58 +0000

It has been a while ago since we announced the Koala - Komodo Advanced Localization Assistant - Project. While we work on the project on a nearly daily basis, we are just three students that need to do other work (like preparing for the upcoming examinations...), and because of that, the progress isn't as fast as it could be, if Koala would be our only project, but: we have a target for the final release: August, 23rd - September, 15th - and we plan not to miss it.

Our project schedule is of course more detailed - it consists of four big stages: preparation, implementation, integration and stabilization. That's the process of software development we did learn at our university, and our goal is to develop Koala that way.

During the first project stage, preparation, we've investigated as much as possible how Koala should work and look like, and as a result, we have written the Software Requirements Specification and Software Architecture documents.

In the Software Requirements Specification, we've listed the must-have features and have split them into modules with similar or dependent functionalities. In the now ongoing implementation stage, we are working on that modules separately. What does this mean? We code e.g. the "compare-locales" access module, make a few tests to be able to test it if it works as expected - and leave it there. So it's a single module, not (yet) connected with other modules.
As a result of this software development model, it's not possible to have something you "could touch" now - there won't be anything really usable until the next phase of development.

During the integration stage, we will make an working extension out of the many standalone modules. We will connect the modules through the, in the preparation stage specified, API's, one by one. It may look easier than it'll be, because this stage never comes as expected.
That will be also the time where we will start releasing pre-release versions of Koala: alpha and beta releases. They are to be expected late July.

After getting rid of the biggest blockers, we will enter the stabilization phase, where we will just fix known bugs and look for yet undiscovered bugs, by: testing, testing and testing. Because of that, in the middle of August you can expect an release candidate (hopefully just one).

The final release target is August, 23rd with a margin up to September, 15th.

If you'd like to help us in any way with this project, please drop a line in the comments.

Short update: between writing this posting and publishing it, we already entered the integration stage - but because of our examination session, the integration will start at full speed not earlier than in about three weeks.

Daniel Glazman: R.I.P. XHTML2

glazou — Thu, 02 Jul 2009 22:52:00 +0000

More than 7 years ago, I wrote that XHTML2 was a major strategic mistake that had to be stopped immediately. In fact, I started saying so even earlier than that. Today, XHTML2 is no more. It takes with it into the grave CURIE, HLink and XFrames. Specs that nobody ever seriously considered as part of the future of the web, nobody outside of the XHTML2 WG of course.

Anyway. It's a good move but a move that comes too late. That decision should have been taken YEARS AGO. What a waste of time, money and energy. What a bad sign to the community. Many people thought the following : "it's good these specs are in the xhtml2 wg, we don't want them elsewhere".

R.I.P.

Mozilla IT: Mozilla Scheduled Downtime - 07/02/2009, 7pm PDT (0200 - 0600 07/03/2009 UTC)

mrz — Thu, 02 Jul 2009 21:47:40 +0000

We will have a scheduled maintenance window tonight from 7:00pm to 11:00pm PDT. The following changes will take place:

7:00pm PDT (0200 UTC) graphs.mozilla.org update. We’ll be updating graphs.mozilla.org to pick up code updates (bugs 501432 and 498802). Duration 4 hours.
8:00pm PDT (0300 UTC) DHCP infrastructure changes. We’ll be implementing an active/standby DHCP server setup which requires some reconfiguration on the current DHCP server. No downtime expected.
10:00pm PDT (0500) UTC hg repo maintenance. We’ll be resetting the hg repo (bug 500246). Duration 30 minutes.

Please let me know if you have any reason why we should not proceed with this planned maintenance. As always, we aim to keep downtime to as little as possible, but unexpected complications can arise causing longer downtime periods than expected. All systems should be operational by the end of the maintenance window.

Feel free to comment directly in those bugs if you see issues past the planned downtime.

Trent Mick: ActiveState Code: lauched!

trentm — Thu, 02 Jul 2009 19:09:50 +0000

We launched ActiveState Code today, and there was much rejoicing. Yaaaah!

ActiveState Code is a site for sharing code recipes. It is the replacement for the popular ASPN Cookbooks (especially the Python Cookbook, which was a collaboration with O’Reilly and Associates that resulted in two print cookbooks using recipes from the site). The new site adds things like tagging, the ability to add recipes in a number of other languages, and a fresher and hopefully more usable site.

Migration should be easy. All recipes from the Python, Tcl and PHP Cookbooks have been carried over. Redirects maintain all old aspn.activestate.com/ASPN/Cookbooks links. Recipe id and author ids have been maintained. The ASPN Cookbook categories have been translated into tags in the new system — full details here.

I welcome any feedback on the site.

Mozilla Standards: (R)evolution Number 5

aruner — Thu, 02 Jul 2009 18:55:57 +0000

Cross-posted from hacks.mozilla.org

We’ve just launched Firefox 3.5, and we’re incredibly proud. Naturally, we have engaged in plentiful Mozilla advocacy — this site is, amongst other things, a vehicle for showcasing the latest browser’s new capabilities. We like to think about this release as an upgrade for the whole World Wide Web, because of the new developer-facing features that have just been introduced into the web platform. When talking about some of the next generation standards, the appearance of the number “5″ is almost uncanny — consider HTML5 and ECMAScript 5 (PDF). The recent (and very welcome) hype around HTML5 in the press is what motivates this article. Let’s take a step back, and consider some of Mozilla’s web advocacy in the context of events leading up to the release of Firefox 3.5.

Standardization of many of these features often came after much spirited discussion, and we’re pleased to see the prominent placement of HTML5 as a key strategic initiative by major web development companies. Indeed, exciting new web applications hold a great deal of promise, and really showcase what the future of the web platform holds in store for aspiring developers. Many herald the triumphant arrival of the browser as the computer, an old theme that gets bolstered with the arrival of attractive HTML5 platform features that are implemented across Safari, Chrome, Opera, and of course, Firefox (with IE8 getting an honorable mention for having both some HTML5 features and some ECMAScript, 5th Edition features).

Call it what you will — Web 5.0, Open Web 5th Generation (wince!), or, (R)evolution # 5, the future is now. But lest anyone forget, HTML5 is not a completed standard yet, as the W3C was quick to point out. The editor doesn’t anticipate completion till 2010. The path taken from the start of what is now called HTML5 to the present-day era of (very welcome) hype has been a long one, and Mozilla has been part of the journey from the very beginning.

For one thing, we were there to point out, in no uncertain terms, that the W3C had perhaps lost its way. Exactly 5 summers ago (again, with that magic number!), it became evident that the W3C was no longer able to serve as sole custodian of the standards governing the open web of browser-based applications, so Mozilla, along with Opera, started the WHATWG. Of course, back then, we didn’t call it HTML5, and while Firefox itself made a splash in 2004, the steps taken towards standardization were definitive but tentative. Soon, other browser vendors joined us, and by the time the reconciliation with W3C occurred two years later, the innovations introduced into the web platform via the movement initiated by Mozilla had gained substantial momentum.

The net result is a specification that is not yet complete called “HTML5″ which is implemented piecemeal by most modern browsers. The features we choose to implement as an industry are in response to developers, and our modus operandi is (for the most part) in the open. Mozilla funds the HTML5 Validator, producing the first real HTML5 parser, which now drives W3C’s markup validation for HTML5. That parser has made its way back into Firefox. It’s important to note that capabilities that are of greatest interest (many of which are showcased on this blog) are not only developed within the HTML5 specification, but also as part of the W3C Geolocation WG, the Web Apps WG, and the CSS WG.

The release of Firefox 3.5, along with updates to other modern browsers, seems to declare that HTML5 has arrived. But with the foresight that comes with having been around this for a while, we also know that we have a lot of work ahead of us. For one thing, we’ve got to finish HTML5, or at least publish a subset of it that we all agree is ready for implementation, soon. We’ve also got to ensure that accessibility serves as an important design principle in the emerging web platform, and resolve sticky differences here. Also, an open standard does not an open platform make, as debates about web fonts and audio/video codecs show. We’ve got a lot of work ahead of us, but for now, 5 years after the summer we started the ball rolling, we’re enjoying the hype around (R)evolution Number 5.

Mozdev: Drupal 5.19 upgrade

silfreed — Thu, 02 Jul 2009 17:23:05 +0000

Our Drupal installation has been upgraded to version 5.19 to address a security vulnerability. Let us know if you encounter any problems.

David Tenser: How to make community members stick

David Tenser — Thu, 02 Jul 2009 16:53:46 +0000

How to grow communities is a hot topic these days. Francesco Lodolo recently blogged about how the Mozilla Italia community mainly consists of veterans who have been participants for several years, and how hard it is for them to find new contributors.

Illustration: Grow by Amy.Ng

Abdulkadir Topal from the German community also blogged about getting help for localization work on the European Mozilla Community Blog and reached an interesting conclusion about how to turn new and casual contributors into long-time community members: the key is to distribute ownership.

Kadir uses Thomas from the German localization team as a good example of this theory: Thomas is a relatively new community member (”only” two years worth of contributions so far!), yet he is one of the most active members on SUMO today. The key factor for why this happened, according to Kadir, is that Thomas was given full responsibility for the SUMO component within the German localization team.

As Kadir concludes, it’s “one thing to contribute little bits and pieces to a [project], but it’s a completely different thing to own it.”

I find this theory interesting. Maybe it is not a universal law that can be applied to everyone or every type of project/responsibility, but looking back at my initial involvement with Mozilla, ownership was definitely part of what motivated me — but not all of it, as I will explain below.

Kadir mentions in his blog post that it was something as trivial as a product logo that made me discover the Mozilla project in the first place. To me, the little Gecko logo — featured in an article about the planned Netscape 6 browser based on the previously open-sourced Netscape 4.x codebase — communicated “lean and mean,” and the article went on explaining how this new Gecko HTML rendering engine would be modern, compatible, portable, and small enough to be used even in future handsets (and guess what; about nine years later it turns out that they were right!).

Just a few days later, I learned that Netscape 6.x was just a branded and slightly outdated version of something called “Mozilla,” which apparently was the open source project behind the well known Netscape browser. I immediately switched to Mozilla instead, since it was more bleeding edge and therefore more fun for a geek like me.

That’s how it started for me. However, that wasn’t the reason why I sticked. Why did I turn from just interested in Mozilla to a deeply involved contributor? I will try to explain this and get back to Kadir’s theory, but I can say right now that there is a lot more than one reason why I’m still an active Mozilla community member.

It started around year 2000 with the realization that I could actually affect the project by submitting bug reports and providing feedback. Although open source as a concept wasn’t new to me, I had never actually gotten involved myself before. This, combined with the fact that I got to know other people with similar interests, made reading the newsgroup daily a pleasure.

However, I always felt that the original Mozilla suite represented something from the past, and that the way of the future was something lean and mean (yes, that Gecko logo that got originally got my attention!). The word “monolithic” was often used to describe the Mozilla suite, and even the word itself felt big, old and unmanageable to me. When the Phoenix project was announced on MozillaZine, I immediately turned my focus to that instead, and never looked back.

Because the project was still small and new, it was also a good opportunity to get more deeply involved because the signal to noise ratio was higher. Many people in the Mozilla community were still skeptical about Phoenix and preferred the tried and true Mozilla suite. This made the feedback I provided to the Phoenix project much more visible than it had been for the suite, making it a lot more rewarding for me to contribute.

As the project started to shape up with the release of Phoenix 0.3, I found myself heavily involved with things like filing bugs and RFEs, discussing feature implementations with developers, and, most often, answering questions from the growing number of users of Phoenix. As this consumed more and more of my time, I realized that there wasn’t a centralized place for people to get help with Phoenix. I viewed this as my opportunity to finally give something meaningful back to the project, and spent a couple of afternoons creating a small site called Phoenix Help. It was also a more meaningful way to develop my HTML/CSS coding skills compared to creating a website for, say, a Brood War clan (let’s call it UU).

Phoenix Help was very small and seemingly insignificant, but it was quickly noticed and appreciated by fellow community members in the MozillaZine forums. I especially remember getting my first personal e-mail from Asa Dotzler thanking me for doing what I did and encouraging me to continue the great work. This meant a lot for my motivation, because it was a confirmation that what I was doing was appreciated.

Before I knew it, people were linking to my site from all sorts of places (starting with Phoenix 0.5, even the release notes linked to it!), which made it even more important for me to ensure that the site looked good, was easy to use, and that the content was up to date. I was, in fact, responsible for the support site of Phoenix — I “owned” that part of the Phoenix project!

To wrap up, there were several things that motivated me to stay active in the Mozilla community:

A belief in the mission of the project — to create a web browser that supports and promotes the use of open standards
An interest in the technology — initially with the Gecko logo as my hook
The feeling of belonging in a community of people with similar interests
The desire to give something back to a project that gave (and still gives) me the best browser in the world for free
The experiences gained by managing a website — HTML, CSS, server configurations, and perhaps most importantly, the English language
The recognition and respect from Mozilla project members for my contributions
The pride of being responsible for an important piece of the project

When I look at this list, I realize that it’s impossible to point to one particular motivator for community members, and that everyone probably has their own unique list. More personally, I also note that my motivation model today is the exact same as it was when I got involved seven years ago.

Despite the fact that the list is based on my personal experience, I think that all of the motivators could be taken into consideration for anyone trying to build or grow a community. Depending on the project, some things might be more important than others, but they all affect your community:

Tree Climbing Cat by mokwai

Does your project add value to people using it? Do people feel like they are making a difference by contributing?
Is your technology cutting-edge? Is it solving a unique problem? Is your project making people feel “wow, I want to be part of that!” or “I’d love to learn more about that”?
Is your existing community friendly, welcoming and collaborative? Are tasks and discussions communicated in the open? Do people in your community have fun together?
What kinds of contributions are welcomed? Does your project offer different ways to get involved?
What’s in it for the contributors? Aside from the positive feeling of making a difference, do they gain relevant experiences by contributing to your project?
Do you reach out personally to community members and make them know that their contributions are appreciated? Do you have automated systems in place to show the impact contributors make (e.g. a karma system)?
Is your project modularized enough to allow people to take ownership of parts of the project?

There you have it — my first attempt to unwrap the mystery of building and growing communities. Is this helpful? Do you have similar experiences? I would love to hear what you think!

Planet Mozilla Interns: Aaron Train: A Week of Milestones

Aaron — Thu, 02 Jul 2009 15:30:06 +0000

In the spirit of an exciting successful week, I would like to congratulate our friends at SourceForge who have delivered their 4,000,000,000th open source download. That’s one of a few major open source milestones this week. That’s alot of downloads.

Henrik Skupin: Firefox 3.5 has been released

Henrik Skupin — Thu, 02 Jul 2009 14:34:16 +0000

Huh, I’m still a bit late in blogging this but I don’t wanna miss it because it’s really important…

With a bit more then a year development Firefox 3.5 has been officially released 2 days ago. It contains tons of new stunning features like native video support, a private browsing mode, a jitted JavaScript engine, and many more. See the official release notes. For a quick overview you can also watch this video.

Mikeal Rogers: Up for a Pint?

mikeal — Thu, 02 Jul 2009 13:55:51 +0000

I’m in London for the next few days and would love to grab a drink with any community members be you Mozilla, CouchDB, Python, Windmill, JavaScript or just plain old coffee, whisky or beer geeks

Pascal Chevrel: July 2003 - July 2009: 6 years of Mozilla Web localization

Pascal Chevrel — Thu, 02 Jul 2009 13:33:00 +0000

Although I got into the mozilla project through en-user documentation and support around 2001, I really got involved in Web localization in 2003 when I started to build a Spanish Mozilla community around the Mozilla Suite and I convinced Bob Clary (who also gave me my canconfirm rights in bugzilla, thanks for that!) to publish a page in Spanish on mozilla.org so as to promote Tech Evangelism activities in Spanish.

That was the first non-English page on an official mozilla site ever and the funny thing is that... this page is still online!

We are now in July 2009 and we just shipped Firefox 3.5 in more than 70 languages, all with a set of in-product pages hosted on mozilla.com. But more than in-product pages, we now have with this release a localized home page on mozilla.com for ALL of our locales!

Now that the release is done and millions of users are downloading the best version of Firefox ever every day, I have some time to thank all of the people that have made such an achievement possible.

Thank you to our localizers first, without them, the Mozilla project would not have the international outreach it has and I really think that our localizers are way more than translators, they are involved in every corner of mozilla activities, from code, to marketing and documentation. It is a privilege for us to work with people having so many skills and passionate about FLOSS and the open web!

Thank you also to the rest of the l10n-drivers team (Seth, Axel, Stas, Gandalf...) and thank you to Delphine who did an awesome job with QA of all of the localized pages over the past weeks on our sites!

Happy international browsing

Pascal

Robert Sayre: Web Video Codecs

rsayre — Thu, 02 Jul 2009 13:22:46 +0000

Anne van Kesteren: “Opera has announced support for Ogg Theora and Vorbis“

Robert Sayre: Secrets

rsayre — Thu, 02 Jul 2009 12:51:20 +0000

That’s right, the WHATWG accepts secret feedback.

But… I thought secrets were bad.

Something must have changed. Secrets seem to be OK now. What am I missing?

Seth Bindernagel: Response to a Swahili localization enthusiast

seth bindernagel — Thu, 02 Jul 2009 10:23:47 +0000

Those who read this blog may remember that we are trying to finalize a version of Firefox in Swahili. As it happens now and again, we have two groups who have completed translations at nearly the same time. The l10n-drivers team is now trying to find the most judicious solution to the problem: determining fairly which translation is best and shipping that. Amazingly, the differences between the the strings for the two localizations number in the thousands, and properly evaluating the discrepancies is a sizable undertaking for us to find the better version of the two. If you’d like to see the existing diff, comment here and we’ll send it your way. Now that we have a finalized Firefox 3.5, I’ve asked each team leader to update the strings in their language pack for final evaluation and we’ll prepare the final diff.

Sadly, amidst all we have done to ship Firefox to seventy-five locales, it was frustrating to read a blog post from one person suggesting that Mozilla’s l10n-drivers team is playing politics when it comes to shipping the Swahili version. If it needs to be made explicitly clear, we are in the business of shipping excellent localized software to as many locales as possible. If our team allowed politics to disrupt prudent judgment, I am not sure we would scale at all.

In his post, huarya writes, “The Mozilla people want to play nice with everyone instead of giving priority to the team that has actually showed results, real result!”. I responded extensively in the comment thread, an d here is a copy of my lengthy response for those who care to read it:

huayra: I’m not sure if we have ever spoken personally, so it seems a bit careless to suggest that we are playing politics. If we have spoken via email or IRC, then my apologies. You can find me on irc.mozilla.org, nick: sethb.

We ship Firefox now in 75 locales. We are not in the business of playing games. It’s about scaling our localization communities in the most sustainable way possible AND providing an excellent finished product.

But, as you can see through the comments in this post, you’ve planted the seed that our team at Mozilla is doing something dubious. We are not and that’s irresponsible on your part since you do not mention the full story in your post. Exactly what do you mean by “The Mozilla people want to play nice with everyone instead of giving priority to the team that has actually showed results, real result!”?

Here are the facts and consider rewriting your post:

We do have two language packs from the two teams with thousands of differences. With those two language packs, my team prepared a presentation of grammatical and translation differences between the two versions and reached out to many different linguistic professors who have expertise in East African Language Studies. One was eager to help and we are trying to get a final evaluation from him since he wants to get sw-TZ users a version of Firefox. Another academic contact requested tens of thousands of dollars to do the evaluation and we cannot fund that since no other locale has been afforded any funding to help settle disputes. A final academic contact did a rough evaluation, said that both translations contained many errors, he wouldn’t be comfortable with either, and would need to charge Mozilla a fee for him to do the thorough evaluation. These responses come from department heads at leading universities.

Playing politics would be something less prudent.

Please also keep in mind that we have several things going on right now, not the least of which is shipping Firefox to 75 locales to our 300+ million users who want updates to Firefox 3.5. In addition, we are actively working with many other new locales who want to participate. Yes, sw-TZ has been trying to localize Firefox for many years now. But, we are responding to requests from all over the world and do our best to manage it all and have done fairly well since we have scaled to 75 localizations. Most importantly, we want our end users to have something that is an excellent finished product.

sw-TZ is unique because we have two translations asking to be the official one. We are seeking the most judicious result as possible because surely one team will be quite disappointed if their translation is not chosen. The team at Mozilla is the group who deals with the aftermath of that decision. And, not making a wise decision would only complicate things.

I’d ask for your patience and understanding as we come to a resolution. And, please minimize the flaming when you don’t have all the facts. Not sure how that helps.

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Jane Finette: Firefox 3.5 LIVE – help us celebrate in London, July 6

jfinette — Thu, 02 Jul 2009 10:08:02 +0000

Firefox 3.5 is now alive and kicking! Our fastest release ever, new personal security features and support for open video. Its a release in which once again Firefox is “Upgrading the Web”.

Help us celebrate this landmark achievement in London, on Monday July 6. We’ll have a few beers together, and there will be a big screen to demo Firefox 3.5 and what’s new at Mozilla Labs.

We’d love to see your demos too – so please come along and share what you have.

When: Monday July 6, 2009 from 7:00pm – 9:00pm

Where: Shooting Star

125-129 Middlesex Street
London, England E1 8JF

See you there!

Michael Erlewine: Ubiquity 0.5 日本語紹介ビデオ

mitcho — Thu, 02 Jul 2009 09:08:03 +0000

今夜リリースされる Ubiquity の最新版、0.5 に備えて日本語で Ubiquity のスクリーンキャストを作ってみました。 Ubiquity 0.5 は特に多言語化を重視したリリースで、 Ubiquity 内蔵のコマンドが日本語とデンマーク語で使えるようになっています。是非インストールしてみてください！

Ubiquity 0.5 日本語紹介ビデオ from mitcho on Vimeo.

As Ubiquity 0.5 will be released soon (Thursday morning in Mountain View), I decided it was a good time to put together a screencast in Japanese demoing the use of the new Japanese parser and commands. If you can’t understand it, it’s probably time to start learning Japanese!

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.

John Resig: Which Unit Testing Framework?

John Resig — Thu, 02 Jul 2009 08:43:35 +0000

I'm in the process of working on, and improving, test suite support in TestSwarm (an upcoming project of mine). However, there isn't a lot of information on which unit testing frameworks developers actually use to test their code (whereas there is more information on which JavaScript libraries are used).

It will be of great help to me if you could quickly fill out the question below. I will release the results of the survey as soon as possible. Thanks!

» Which JavaScript Unit Testing Frameworks do you use?

More information on the frameworks listed above:

Gervase Markham: Dopplr or TripIt?

gerv — Thu, 02 Jul 2009 07:53:03 +0000

Where's the action these days? I'm currently on Dopplr but have had TripIt invitations. Where are most people in the Mozilla community? A particular one, or both? I hear TripIt parses your emails from Expedia (which Mozilla uses) and other such places, which would be a time-saver. But migrating everything over would be a pain. I guess this is my first experience of potential social networking data migration anxiety. Open data FTW!

Please declare interests such as board seats or shares ;-)

hacks.mozilla.org: (r)evolution number 5

Arun Ranganathan — Thu, 02 Jul 2009 03:39:57 +0000

John O'Duinn: Major update to Firefox 3.5 (the day after)

John — Thu, 02 Jul 2009 02:36:11 +0000

Looking at the people who moved to FF3.5.0 yesterday:

65% downloaded the FF3.5.0 installer and installed from it
35% manually did Help->CheckForUpdates

That is a large percentage of people doing CheckForUpdates.

Considering this was our first time having Major Update available on release day, and considering there was no user prompting of this new major update ability, I found these percentages quite delightfully stunning.

Robert Sayre: News At 11

rsayre — Thu, 02 Jul 2009 01:36:17 +0000

This just in…

<othermaciej> sayrer: the normal definition of “open stanard” doesn’t automatically imply royalty-free licensing
<jcranmer> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_standard disagrees
<jcranmer> “The term “open” is usually restricted to royalty-free technologies”
<jcranmer> (2nd para)
<sayrer> but that was written by hippies, obviously
<jcranmer> “The definitions of the term “open standard” used by academics, the European Union and some of its member governments or parliaments such as Denmark, France, and Spain preclude open standards requiring fees for use, as do the New Zealand and the Venezuelan governments.”
<sayrer> othermaciej: how about this: proprietary is where you pay
<othermaciej> wikipedia seems to disagree with actual standards orgs (as stated in later paragraphs)

That’s right folks, standards orgs producing patent-encumbered standards claim their standards are open. Clearly, a fair and balanced approach is called for.

Taras Glek: Python GDB - Logging File IO

tglek — Wed, 01 Jul 2009 23:05:42 +0000

Python GDB Rocks!

I wanted a non-painful way to figure out what’s causing bonus file IO. I’ve noticed that gtk likes to open files, but I didn’t have the exact details. So I grabbed python gdb, and with some tips on syscalls from gdb old-timers managed to produce a report to assign blame for open()ing files to relevant Mozilla functions.

Other than the gdb-hating syscalls issue, achieving this was simple

Compile python-enabled gdb(Next set of distribution releases should have it..I hope)
Define a new gdb command in a python file. I called mine “taras” for lack of a better name.
Set a breakpoint, attach your command to it. :
break open source -p /path/to/your/script.py command 1 taras end
Have the script walk the backtrace to figure out the filename and the last Mozilla function. Log the info, issue gdb continue command.
Print out a report and profit:
python report()

Here is my script. The only nasty part here is that I had to read the filename out of a register (i’m on amd64, on 32 it’d be $esi instead of $rdi) because gdb doesn’t deal well with system calls.

I’ve never throught it would be this fun to use gdb. I always thought debuggers should be scriptable, thanks to Tom Tromey (lots of gdb tutorials on Tom’s blog) and any others who finally made this a reality.

Mozilla Add-ons Blog: Removing the Sandbox

Justin Scott (fligtar) — Wed, 01 Jul 2009 22:38:45 +0000

The “Sandbox Model” addons.mozilla.org uses to organize and review add-ons was first announced almost 3 years ago. Since then, we’ve made a number of changes based on user feedback that, in my opinion, have greatly improve the experience of finding and installing add-ons that haven’t been officially reviewed yet.

Today, the main feedback concerning the review and distribution process of add-ons is:

developers feel it takes too long for add-ons to be reviewed, and
users and developers want to receive updates to add-ons that they have installed that haven’t been reviewed yet

It’s important for us to balance our desire for all add-ons to be discoverable and easy to install with the need for security measures for add-ons that haven’t been reviewed yet.

After taking many of these issues into account, I’ve come up with a proposal for removing the public and sandbox classifications on the site and moving to a more flexible, comprehensive trust system based on everything we know about an add-on. If you’re interested in the review process and distribution of add-ons, please read the proposal and give us your feedback, preferably in this newsgroup thread.

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QMO: Firefox 3.5 Security Testday Next Week!

ashughes — Wed, 01 Jul 2009 21:23:11 +0000

MozQA is holding a Security Testday for Firefox 3.5 on Friday July 10th! Security is something Mozilla takes very seriously. We have recently updated our security test cases and added some new ones for Firefox 3.5. Our community representatives will be available through IRC Chat ( channel #testday on irc://irc.mozilla.org ), QMO forums as well as the dev-quality newsgroup to help with any of your questions/comments/suggestions. So, if you're interested, come on by anytime between 7AM to 5PM PDT that Friday!

For more information on this event, please see the event page

Firebug Blog: Firebug 1.5a7with Activate Same Origin

johnjbarton — Wed, 01 Jul 2009 21:19:08 +0000

getfirebug.com has Firebug 1.5a7. This release has one new small feature for users who have sites that generate unique URLs: “Activate Same Origin”. When this option is on, all pages with the same “origin” as an active page will be active. So, for example, if you open Firebug on bar.foo.com, then visiit foo.com or baz.foo.com, Firebug will be open. (This is close to the same-origin policy used by the browser).

Also in this version are some important bug fixes:

Issue 1894: CSS-edit removes declaration if page with specific javascript.
Issue 1879: nsIStreamListener.onDataAvailable throws exception
Issue 882: console.log() reports wrong source file and line number

All of this will appear in Firebug 1.4.0, “soon”. Note that if you install 1.5 it should work well but updates will begin to diverge from 1.4 and at that point it will be, well, ‘alpha’ quality.

jjb

Please post followups to the newsgroup.

Robert Sayre: Offered Without Comment

rsayre — Wed, 01 Jul 2009 20:46:30 +0000

Maciej Stachowiak: “I believe the wide availability of H.264 hardware is in part because H.264 was developed through an open standards process that included the relevant stakeholders.”

Eric Shepherd: Another minor usability tweak to MDC

sheppy — Wed, 01 Jul 2009 20:31:23 +0000

We’ve deployed our new editor plugin on the Mozilla Developer Center this afternoon. It currently doesn’t do a lot, but what it does is — at least for me — very nice.

When you open the editor on MDC, the table of contents sidebar now disappears, allowing you to use nearly the full width of your browser window for editing the article’s content. When you close the editor (either by saving your change or canceling the editor), the sidebar returns automatically.

This is especially helpful because the sidebar would often get in the way while editing tables and other wider formatted content, including code samples.

Now that Firefox 3.5 is out the door, I plan to ramp up work on back-end stuff even further, including adding more capabilities to our plugins; in addition, I’m gearing up on some organizational work, and talking with Mindtouch about implementing some scripts to help automate more administrative tasks.

Tara Shahian: Refreshing the Firefox Digital Gifts Collection

Tara — Wed, 01 Jul 2009 20:06:51 +0000

We recently released 20 new digital gifts into the Facebook ecosystem. These cute little icons are part of the Mozilla Firefox collection that launched last year through the Free Gifts application - conceived by Zach Allia and later transitioned over to SGN. Exchanging digital gifts has long been a popular activity on social networks, and thousands of Firefox gifts have been sent so far. If you’re interested, the total numbers per icon are reported on a basic stats page, here (Foxkeh is #1, with over 8,000 gifts sent). Thanks to Shervin Pishevar, Chris Henley, and Gabriel Stock from SGN for their help on this. Happy gifting!

Aza Raskin: Know Who’s Calling: Tactile Design

Aza Raskin — Wed, 01 Jul 2009 20:04:17 +0000

I keep my phone in my pocket. This has the (un)fortunate side effect of putting the entire internet in my pants. When I get a call, I have to do a little dance to slip the phone out of my pocket and in to my hand.

I’m one of those people who thinks its rude to answer the phone in the middle of a conversation. It’s worse when it’s during dinner. It’s even border-line rude to just check the phone to see whose calling before slipping it away. I want to know whose calling before I go pocket diving.

Having my phone read out the caller’s name isn’t a tenable solution: I’d don’t want to broadcast that information to everyone near me. Imagine the embarrassment of being on a date and having your ex’s name announced by your phone to the room at large. Or worse, “Mom” being blared in the middle of your slam poetry reading. We’re going to need a more local solution.

I generally keep my phone on vibrate; it’s less intrusive that way. Given a name, it’s not difficult to deduce its basic constituent phonemes (every text-to-speech program does it). Here’s the thought, have the vibrator buzz out the phonemes of the caller’s name. The name Alexis, would be “br br brrr” and Jenny would be “Brr brr”, and Dan would be “bRrr. Imagine it as the sound of trying to say someone’s name without opening your mouth, complete with pitch and loudness modulation (which can be controlled with vibration speed and strength).

Playing around with a toy implementation, the mapping seems to be fairly natural. Learning the feel for a name is close to instant.

I know what your thinking, though: With my hundreds of contacts, how can I possibly differentiate them all from the buzz patterns?

The answer is that you don’t need to.

Most of us get calls regularly from less than 10 people. On Facebook, where the cost of communication is significantly lower than placing a call, an average man has two-way communication regularly with only 4 people. For women, that number is 6. (Data from Primates on Facebook). Learning to differentiate even 10 buzz patterns that feel like the way a name sounds is easy. That covers 90% of your use cases. And keeping you from needing to take your phone out of your pocket 9 out of 10 times is a big win.

Just a thought. It doesn’t bother you when it doesn’t work, doesn’t require you to go through a setup process to choose a ring/vibrate for each person, and is quick to learn. Plus, it gives the phone a bit of emotional impact (think Pixar).

Any other solutions?

Laura Mesa: Affiliates Program--Bring on the Rewards!

noreply@blogger.com (Laura) — Wed, 01 Jul 2009 18:44:07 +0000

The Affiliates program is moving on up!

Starting July 1st, 2009, every download you generate from your Firefox 3.5 Affiliate buttons gives you an opportunity for being rewarded as an active member of the Spread Firefox Affiliates Program.

Everyone with more than five downloads a quarter will be entered into a reward pool. We will randomly award ten individual Affiliates each quarter with incentives like a Flip Video Camera, an iPod Touch, an iPod Nano, Amazon Gift Certificates and exclusive Top Fox T-shirts!*

Awardees will be notified in the beginning of October 2009 for activities between July 1st-September 30th, so make sure your email in Spread Firefox is up-to-date!
You can learn more about the program here and make sure to check out the Affiliates Terms of Service.

Last but not least, any Affiliates buttons are eligible for this program, but why not update your buttons to our latest and greatest dynamic Affiliate buttons and help us "Upgrade the Web"?

Thanks to John Slater, Rhonda Spencer, Elise Allen, Alex Buchanan, Stephen Donner and the WebQA team for all their hard work--I'm really excited to see how this program continues to grow!

Happy Firefox 3.5 launch!

Note*: Once you have been chosen to receive a reward (not including t-shirts) you will be ineligible to receive another reward for a full year.

QMO Events: Learning about Mozilla Crash Reporting and Analysis

marcia — Wed, 01 Jul 2009 18:20:58 +0000

Location:
Mozilla Headquarters
650 Castro Street, Suite 300
Mountain View, CA 94041

Start time: 6:30 PM PST. We will have pizza and mingle and the talk will start promptly at 7 PM

If you arrive after 7 PM you will need to call 650-903-0800 x214 to get into the building as the 650 Castro Street lobby doors lock at 7 PM.

Street parking is available on both Castro and Church Streets, as well as directly behind the building.

Firefox Support Blog: How our wiki is different

Chris Ilias — Wed, 01 Jul 2009 18:20:21 +0000

To say that the SUMO knowledge base is just a wiki really doesn’t do it justice. While it’s very easy to start contributing to the knowledge base and simply assume that it works just like many other wikis (e.g. Wikipedia), there are a number of characteristics of SUMO tailored toward user support which make it different. This can be both a blessing and a curse. We need to understand how SUMO is different; but once we are familiar with it, the community has better tools to provide better user support.

If you’re a new knowledge base contributor, please read our new How we are different page, which lists the differences between SUMO and other wikis and gives an overview of why we are different. New knowledge base contributors will also be able to find a link to that page in our introduction to contributing to the knowledge base.

This is also part of our response to localizer feedback, which we have been continually gathering from active SUMO localizers. Remember that if you are a SUMO localizer and would like to meet with us, just contact us on this blog or post in the Contributors forum.

Jonathan DiCarlo: It’s not spam, but it’s still annoying when it fills up my inbox

jonoscript — Wed, 01 Jul 2009 17:14:38 +0000

What do you call emails which are not spam — because one did, technically, ask for them when you signed up for some mailing list or other — but which one nevertheless deletes without reading?

As in, “My inbox is half full of spam and half full of ________.”

It seems like a word that we should have.

hacks.mozilla.org: synchronous XHR requests in Firefox 3.5

Christopher Blizzard — Wed, 01 Jul 2009 17:06:25 +0000

This post is from Doug Turner who has previous written about Geolocation. Doug works on Mozilla’s mobile project.

XMLHttpRequests (XHR) can be either synchronous or asynchronous. Although most people use asynchronous requests there are instances where you might want to use a synchronous request. That is, wait until the XMLHttpRequest call completes to continue executing JavaScript. In Firefox 3 and earlier the browser would still fire timer events and respond to input events during a synchronous XHR request. In Firefox 3.5 and later input events such as mouse moves and timeouts will be suspended until the synchronous request completes. This allows the synchronous request to block.

For example:

function hello() {
     alert(“hello”);
}
 
setTimeout(hello, 20);
 
var req = new XMLHttpRequest();
req.open('GET', 'http://www.mozilla.org/', false);
req.send(null);

Prior to Firefox 3.5, it was impossible to determine if the “hello” function would be invoked during or after the XHR request. This led to all sorts of timing issues in web applications that used synchronous XHR requests.

The solution to this problem has been to delay input events and timeouts until after “req.send” returns.

For more information see the two bugs on the issue.

Jonathan DiCarlo: Zero Trust

jonoscript — Wed, 01 Jul 2009 17:03:27 +0000

When I find a map on the web and I want to take it with me, I take a pen and copy the map onto scrap paper, because I have zero trust that the map would print out correctly.

I use the default font for everything, because I have zero trust that any font I choose would be reproduced correctly by the time my words reach the reader’s screen.

I don’t use bold text in email, because I have zero trust that it would show up right in the recipient’s email client.

I don’t take pictures with my phone, because I have zero trust that I’ll ever be able to get at those pictures in a usable form.

Is it just me, or does the behavior of computer systems rarely inspire trust?

Daniel Glazman: Firefox 3.5 CSS Media Queries demo

glazou — Wed, 01 Jul 2009 16:33:00 +0000

(This is a repost of an article I wrote for hacks.mozilla.org)

CSS Media Queries were originally a proposal submitted to the CSS Working Group by Opera Software and are now implemented in Firefox 3.5. In short, Media Queries extend the media declaration attached to a stylesheet to allow matching based on the rendering device's intrinsic properties.

Let's take a link element declaring a stylesheet inside an HTML document:

<link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" href="http://www.glazman.org/weblog/dotclear/index.php?post/2009/07/01/style.css"
 media="screen">

Now imagine you want this stylesheet to apply to the document if and only if the width of the content window is less than 300 pixels... CSS Media Queries make it simple to declare:

<link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" href="http://www.glazman.org/weblog/dotclear/index.php?post/2009/07/01/style.css"
 media="screen and (max-width: 300px)">

Available properties include viewport's width and height, device's width and height, orientation (portrait or landscape), viewport's aspect ratio, device's aspect ratio, colormap, resolution and type of device.

It's then very easy to have one single web page ready for consumption on a wide variety of devices, ranging from mobile devices to monochrome tty displays.

Click here to see the demo and don't forget to resize your window from 100px-wide to 900px-wide to see it in action (WARNING: this link opens a new window without toolbars because toolbars could block the size of a viewport above roughly 400px...)

European Mozilla Community Blog: Ask Tristan a question

Irina Sandu (Romania) — Wed, 01 Jul 2009 16:31:00 +0000

Tristan Nitot of Mozilla Europe will be hosting a live chat on the Web User website (www.webuser.co.uk) on Friday, the 3rd of July at 12:30 BST (that's British Standard Time). He will be answering questions about the recent Firefox 3.5 launch and the floor will be open to anyone who wants to ask Tristan a question about the browser.

All you need to do to take part in the chat is visit www.webuser.co.uk/livechats at 1230BST on Friday 3 July. Questions and comments will be moderated.

Everybody is welcome to participate.

hacks.mozilla.org: another great CSS media query demo

Christopher Blizzard — Wed, 01 Jul 2009 16:20:20 +0000

This demo is from Daniel Glazman who works actively on web standards and is a long-time mozilla contributor.

Let’s take a link element declaring a stylesheet inside an HTML document:

<link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" href="style.css"
      media="screen">

Now imagine you want this stylesheet to apply to the document if and only if the width of the content window is less than 300 pixels… CSS Media Queries make it simple to declare:

<link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" href="style.css"
      media="screen and (max-width: 300px)">

Available properties include viewport’s width and height, device’s width and height, orientation (portrait or landscape), viewport’s aspect ratio, device’s aspect ratio, colormap, resolution and type of device.

It’s then very easy to have one single web page ready for consumption on a wide variety of devices, ranging from mobile devices to monochrome tty displays.

When viewing the demo, please don’t forget to resize the window from large to very very small (less than 100px!) to see it in action.

View the Demo in Firefox 3.5

Loading via planet, RSS or a reader without JavaScript? Click here instead.

David Boswell: Featured Mozilla-Based Applications For July

davidwboswell — Wed, 01 Jul 2009 15:18:40 +0000

People and organizations are doing a lot of interesting things with Mozilla technologies. Here are two of the many Mozilla-based applications available. If you would like to suggest other applications to feature, please leave a comment.

TuneUp was created for music lovers, by music lovers. TuneUp automatically cleans up your music collection, gives you information about upcoming concerts in your area and more.

Wesabe is part money management tool, part community. Wesabe gives you the tools and the insights to take control of your finances and see all your bank and credit card balances in one place.

Giorgio Maone: ABE Warnings Everywhere OMG!

Giorgio — Wed, 01 Jul 2009 15:15:56 +0000

Many people use their hosts file for resources blocking purposes, especially against ads or known malicious sites.

Since your hosts file takes precedence over your DNS in domain name resolution, you can redirect undesired domain to invalid IP addresses, saving both bandwidth and CPU because resolved IPs are cached.

Unluckily, most information sources about this useful technique, including the Wikipedia article above, instruct the reader to use 127.0.0.1 (the local loopback IP) as the dead-end destination, rather than a truly invalid address such as 255.255.255.0. This is not very smart, especially if you installed a web server on the loopback interface (like many web developers do), because you’re spamming it with dummy requests whenever you browse an ad-laden web site.

Furthermore, I’m currently receiving several reports about ABE warnings popping up everywhere. If you read my post about ABE yesterday, you know that it ships with a built in “SYSTEM” ruleset containing just one rule which alone implements the whole LocalRodeo functionality:


# Prevent Internet sites from requesting LAN resources.
Site LOCAL
Accept from LOCAL
Deny

Such a rule blocks any HTTP request for resources placed in your local network, including localhost (127.0.0.1) and any other LAN IP, unless it is originated from your local network as well. This protects your internal servers and devices (e.g. routers and firewalls exposing web interfaces) against CSRF and XSS attacks performed from the internet.

As a side effect, though, if you’re redirecting arbitrary hosts to 127.0.0.1, you’ll get bombed by a storm of ABE warnings whenever those sites are linked from external web sites. The solution is simple: just open your host file and replace 127.0.0.1 with 255.255.255.0 everywhere it’s used to block something, but being careful to keep 127.0.0.1 on the localhost entry and other really local domains, if any.

Gervase Markham: Bzzzt!

gerv — Wed, 01 Jul 2009 14:50:00 +0000

Feel the Shiretoko Shock!

So what am I personally most excited about in the new Firefox? Well, I have no uses for Private Browsing Mode - I think porn is a terrible corruption of God's design for sexual relationships, my personal medical condition that I research is by no means a secret, and I don't share my computer with anyone anyway. The security UI improvements are cool and well worth having, but I'm not going to get phished any time soon. It's wonderful that we're now in even more languages, but I don't speak any of them!

So really, I'm just waiting for sites to take the excellent technical and standards changes and build cool new stuff I can use. Web designers, what are you waiting for? :-)

Marco Zehe: The WAI-ARIA Windows screen reader shootout

Marco — Wed, 01 Jul 2009 13:59:51 +0000

Firefox 3.5 has been released, and now it’s time to take a look at what features of WAI-ARIA are being supported by which Windows screen reader. Competition is healthy in this market, and two new screen readers have started supporting Firefox during the 3.5 development cycle: Dolphin’s Hal/SuperNova and Serotek’s System Access (including the free SAToGo offering). So to document the current state of affairs, I’ve taken each one of the following screen readers running on the Windows platform on a tour through some WAI-ARIA implementations that are out there for everyone to use. I’ve chosen not to do a widget-by-widget walkthrough of the Dojo DIJIT Toolkit or some other JS library already including WAI-ARIA, but instead concentrated on stuff users will actually encounter while surfing the web under non-clinical conditions.

The following are the candidates:

NVDA, using the latest snapshot build, which actually does not behave much different from the current 0.6p3 release.
JAWS 10.0.1154.
Window-Eyes 7.1.
SuperNova 11.02.
System Access in the form of the free System Access To Go service.

The scoring is simple: For each important feature that is fully supported, each screen reader gets 1 point. A particular web app may have more than 1 feature, so it is possible to score multiple points for web apps.

Note that, even if WAI-ARIA support is not explicitly documented, it is still possible to score points because Firefox exposes many widgets through MSAA and IAccessible2 that are not standard HTML widgets. The interesting question here is: Are the various forms of Forms/Focus mode flexible enough to deal with these?

Landmarks

WAI-ARIA landmarks are one of the most widely used features of the spec already. They allow another means of navigating a web page, finding things such as the banner, main content, search, complementary or footer information. The newly relaunched Mozilla Add-Ons website uses them now, as does this blog.

NVDA: No.
JAWS: Yes. Landmarks are announced, they can be navigated to using the Semicolon quick navigation key, and there’s a list of landmarks available through JAWSKey+Ctrl+SemiColon. 1 point
Window-Eyes: No.
SuperNova: No.
System Access To Go: No.

So after the first round, JAWS is in the lead with 1 points.

Contact form from my Easy ARIA tips

The example contact form I created for my Easy Aria tip #3 offers several features that can be incorporated without having to create widgets, and which have appeared in some form or another on pages throughout the web already:

Does the fact that the Name, E-Mail and Message fields are required get indicated by anything other than the label saying “required”?
- By navigating the virtual buffer
- When in forms/focus mode and tabbing around
When entering an invalid name by just entering the first name:
- Does the alert get spoken when tabbing away?
- When tabbing back, does the field get indicated as having an invalid entry?
- Does the fact that this field has an invalid entry get indicated when navigating in the virtual buffer?

In total, there are 5 points to score for this test.

NVDA: NVDA indicates the field as being required in v cursor mode and when tabbing around. 2 points. It speaks the alert. 1 point. It indicates the invalid attribute both when navigating the virtual buffer and when in focus mode and tabbing around. 2 points. Total: 5 points
JAWS: While the label gets spoken in virtual cursor mode, when JAWS switches to forms mode automatically when hitting the entry field, the plopping sound drowns out every indication of attributes such as required or invalid. Only when deviating from default settings and turning AutoFormsMode off one will hear those attributes in V cursor mode. No points for these two. The alert gets spoken. 1 point. When tabbing around, the attributes such as required and invalid do get announced with the default settings. 2 points for these. Total: 3 points
Window-Eyes: The fact that the field is required gets spoken in both browse and focus modes. 2 points. The alert gets spoken. 1 point. The fact that the field has an invalid entry gets spoken in both browse and focus modes. 2 points. Total: 5 points
SuperNova: None of the asked for features work. Sorry, 0 points.
System Access To Go: The alert gets spoken. 1 point. None of the attributes are spoken when navigating or tabbing. Total: 1 point.

After round 2, NVDA and Window-Eyes take the lead with 5 points each, JAWS follows on third place with a total of 4 points, System Access has 1 point, and SuperNova has 0 points.

Yahoo! Search

The new Yahoo! Search is an interactive widget allowing browsing of possible search terms and related concepts that fit the currently selected search term. It uses a whole range of WAI-ARIA widgets, properties and states, live regions etc. When performing a search, the following things should be working:

When focusing the textbox:
- Does the screen reader speak the name “Search query”?
- Does the screen reader announce the description “Use the up and down arrow keys to select suggestions, or press down and then right to explore concepts.”?
When typing, does the screen reader announce that search suggestions are available?
When search suggestions are available, does pressing DownArrow properly announce that focus shifted to the list of suggested search terms, and what to do to get back to the search field?
Does pressing RightArrow announce the shift to the “related concepts” list and the selected item?
When arrowing through either list, does the highlighted/focused item get spoken, and does the search that will be performed when pressing Enter get announced by the screen reader?

So, there are 7 points to score for this one.

NVDA: It speaks the “Search query” label. 1 point. It speaks the “Use the..” description. 1 point. When search suggestions are available, the fact is announced. 1 point. When pressing DownArrow, the transition to the list of suggested terms is announced along with the full instructions and the selected item. 1 point. When arrowing left and right to the related concepts and back, each focus transition is properly announced and the highlighted item read. 1 point. When arrowing up and down through either list, the newly highlighted search term is announced, and the search that is going to be performed is announced automatically. 2 points. Total: 7 points
JAWS: When focusing the search field, the “Search query” label is announced. 1 point. The “use …” description is not announced automatically. It is also not being announced when pressing JawsKey+Tab or Insert+F1. The only way to get to it is to use their HomeRow utility functions and cycling to the “Description” item with HomeRow+F10 and then listening to it with HomeRow+F9. For this almost non-discoverability I can’t give a point, sorry. When search results are available, this gets announced. 1 point. When pressing DownArrow, the transition to the list is announced along with the prompt. 1 point. When RightArrowing, the transition to the “Explore related concepts” list is announced. 1 point. When arrowing up and down, the newly highlighted item is not announced, and neither is the search that is going to be performed. One can get the currently focused item by using Insert+Tab, but the description is once again burried in HomeRow. I’m willing to give half a point for this one since initially it will be confusing to users that they don’t hear anything when arrowing up and down. Total: 4.5 points
Window-Eyes: The label “Search query” is announced. 1 point. The “Use…” description is announced. 1 point. The availability of search results is not announced. The transition to the search term suggestions is partially announced: The focused item is, but the prompt is not. Half a point. The transition to the “Related concepts” and back is announced partially: The newly focused item is, but the prompt isn’t. half a point. When arrowing up and down, both the search suggestion and the search that is going to be performed are being announced. 2 points. Total: 5 points.
SuperNova: Announcing the “Search query” label works. 1 point. But unfortunately, that’s where the fun ends. The description is not announced, the availability of search term suggestions is neither. And the rest of the functionality of this widget is broken. DownArrow is captured by SuperNova and will not fall through to the widget, getting one stuck inside the textbox. Tabbing around will only get up to the “Submit your site” link, but the search terms aren’t reachable. SuperNova will say “bottom”, and no further can one go. Total: 1 point.
System Access To Go: The picture is roughly the same as with SuperNova. The label “Search query” is spoken. 1 point. The description is not spoken. The availability of search term suggestions neither. DownArrow gets you to the “Search” button instead of the list of search terms. In fact, this virtual buffer also ends at the “Submit your site” link. Total: 1 point.

At the end of this round, NVDA leaps ahead with 12 points. Window-Eyes is second with 10 points, followed by JAWS with 8.5 points. System Access scores a total of 2, and SuperNova got their first point!

GMail Chat

GMail has an integrated Google Talk widget that I talked about before. The following should be working:

Ability to activate the “Set status here” label by pressing Enter on it to input a personal status message.
Ability to activate the “status menu” and navigate inside it with speech output.
Navigate inside the list of buddies and hear their names and status.
Inside the Chat window, announce typed and incoming messages.
Track going to the Chat window toolbar.

Once again, there are 5 points to score. Let’s see how everyone fares!

NVDA: Pressing Enter on “Set status here” works fine, and one can input a status message. 1 point. Activating and navigating in the status menu works fine. 1 point. The list of buddies talks fine. 1 point. Chatting works fine. 1 point. Trying to access the toolbar items by first going out of focus mode with Escape made NVDA hang each time I tried it. It somehow has a conflict with the chat widget. Sorry, no point for this one. Total: 4 points
JAWS: The label to input a status message is not activable by pressing Enter. It can only be activated using the JAWS cursor emulation. Since this is a well-known workaround, I’m giving half a point. The Status menu is activable and works fine. 1 point. The list talks fine. 1 point. The incoming and typed messages are spoken in the chat output. 1 point. The chat toolbar to pop out the chat into its own window is accessible. 1 point. Total: 4.5 points.
Window-Eyes: Accessing the label to input a status message works with workaround of routing WE cursor to element, then mouse to WE cursor, and clicking with the mouse. However, I cannot input a status message afterwards, even though I hear the prompt for it. a quarter of a point for that. The status menu cannot be activated through any means. The list talks fine. 1 point. The chat window works with restrictions: It can be activated and typed in, but incoming messages are not read. half a point for that. Trying to access the toolbar items of the chat window sort of works by turning browse mode back on, and then searching, but since the last position is not retained, I can only give half a point for this one. Total: 2.25 points.
SuperNova: Activating the “Set status here” works. I can input a new status. 1 point. The status menu button does not work, cannot be activated or found through other means. The list of buddies talks. 1 point. Activating a chat with a buddy does not work. Consequently, since the chat window never comes up, the toolbar items for the chat window obsolete themselves. Total: 2 points.
System Access To Go: The “Set status here” and Status menu items are not accessible. The list talks fine. 1 point. Activating a chat works. 1 point. Finding the toolbar buttons is not possible, because the cursor gets stuck within the textbox of the chat window and there’s no way to move it out. Total: 2 points.

…and the winner is…

Congratulations go to the NV Access team and their screen reader! In this WAI-ARIA shootout, you scored 16 points.

Number 2 is JAWS by Freedom scientific, scoring a total of 12.5 points.

Window-Eyes by GW Micro is third with a total of 12.25 points.

Fourth place goes to Serotek with their System Access screen reader product line, with a total of 4 points.

And SuperNova by Dolphin receives 3 points.

In summary

This was a close match, although there is clearly a dividing line between the three screen readers that have been supporting Firefox for a longer period of time, and those that came on board fresh within the past year or so.

I hope this little competition encourages each of the vendors to better themselves for the benefit of the users. We’re here to help each and everyone of you with technical advice and discussion on how things should be implemented.

Keep on rockin’!

Robert Kaiser: Schedule for SeaMonkey 2.0 Beta 1

KaiRo — Wed, 01 Jul 2009 11:52:44 +0000

Thunderbird came around with setting up a schedule just in time, so at yesterday's SeaMonkey Status Meeting, we agreed on adopting Thunderbird 3.0b3 dates as the SeaMonkey 2.0 Beta 1 schedule as well (times of 23:59 US/Pacific, as usual):

Slushy String freeze date: 2009-07-02 (Thur)
Slushy Code Freeze date: 2009-07-07 (Tues)
Firm String / Code freeze date: 2009-07-14 (Tues)
l10n-mozilla-1.9.1 freeze date: 2009-07-16 (Thur)?*
Target Ship date: 2009-07-21 (Tues)

This is the first time we have string freezes for SeaMonkey, so let me give you some explanation:

After the slushy string freeze, string changes should be avoided where possible, and those needed must get approval-seamonkey2.0b1+ before being checked in.

After the slushy code freeze, the same is true for any code changes, though blocking-seamonkey2.b1+ bugs without string changes can go in without further approval (blocking+ serves as approval).

The firm freeze should be the cutoff for any changes at all, unless there are blockers we still need to fix.

* I'm not completely sure about the freeze for L10n, we might not need that at all, as we'll likely do the same opt-in process as Firefox did recently and so might be able to just take any L10n changes up to the time when we start the builds. This is the first time we're doing that, so please excuse roughness in the process.

Robert O'Callahan: Progress

roc — Wed, 01 Jul 2009 04:46:33 +0000

I've submitted all of my compositor phase 1 patches for review. The patches are also published here. 111 files changed, 2573 insertions, 1448 deletions, divided into 39 separate patches over multiple Bugzilla bugs. In theory every one of those steps should build and pass tests, although I haven't actually verified that for all the patches. I managed to break things up pretty well --- the largest patch is only 536 insertions and 75 deletions --- so hopefully that will make reviewing easier.

MQ has been working pretty well for me. I get into a routine of applying all the patches, doing some testing, fixing a number of bugs, and then redistributing the changes across the patches that they logically belong to. I'm not 100% sure this is the most efficient way to work --- sometimes I burn quite a bit of time putting all the changes in just the right places --- but at least it's now possible.

Now it's time to start working on something else. My immediate next task is to restructure the media tests so we can generalize tests across file types and backends; for example, right now we have one set of seeking tests for Ogg and another for Wave, but we should just have a single set of tests parametrized by test files of different types.

After that, I plan to do some cleanup that's enabled by compositor phase 1. In particular, we can move scrolling out of the view system and integrate it all directly into the scrollframes in layout.

After that I plan to work on compositor phase 2. Right now in Gecko whenever something needs to be repainted we make platform-level invalidation requests, the platforrm dispatches paint events and we paint. This often leads to over-frequent painting. For example if there's a script changing the DOM 100 times a second, we'll try to paint 100 times a second if we can keep up, which is a waste of time since most screens only refresh at 60Hz or so. Even worse, if you have that script, and an animated image painting 20 times a second, and a video playing at 25 frames per second, we invalidate them all independently and if your computer is fast enough we'll paint 145 times a second. We need to fix this, and I have a plan.

Part of that plan is to create an internal animation API that various Gecko components (animated images, video, smooth scrolling, SMIL, CSS Transitions, etc) can plug into. But we also recognize that declarative animations will never be expressive enough for all use cases, and there's a lot of existing scripted animation libraries out there, so I have an idea for tying in scripted animations as well. Basically, I would expose the following API:

window.mozRequestAnimationFrame(): Signals that an animation is in progress, and requests that the browser schedule a repaint of the window for the next animation frame, if the window is visible.
The browser will fire a mozBeforePaint event at the window before we repaint it. Animation libraries should register an event handler that checks the current time, and updates the DOM/CSS state to show that point in the animation. If the animation has not ended, the event handler should call window.mozRequestAnimationFrame() again to ensure another frame will be scheduled in a timely manner.

That's it! That API gives the browser control over the frame rate, while allowing JS to do anything it wants in each frame.

Suneel Gupta: the need for speed

suneelgupta — Wed, 01 Jul 2009 04:39:06 +0000

cross-posted to mtv here.

Most of us spend more time online than we do on the road. And whether we’re behind the wheel or behind the keyboard, we want to move fast. This is why I’m incredibly proud of my peeps at Mozilla today for releasing Firefox 3.5 – the fastest way for you to get around online. 3.5 is more than two times faster than Firefox 3 and ten times faster than Firefox 2.

I could say more, but a few guys in Hyderabad, India, channeled their passion for Firefox into a video that pretty much says it all. Check it out:

Paul Kim: Going Live with Firefox 3.5

Paul Kim — Wed, 01 Jul 2009 04:24:40 +0000

This morning Mozilla released Firefox 3.5.

It’s a terrific upgrade for the 300 million+ current Firefox users, and will radically improve the Web experience for everyone who migrates to Firefox in the months to come. Most of all, Firefox 3.5 is a compelling expression of the values that underlie Mozilla’s ongoing mission to improve the Web itself.

I’m extremely proud of the hard work everyone in the Mozilla marketing community put into making this a stellar product launch. Each launch I’ve been a part of has felt unique. This year, and with this release, we’ve crossed into operating within a new, more intense competitive environment. One that we’ve had a huge part in creating, for the benefit of everyone on the Web.

Much <3 to everyone in the Mozilla community on a fantastic release, and to upgrading the Web.

Andy Edmonds: Observations on the Tab Design Challenge

andyed — Wed, 01 Jul 2009 04:13:50 +0000

I’ve been making blog drafts for weeks now on the Mozilla Labs “Reinventing Tabs” Design Challenge. A big review seems beyond my attentional capacity which is more and more mimicing that of my 3 year old! I do hope to follow up with a call-out of some of the submissions that incorporate the power of history in tabs. It’s apparent to me that the spawning relationships between tabs is too salient to the human to not be part of the next evolution of tabs. In fact, one might view it as a very subtle and lightweight way of creating landmarks within browsing trails.

Reducing the # of Tabs reduces the management challenge

After reading Limi’s post on reinventing tabs I started using Tree Style Tab on both my core profile and 3.5 beta. This addon groups creates a hierarchy when tabs are spawned from an existing (e.g. “open link in new window”) within a sidebar menu. The initial adjustment was brutal, with pro-active interference in both procedural and motor memory blocking learning. In plain english, overcoming my learned behavior around tabs at the top was challenging initially.

That faded and I swapped back one profile to normal tabs after a week of use. The most startling thing to me about the Tree Style functionality wasn’t the grouping of related tabs, or the presence of a natural mapping between my activity stream and the tab organization. What really rocked was the ability to close all the tabs from a browsing “sub-session”. These tended to be topical explorations.

This points out that the cost of closing tabs, and particularly closing all tabs related to a particular activity, is really high! In addition to offering better ways to select one tab of many tabs, enabling easier tab cleanup could work to alleviate the interaction challenges of tab growth.

Here’s a list of potential user actions that might be useful in a “spawing relationship” aware tab system. I’ll refer to a set of tabs that share a common initial location and have been created from subsquent open in new tab operations as trails.

Close all from this trail
Promote this page to start of trail (close all other tabs in it’s backstream)
Move this trail to a new window, reinstating tabs and history
Bookmark this trail as a tab group bookmark and close
Tag all locations in the tabs of this trail with ___

In the meantime, ctrl-w (win) or apple-w (mac) to close a tab quickly is your friend.

On the Design Challenge Process

The quality and extent of submissions is awesome and I’d call the effort a brilliant success. Yet I think future design challenges might try a different spin on design, critique, and collaboration. I’d like to see the encouragement, both in process and positioning, of derivative works (e.g. remixes) of designs. From a process point of view, this means encouraging the sharing of source files (ex. layered graphic files), a dialogue about common attributes across the designs (ex. tagging) in addition to the current remix friendly licensing requirement.

From a positioning point of view, the current award slots focus on an individual single iteration. A tiered approach of initial designs with subsequent remix rounds could preserve the motivational aspect of individual winners and the downstream rounds of remix would incent non-winners to iterate and incorporate feedback and key elements of winning designs. Perhaps the Chocolate Factory project is a way to realize some of this ambition.

Thanks to Drew @ Mozilla for being a sounding board on some of these ideas.

hacks.mozilla.org: new CSS3 properties in Firefox 3.5 - *-of-type

Christopher Blizzard — Wed, 01 Jul 2009 03:26:54 +0000

In today’s feature post we’ll talk briefly about three new CSS3 pseudo-classes: only-of-type, first-of-type and last-of-type. These are all very similar to the *-nth classes we covered in an earlier post.

first-of-type and last-of-type

These two pseudo-classes allow you to select the first and last item in a list of siblings within a particular element. You can use this to color the first item in a list, use opacity to make the last paragraph on a page fade out or a number of other things. Here’s an example that sets small caps on the first paragraph of a document:

#type-ex1 div:first-of-type {
    font-variant: small-caps;
}

Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit. Sed nulla neque, cursus venenatis vehicula ac, rutrum id libero. Nullam porttitor ultricies eros, laoreet mollis nunc vestibulum in. Sed iaculis nibh nec tellus vulputate pulvinar. Aliquam ultricies mauris vel nulla semper ac dignissim arcu sollicitudin.

Vestibulum ante ipsum primis in faucibus orci luctus et ultrices posuere cubilia Curae; Cras molestie elit sed libero pretium faucibus. Ut sed lacus eget est gravida aliquet sed sed risus. Maecenas vitae volutpat purus. Fusce porttitor aliquam lectus sit amet vehicula. Nulla molestie mi lacus.

only-of-type

only-of-type is similar to the previous two, but only selects an element if it has no siblings with the same name. Here’s a somewhat contrived example* that will hide single images inside of a div. If there’s more than one image in the div they will be visible:

.type-ex2 img:only-of-type {
    display: none;
}

This is some text before a single image.

This is some text after a single image.

This is some text before two images.

This is some text after two images.

And that’s it. Enjoy!

[ * Note: if someone can come up with a better example for only-of-type I'm all ears. There are very few examples of where this is useful. ]

John Slater: An Upgraded Mozilla.com for an Upgraded Firefox

John — Wed, 01 Jul 2009 03:09:14 +0000

As you no doubt have heard by now, we launched Firefox 3.5 today…a triumphant and exciting moment made possible by a lot of hard work from a lot of very smart, talented and dedicated people around the world. The result is a shiny new Firefox that includes dramatically improved performance, support for open video and other web standards, and new features ranging from geolocation to private browsing. Great stuff all around.

A release that awesome demands that we also upgrade the website that serves up those millions of downloads, so mozilla.com received its own set of 3.5 enhancements today. Check out the project plan for the full overview (and that doesn’t include the dozens of bugs that were filed to tweak things here and there), but here’s a list of my personal favorite improvements:

* a “thank you for downloading” video on the First Run and What’s New pages starring members of the Mozilla community (in addition to showing off some of the people who volunteer so much time to make Firefox possible, it’s also most people’s first exposure to the magic of open video)
* a page detailing the immense amount of back-end work that went into the release that we’re calling Under the Hood (includes some nifty graphs and a demo by Chris Blizzard)
* lots and lots of updates to our Firefox Features page, plus call-outs for what’s new and what’s been improved
* refreshed information on the Firefox download page, with redirects in place to display different content depending on which browser you’re using
* new illustrations throughout the site, most notably the addition of dolphins & gears to our existing homepage menagerie (hit refresh if you don’t see them right away)

Like any major site update, this was a large and complex project that was only possible through a true team effort. Special shout outs (in no particular order) go to:

* Steven Garrity, Stephen DesRoches and Mike Gauthier from silverorange for their tireless design and development efforts
* our Web QA superstars – Stephen Donner, Krupa Raj and Raymond Etornam – for checking the site over and over and over until it was right
* Pascal Chevrel and our localization community for making sure the key pages were available in more than 70 languages…a feat that staggers me the more I think about it
* the folks at The Royal Order & the Delicious Design League for continuing the great visual design and illustration work they started with the 3.0 site
* our incredible IT crew, including Jeremy Orem, Matt Zeier, Reed Loden and Justin Fitzhugh, for making sure everything worked
* Alex Buchanan, Frederic Wenzel and Mike Morgamic from our WebDev team for lending their magic touch to a variety of key areas
* all the technical experts – especially Chris Blizzard, but also Mike Beltzner, Vlad Vukicevic, Damon Sicore and Eric Shepherd – who patiently walked me through concepts like Native JSON and Web Worker Threads until I had them reasonably figured out
* Alex Faaborg for leading the charge on the new logo/icon and lending his detail-oriented expertise to plenty of other areas as well
* Sylvain Barre, Sébastien Adgnot and Pierre-Yves Kerembellec from Dailymotion for supporting the open video demo on First Run/What’s New with their bandwidth and expertise
* Alix Franquet and Rainer Cvillink for making all the new videos
* Paul Kim, Tara Shahian and Dave Bottoms for their opinions and ideas throughout the process

Robert Accettura: Things You’ll Love About Firefox 3.5

Robert — Wed, 01 Jul 2009 01:04:40 +0000

Firefox 3.5 is around the corner. For those who don’t pay attention to development here’s the big features worth checking out. There’s lots more, but these are my favorites:

User Centric Features

Private Browsing – Officially it’s called “Private Browsing” but most know it as “porn mode”. Simply put once you turn on the feature nothing about your browsing is saved to your computer until you turn it off. No browser history, cookies, cache, no passwords, download list. Great for shared computers where you may not want the next person to know where you shopped, what you bought etc.

Faster JavaScript – Everyone is doing it. Firefox 3.5 now ships with TraceMonkey which uses a technique, called trace trees to add just-in-time native code compilation to SpiderMonkey, the JS engine in Firefox. Bottom line: faster JavaScript makes JavaScript powered sites like Gmail way faster.

Faster Awesomebar – The awesomebar is a fast way of browsing the web, but the UI can sometimes get a little sluggish. Some awesome work has been done to optimize it for better performance. Faster UI = better browsing experience.

Better Awesomebar – The Awesomebar got a few enhancements including autocomplete for tagging, which is extremely handy as well as editing tags on multiple bookmarks at the same time.

Undo Closed Window – We’ve all done it before. Now you can undo a closed window just like a closed tab.

Drag Tab To New Window – Previously you could drag/drop to reorder tabs. Now you can drag a tab off the tab bar to move it into it’s own window. This may sound trivial but it actually makes organizing tabs much easier.

Video/Audio – Firefox 3.5 supports the new HTML5 <video/> and <audio/> tags. Specifically it supports Vorbis in Ogg containers, as well as WAV with support for more formats expected in the future. I’ve discussed open video before and suggest learning more about how important this is there.

SSL Error Pages Suck Less – The error pages shown when there is an SSL error were pretty tough on users since they didn’t display anything helpful. The new error pages are a bit more helpful. The bug implementing the changes has tons of details on the changes.

Geolocation – Simply put a website can (if you allow it) gather information about your internet connection and using a location service (provided by Google by default) will calculate your location. No more needing to constantly type in your zip code, or city name to get local information. For privacy you need to explicitly allow it. Geolocation is in a word awesome.

New Icon – Well, it’s not really new. It’s “refreshed” I guess. It’s not a huge change, but it does look really sharp, especially in more modern operating systems that use larger icons like Mac OS X. Alex Faaborg has it on his blog in various sizes for you see.

Developer Centric Features

Web Workers – My personal favorite is web workers. Essentially it’s background processing in a separate thread for JavaScript. No more locking up the browser’s UI because you need to do some complicated JS calculations. I’ll leave it to the documentation linked above for examples. Very handy stuff.

@font-face – Designers have long been frustrated with the lack of font options on the web. They often resort to using images and flash as a way to expand their font options. With @font-face it’s now possible to use custom fonts and reference them via CSS. There is however the issue of licensing of fonts used on a webpage since the font file itself is accessible via a web browser.

Native JSON Enough said. Native JSON is fast. var obj = JSON.parse(someJS);

Cross Site xhr – xmlHttpRequest() has ushered in a new era of JavaScript. It’s not however without some serious limitations. One of the most obvious limitations is that you can’t use it across hostnames. Until now.

There’s more cool toys, but these are my favorite.

Still not convinced of all the new stuff? Check out this demo, then look at the source behind it. It’s pretty impressive.

hacks.mozilla.org: exploring music with the audio tag

Christopher Blizzard — Wed, 01 Jul 2009 00:28:49 +0000

Today’s demo comes to us from Samuel Goldszmidt. He’s a web developer specializing in audio applications at Institut de Recherche et Coordination Acoustique/Musique (IRCAM). IRCAM is a European institute covering science, sound and avant garde electro-acoustical art music.

The demo uses XML to describe the various segments of a piece of music - Florence Baschet’s StreicherKreis (Circle of Strings). The music itself is a combination of stringed instruments and electronic effects. From the XML, SVG is generated for each section of the music. You can click on each section to listen to that part of the piece and a description is shown on how that particular section was created.

As far as demos go, this is relatively simple. But it’s worth highlighting because it shows how easy it is to build a timeline around a piece of music and add descriptive information. In this case, it’s information meant to teach people how a particular effect was created. But it could be anything, from showing different camera angles of people playing the music to links about different covers of a popular piece. Opening up media to the web means that we can combine it with text, images and other media. This is just a small example.

View the Demo in Firefox 3.5

J. Paul Reed: Firefox 3.0.11 (still) released!

Tue, 30 Jun 2009 23:53:08 +0000

The definition of "latest and greatest version" just changed...

I heard some some rumbling that the latest version of Firefox, version 3.5¹, hit the web today.

This is most certainly a big accomplishment and everyone involved has many reasons to be proud of this release. But that's not what I wanted to talk about².

I wanted to step back for a moment and call out a group of really important people that are often overlooked in all the excitement during a major release: the sustaining engineering team³.

They're the group of developers, bug triagers, QA engineers, build engineers, ops engineers, web developers, and project managers who have kept the 300 million and change Firefox 3.0.x⁴ users safe, secure, and stable for over a year now.

Sustaining engineering has never been particularly sexy work.

Often times, the pressures imposed by consumers of "sustaining releases" make it particularly grueling work: risk assessment becomes a large—and often difficult—part of the job. Mistakes can be very costly and affect higher numbers of users. Such users are less tolerant of sometimes-necessary changes. And in the case of many software products, Firefox included, when a security vulnerability is involved, all of these decisions and work needs to be done on a very tight schedule.

These realities are doubly true for an open source project, where the "release early, release often"-mentality⁵ often leaves those who toil away on sustaining efforts appearing in relative obscurity. And since open source capital is about visibility, less visibility can translate to less understanding of the actual work being done and the value these teams and individuals bring not only to the community, but to the end users.

So to those who've done this difficult, thankless work, quietly, consistently, and proudly: you have my thanks. And even though they may not know about you, you have the thanks of every Firefox user who is able to easily click "Check for Updates" to get today's New Hotness (tm), because your work has kept them safe and secure on the web for the past year.

If history is any guide, these tireless souls are already getting ready to do it all over again and take stewardship of 3.5.x after a couple of releases or so.

So take a moment to raise a (virtual) glass to them⁶... and then get back to enjoying the awesomeness that is Shiretoko.

____________________
¹ Back in my day, it was called "Firefox 3.next." P.S. Get off my lawn.
² If you do want to read more about the 3.5 release, try here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here,here, here, here,
here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, or here.
³ I don't know what Mozilla Corporation calls this team, exactly; unlike some other organization, I don't think (structurally) they split them out; but the function is the same
⁴ And you have to admit... it was a pretty good vintage of Firefox
⁵ Which, don't get me wrong, is critical for any open source project's success
⁶ Or, if you're in a physical localized spot next to them, a real one...

Jonathan DiCarlo: Download Firefox 3.5!

jonoscript — Tue, 30 Jun 2009 23:21:59 +0000

Firefox 3.5 is released today, representing almost a year’s worth of hard work and improvements over Firefox 3.0. Key features include faster Javascript, <audio> and <video< tags that allow media to play as part of a page with no plugins; and private browsing mode (Sing it with me: “The int-er-net is really really great…. for porn!”) Download Firefox 3.5, try it out, and spread the word!

Blog of Metrics: Live Tracking of Firefox 3.5 Adoption (part II)

kkovash — Tue, 30 Jun 2009 22:08:40 +0000

Earlier today, we highlighted some real-time tracking by whos.amung.us. Next up, we have another visualization engine for today’s Firefox 3.5 launch – downloadstats.mozilla.com.

This was a somewhat stealth (i.e., surprise) project brought about by our very own Daniel Einspanjer (in collaboration with the folks at SQLstream). (Thanks to the Mozilla web dev team as well.)

Similar to the real-time tracking presented at Spread Firefox last year, we set out to provide a similar visualization whereby everyone could see downloads happening in real-time – across every corner of the globe.

You’ll notice several cool things within this new visualization – a lit dot for every actual download of Fx3.5; a “current”, “minimum”, and “maximum” per second download rate for every country (along with a trend over the past minute); and a “total” or cumulative number of downloads since Fx3.5 was launched this morning (PDT).

In case you’re really curious, here are a couple comparable numbers from Firefox 3’s wildly successful Download Day last June… in its first 24-hours after launch, the “max” per second download rate was approx. 283 and the “average” was approx. 95. Please keep in mind that the two product launches are not quite apples-to-apples, but these numbers are still interesting to know from simply a context perspective.

Enjoy the live, interactive map!

Blake Kaplan: Working on the JS engine

mrbkap — Tue, 30 Jun 2009 22:00:02 +0000

Especially working on old branches without some of the nice debugging helpers that jorendorff has implemented, sometimes I look at my gdb session and just know that I’m working on the JS engine:

(gdb) p $.atom
$11 = (JSAtom *) 0xb194f984
(gdb) p/x *(JSString *)((int)$ & ~7)
$12 = {length = 0x20000004, u = {chars = 0xaf434970, base = 0xaf434970}}
(gdb) x/4ch $.u.chars
0xaf434970:	97 'a'	98 'b'	99 'c'	100 'd'

John Resig: JSConf Talk: Games, Performance, TestSwarm

John Resig — Tue, 30 Jun 2009 21:45:38 +0000

The video from my talk at JSConf has been posted. Thanks to Chris for organizing the conference and the excellent quality of the video.

The description from the JSConf site summarizes the talk well:

John Resig presents his mystery topic, which is actually three topics that strike his interest. First up is measuring performance and a quick introduction to benchmarking (and its positives and negatives). This is followed by JavaScript Games which he unveils some super cool hidden functionality (cheat codes++) on the jQuery web site. This is followed up by the introduction of John's distributed continuous test framework platform, Test Swarm. It is jam packed with Nirvana and goodness so be sure to watch both parts.

Part 1: Measuring JavaScript Performance, JavaScript Games

Part 2: Distributed JavaScript Testing, Q&A

Additionally, the slides from the talk are up on Slideshare.

Sean Martell: A Web Browser Renaissance

Sean — Tue, 30 Jun 2009 21:22:13 +0000

With the launch of Firefox 3.5 today, I’m excited to post an all new wallpaper to commemorate the event!

Within the web today, a browsing transformation is underway. We’re seeing constant advancement from the static browsing Middle Ages of old and the ushering in of a new Modern Era of openness, speed and security.

Taking advantage of all the glorious advancements this new era has to offer has never been easier with the newly relased Firefox 3.5!

To add to the excitement, when a person decides to upgrade to the speediest, safest and most advanced Firefox yet, it is best to update your desktop wallpaper to show your love for the browser. Why not download a freshly baked Firefox 3.5 wallpaper? Our wallpaper is rich in pixels and has 100% of your daily visual intake of Firefox fun.

A big shout out to the team of Alex Faaborg, Jennifer Boriss, Alexander Limi and John Slater for the idea and feedback!

Now, go get one now!

(Update: Now get this wallpaper as a Firefox Persona skin!)

download the widescreen version

download the fullscreen version

QMO Events: Testday: Testscripting with MozMill 1.2!

aakashd — Tue, 30 Jun 2009 20:51:10 +0000

Join the MozQA Community in Testscripting with MozMill 1.2!
==============================================================

Use Pastebin URLs to send code snippets to other members. To add any testscripts created, please attach them to a bugzilla bug that will be linked in the chat room topic as well as here on the day of the testday. Make sure to follow the instructions listed.
You can use the test template as quick way to create a new test file. Further instructions will be available as we get closer to the testday.

Otherwise, have fun with the event!
==============================================================

Here's some of the things we're planning on doing throughout the day:

Go to Litmus and head over to the General Subgroup located in the Basic Functional Test Testgroup. From there, try to create some test scripts following those manual test cases!
Perform exploratory testing on the latest MozMill build.
Tell us what you think about your experience as well as log any bugs via Bugzilla.

QMO Events: Testday: Testing a Mozilla Web Property

aakashd — Tue, 30 Jun 2009 20:34:45 +0000

Join the MozQA Community in testing a Mozilla Web Dev Property!
==============================================================
Currently, the testsuite is currently being set up at this time, so exploratory testing for the website is the plan, so far, for the testday. Once the testsuite has been created and ported to an online directory, its link will be posted to this event.

Otherwise, have fun with the event!
==============================================================
This page will be updated over the next 2 months once more is known about the specifics of the testday. Mark your calendars otherwise!

Majken "Lucy" Connor: Happy Firefox 3.5!

Lucy — Tue, 30 Jun 2009 20:22:16 +0000

By now of course you’ve downloaded Firefox 3.5 and enjoyed the best browser update yet! It’s very exciting, and there are so many great improvements to discover. If you can handle any more excitement, we have some bad news. We’ve lost our pandas! We’ve been spending so much time getting our Firefoxes (aka red pandas) ready for their new homes, that they all managed to sneak out when we weren’t looking. We need your help to find them and bring them home.

They can’t have gotten too far, look for them wandering around the Mozilla websphere. Don’t forget to sign up for the hunt so we can get you set up with the tools you’ll need to catch them. You can also follow @mozhunt on twitter for updates on how many pandas we’ve lost, and clues about where they might like to hide.

Oh! I think I just saw one go by now!

P.S. If you have a Mozilla related website or blog that you think might be a cozy spot for a panda to hide, please contact me via email/IM/IRC etc!

Massimiliano Mirra: The Mozilla Add-Ons Workshop in Florence

bard — Tue, 30 Jun 2009 19:48:00 +0000

(Note: this post is also available in Italian on xulit.org)

Picture a Mozilla geek standing on the shoulders of another to reach an electric outlet in the ceiling, then expecting to be returned to firm floor and instead being shuttled elsewhere to the reason of "one more outlet to gooooo!".

(Photo credits: William. Complete photoset here.)

Picture the chatty signora who serves drinks and panini at the bar, getting asked tens of chairs first, then an old knife to be used as a screwdriver to assemble fans (no, not the human variety), then rags to clean above said chairs retrieved from the basement from above said geeks. Picture her respond with more lively chatter instead of increasing threats to kick us out.

Picture two guys who never gave a presentation together bantering/negotiating on stage, much to the audience's amusement, which slides to skip to make time for an unplanned but ubercool presentation. (Of course I was right most of the time but Luca was tougher. :P)

You might think by now that the Mozilla Add-On Workshop had more than a bit of adventure in it, but our men in Florence Giacomo and Iacopo (from Mozilla Italia) as well as the headquarter agents Paul and William (from Mozilla Europe) plowed through every obstacle and got us safely to the heart of the workshop: an introductory talk on Firefox extension development, a hands-on tutorial, and a short finale on the tricks of the trade.

Despite many rough edges and a wealth of non-obvious material to cover (we went from zero to a Twitter-search extension to interactive development in less than three hours), almost fifty people gave us full attention and support, which is a testament to the rising interest on the subject in this country (or to the seldom sung quality of Italian patience (or both)).

Courseware is available: slides, incremental examples on building an extension, samples of “unusual” (if you've only done web development so far) JavaScript.

If you were there and your questions went unasked or unanswered because of time or because you couldn't hang out afterwards; or you want us to keep you in the loop about this Fall's initiatives; or you just want to say hi, feel free to get in touch with us or leave a comment here or on the Italian version of this post.

Happy extension hacking!

Marcio Galli: Shock with Icons

mozillabr — Tue, 30 Jun 2009 19:39:07 +0000

Noticed a few of the early #ff35 shockers in Brazil changed their twitter icons. This can be also insteresting for Facebook in US and other locations like Orkut. I saved one icon here..

Dan Mosedale: Thunderbird 3.0b3 dates

dmose — Tue, 30 Jun 2009 19:26:02 +0000

At today's thunderbird-drivers meeting, we agreed on Thunderbird 3.0b3 dates (times of 23:59 US/Pacific, as usual):

Slushy String freeze date: 2009-07-02 (Thur)
Slushy Code Freeze date: 2009-07-07 (Tues)
Firm String / Code freeze date: 2009-07-14 (Tues)
l10n-mozilla-1.9.1 freeze date: 2009-07-16 (Thur)
Target Ship date: 2009-07-21 (Tues)

Joel Maher: Where is the Fennec QA team?

elvis314 — Tue, 30 Jun 2009 19:02:57 +0000

This title can imply a lot of things, yet this post will outline where the Fennec QA team is on developing tests, plans, and processes for our Fennec releases.

As many of you have seen, we released Fennec Maemo Beta2 and Windows Mobile Alpha2 last Friday. We also held the first ever Fennec testday logging a massive 43 bugs. This brings up some questions about why would we release after just finding 43 bugs, what is our release criteria, and what is the QA team doing.

Here is my take on the Firefox QA process (which the Mozilla community is accustomed to and looks to Fennec for a similar process):

Build master test plan for release (alpha, beta, final)

This includes a list of new features, update features and bugs fixed
Define the target audience (hardware), performance goals, and list of must pass tests
Outline points of intersection with other products, upgrades, l10n, support, marketing and schedule

Start writing test cases and feature specific test plans
Test private builds for feature and integration with product and ecosystem
Test nightly builds
As bugs trend towards zero (naturally or through triage) finalize test plan for features, dates, criteria
Get release candidate build, start running full tests
When no blockers and tests are done start running update, l10n, and documentation tests
QA gives sign off, everybody is happy

For Fennec, we are not ready for that type of a cycle. Dev is cranking out serious changes to code. We are building from mozilla-central which is a roaming beast. Unittests are not running for all platforms. Everybody is asking where they can download Fennec for iPhone! A lot of chaos to apply quality measures to. Lets say (hypothetically) we want to check in a performance fix to gain 25% faster panning, but causes some issues in the url bar and focus. This might get done overnight (not planned) and there are only a few notes in a bug outlining this. Worse yet, this could happen after we are already testing a release candidate since it resolves so many side effects of bad performance and only introduces a few new problems.

Here is a quick outline of the current QA cycle for the Fennec releases to date:

List of bugs is built up (~40) for the upcoming release
a few weeks later, we are at 30 bugs (a lot of new issues)
We triage down to top 5, build release candidate and start testing
QA runs through litmus test suite, also some manual browsing
If no big issues are found, lets ship tonight

I know this is a lot less formal than Firefox and rightly so. We are looking with our Alpha releases to get feedback from the motivated community members who are willing to tinker and hack and give us good feedback that we act upon. For the Beta releases, we need to be much more stable and change our audience to people who are not so patient but willing to accept a lot of bugs. This means little to no crashes, faster performance and good compatibility with the web.

Going forward, we will step up the QA involvement and evolve into a more formal QA process. Keep in mind we will be doing alpha, beta, and formal releases all at the same time just on different platforms (we can’t lose our current methods completely).

Here is what we have in place right now:

Litmus test cases
Firefox unittests running on Maemo
Maemo talos runs (including fennecmark for panning and zoom performance)
Initial presence in phone specific forums: htc touch pro and samsung omnia
Account with Device Anywhere for compatibility testing

These are all key components to providing quality test coverage. If you look at putting some solid release criteria around the things we have in place for an official release we will look more like this:

Create test plan with release criteria
Test individual changes and new features
Develop new test cases and flag cases required for release
Get consensus from team on release criteria
Request milestone build every month that we can make a quick pass on to see how close we are
Utilize Testdays to keep the product stable at each milestone
Bug count trends to zero, RC build is generated, test pass starts
Tests pass, move onto final release prep (note: not just call it good)
Test install on criteria hardware, l10n, and release note testing

This new approach falls in line with the Firefox QA methodology quite well. It really adds more overhead to the process, but give appropriate time for each area as well as a general consensus with the whole team of what to expect and how to make the decisions.

It is time to mature the Fennec release process and make it a real piece of software that is reliable and well respected in the mobile community.

Blog of Metrics: Live Tracking of Firefox 3.5 Adoption (part I)

kkovash — Tue, 30 Jun 2009 18:17:29 +0000

With the Firefox 3 launch last summer, we saw some great examples of community driven stats and real-time tracking of its adoption. With today’s launch of Firefox 3.5, we’re stoked to see another wave of innovative tracking tools and visualizations.

One such tool comes to us from the folks at whos.amung.us, a widget application providing stats to blog/site owners.

Check it out!

We’ll be featuring one or two more real-time visualizations of the Fx3.5 launch a little later today.

Mozilla Add-ons Blog: A note on add-on stats this week: Firefox 3.5 edition

Justin Scott (fligtar) — Tue, 30 Jun 2009 17:43:08 +0000

In the days after Firefox 3’s release last year, I made a blog post titled “A note on add-on stats this week” that explained why active daily user statistics would be inflated more than usual.

With the release of Firefox 3.5 today, the same inflation will be present for the rest of this week, so please don’t be alarmed by a large spike in the reported active installations of your add-ons.

Hopefully by the release of Firefox.next, we will have fixed the bug that will allow us to get rid of update ping inflation entirely.

ShareThis

Planet Mozilla Interns: Jeff Zeller: Firefox 3.5 is here!

jeffzeller — Tue, 30 Jun 2009 17:28:14 +0000

There is a lot of excitement around the office today regarding the release of Firefox 3.5…it has been cool to see the worldwide support for our product, and the positive feedback that we have been getting from members of the international community. Congrats to the whole Firefox team, especially the people who have been here from the beginning to see this process through. Go check it out! http://www.mozilla.com/en-US/

Laura Mesa: Upgrade to Firefox 3.5: Shaking Up the Affiliates Program

noreply@blogger.com (Laura) — Tue, 30 Jun 2009 17:10:56 +0000

One of the projects I have been working on for the Firefox 3.5 is a new dynamic messaging campaign for the launch called "Upgrade the Web". The idea first started as an IE switch campaign but morphed into an upgrade campaign for all browser users.

There are three main touch points for this campaign:
-Affiliate Buttons
-Word Press Plug-In
-Google Gadget Ads

The idea is that each one of these Firefox promoters dynamically displays a different message to the viewer depending on what browser they are using. We made an effort to make the tag lines cute and cheeky (thanks Elise!) and to make the graphics snappily emphasize (Thanks Sean!) the "new and improved-ness" of Firefox 3.5.

Here are the buttons and their respective messages:

These same messages are also being used in the Word Press plug-in and the Google Gadget Ads.

Put these buttons on your blog or website and help spread the word about Firefox 3.5!

[You can get the Affiliate buttons or the plug-in from the "Upgrade the Web" program homepage.
To download the buttons (and get credit for the downloads you generate) you need to be a Spread Firefox member. ]

Thanks to Elise Allen, Sean Martell, John Slater, Alex Buchanan, Mike Hostetler, Chris Blizzard, Stephen Donner, Krupa Raj for all their hard work--Awesome job!

Jay Patel: It’s time to Shock the Web!

Jay Patel — Tue, 30 Jun 2009 16:38:40 +0000

It’s no surprise that Firefox 3.5 is already causing a ruckus on Twitter… but that’s just the beginning!

We hope the social media blitz will continue over the next 24 hours as we watch the Shiretoko Shock travel around the world.

The idea for the Shock came from Prashanth, one of our Mozilla Campus Reps, and we put a campaign together in just a few days so that the Mozilla community and fans everywhere could participate during our launch.

We’re hoping everyone will tweet, blog, share, post, etc. on their favorite social media channels at 3:50pm in their time zone, starting in South America at 3:50pm BRT (11:50am PDT) today. Every part of the world will get a chance to share their thoughts on the new Firefox 3.5 as the Shock travels west around the globe.

We’ll come together 24 hours later at 3:50pm BRT (Brazil Time) on Wednesday, July 1st for the “Super Shock”! At that time, we want the entire world to help us Shock the Web at the same time.

It should be interesting… so get ready to get your Shock on!

Eric Shepherd: Happy Firefox 3.5 release day!

sheppy — Tue, 30 Jun 2009 16:30:44 +0000

Firefox 3.5 was released about an hour and a half ago, and downloads are going strong. Seems like a good opportunity for me to thank everyone that contributed to the documentation for Firefox 3.5. While there are far too many people to thank them all by name (so I won’t be calling anyone out by name today, to avoid leaving anyone out), I’ll call out a few specific groups of people:

Thanks to all the developers that made Firefox 3.5 all kinds of awesome. It’s because of you that we had so much writing work to do for this release!
Thanks also to everyone that wrote content for the Firefox 3.5 documentation. This includes not just the folks that wrote articles on the wiki, but also people that blogged about new features and about fixed bugs, because your blog posts helped us get the documentation whipped into shape.
I’d also like to thank people that helped tag bugs with the “dev-doc-needed” keyword so that we’d know what needed to be written about, as well as folks that filed bugs against the documentation.
Last, but not least, I’d like to thank everyone that offered feedback on the documentation, as well as the folks that were so helpful when I had questions about the technical details.

The quality of our documentation rests largely in the hands of our engineers and contributors; there’s far too much for me to get it all right by myself, so thanks to everyone for your help!

For the next little while, while the plan for the next release is still coalescing, I’ll be working mostly on back-end stuff, such as our MindTouch wiki add-ons, as well as organization clean-up work. My goal for the next few months is to make the Mozilla Developer Center easier to use, as well as easier to contribute to.

I’d like to remind everyone to start tagging relevant bugs for Firefox.next as dev-doc-needed! It’s never too early; we’ve already got some docs for Gecko 1.9.2 on MDC!

Chris Ilias: How to upgrade to Firefox 3.5

Chris Ilias — Tue, 30 Jun 2009 16:19:36 +0000

Firefox 3.5 is released!!

If you’re using Firefox 3.0.x, just open the Help menu and select Check for Updates…

If you’re using anything else, download Firefox 3.5 from http://www.getfirefox.com.

Boris Zbarsky: Performance testing pitfalls

bzbarsky — Tue, 30 Jun 2009 16:13:54 +0000

Someone recently asked why it is that SFX (e.g. in Safari 4) scores 1000runs/s on the Dromaeo CharAt test while Spidermonkey (e.g. in Firefox 3.5) scores something closer to 80runs/s. Naturally, I pulled out my profiler and looked. I discovered some interesting things:

About 2-3% of the time the Dromaeo harness measures for the charAt test is actually spent running the str_charAt function in Spidermonkey. The rest is spent inside the harness itself.
If I pull the test out of the harness, and instead of the harness' runs/second measurement just directly measure how long it takes to run the test 1000 times, I get 430ms or so in Firefox and 750ms or so in Safari. That corresponds to scores of 2325runs/s and 1333runs/s for Firefox and Safari respectively.
If I rerun the same standalone test in Firefox with jit disabled, I get numbers closer to 7300ms.

Conclusions: The harness is measuring pure JS-execution overhead in both browsers, not actual charAt performance. The harness causes us to somehow not trace the test when running inside of it, leading to the numbers seen above.

Update: Filed a bug on this.

Mozilla Developer DevNews: about:mozilla – Firefox 3.5 launch edition!

dria — Tue, 30 Jun 2009 16:08:35 +0000

In this issue…

Firefox 3.5 now available

Firefox 3.5 has been released and is now available for Windows, Mac, and Linux in more than 70 languages. This release represents the hard work, dedication, and perseverance of thousands of contributors throughout the Mozilla community and around the world.

Firefox 3.5 has a huge number of additions and improvements for both users and web developers alike, including: robust new user privacy features; support for high quality open video and audio; a new, high performance JavaScript engine (and a host of other performance and speed improvements); downloadable fonts that will fundamentally change how we view typography and the web; powerful new developer features such as location aware browsing, canvas features, worker threads, native JSON, and media queries; and so much more. Firefox 3.5 is essentially an upgrade to the Web itself.

Mike Beltzner, Firefox Product Director, stars in this quick video introduction to Firefox 3.5. Visit GetFirefox.com for more information about and to download this release.

Firefox Hacks

The Firefox Hacks team continues to focus on the new features that are part of Firefox 3.5, posting an article and demo every day. Recent posts include: Open video codecs and quality, a short introduction to media queries, 3d transforms, better security and performance with native JSON, and HTML5 video and the web. Check out the Firefox Hacks weblog to read about all of these new features and more.

Discover Shiretoko

Mozilla Japan has started a new “Discover Shiretoko” campaign in cooperation with the non-profit Shiretoko Nature Foundation in Hokkaido, Japan. “As some of you may know, each version Firefox has a code-name that is the name of a national park. The code name for Firefox 3.5 is ‘Shiretoko’ which is taken from the name of the Shiretoko National Park in Northern Japan. Mozilla and this organization have a number of common goals and you can read 4 stories about Firefox and Shiretoko on the Discover Shiretoko site.” The team is also running a new web banner campaign, featuring a unique and creative use of the Canvas element to grow a virtual tree on your website or blog. Read Foxkeh’s weblog to find out more.

Firefox in context

Mitchell Baker has written an article that talks about Firefox in context of Mozilla’s larger mission to promote choice and innovation on the Internet. “Firefox enables the web and web applications to be ever more robust and exciting. The web enables Firefox to be more flexible, more agile and more responsive. Firefox builds an experience where the center of the entire system remains a person. Not a website, not a business, not a piece of software. The most important actor in the entire picture is a human being; an individual. You. Me. Each person living part of his or her life online.” Read Mitchell’s full post on her weblog.

Weave 0.4 released

Weave Sync is a prototype add-on that encrypts and securely synchronizes the Firefox experience across multiple browsers, so that your desktop, laptop and mobile phone can all work together. It is part of the Weave project, which aims to integrate services more closely with the browser. This new release includes a major rewrite of many of Weave’s key components since the last major release in June. For more information, see the Weave 0.4 release announcment.

Two new Fennec releases

Stuart Parmenter has announced the release of Fennec 1.0 Beta 2 for Maemo and Fennec 1.0 Alpha 2 for Windows Mobile. “For these releases we have worked on improving the user experience, replacing our old theme with a much nicer looking one and fixing numerous usability issues. We’ve continued to increase performance and responsiveness.” Other changes include how add-ons are installed, how the download manager works, and several improvements to web forms.

Firefox browser for CyberMentors

Jane Finette has posted about Mozilla’s involvement with the UK-based charity that works to help Britain’s youngsters deal with and protect themselves from bullying. “Earlier this year they launched their CyberMentors program, offering help and advice from trained mentors to anyone who is being bullied online. Mozilla supported CyberMentors straight out of the gates, whereby members of the Mozilla community volunteered to be trained as CyberMentors. Yesterday, we took our partnership a stage further for this worthwhile cause by building and launching a new custom Firefox browser for CyberMentors.” To learn more about this project, see Jane’s weblog post.

Open Video Conference roundup

Mark Surman posted an interesting round up of the goings-on and takeaways from the Open Video Conference that took place recently in New York. “It was an amazing confluence of people from the worlds of online video, art, free culture, open content and web technology.” Mark’s takeaways, summarized, are: “people who make video are great potential allies”, “we have a long way to go”, “there are some simple things we can do now to build momentum”, and finally “open video is both important and fun”. Mark’s post finishes up with some potential next steps, and you can read it in full over at his weblog.

Mozilla Service Week

There are two new stories about the exciting new Mozilla Service Week project that’s taking place Sept 14-21. The first article asks that non-profit and community organizations that are in need of technology help get in touch with Mozilla, so your organization can be included in the program. If you already have ideas about what sort of help you need, you can register directly at the Idealist volunteer organization. The second post is about how individuals can get involved with and get a head start on the Service Week. The team is looking for help promoting the Mozilla Service Week event over the summer, both to volunteers worldwide and to non-profits and local organizations that could use help. For more information, check out both articles: Public benefit organizations: How can we help you?, and Mozilla Service Week: How to help!

Design Challenge: vote now!

The submission deadline for the Mozilla Labs Summer ‘09 Design Challenge has passed, and over 120 concepts have been submitted around the theme of reinventing tabs in the browser. The nine panelists will be going through the submissions and determining the four “best in class” honors, but there’s an additional honor to be bestowed, and we need your help! You can participate by going to the Design Challenge showcase site, reviewing the concepts, and voting for your favorite to help determine which entry should receive the “People’s Choice” award. Voting closes on July 5th, so now’s a great time to start checking out some of the incredible work that’s been submitted for this Challenge. More information is available on Pascal’s weblog post.

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.

* Fri, Jul 10 – Online – Firefox 3.5 Security Testday
* Sept 14-21 – Everywhere! – Mozilla Service Week

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.

Mozilla Developer DevNews: Firefox 3.5 is now available for download

beltzner — Tue, 30 Jun 2009 16:05:18 +0000

Mozilla is proud and pleased to present Firefox 3.5, now available for download. Firefox 3.5 has been under development for the past year, contains many new exciting features for users and web developers, and is our fastest Firefox release ever. A video highlighting some of these new features is available, describing how:

Firefox 3.5 is available in more than 70 languages – get your local version.
We have included tools for controlling your private data, including a Private Browsing Mode, and the ability to go back in time and Clear Recent History.
Firefox 3.5 has support for the HTML5 <video> and <audio> elements including native support for Ogg Theora encoded video and Vorbis encoded audio.
The browser features faster performance on complex websites thanks to the new TraceMonkey JavaScript engine.
Users can enjoy Location Aware Browsing using web standards for geolocation.
Web developers can make use of native JSON parsing, and web worker threads.
This release includes improvements to the Gecko layout engine, including speculative parsing for faster content rendering.
Firefox 3.5 supports new web technologies such as: downloadable fonts, CSS media queries, new transformations and properties, JavaScript query selectors, HTML5 local storage and offline application storage, <canvas> text, ICC profiles, and SVG transforms.

As always Firefox 3.5 is available as a free download. Firefox 3.0 users can update their existing browser by selecting “Check for Updates…” from the “Tools” menu in Firefox.

We encourage web and Add-on developers to read the Firefox 3.5 for Developers article on the Mozilla Developer Center.

Note: users already running a Firefox 3.5 Beta or Release Candidate can also obtain an update by selecting “Check for Updates…” from the “Help” menu. If no update is available, you already have the final version!

The Mozilla Blog: Firefox 3.5 Available Now!

Melissa Shapiro — Tue, 30 Jun 2009 16:04:38 +0000

We’re very excited to announce the official release of Firefox 3.5! You can download Firefox 3.5 at firefox.com and enjoy the new features and faster performance. If you’re using the latest version of Firefox 3.0, you can get Firefox 3.5 by clicking on the Help menu and then selecting Check for Updates.

The Firefox 3.5 press release is available here. We also compiled a guide to frequently asked questions. You can also check out this video for a guided tour of what’s new in Firefox 3.5.

Mike Beltzner, Director of Firefox has a comprehensive post here. The post includes a list of some of the coolest Firefox 3.5 features, excerpted below.

Firefox 3.5 is available in more than 70 languages – get your local version.
We have included tools for controlling your private data, including a Private Browsing Mode, and the ability to go back in time and Clear Recent History.
Firefox 3.5 has support for the HTML5 <video> and <audio> elements including native support for Ogg Theora encoded video and Vorbis encoded audio.
The browser features faster performance on complex websites thanks to the new TraceMonkey JavaScript engine.
Users can enjoy Location Aware Browsing using web standards for geolocation.
Web developers can make use of native JSON parsing, and web worker threads.
This release includes improvements to the Gecko layout engine, including speculative parsing for faster content rendering.
Firefox 3.5 supports new web technologies such as: downloadable fonts, CSS media queries, new transformations and properties, JavaScript query selectors, HTML5 local storage and offline application storage, <canvas> text, ICC profiles, and SVG transforms.