In this issue...
Mobile Firefox (Fennec) alpha 2 released
Stuart Parmenter writes, "We're happy to announce that our second alpha release of Fennec has come together. While we focused much of the previous alpha on getting the user experience how we wanted, we've spent much of the time since focused on improving performance. We've made major strides improving startup performance, panning and zooming performance, and responsiveness while pages are loading. We've refactored a significant amount of the front end code resulting in substantial speed improvements as well as providing a much better base for extension authors to build upon."
Additionally, the Fennec team has released desktop versions of mobile browser as they did with Fennec alpha 1, which you can download for Windows, OS X, and Linux. These builds allow content and extension authors to experiment with the mobile browser on their desktop. Release notes are available for Fennec alpha 2, with information on how to install the browser, what's new, known issues, and how to provide feedback. Further information can be found in Stuart's original announcement.
Firefox 3.0.5 and 2.0.0.20 now available
As part of Mozilla Corporation's ongoing stability and security update process, Firefox 3.0.5 and Firefox 2.0.0.20 are now available for Windows, Mac, and Linux. Mozilla is not planning any further security and stability updates for Firefox 2, and we recommend that you upgrade to Firefox 3 as soon as possible. Additionally, the Phishing Protection service will no longer be available for Firefox 2 users. Firefox 3 offers a new and improved Phishing and Malware Protection service, so again, we strongly urge you to upgrade to Firefox 3. You can download Firefox 3 at GetFirefox.com
"Fox For All" wins Impact Mozilla
Mozilla is proud to announce "Fox For All" as the grand prize winner of Impact Mozilla. "Fox For All" was authored by Phani Kumar Vadrevu and Uttam Byragoni of India. "We're extremely grateful to all ten finalists. The degree of hard work and the diversity of ideas contributed by the teams far exceeded all expectations. Impact Mozilla also succeeded in reaching out to groups not traditionally part of the Mozilla community (e.g., MBA students)." More information about the wrapping up of Impact Mozilla can be found at the Mozilla Blog.
Camino 1.6.6 released
The Camino Browser team has just released Camino 1.6.6, a maintenance release which contains various security and stability updates. All Camino users are urged to update. In addition, Camino 1.6.6 is now available in the following languages: Catalan, Czech, Dutch, English (US), French, German, Italian, Japanese, Norwegian (Bokmal), Polish, Portuguese (Brazillian), Russian, Spanish (Castellano), and Swedish. You can download Camino at CaminoBrowser.org.
Fireunit, testing in the Firebug world
Jan Odvarko and John Resig have been working hard on a new Firebug extension called Fireunit. Fireunit provides a simple JavaScript API for doing test logging and viewing within a new tab of Firebug. Jan writes, "This very promising extension is intended as an automated testing framework for Firefox extensions and it should also be useful for testing web pages in the future. It's still at the beginning, but growing and starting to be very useful for testing Firebug itself." For more information, you can read Jan's blog post and John's blog post, and the extension itself is available at Fireunit.org.
Firebug in Firefox 3.1b2 and beyond
Rob Campbell has written a blog post where he clarifies some of the confusion that has been recently surrounding Firebug and its compatibility with Firefox 3.1. Not only is Firebug 1.2.1 not compatible with Firefox 3.1, neither is Firebug 3.1. "If you want to use Firebug with Firefox 3.1, you will need to use Firebug 1.4. Get the latest version from the releases directory and install it. No compatibility override required. Don't let the alpha version tag frighten you, it's really quite decent." Details about the different versions are available on GetFirebug.com's releases page.
JSON explorer for Firebug
In another bit of Firebug-related news, Jan Odvarko writes, "Thanks to Ashish Datta, Firebug has fresh new support for inspecting JSON in net responses. This feature allows you to see JSON formatted as an expandable tree of items and also explore them using Firebug's Dom tab. The view is available within the Net panel and is visible as soon as a JSON request is expanded. This feature should be part of Firebug 1.4a11. Ashish is a senior at Tufts University and he did this work as part of his class focusing on open source development. It's great to see how community around Firebug is growing and willing to contribute to this indispensible tool!" For more information see Jan's blog post, and find out more about Firebug at GetFirebug.com.
New Mozilla design community mailing list
John Slater, part of Mozilla's super fun marketing team, writes, "Following the successful examples of our developers, localizers, marketers, QA testers, etc we're going to be making a major push to organize and grow our visual design community. I'll share more details soon -- including our plans to create a new site for posting and sharing your artwork -- but if you're curious to learn more the first thing to do is sign up for our new design mailing list."
"Of course, there already is a Mozilla design community -- just look at the 3,500+ people who participated in our Firefox 3 t-shirt design contest or Google around for Firefox art -- but there's so much more that can be done. This is an entirely new way we can put our greatest advantage to good use, and we should get a lot of cool stuff to look at, too. The possibilities are incredibly exciting." For more information, see John's post and sign up for the mailing list.
Localization Testing and QA survey
The l10n-drivers team recently launched a Testing and QA survey targeted at the localization community. The survey will remain open until December 26th. Stas Malolepszy writes, "Many localization teams have worked out their own practices and procedures regarding testing. So it's natural that when Mozilla starts thinking about localization testing plans, we first look at what's been already invented and proved to work well. There are many localization teams, each with their own way to test the localization, suited for their needs and resulting from their approach and past experience. What if we could share these practices between the localization teams and help other teams adopt them? This briefly summarizes the objectives of the survey." If you are part of the Mozilla localization community and would like to help, you are strongly encouraged to take the survey. For more information, see Stas' blog post.
Interview: Mozilla Weave project lead
Dan Mills, Lead Engineer of Mozilla Labs' Weave project sat down with Aza Raskin for a brief chat. In this video he talks about what Weave is, what it's good for, how it ties in with Firefox Mobile, when it will be in users' hands, and what you can do to help. View the full video interview.
Quality Assurance community site now in beta
Jay Patel writes, "After over a year and a half of experimentation, discussion, design, development, and testing...I am proud to announce the launch of the 'official' QMO beta. While we used to rely on our team mailing list and the QA blog on mozillaZine, we now have a robust community website that I believe will help bring the Mozilla QA team and our growing community of volutneers together. We will be able to better collaborate to improve the quality of all Mozilla products and services, and QMO will provide a place for others to join us and learn more about Mozilla QA." For more info, see Jay's blog post, or head right on over to the new QMO website.
Automatic project creation coming to Mozdev
silfreed writes, "It's been a long time coming, but your requests to speed up the project creation process are coming to fruition. Over the past couple of years there have been two major pain points in setting up new projects: tracking the requests to make sure they're handled properly and actually creating projects. We finally have the tools in place to handle tracking the project requests and creating projects which should dramatically increase the response time of setting up new projects. We still have some work to do, but we're well on our way to making those things happen." Further details are available at silfreed's weblog, and you can request a project at the Mozdev site itself.
New Firefox feature videos on mozilla.com
The Mozilla Blog reports, "We've launched a new video section on mozilla.com to help bring some of the many great features of Firefox alive. The feature-specific videos are narrated by the people who helped bring them to Firefox. The new video section even includes a walk through on how to install Firefox -- perfect to help people make the switch." The videos currently include: Firefox 3 overview, How to switch to Firefox with Asa Dotzler, Security features in Firefox 3 with Johnathan Nightingale, Bookmarks and tags with Alex Faaborg, and the Awesomebar with Seth Spitzer.
Last issue of 2008!
Just a quick reminder that this is the last issue of about:mozilla for 2008. We will resume our regular weekly schedule after the holidays, either January 6th or January 13th depending on how much news there is to report the first week back. Happy holidays to everyone, and a have a safe and happy new year.
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