Firefox 4, SUMO, Thunderbird, lemurs, Jetpack, Multi-process plugins, Firebug, and more…
In this issue…
- Firefox 4 Windows theme/UI update
- Join the SUMO team!
- Thunderbird volunteers needed!
- Help the lemurs
- Jetpack design challenge update
- European Commission – Microsoft settlement
- Multi-process plugins
- Firebug and the JIT
- about:mozilla holiday hiatus
- Software releases
- Upcoming events
- Developer calendar
- About about:mozilla
Firefox 4 Windows theme/UI update
Stephen Horlander has posted an update about his work on the Firefox 4 redesign for Windows. “This work has involved evaluating feedback on previous direction, polishing visuals, tweaking all kinds of things and exploring totally new ideas.” Stephen’s post discusses his work on the app button, refining toolbar button appearance, the location bar, the bookmarks widget, and more.
Join the SUMO team!
The SUMO team is hiring a community manager. “SUMO is growing rapidly. In 2009, the size of the community doubled. Today there are over 100 actively monthly contributors to SUMO, many of whom are localizers who translate support documentation into their native lnaguage. We’re looking for a passionate and highly motivated community star to join the SUMO team as a community manager.” For further details about this position, see David’s blog post or just head directly over to the job posting to apply.
Thunderbird volunteers needed!
With the recent launch of Thunderbird 3, the team’s community support traffic has increased dramatically. “We have roughly three times the number of support topics as well as 15 times the amount of traffic. We need help! Do you use Thunderbird? Always wanted to contribute to an open source project but don’t know how? Love explaining things and helping others? Then helping our community support Thunderbird is a great way to start.” The team has a detailed post up about how to get involved and how to get started — if you’ve ever wanted to contribute to a Mozilla project, now’s your chance.
Help the lemurs
No longer content to just save the world by ensuring we have choice and innovation on the Internet, the Mozilla crew is taking things a step further by helping support the national parks after which we code-name versions of Firefox. “The next version of Firefox happens to be named after Namoroka, a park in Madagascar. Namoroka is also home to adorable lemurs — almost as cute as the Red Panda. We’re celebrating the release of Firefox 3.6 by raising funds to make a gift to the namesake park, and we’re ready to accept donations.” See Mary Colvig’s post for more information and a picture of a lemur.
Jetpack design challenge update
“The Jetpack for Learning Design Challenge enters phase II. We are excited to receive 36 amazing submissions from teams around the world and accepted 26 into the next stage. Ideas that we liked ranged from annotating the Web with other students, building assessment into the browsing experience, or linking the browser to a backend learning management system.” The second phase of the challenge will see teams participate in a series of online seminars discussing Jetpack development and user interface design. They will also get support and mentorship from the Mozilla community to help them turn their ideas into Jetpack prototypes. At the end of phase II, up to 10 participants will be invited to a hands-on Design Camp at SXSW Interactive 2010. See the full post for more details.
European Commission – Microsoft settlement
Mitchell Baker has posted a short article outlining Mozilla’s stance on the recent settlement between the European Commission and Microsoft. “While the ballot mechanism represented by the choice screen has received the most attention, Mozilla is most pleased with the core principles Microsoft will be adopting that protect the choices a person has already made. Mozilla’s non-profit mission is focused on self-determination and individual empowerment; we are gratified to see these principles appear in the settlement.”
Multi-process plugins
Benjamin Smedberg has been working on developing multi-process plugin support into Firefox. Last week he landed the new code on the mozilla-central codebase and is looking for help testing it on Minefield nightlies. “Currently only Windows and Linux support multi-process plugins: mac support requires additional work. To turn [it] on, visit about:config, find the pref dom.ipc.plugins.enabled, set it to true, and restart your browser. Please report any crashes or instability in bugzilla: product “Core”, component “Plug-Ins”. Please be as detailed as possible in bug reports.” Benjamin goes on to list what details are useful in bug reports, as well as one currently-known issue. See the original post for full details.
Firebug and the JIT
Rob Campbell has posted an article that should be of interest to anyone who uses Firebug. “When Firebug is active, particularly when you’ve enabled the Console/Script panels, some pages perform much more slowly. Enabling these panels turns on all of our debugging hooks, so some slowdown isn’t surprising, but what may surprise you is that, in order to get accurate debugging information, these hooks also turn off Firefox’ high-performance Javascript JIT compiler, even when Firebug is inactive. And now we have a fix for that. I need to be clear here: If you have Firebug installed you are probably not getting fast Javascript.” Head over to Rob’s weblog for more details and instructions for a quick fix.
about:mozilla holiday hiatus
The holiday season is upon us and the Mozilla Project always gets a little quiet around this time of year. This being the case, you’re reading the last issue of about:mozilla for 2009 — regular weekly publishing will start again on January 12th, 2010. Happy holidays!
Software releases
* Firefox 3.5.6 and 3.0.16
* Firefox 3.6 beta (rev 5)
* Lightning 1.0 beta 1 rc 1
* Getpersonas.com 2.0
Upcoming events
* Feb 6+7 – Brussels – FOSDEM 2010
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, announcements, events, or software releases 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.
22 Dec 2009 deb comments off
