In this issue…

• Firefox 3.6 released
• Firefox Personas: What’s your style?
• Mobile Firefox nightly builds
• Add-ons and broken executables
• Firebug 1.5: a closer look
• Thunderbird localization news
• New Thunderbird QA weekly events
• Mozilla Foundation in 2010
• SeaMonkey 2.1 planning
• Experiments with audio, part VIII
• What’s up with Ubiquity?
• Raindrop design status
• Software releases
• Upcoming events
• Developer calendar
• About about:mozilla

Firefox 3.6 released
The Mozilla community is proud to announce that Firefox 3.6 has shipped and is now available for free download at Firefox.com. Firefox 3.6 and the new Gecko 1.9.2 platform were built by our global community of contributors, including thousands of developers, security experts, localization and support volunteers, and hundreds of thousands of active testers.

As you might imagine, there has been a lot written about Firefox 3.6 recently. Here’s a quick handful of related articles and blog posts.

* Firefox 3.6 is now available for download
* Personas Update
* Firefox 3.6 is here! Are your add-ons up to date?
* Firefox 3.6, Mozilla.com and you
* Firefox 3.6 is out the door!
* Industry support for WOFF and Firefox 3.6
* Firefox 3.6 performance: startup and snappiness improvements
* Firefox 3.6 is here!

Firefox Personas: What’s your style?
One of the crazy fun new features of Firefox 3.6 is Personas, a new sort of browser theme that lets you change the appearance of your browser with a single click. There are over 35,000 designs to choose from (and more coming in every day) thanks to our incredible community of artists.

We have started a campaign where you can help celebrate the launch of Firefox 3.6 by telling the world about your favorite Persona. Mary Colvig has written up a step by step guide to taking part in this new “What’s your style?” project. Also, check out the fantastic video the team has put together about Personas — it stars real Mozilla community members (in the real Mozilla office!) showing off their favorite Personas.

Mobile Firefox nightly builds
Now that nightly builds of Firefox Mobile are available for Maemo-based devices, Aakash Desai has written a post explaining how to install them. You have two ways to get the latest Firefox Mobile builds: through automatic updates, or by installing them manually. Aakash walks you through the instructions for each, as well as explaining how to clear your profile and, if needed, how to uninstall the application.

Add-ons and broken executables
If you are an extension developer and include executable files in your XPI package (binary or shell scripts) then you may be seeing problems in Firefox 3.6. Dave Townsend explains, “We took a small fix to the extension manager that changed how we extract the files from the XPI package. The fix involved adjusting how we accessed files to avoid hitting problems with certain anti-virus tools that would occasionally lock files in the middle of extraction making us fail to install the add-on. A side effect to this fix leaves us setting file permissions on the extracted files in a slightly different way. This side effect means that the executable permission is being stripped from all extracted files. If you try to execute these files with nsIProcess it will likely fail.” More details about this problem, an upcoming fix, and a temporary workaround are available on Dave’s blog.

Firebug 1.5: a closer look
The Mozilla Hacks team has posted a quick overview of articles about new features in Firebug 1.5, including Break on Next, XHR breakpoints, Debugging cookies, Page load analysis, HTTP Time Monitor, XML Response Explorer, and Network info header and column customization. If you haven’t had a chance to try the new Firebug release, head over to Addons.mozilla.org. If you haven’t had the opportunity, you should also watch Rob Campbell’s “Introduction to Firebug” screencast.

Thunderbird localization news
The Thunderbird team is moving towards their next major release, Thunderbird 3.1 (codename Lanikai), which is scheduled to be released in early April 2010. The team has published a draft schedule for Thunderbird 3.1 development, and has posted information important to anyone who wants to contribute to the Thunderbird localization effort. Most recently, the Thunderbird localization community released Thunderbird 3.0.1 in 50 languages — a significant achievement and incredible milestone for the project. For more information about the upcoming Thunderbird 3.1 work, see Simon’s weblog.

New Thunderbird QA weekly events
The Thunderbird Quality Assurance team is now organizing weekly QA events for testing new features, pre-release versions of the software, and maintaining the “known bug” database. These events are held online using a distributed chat system called IRC, which Ludovic explains in his blog post. The team has posted a schedule of upcoming events, which will also be announced on the Thunderbird dev mailing list.

Mozilla Foundation in 2010
Mark Surman writes, “It’s hard to believe that I’m now entering my second full year at Mozilla. Year one was both enlivening and humbling: mind blowingly smart people; cool and useful project experiments; and a ton of new ideas and learning. Much of this great energy flowed into Drumbeat, which will be the main focus of the Mozilla Foundation during 2010. It also helped the Foundation team clarify our thinking on telling the Mozilla story and supporting the broader community. We’ve got a clear and crisp plan for the year ahead.” Mark’s post continues with a video update that focuses on the Mozilla Foundation plans for the coming year.

SeaMonkey 2.1 planning
With the recent release of SeaMonkey 2.0, the team has started planning for SeaMonkey 2.1. “From where we stand right now, I estimate the earliest possible time we could stabilize for a release would be in June or July of this year — on the other hand, we should not take longer than a year after 2.0 to release. In any case, now is the right time to really start attacking all the things we want to have implemented in a SeaMonkey 2.1 release.” The SeaMonkey team is looking for help and feedback on these plans, so please see Robert Kaiser’s blog post for all the details.

Experiments with audio, part VIII
David Humphrey has been working with a growing group of web developers, Mozilla developers, and audiophiles to expose audio spectrum data to JavaScript from Firefox’s audio and video elements. He has posted another trio of demo videos (and links, but you’ll need a patched version of Firefox for them to work).

The first demo is a visualization of audio spectrum data using the C++ FFT code, the second shows how the video element can be used in the same was as audio, and the third shows both visualization and dynamic generation of audio using JavaScript. The team has been thinking about other things they might do with audio in the browser, including ideas for improving accessibility and the possibility of making music specifically for this medium.

What’s up with Ubiquity?
Jono Xia has posted a Mozilla Labs update about the current status of the Ubiquity project. “Last October, Mozilla Labs got together and had a meeting about all the things we want to get done in 2010. It became clear that there were too many things on our plate, and we had to make some hard decisions. Ubiquity was one of the things that was put onto the back burner. Does this mean Ubiquity is dead? Not at all! It’s an open source project with a fairly large installed user base, and if you look at the Mercurial repository and the mailing list you can see that the community is still actively fixing bugs and answering users’ questions.” Further details about the Ubiquity project are available on Jono’s post.

Raindrop design status
Andy Chung, part of the Raindrop (wiki page) team, has posted “a quick update from your friends at Raindrop,” in which he summarizes what’s been happening with the project over the past month — what’s currently live, what’s still being iterated on, and what they’re still thinking about. There’s also some discussion of their “near future” plans for a hosted version, which is particularly exciting, as well as links to a Milestone planning page and a quick screencast.

Software releases
* Firefox 3.6
* Thunderbird 3.0.1
* MozMill 1.4

Upcoming events
* Tonight! – Labs Night
* Feb 5 – Testday: AMO + SUMO
* Feb 6+7 – Brussels – FOSDEM 2010
* Feb 19 – Testday: OS Testing with Mobile Firefox
* Mar 5 – Learn how to testscript your add-ons
* Mar 19 – Improve the quality of QMO
* Apr 2 – Litmus 2 development review

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.

In this issue…

• JavaScript speedups in Firefox 3.6
• Jetpack and the future of add-ons
• Mozilla Drumbeat: January update
• WebGL articles and demos
• Page load analysis using Firebug
• Designing experiments for Test Pilot
• Browser ballot testing + results
• New mobile add-ons categories
• Making getpersonas.com blazing fast
• A Creative Commons for Privacy?
• Five years of Firefox in pictures
• Software releases
• Upcoming events
• Developer calendar
• About about:mozilla

JavaScript speedups in Firefox 3.6
David Mandelin has written an overview of the JavaScript performance work the team has been doing for Firefox 3.6. The improvements include JIT for browser UI JavaScript, more efficient Garbage Collector performance, tracing more JavaScript constructs, and String and RegExp improvements among other things. For more details and demos, head over to Mozilla Hacks.

Jetpack and the future of add-ons
Project Jetpack is a new experimental library and Firefox API being developed by the Mozilla Labs team. The team has recently posted an article talking about this project, covering some frequently asked questions such as whether Jetpack will replace XUL-based add-ons entirely, why Jetpack is needed, and what it all means for current add-on developers. Most importantly, the article discusses how you can get involved with the Jetpack project, as the team is looking for developer feedback on the third iteration of the project. Read more at the Mozilla Labs weblog.

Mozilla Drumbeat: January update
Mark Surman has posted the lastest news from the Drumbeat project. “Drumbeat — and growing the number and diversity of people participating in Mozilla — will be the main focus for the Mozilla Foundation team in 2010.” There has been a lot of activity building up around Drumbeat and the project has a growing community of contributors, but they’re always looking for more help. Mark’s post gives a high level overview of the recent project activity, with more detail available on the Drumbeat wiki and newsgroup.

WebGL articles and demos
Eric Shepherd has recently spent some time writing about WebGL, the in-progress specification to bring real-time 3D graphics to the web. “This is a very, very cool technology done — in my opinion — in the right way: instead of inventing a whole new API, WebGL takes the established and well-regarded OpenGL ES standard and makes it available to web content.” Eric’s blog post links to his series of eight articles, and also explains how to run the demos.

Page load analysis using Firebug
Web page load performance is an extremely important topic these days, of great concern to all web developers. Jan Odvarko has written an article demonstrating several page load cases, describing how to properly read and analyze the data provided by the new Net panel feature in Firebug 1.5. “The purpose of Net panel is to intercept network communication between a web-page and the server and see what’s going on under the hood.” Jan’s post walks you through six examples, including: simple page load, connection limit, pipelining, persistent connections, inline scripts block, and redirects. Firebug 1.5 launched recently and is now available through AMO.

Designing experiments for Test Pilot
The Test Pilot team has run three studies since the project’s inception and they have collected an enormous amount of data. Having data presents some dangers that the team is trying to avoid. “There’s a temptation, when looking at a pile of data, to leap to design conclusions. It’s [also] easy to make a model that fits a given dataset perfectly…but it may be adapted so well to the quirks of the particular data that it has no generality, no ability to predict anything else. You can always get some kind of conclusion out of a data set, but the conclusion isn’t worth much unless you test it against new, independently collected data.” Jono and the team are going through the process of developing hypotheses based on the data they’ve collected, and would like your help. The most promising hypotheses will be used for further Test Pilot studies and experiments.

Browser ballot testing + results
Jenny Boriss has been following and blogging about the European Commission/Microsoft browser case and the resulting remedy in which Microsoft will be presenting users with a browser ballot. “Last month, Microsoft agreed to show the browser ballot choices in random order, rather than fixed. I still wondered what effect, if any, item order and other variables would have on what browser people would choose. Would certain design changes on the ballot have a big impact on users? How could Firefox optimize its space on the ballot to be most effective?” In an innovative experiment, Jenny made use of Amazon’s Mechanical Turk service to get some answers to these questions, which she has written up on her weblog.

New mobile add-ons categories
“As you probably know by now, Firefox is the first Web browser to support mobile add-ons. Due to all the great new add-ons being created for mobile, we recently set up categories so they’re more discoverable. Go to the Firefox mobile add-ons page and check them out on the top left corner. Add-on developers: please categorize your add-ons, or re-categorize your existing add-ons so that users can find them more easily.” See Caitlin’s blog post for more information.

Making getpersonas.com blazing fast
Ryan Doherty recently spent some time optimizing the GetPersonas.com site. “Personas have been integrated into Firefox 3.6. With the impending tsunami of traffic from millions of Firefox users, I knew my time had come. Donning Firebug, YSlow, and webpagetest.org, I set out to squeeze every last drop of performance out of it.” Ryan has written up the full optimization process he went through, which resulted in a 500ms earlier rendering start time, 300ms shorter download time, and a more than 2x increase in repeat view speed. It’s a great read if you’re interested in web development and performance optimization.

A Creative Commons for Privacy?
Aza Raskin has been discussing privacy both on his blog and with various industry leaders, exploring the idea of creating a “Creative Commons for privacy”. His most recent blog post on the subject goes into some of their current thinking and next steps. “This blog post lays out the groundwork for how we are thinking about crafting Privacy Icons. We still need to figure out what the icons and their states will actually be (as well as if this approach makes sense). Ahead of the Federal Trade Commision Privacy Roundtable, we will be hosting a workshop to discuss and creating solutions (or at least next steps) toward a more meaningful privacy framework over the web. We hope you can join us.” See Aza’s post for more information about this initiative.

Five years of Firefox in pictures
Mozilla’s marketing team has announced the winner of the Mozilla Creative Collective Five Year Challenge: Rolegio Calamaya Jr., also known as Lucero. “As you can imagine it was a tough decision with so many great choices (see John Slater’s slide show). Rolegio’s illustration, Happy B-day Firefox, really captured everyone’s hearts and imagination. As inspiration for his design, Rolegio imagined a busy Firefox who’s always running around, stepping away from his 5th birthday party for a second to rest and enjoy some cake.” In addition to the Creative Collective challenge, the team also put out a call for community members to “Light the world with Firefox“, and has posted a few of their favourites.

Software releases
* Firefox 3.6 RC 2
* Firebug 1.5
* Bespin Embedded 0.6
* Prism 1.0b3pre
* Weave Sync 1.0 release candidate

Upcoming events
* Jan 22 – Testday: Firefox 3.6 Website Compatibility
* Feb 5 – Testday: AMO + SUMO
* Feb 6+7 – Brussels – FOSDEM 2010
* Feb 19 – Testday: OS Testing with Mobile Firefox
* Mar 5 – Learn how to testscript your add-ons
* Mar 19 – Improve the quality of QMO
* Apr 2 – Litmus 2 development review

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.