In this issue…

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.

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