Archive for March, 2010

Add-ons challenge, SFX, SoC, MozFdn, glyphs, hub, Twitter, law, menu bar, and more…

In this issue…

Add-ons challenge ends Apr 12
There are two weeks left to submit an entry to the current Firefox mobile Add-ons Challenge for a chance to win Mozilla swag and a shiny new Nokia N900. “Developers are challenged to build an add-on that shows innovation, compatibility and that considers the mobile context (small screen size, touch screen, on-the-go, etc.) At the end of the Challenge period our panel of judges will select ten winners who will receive a new Nokia N900.” Some themes the mobile team thinks are particularly interesting are: using device APIs; photo, media, social and sharing tools; and saving files and session restore. Check out the Mozilla blog for more information, or read the complete contest details and rules.

SFX Education toolkit
Mozilla’s community marketing team recently launched the brand new Spread Firefox Education Toolkit. “These materials allow us to scale our events program. Instead of doing a few events per year where we work one on one with either community members or event organizers, we are now able to have more events and participation! With the new Firefox education toolkit, anyone can go out and teach people about Mozilla and Firefox. The toolkit contains everything you’ll need, including a set of print pieces, videos and presentations.”

Summer of Code applications
Gervase Markham writes, “Applications have just opened for the Google Summer of Code 2010. If you are a student, please consider applying to Mozilla — either to do one of our ideas or an idea of your own. If you are not a student, please contact students you know and encourage them to apply.”

Thank you notes for contributions
The Mozilla Add-ons gallery (AMO) site has added a new feature for developers. “Since we launched the Contributions Pilot last year, hundreds of add-ons have participated in the program. We know from talking to developers that they deeply appreciate it when they receive contributions, so we thought we’d launch a small feature to help express this gratitude. Now, in the Contributions section of the Developer Control Panel, you can fill out an optional ‘thank you’ note that gets sent to anyone who elects to send you a contribution. These emails are text only and contain a link to the developer profile page for the add-on.”

Mozilla Foundation update
Mark Surman has posted the most recent update from the Mozilla Foundation. “As we near the end of Q1 2010, we are starting to see good early results from Drumbeat and other Mozilla engagement efforts. Of course, we’re still at the seedling stage. We now need to move to a place where large numbers of people can participate in Drumbeat, and where it’s easy and obvious for almost anyone on the web to support Mozilla with their time or donation. My March status update provides a detailed overview on all of this, both progress to date and challenges ahead.”

How to make toolbar button glyphs
Stephen Horlander has posted an extensive and detailed tutorial about how to create your own toolbar button glyphs for Firefox. “Now that the new ToolbarButton style has landed on Trunk, I put together some templates in Photoshop and posted them on the SVN server. These templates will allow someone to make their own glyphs with only a new vector graphic.” Stephen’s blog has a step by step guide that walks you through the process.

Firefox engagement hub
“As part of our larger plans to strengthen our communication channels, we’ve created the Firefox Engagement Hub on mozilla.com, highlighting our top four social media channels: Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and Flickr. This is a fairly simple/static page right now which we’ll be evolving into a more robust engagement space in the near future — including an awesome Twitter visualization and much more.” See Tara’s post for more details, or go check out the Engagment hub yourself.

SUMO Twitter experiment
The Firefox support team is launching a new experiment in which they will be reaching out to Firefox users on Twitter and offering them help when needed. “A huge number of people are actively engaged in social networks, where they speak their mind and share what’s bothering them. When they experience a problem with Firefox, they might just post a tweet and express their frustration instead of finding their way to SUMO and getting help with the issue.” You can read more about this plan through Kadir’s blog post or the project’s wiki page.

Open source law
Luis Villa, the newest member of Mozilla’s crack legal team, has written an interesting article about FOSS and lawyers over at opensource.com. “There is a fairly common perception among FOSS hackers that there is no community of FOSS lawyers. Scratch the surface, though, and it turns out that the FOSS legal community is there and growing. Since this question recently came up in the context of Mozilla’s decision to revise the MPL, I thought it might be a good time to talk about this community.”

Visualizing usage of the Firefox Menu Bar
Working with data obtained through the recent Test Pilot study to explore how users interact with Firefox’s menu bar, Alex Faaborg has generated some heat map illustrations of how Windows users use Firefox menu bars. “The Firefox UX team and the Test Pilot team put together this study and are now sorting through the data to help streamline Firefox’s menu interface for Windows Vista and Windows 7. This interface re-factoring is still very much in progress.” Alex goes on discuss some initial ideas the team is working with based on the data, and includes some mocked up early designs.

Experimenting with page designs
The Metrics team has been working on some website optimization experiments, and Blake Cutler has written about the recent results of their trial to see which design elements are most effective in driving downloads on the IE landing page. “We didn’t know which elements were most effective, but expected each would help visitors to ditch IE. Our results were surprising! The simplest variation performed the best, increasing the download conversion rate by 2.3%, at the 99% confidence interval. This improvement translates to 1.7 million additional Firefox downloads per year!” For more details, check out Blake’s post on the Metrics weblog.

Software releases
* Bugzilla API 0.5
* Jetpack SDK 0.2

Upcoming events
* Apr 3 – Jetpack Workshop – Taichung, Taiwan
* Apr 9 – Testday – Tab matches awesomebar

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.

about:mozilla

30 Mar 2010 comments off

Design Challenge, AMO, add-ons, Web Dev survey, Personas, Contacts, metrics, mobile, and more…

In this issue…

Home Tab Design Challenge results
Mozilla Labs and the Mozilla Firefox User Experience team recently bestowed the “Best in Class” honors for the Labs’ Home Tab Design Challenge. Recipients include Chatree Campiranon and Craig Birchler, Amine Zafri, Yatrik Solanki, Daniel Goodwin, and Blake Cutler. You can see all entries, the first round top 10 concepts, the People’s Choice Award winner, and all of the Best in Class winners at the Design Challenge page.

AMO: Sandboxing the sandbox
“With almost 2 billion downloads, add-ons have proven to be a huge part of Firefox’s growth and popularity over the last 5 years. As Firefox continues to be adopted by non-technical, mainstream users, the security and consumer experience of installing third party add-ons becomes increasingly important.” Justin Scott, with these users in mind, has blogged his proposal for some major changes to the way add-ons are submitted and distributed through Mozilla’s official Add-ons gallery. It is strongly recommended that all add-on developers take the time to read through and give feedback on his proposal.

Upcoming extensions changes
Over the past year Dave Townsend has been working on a project that involves re-implementing the bulk of the Firefox extension manager. Things have progressed well and Dave is looking at landing the first pieces of this on Firefox trunk nightlies soon, and it may affect extensions. “In many cases there will be no change at all, the extensions will continue to work as they did on previous trunk builds. Those that do anything to the add-ons manager UI will see obvious problems since that UI has changed considerably. There is also a set of extensions that are likely to see issues because of API changes.” Dave’s blog post goes on to outline two common issues that extension developers are going to have to change in their code.

New web developer survey
The Mozilla Hacks team has posted some results from last November’s Developer Survey and are looking for further feedback. “Our March survey picks up from some of the themes in the November survey. Many of you stressed the importance of development tools and expressed how it can be difficult to understand the Firefox development process and to give input. We designed this quarter’s (much shorter) survey specifically to ask for your feedback on Firefox 3.6 and Firebug 1.5, both released in January.” Read the results and take the new survey here.

Google Summer of Code 2010
Mozilla will again be participating in the Google Summer of Code program this year. If you’re a student who would like to work with us over the summer, you should start by checking out our projects list and prepare to apply. If you have any questions, contact Gervase Markham or Chris Hofmann.

Menu item usage study: Part II
The Test Pilot team recently ran a study about menu items in Firefox. “In the last post, we presented the most and least commonly used menu items. We noted that a problem with analyzing aggregated data is the potential for outliers to skew our results. Today, to identify these outliers, we will move from looking at aggregate counts to examining how these counts are distributed.” Read more at the Mozilla Blog of Metrics.

Future of Personas, Round 2
Ryan Doherty has posted an update about the team’s plans for getpersonas.com, the Personas feature in Firefox, and the Personas Plus add-on. “As stated before, we will be migrating getpersonas.com over to addons.mozilla.org (AMO). This will involve redesigning the entire personas section of AMO to make it more interactive and engaging. Our plan is to support uploading and reviewing personas on AMO at approximately the beginning of May. Personas Plus will be continually updated and improved upon. Our plan is to implement the ability to apply a persona while using a theme in the next release. This has been our number one request. The personas feature in Firefox will continue to evolve with each release. Features that work well and are successful in the Personas Plus add-on may be uplifted into Firefox itself.”

Contacts in the browser
The Mozilla Labs team has released an experimental version of a new Contacts add-on. “Address books and buddy lists have become an integral part of how we manage our relationships online. Your email addresses, Twitter handle and openID are used in hundreds of ways as you connect, follow and share. This information is also special, because it represents the boundary between ‘my data’ and ‘your privacy’. When you disclose your friends’ email addresses on a website, you are trusting the website to keep that address private. The disclosure of your friends’ contact information is an important step: we think you should be in control of it. With Contacts, we’ve enhanced your browser by making it aware of your online contacts and friend lists. You can then search and browse your contacts in the browser, and a website can ask for permission to access them through an API.”

Firefox 3.6 upgrade stats
Mozilla recently pushed a Firefox 3.6 upgrade offer to people who were still using older versions of Firefox, and the impact has been impressive. The Metrics team blogged about this last week: “The percentage of Firefox users on Firefox 3.6 increased dramatically in recent days. Late last week, the percentage of users on 3.6 stood at roughly 23%, and as of yesterday that number had climbed to 43% (that 20% pick up translates to roughly 75 million total people who made the switch — that’s huge!). Past major update offers have generally converted in the ballpark of 10% to 20% of users, so this most recent push has definitely had a substantial impact.” Read more on Ken’s blog post.

Stopping development for Windows Mobile
Stuart Parmenter, Mozilla’s Director of Mobile, has blogged about a recent change to the team’s development focus. “We have been building a version of Firefox for Windows Mobile for quite a while, with the expectation that Microsoft would be doubling down in the mobile market and hoping that they would put out a great new mobile operating system. While we think Windows Phone 7 looks interesting and has the potential to do well in the market, Microsoft has unfortunately decided to close off development to native applications. Because of this, we won’t be able to provide Firefox for Windows Phone 7 at this time. Given that Microsoft is staking their future in mobile on Windows Mobile 7 (not 6.5) and because we don’t know if or when Microsoft will release a native development kit, we are putting our Windows Mobile development on hold.” Read more at Stuart’s weblog.

1,000,000 Firefox fans and growing
Tara Shahian has blogged about the recent and exciting milestone in which Firefox surpassed 1,000,000 fans on our Facebook page. “It was about one year ago that we began dedicating resources towards optimizing our page, and building a better engagement channel with our community on Facebook. We’ve come a long way since then… increasing our fan base by over 639,400 (~177%), and experiencing daily growth rates of 5,000-6,000 (and as high as 34,600+) since Jan of 2010. But these numbers alone don’t define our success, and in the coming weeks I’ll be writing more about our social media strategy with Facebook… diving deeper to talk about how we got here, our learnings so far, and plans moving forward.”

Support for SeaMonkey 1.x dropped
“The SeaMonkey project is discontinuing support for the SeaMonkey 1.x series today in favor of SeaMonkey 2.0, which is not only more modern, but also maintained for stability and security problems. As the SeaMonkey 1.x series no longer receives security updates, the SeaMonkey team strongly urges users of that series to upgrade. Additionally, the team continues to strongly urge people still using the old Mozilla Suite or Netscape 4, 6 or 7 to upgrade. All these older software packages suffer from a large, and steadily increasing, number of security vulnerabilities because they are no longer being maintained.” See Robert Kaiser’s write up for more details.

Software releases
* Firefox 3.6.2
* Instantbird 0.2

Upcoming events
* Mar 26 – Munich – OpenSource Meetup
* Apr 3 – Taichung, Taiwan – Jetpack Workshop

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.

about:mozilla

23 Mar 2010 comments off

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