In this issue…

• Firefox 4 product plan
• Fellowship: Education for the open web
• Mozilla and the Korean web
• You, two minutes, and Firefox support
• Accessibility team roundup
• Standardizing XUL flexible boxes in CSS
• What do you want to know about builds?
• Further SpiderMonkey changes
• Universal manifest format for unit tests
• Webdev explains the download button
• View source as musical innovation
• New Thunderbird Enterprise mailing list
• Software releases
• Developer calendar
• About about:mozilla

Firefox 4 product plan
Mike Beltzner presented an early product plan for Firefox 4 yesterday, sharing the team’s vision for the next version of Firefox and talking about the various projects that are underway towards making that vision a reality. “Usually software producers don’t present these sorts of plans in public until they’re finalized, but Mozilla is a little different. We work in the open, socializing our plans early and often to gather feedback and build excitement in our worldwide community. That said: please understand that these plans are fluid and are likely to change. As with past releases, we use dates to set targets for milestones, and then we work together to track those targets. We always judge each milestone release against our basic criteria of quality, performance, and usability, and we only ship when it’s ready.” Beltzner has posted both the video of and slides for his presentation.

Fellowship: Education for the open web
Mozilla Drumbeat and the Shuttleworth Foundation have announced a joint fellowship focused on “education for the open web”. “Our aim is to find someone with solid, scalable and fresh ideas on how open learning and the open web intertwine. Once we find this person, we will back them with a year’s salary, project funding and all the connections, horn-tooting, coaching and love that we can muster.” The call for proposals has been posted on both the Shuttleworth Foundation and Mozilla websites, and is open to anyone currently living in Europe or Brasil. The deadline for submissions is June 7, 2010.

Mozilla and the Korean web
Channy Yun has posted about a recent speech given by Lucas Adamski, Mozilla’s Director of Security Engineering, in a seminar about the Security of Internet Banking at COEX, Seoul. “It is a very important period for the Korean web to move forward. Over 160 people participated in this conference with many security experts and governmental representatives, who listened carefully to advice of international experts as like Bruce Schneier, chief security officer of British Telecom (BT) and Lucas.” Read more about this event on the Mozilla Korea weblog.

You, two minutes, and Firefox support
“If everyone reading Planet Mozilla helped just one person in the Firefox support forum per day, there wouldn’t be a single user with their question left unanswered. And answering one question generally takes less than two minutes!” Firefox support is provided entirely by our volunteer community, but they need more help. If you know anything about Firefox and have even only a few minutes to spare, please head over to the Firefox support forums and help answer some of our users’ questions.

Accessibility team roundup
Marco Zehe has posted a summary of what the Mozilla Accessibility team has been working on, including De-XPCOM-ing the Accessible module, Event management, HTML5 form element enhancements, and UI work, among other things. You can read Marco’s full report on his weblog.

Standardizing XUL flexible boxes in CSS
Robert O’Callahan writes, “Tab Atkins is working on a new draft spec for XUL-style ‘flexible boxes’ in CSS. One issue that has come up is whether the XUL concept of ‘preferred widths’ is essential or not. It would be really useful if XUL developers could contribute to the thread in www-style with feedback on that and other issues in related threads. If you have something to say about how you use flexboxes, now’s the time to contribute and ensure your needs are addressed!”

What do you want to know about builds?
Mozilla’s build & release team has been quite involved in recent buildbot development, helping to make it scale across multiple machines. They’re now starting to look at ways to export the detailed data generated by these systems in a way that’s useful to more people, and they’re looking for feedback. “I can think of two main classes of interfaces we could set up: a query-type interface where you poll for information that you are interested in, and a notification system where you register a listener for certain types (or all!) events. What would be the best way for us to make this data available to you? Some kind of REST API? A message or event brokering system? pubsubhubbub? Is there some type of data or filtering that would be super helpful to you?” Get involved with this discussion on Chris Atlee’s post.

Further SpiderMonkey changes
Jeff Walden has been posting about ongoing changes to SpiderMonkey, Mozilla’s C implementation of JavaScript. His most recent post talks about the special “__parent__” property that has been removed. “If you use __parent__, you have a couple of replacements. If you were using it to determine the global object for another object, use Components.utils.getGlobalForObject instead. If you were using it only to test its value against an expected value, use nsIDOMWindowUtils.getParent instead (but do note that its semantics are not absolutely identical to those of __parent__). If you were using it in some other way, comment and we’ll figure something out for your use case.”

Universal manifest format for unit tests
Alice Nodelman, part of Mozilla’s auto-tools team, is working on developing a universal manifest format for all Mozilla unit tests. The problem, she explains, is that each type of unit test uses its own manifest file format, there’s a different manifest file reader for each type of manifest, and each manifest has to be hacked separately to expand functionality. The team has collected proposed formats to the Universal Manifest Project wiki. “One thing we don’t want to do here is design in a bubble. While there are benefits to the auto-tools team in terms of code re-use, centralizing bug fixes and such, the biggest consumer of these tests are developers. Our goal is to keep our test harnesses as simple and as easy-to-use as possible while making them extensible and flexible for whatever the future holds. Feedback is both requested and highly appreciated.”

Webdev explains the download button
The Firefox download button, which handles and directs millions of download requests each day, more complex than you might think. Frederic Wenzel writes, “On a small website, the server would just fetch the file and hand it to you. But if you handle millions of downloads a day like we do, a single server can’t handle it all by itself, so it gets more complicated. In order to provide you with downloads, updates, etc., as fast and conveniently as possible, Mozilla collaborates with a number of mirror providers that have volunteered to host Firefox and other downloads on our behalf, thus sharing the load of our numerous downloads between a number of servers all over the world. For some years now, we have been running a bundle of software called ‘Bouncer‘ to handle our downloads for us.” Read more about Bouncer on Frederic’s blog.

View source as musical innovation
David Humphrey is part of a project working to expose audio spectrum data to JavaScript from Firefox’s audio and video elements. Most recently, the project posted a series of demos and audio experiments that have received some attention and a flood of reactions around the Web. “A number of comments have talked about how Flash already allows some of this. Reading it as many times as I did, I wanted to respond and suggest that what we’re doing isn’t simply parity with Flash. I don’t think it’s exaggerating to say that exposing audio data to the open web has the potential to change sound, audio, and music. The reason is that HTML5 and JavaScript based audio participates in ‘View Source,’ and that means creating a whole new kind of active and passive audio collaboration.” Read more on David’s blog.

New Thunderbird Enterprise mailing list
“Wayne Mery has done the Thunderbird community a great service with a bunch of hard work over the last few weeks chartering, setting up, and working on associated collateral for the new tb-enterprise mailing list. To quote his announcement: ‘It is hoped that this focused mailing list will spawn a strong and vibrant community that will provide mutual support for everyday tasks based on first-hand experience, and that it will be a venue that leads to better tools, documentation, options, and functionality for Thunderbird in the enterprise.’” See Wayne’s full post for more details.

Software releases
* Firefox 3.6.4 updated beta
* Thunderbird 3.1 beta 2
* Jetpack SDK 0.3
* Prism 1.0b4

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…

• Help support Universal Subtitles
• The Mozilla 2010 t-shirt: vote now!
• Fennec 1.1 features
• Fennec on Android
• Test Pilot privacy policy updated
• Status bar and add-on icons
• Revitalizing caching
• Mozilla and the W3C
• Build Your Own Browser project
• Experiments with interactive audio
• Thunderbird Quick Filter Bar extensions
• animateMotion SVG element
• Tbird 3.1 RC 1 schedule: feedback wanted
• Software releases
• Upcoming events
• Developer calendar
• About about:mozilla

Help support Universal Subtitles
The Universal Subtitles project needs to raise $25,000 to get started, and if you donate now the Mozilla Drumbeat project will match your donation dollar for dollar. The project is an initiative to “create an open subtitling standard that lets any video client find matching subtitles, as well as tools to make creating subtitles easy.” Chelsea Novak has posted more about the initiative and the call for donations, including a simple but extremely powerful video that clearly demonstrates why this project is so important.

The Mozilla 2010 t-shirt: vote now!
“Our latest challenge on the Creative Collective was to design the official Mozilla 2010 t-shirt, an exclusive item that will be printed and distributed to active contributors around the world. We received over 700 submissions from the community, which were reviewed carefully and narrowed down to the top 5. Voting has already begun, and it’s up to you to decide the winner. Please take a moment to help us by voting for your favorite design. Voting will end on Friday May 14th at 11:59pm (PST). We’re excited to see which design wins!”

Fennec 1.1 features
Fennec 1.1, which has recently gone into beta, includes some new features. Mark Finkle blogged about the new context menus: “Using a long tap (aka tap-n-hold), or right-click on desktop versions, you can get a context menu to appear. We intentionally designed the context menu system to be simple and minimalistic.” Madhava Enros posted about Fennec’s new “Save as PDF” feature, which makes it easier to print and save webpages with your mobile device. “On current mobile devices it’s rarely straightforward to print, and dealing with a saved folder of HTML, CSS, and images isn’t really what’s called for. Fennec 1.1 tries to fill this void with a Save As PDF option in the new site menu.”

Fennec on Android
“Over the last few months, we’ve made some great progress on bringing Firefox to Android,” writes Vlad Vukićević. “Michael Wu, Brad Lassey, Alex Pakhotin and I have been focusing on getting a build ready that’s usable by a broader set of people, and we’re now ready to get that build out there. This build should be considered ‘pre-alpha’, so there are some warnings and caveats.” Read more at Vlad’s blog, which includes notes about Weave Sync compatibility, Troubleshooting, and Installation & Feedback.

Test Pilot privacy policy updated
The Test Pilot team, based on user feedback, has made it possible for users to export their own Test Pilot data after it has been submitted. This has required some changes to how Test Pilot deals with user data, which is also reflected in updates to the Test Pilot privacy policy. To read more about the new data export feature and privacy policy updates, see Jinghua Zhang’s article on the Mozilla Labs weblog.

Status bar and add-on icons
Jennifer Boriss has written about some of the user experience work she’s doing related to Firefox’s status bar and add-on icons. “One of the major goals in redesigning Firefox is presenting a simpler, cleaner, and smaller user interface. This process has meant looking critically at each part of the interface and how it’s being used. This process led us to an obvious candidate for chrome reduction: the status bar.”

Boriss goes on to discuss the possibility of making add-on icons (which add-on developers often place in the status bar) be modifiable, movable objects that the user can control. “Since we can’t know what these icons will do, we can’t make decisions about their placement based on functionality. Why not give users the ability to modify their placement, just as users can modify the bookmarks on their toolbar and buttons on their UI? It seems inconsistent that we’ve been giving users easy control of so many objects in the Firefox UI, but not the placement of add-on icons.”

Revitalizing caching
“Apparently, there are only two hard problems in computer science: cache invalidation and the naming of things (or so Phil Karlton’s dictum goes). Earlier this month, we invited representatives of Twitter, Facebook, SproutCore, Palm’s webOS, Microsoft’s ‘Office On The Web’, Yahoo, and Google to talk to us about the former problem (amongst other things), though we learned something about the latter. Caching is an important issue to get right on the web, not least of all because of the proliferation of web applications on mobile devices. The goals of our caching summit were to identify use cases that would help us move forward with caching and with HTTP request efficiency.” Read more of Arun Ranganathan’s post about the caching summit — as well as about what Mozilla has planned in terms of working with web developers — on the Mozilla Hacks weblog.

Mozilla and the W3C
David Baron, one of Mozilla’s developers and our representative to the W3C Advisory Committee, has started writing about part of his work related to the W3C. “I wanted to start blogging about one of the ways Mozilla interacts with the W3C: reviews of charters and proposed recommendations in the Advisory Committee (which has one representative per W3C member company). Sometimes I find these somewhat awkward to write, since the W3C requires a single response on behalf of Mozilla. So I want to blog about these reviews to let the Mozilla community know how we’re interacting with the W3C and have the chance to provide feedback about that interaction. Additionally, I think blogging about these reviews provides some more visibility into the W3C process.” David goes on to talk about the review of the Web Applications WG Charter, which you can read on the Mozilla Standards weblog.

Build Your Own Browser project
Carsten Book (aka: Tomcat) has posted about a new pilot Mozilla project called “BYOB (Build Your Own Browser)“, which is now in a beta state and ready for testing and feedback. “The Build Your Own Browser application generates installer files for a lightly customized version of Firefox that can be publicly distributed. These customized versions of Firefox are licensed under the Mozilla Public License (MPL), and the installer files and their contents are subject to the restrictions outlined in the Mozilla Trademark Policy.” BYOB is a fun project because it makes it easy for anyone (not just companies, but smaller groups like sports teams, schools, user groups, etc.) to create a custom build of Firefox that includes relevant links and a preset Persona. The BYOB team is looking for feedback, so please contact them if you have any questions about BYOB or suggestions for how the project could be improved.

Experiments with interactive audio
David Humphrey has been experimenting with Mozilla’s extensible platform — working with multi-touch, sound, video, and WebGL, among other things — and has recently posted about progress they have been making. “David’s work is important,” writes Chris Blizzard, “because it’s showing where the web is going, and where Mozilla is helping to take it. It’s not enough that we’re working on HTML5, which we’re about finished with, but we’re trying to figure out what’s next. Mozilla’s platform, Gecko, is a huge part of why we’re able to experiment and learn as fast as we can. And that’s reflected in what’s possible here. It’s a web you can see, touch and interact with in new ways.”

David’s post includes a clear call to action. “We want to keep going, and we need help. We need help from those within Mozilla, the W3C, and other browsers to get this stuff into shipping browsers. We need the audio, digital music, accessibility, and web communities to come together in order to help us build js audio libraries and more sample applications. Let’s make audio a scriptable part of the open web.” Read more on David’s weblog, and find out how you can get involved.

Thunderbird Quick Filter Bar extensions
The Thunderbird team has landed the previously discussed Quick Filter Bar interface in time for Thunderbird 3.1 beta 2. “Although the Quick Filter Bar already contains dangerously high levels of awesome, we made sure to make it extensible so you can cram even more awesome in. As an example, I have created an extension that enables you to ‘pivot’ based on the currently selectd message(s). In its most straightforward manner of operation, you can click on an e-mail address in the message reader header and pivot by that e-mail address. Out of the box, this will show you all the messages in the current folder sent by that user.” Read more about the Quick Filter Bar and this extension on Andrew Sutherland’s blog.

animateMotion SVG element
Daniel Holbert has posted about the newly added support for the animateMotion SVG element. “The animateMotion element allows for much more flexibility in SVG animations. Mozilla’s nightly builds have supported animation of most SVG attributes and properties for a while now, but animateMotion gives authors the added ability to effortlessly animate an element to move along any arbitrary path.” Daniel’s post includes a simple demo (Firefox nightly build required) to show the sorts of things you can do with this new feature.

Tbird 3.1 RC 1 schedule: feedback wanted
The Thunderbird drivers have proposed a schedule for getting to Thunderbird 3.1 RC1. If you are involved with Thunderbird development or localization, you should look at the schedule in Simon’s post and give the team feedback.

Software releases
* Fennec 1.1 Beta 1 for Maemo
* Bespin 0.7.3
* Jetpack SDK 0.3

Upcoming events
* May 8 – Drumbeat in Berlin!

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.