In this issue…

Firefox Home for iPhone
The Firefox Sync team has been working on an application for the iPhone called “Firefox Home”. This app, which is not yet available, will give iPhone users instant access to their Firefox browsing history, bookmarks and the set of tabs from their most recent browser sessions. What’s more, it provides Firefox “awesomebar” functionality on your iPhone. “Firefox Home for iPhone is part of a broader Mozilla effort to provide a more personal Web experience with more user control. For devices or platforms where we’re unable to provide the ‘full’ Firefox browser, we aim to provide users with ‘on the go’ instant access to their personal Firefox history, bookmarks and open tabs, giving them another reason to keep loving Firefox on their desktops.” Read more on the Mozilla Blog.

Hardware accelerating Firefox
Joe Drew recently posted about hardware accelerating Firefox, as there has been some confusion about what will be hardware accelerated and how it will be done. His post covers both Layers and Direct 2D. “Layers is a technology that lets conceptually simple, but computationally expensive, parts of the web get offloaded to GPUs. Examples of this include transparency, scaling, composition, and simple animations of those attributes. Direct2D (D2D) is a Cairo backend that GPU accelerates everything displayed by Firefox. Some parts of the web are more amenable to acceleration than others.” See Joe’s post for more.

Firefox 4 documentation in progress
A new Firefox 4 for developers page has been started at the Mozilla Developer Center, which will provide links to all Firefox 4 developer documentation. Eric Shepherd writes, “A few articles have already been written. There’s lots left to do, of course, but we’re making progress. If you see something you’d like to write about, feel free to contribute! As always, the content of that page is in flux while the feature set of Firefox 4 continues to be adjusted.”

Experiments with audio: part X
David Humphrey — who is working with an ever growing group of web, audio, and Mozilla developers on a project to expose audio data to JavaScript from Firefox’s audio and video elements — has posted another update and set of demos.

“What began as a series of experiments by a small group of strangers, has now turned into something much larger. Our community continues to grow, and the scope and scale of the projects being done on our API is increasing. At the same time, through the work of Doug Schepers and Chris Blizzard, we’ve managed to get the attention of the W3C, which have now started an Audio Incubator Working Group to look at how to standardize this stuff. One of my colleagues in these experiments, Al MacDonald, has been asked to chair the group, which already has members from Mozilla, Google, and the BBC. You can get involved and follow @AudioXG for updates.”

Mozilla Foundation May update
Mark Surman has posted the slidecast of his Mozilla Foundation update for May. “Almost five months into 2010, key Drumbeat projects and the Drumbeat local event series are picking up speed. Web Made Movies, Universal Subtitles and P2PU Open Web Career Track have all released new material and gotten more people involved. And additional events have taken place in Toronto, Berlin, Sao Carlos and Florianapolis. We’re also making progress on our overall fundraising and engagement efforts — albeit slower than hoped.” Head over to Mark’s blog for more.

Summer of Code 2010 projects
The Summer of Code 2010 kicked off last week, and Gervase Markham has posted a full list (with links!) of the thirteen Mozilla-related projects that are now underway. Projects are related a range of Mozilla products and technologies, including Firefox, Thunderbird, Fennec, Weave, SeaMonkey, Lightning, and Bugzilla among others. Links to project descriptions and developer blogs are available through Gerv’s post.

Add-on packaging: manifests revisited
The Add-on Packaging spec that Jorge Villalobos has been working on now has its very own page on wiki.mozilla.org. “At the moment I’m writing the complete manifest file specification, basically copying and adapting the current specifications for install manifests and chrome manifests. After receiving lots of feedback regarding the manifest format, I agreed to take the manifest file the XML way. I followed JJ Barton’s suggestion of using HTML instead of a custom XML format, which leads to a very simple and familiar manifest format, with some very nice visualization options.” Jorge is looking for further feedback, including the possible pros and cons of the HTML manifest format.

Updating add-ons for Fennec
“In Firefox mobile 1.1, we introduce automatic add-on upgrades. Once a day, Firefox will check your add-ons for an update and if an update is found, we download and install the new version. If you’re interested you can go to the Add-on Manager and see what add-ons have been updated. If you’re eager to use the new add-on, you can restart. In the future, some add-ons may not even need a restart.”

Viewport meta tag for Fennec
Matt Brubeck, part of the Firefox mobile (Fennec) team, has posted about upcoming changes to the viewport meta tag that will be seen in Firefox mobile 1.1. “Previous versions of Fennec supported the width, height, and initial-scale viewport properties, but had problems with some sites designed for iPhone and Android browsers. We now support the same properties Mobile Safari does, and we also changed Fennec to render mobile sites more consistently on screens of different sizes and resolutions.” Matt’s post continues on to cover all the details of the viewport meta tag over on the Mozilla Hacks weblog.

Crash reporting comes to Firefox mobile
In another tidbit of Firefox mobile (Fennec) news, Mark Finkle writes, “The latest Firefox mobile nightly builds have enabled the Mozilla Crash Reporter, powered by the same Breakpad system as desktop Firefox. While desktop Firefox has been using Breakpad since Firefox 3.0, it was only recently ported to the ARM architecture for the Nokia N900. Crash reports and the data they provide will be a huge help to the mobile team. A big thank you goes out to everyone who helped get crash reporting enabled on Maemo!”

Lazy frame construction + performance
Lazy Frame Construction is new to Gecko and allows many DOM operations (appendChild, insertBefore, etc.) to not trigger immediate reflows. This can vastly improve the interactive performance of very complex web pages. If you want to test this out, you should get a Firefox Nightly. Timothy Nikkei has blogged about this new Gecko feature, including some code samples and an explanation of what it means and how it works. Check it out on Mozilla Hacks.

Lessons from Mozilla: open innovation
Pascal Finette writes, “We recently were invited to present Mozilla Labs at a workshop on open innovation and crowdsourcing organized by Eric von Hippel (MIT) and Karim Lakhani (HBS). The workshop brought academics and practitioners from organizations such as General Mills (food), Ford (automobile), Pitney Bowes (services) and the World Bank (finance) together, and had each present the specific implementation of crowdsourcing at their respective organization.” Pascal has posted the slides for his presentation about Mozilla Labs’ approach, experiments, results and challenges, titled “Lessons from Mozilla – How we are learning to foster and grow participation”.

Mozilla Parks
A new Mozilla Parks page has been put up on Mozilla.org as a place to link to the various charitable conservation efforts Mozilla is supporting. “The Mozilla Parks page explains how parks are used as code names, shows where the parks are in the world and links to the different pages.” The Mozilla Parks logo combines the “Mozilla tree” concept with animals from different parks, including a lemur from Namoroka, a petrel from Lanikai, a whale from Shiretoko and a phoenix from the early Firefox days. “There are many parks, like Gran Paradiso or Bon Echo, that aren’t included yet and it would be great if people were interested in helping us add this history.” If you’re interested in helping, contact David Boswell.

Mozilla UK project
Tom Ellins has posted a quick update about the Mozilla UK project that started in December 2009. “We have created a community portal with the aim to enable contributors to gain information about Mozilla in the United Kingdom, about the various community projects and about ways to participate. Now it’s time for something new, we have finally decided to open up the Mozilla UK website to contributions outside the Mozilla UK administration team. Everyone who wants to contribute to the site and make a difference can start immediately.” To get involved, visit mozilla-uk.org/contribute/.

Software releases
* Thunderbird 3.1 RC1
* Firefox Windows 64 bit pre-release builds
* Jetpack SDK 0.4
* Camino 2.0.3
* Camino 2.1a1 pre nightlies (w/ Gecko 1.9.2)

Upcoming events
* Jun 7 – Open Video Conference proposals deadline
* Jun 30 – London 2010 Add-ons workshop
* Oct 1-2 – New York City – Open Video Conference
* Nov 5-7 – Free Society Conference and Nordic Summit (FSCONS)

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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