In this issue…

Gary Kovacs: Mozilla’s new CEO
Mozilla’s six month search for a new CEO has ended. Last week, John Lilly and Mitchell Baker introduced us to Gary Kovacs, who will be stepping into the role in November. John and Mitchell have both written about this momentous occasion, and Gary recorded a video message that has been posted on the Mozilla blog.

Lilly writes, “[Gary has] deep background in the battlefields that will define the future of the Open Web: mobile and rich media, and he’s been involved in building great organizations several times over. But beyond all that, it’s his personality and humanity that really made us feel like he’d be a great fit for Mozilla. He understands that Mozilla is a unique organization, with unusual strengths and weaknesses, and really embraces that difference. But he’s also ready and able to help us do more with what we’ve built, and deliver even more towards Mozilla’s mission of making the Web more participatory and open.”

Game On competition continues
Just a quick reminder that Mozilla Labs is holding their first-ever Open Web game development competition! The top prize for the contest is a trip for two to the Game Developer Conference and the Independent Games Festival in San Francisco. To participate, you need to write a game using only open Web technologies (no plug-ins!) that works in Firefox 4. There will be prizes awarded throughout the course of the contest, so don’t wait until the last minute to get involved! The final contest deadline is January 11th, 2011. The original Game On 2010 announcement has all the contest details, and the team will be posting other useful links as the contest progresses!

Labs Night Gaming special, Oct 28
To celebrate the launch of the Game On 2010 contest, Mozilla Labs is hosting a very special “Open Web Games” edition of Labs Night on October 28th. “The evening will be about games being developed and played on the Open Web — expect cool tech demos, how-to talks and lots of interesting people! We will have a couple of speakers who will give demos and short tech talks on their projects followed by an audience Q&A. We’ll continue the tradition of opening up the podium to you if you want to give a short presentation (5 minute max) on your own project.” Check out the Labs blog for more information. We’ll post details about how you can attend remotely when those details are available!

You can join the Army of Awesome
Did you know that anyone with a Twitter account can join Mozilla’s Army of Awesome and reply to a tweet about Firefox? “Many times it’s as simple as showing someone where to find the info they need. Just as we routinely rely on signposts to navigate streets, we’ve created some standard signpost messages so you can direct users to commonly searched pages. You don’t have to be a Firefox expert to join the Army of Awesome — simply choose a tweet, sign in with your Twitter account, and select the signpost message that will point the user in the right direction.” For more about this new initiative, see William’s and Mary’s blog posts.

Mobile add-ons: online training tomorrow!
Mozilla’s mobile team is hosting a three day training event where you will be able to learn everything you need to build or port a mobile add-on for Firefox. “Firefox 4 Beta for Android and Maemo has been released into the wild. Pretty soon it will be available for download in the Android Marketplace. Already Firefox for mobile has seen tremendous attention from press and consumers, not to mention our 400 million desktop users who have been asking to take their Firefox with them wherever they go. The opportunity to get in early and develop mobile add-ons for Firefox is enormous.”

The Mobile add-ons training week will take place online starting tomorrow, and continuing through Friday. Caitlin’s post has more about this free event.

Scrabb.ly dev guest post on Mozilla Labs
The Mozilla Labs crew is obsessed with gaming these days, and in support of the Game On 2010 contest they have published a guest post by Grant Goodale, one of the makers of Scrabb.ly, a massively multiplayer online crossword game. “Scrabbly is a JavaScript rich client written in jQuery, communicating via a JSON-based API to a pure-JavaScript back end running on Node. The game world is stored in MongoDB hosted at MongoHQ. In order to provide a real-time play experience, Scrabbly notifies game clients of tile and word plays via small JSON messages pushed via Pusher, a hosted websocket push service. The generous support of service providers meant we could focus on the app itself rather than installation and setup.” Grant also gave a talk about Scrabbly at Seattle’s Google Technology User Group last month, and a video of that talk is included.

JavaScript Compartments
The Platform team has implemented a major change to the way Firefox manages JavaScript objects, adding support for multiple JavaScript heaps — which they are calling “compartments” — to the SpiderMonkey engine. Where previously all JavaScript objects ended up in a single heap, in Firefox 4 all objects that belong to a certain origin (such as “http://www.bank.com”) are placed into a separate compartment. This, as Andreas Gal points out, has a couple of very important implications. First, all objects created by a website reside within the same compartment and hence are located in the same memory region, improving cache utilization. Second, JavaScript objects (including JavaScript functions, which are objects as well) are only allowed to touch objects in the same compartment, which is very useful for security purposes. For much more detail about JavaScript Compartments, see Andreas’ blog post.

Barcamp Bangkok 4: Oct 23-24
Advertised as “Thailand’s Biggest Geek Event”, Barcamp Bangkok 4 is taking place Oct 23-24, and several Mozillians are participating. Gen Kanai writes, “William, Dietrich and I will all be at BarCamp Bangkok 4 and are looking forward to hearing from Firefox users in Thailand as well as those who used to use Firefox and may not use it anymore. Whatever browser you use, we hope to see you there too!” Registration for the event is now open on the Barcamp Bangkok website.

Evolving the Concept Series
Mozilla Labs is thinking about the future of the Concept Series, and they’re looking for feedback on their latest proposals. “The Mozilla Labs Concept Series has been around for a while now. We’ve seen awesome projects emerge and had thousands join the community, share ideas, develop concepts and give feedback shaping the future of many Web explorations. It’s time to evolve the Concept Series into a large scale program.” The team’s proposals have been outlined on their weblog, and include ideas around student outreach, community concepts, design challenges, an open web library, prototype challenges, and “local frequency” — a channel to showcase video and audio content from local tech events and meetups around the world. Desigan Chinniah’s blog post has more details about all of these proposals, and is where you should leave any feedback you have about them.

Input team seeks input
The Input team (who run input.mozilla.com) are hoping to get more bang for their proverbial buck in terms of the data they have collected. Aakash Desai posts, “We’d like to get a slew of questions people would like to have answered (that makes our software/product better) with this data.” The team also provides some example questions as inspiration, including: “How do users commonly name features of Firefox? How happy/sad are messages submitted within the happy/sad forms? Is there a distinction in sentiment between messages sent with or without URLs across the happy/sad forms? How many users offer Input a message in another language, but on an en-US build, when there are no other locales available?” Read more and start exploring some of the possibilities with the team over on Aakash’s blog post.

Help fix Thunderbird bugs
To make it easier for people to get involved and start helping with Thunderbird, the team has put together a priority list of bugs they would like to see fixed but don’t currently have the time to handle. If you’ve never contributed and aren’t sure how to get started, Ludovic Hirlimann has a list of handy links, including documentation, the Thunderbird section of the Mozilla Developer Network, development tools, and team discussion forums. See Ludovic’s post for all of this and more.

Resurrecting Nightly Tester Tools
“Some of you may have noticed that the Nightly Tester Tools add-on doesn’t work on nightly builds at the moment. A few months ago Dave Townsend mentioned that the popular extension was in need of some new owners and an update. A couple of people that work on automation have decided to lead an effort to revive Nightly Tester Tools and make it even better.” The team has a wiki page outlining their current plans, and you can learn more — including how to get involved — at Heather Arthur’s blog.

PromoteJS: improving JS docs visibility
The PromoteJS project is an effort to make it easier to find high quality documentation about JavaScript on the web through organic, guerilla SEO (search engine optimization). This project is being spearheaded by Chris Williams, the curator of JSConf and a staunch JavaScript evangelist. “We need to be the voice of education for our community. We need to promote the proper way of doing things, instead of just ignoring those that don’t ‘get it’ or watering things down. We need to commit to educating our fellow developers on JS, the language, and in doing so it helps all our frameworks, libraries, meetups, and conferences. PromoteJS is a step in that direction, but by no means the end of the story. Be sure to check the site frequently as we continue to add new ways to help improve documentation visibility and the documentation itself.”

Mozilla Pulse update
Mozilla Pulse is a prototype message broker/event system that aims to better integrate the myriad systems and tools Mozilla uses. Christian Legnitto, Pulse’s original developer, has posted an update about the project. “First, Pulse has become a quarterly goal for Bob Moss’ team! This is huge and means we’ll get some talented people and additional momentum behind the project. They are tasked with moving it from a concept to something that can stand up on its own. Recently we had a meeting to discuss the current state of Pulse and how to hand it off. The slides from that discussion can be found on my people account.” See Christian’s blog post for more.

Newsletter news!
Just a quick heads up for everyone who subscribes to this newsletter by email: we’re moving to a new newsletter system next week. The shift should be seamless for everyone, but if things are a bit wonky over the next couple of weeks, that’s probably why!

As always, if you have any questions or feedback about this newsletter you’re welcome to email me (deb-at-mozilla-com) any time. Thanks for reading!

Software releases
* Firefox Sync 1.5
* RequireJS 0.14.5

Upcoming events
* Oct 20-23, ONLINE, Mobile add-on development training
* Oct 23-24, Bangkok, Barcamp Bangkok 4
* Oct 28, Mozilla Labs Gaming Special
* Oct 28-29, Toronto, FSOSS
* Nov 3-5, Barcelona, Drumbeat Festival 2010
* Nov 5-7, Gothenburg, FSCONS
* April 9-10, Bulgaria Web Summit 2011

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.