In this issue…

Firefox 4 playing well on major websites
Ed Lee reports that the Firefox 4 beta is working well on major content sites, such as Netflix, Pandora, Gmail and YouTube. He lists the past problems and how they were fixed. Try them out.

Laura Thomson talks Socorro at AOL
Laura Thomson, who leads the Webtools group at Mozilla, was recently invited to speak to AOL about Socorro, the crash-reporting system, as well as how and why open source works for Mozilla. Laura was kind enough to blog about the questions she received about open source at Mozilla from the audience. It’s interesting to see Mozilla teaching AOL about open source in 2011 (considering the history between AOL and Netscape and Mozilla.)

Mozillians Take PyCon 2011
Tarek Ziadé writes about the Mozillians who will be presenting at PyCon US 2011, in March in Atlanta including Tarek, Ian Bicking and Kumar McMillan. If you are attending PyCon US 2011, please try to attend any of the presentations by Mozilla community members.

Now serving weekly updates on Join Mozilla
Jane Finette and team are publishing weekly updates on Join Mozilla, a supporter program that will enable more people to show their love and support for Mozilla. Jane writes that the program plans to, “bring existing elements of participation in the Mozilla project together in one program which includes: the ability to get regular news about what’s happening at Mozilla, the ability to donate to the project, and finally to purchase special merchandise.” Check out her blog for weekly updates.

Meet the Developer Engagement Team
Stormy Peters gives us an overview of the Developer Engagement team’s mission and members.  Take a read to get to know them.  Stormy closes with, “Of course we don’t do this alone. We are joined in our efforts to promote open technologies for the web by Mozillians and web developers world wide.”

Thoughts on community from metrics guru
Daniel Einspanjer, who usually obsesses about metrics for Mozilla, writes about his impressions of community contribution to Mozilla and why he believes it will be absolutely key to Mozilla’s future success.

Mozilla and IPv6 day
Matthew Zeier, who herds cats for Mozilla’s IT group, writes about participating in World IPv6 Day (8 June 2011) and how many of Mozilla’s websites will be available via both IPv4 and IPv6 addresses. As the last IPv4 addresses have been allocated, it’s clear that the future is IPv6 and Mozilla will be ready for this future.

Can IE9 be considered a modern browser?
Paul Rouget, Tech Evangelist at Mozilla, shares his thoughts on IE9. Although IE9 makes a giant leap from IE8, Paul explains why he thinks the most used Web browser in the world still has a long way to go before it can be considered a real “modern” browser.

Improvements to Firefox 4′s spell checker
Ehsan Akhgari writes about important changes to the spell checker in Firefox, namely that the newly patched spell checker will work with hyphenated words (it does not currently) and will work with words up to 130 characters long (current limit is 64.) As the spell checker is probably one of the features of Firefox that we all use unconsciously, this is a very welcome addition.

More on MozMill at FOSDEM
Henrik Skupin has kindly published his FOSDEM presentation on MozMill, the QA Team’s effort to expand and automate testing for Firefox. If you are interested in helping to test Firefox, please feel free to review Henrik’s recent presentation on MozMill and Mozilla QA.

What will Add-on Updates look like in the future?
Jennifer Boriss has an idea for Firefox 5 that will give users some flexibility. She writes: “The user begins with completely automatic updates on by default. By switching to manual updates in the advanced menu, the user can go back to installing updates themselves. Each add-on shows, in its detailed pane, whether it receives updates automatically or manually.” Feel free to leave a comment or thought for her.

Software updates
* Bugzilla 4.0

Upcoming events
* Feb 26, London, UK, Open Design Jam
* March 1-5, Hannover, Germany, CeBIT
* March 9-10, Atlanta, GA, PyCon
* 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 Mozilla’s contributor engagement team and will be published every Tuesday. This week’s issue is brought to you by Gen Kanai.

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.

You can also subscribe to the email version!