about:mozilla is a weekly round-up of news and contribution opportunities. Here’s what’s happening this week.

Mozilla Unlocks the Power of the Web

This will be one of the most exciting weeks ever! One year ago, we promised to change the way you interact with the web on the go. And Sunday, at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, we announced the release of the probably best smartphone operating system ever. (If we do say so ourselves.) While the first Firefox OS phones are quite powerful and look pretty fancy, they are also affordable in the developing world: At less than $100, it’s ten times more affordable than many other popular smartphones.

Firefox 19 and its PDF viewer
A few days ago, we were proud to release Firefox 19, the latest version of your favorite browser. It comes with some new features, but the most useful one is definitely the built-in PDF viewer. Now, you can read PDFs directly within your browser and for example check out a menu card from your favorite restaurant. Without having to interrupt your browsing experience with extra clicks or downloads.

Helping or Hurting?
When Christian Heilmann started as a web developer, there was no such thing as CSS. He had to use complicated tables for layout to display a site correctly. But there were still browsers that didn’t render the pages right – which led to the use of massive code snippets. According to Heilmann, the mistakes of the earlier days are being repeated: Many websites expect scripts to be flawlessly executed, which can be a problem. Find out how even Google experienced that we rely far too much on them for incredibly simple tasks.

New Features On the ReMo Platform
During the last month, the Mozilla Reps Web Development team has been working on improving reps.mozilla.org and last week, Pierros Papadeas showed off the two best and new functionalities: You can now see all events in a handy timeline to visually identify events worldwide and through different time periods. And if you are a vouched Mozillian, you can log into the portal – even if you are not a Rep! Find out why this is useful and get to know about the other features in his blog post.

UI Improvements in Firefox for Android
In Lucas Rocha’s latest blog post, it’s all about the recent changes made to the user interface of Firefox for Android. One of them is the two-way tabs tray which now displays the tabs horizontally whenever it improves the use of your screen’s space. The Firefox User Experience team also worked hard on streamlining the look of Firefox: It should feel like the same browser wherever you use it. You can test these new features in a bleeding-edge Nightly build.

Photo of the Week

Mozilla Representatives at the Mobile World Conference 2013. Follow us on our Yammer network for more pictures and news by signing up with your vouched Mozillians e-mail.

Meet Some Mozillians
Mozilla says bonjour to Bas Schouten, Jovanka Gulicoska, Mexico and our little surprise guest. Read more about how they contribute to Mozilla.

Upcoming events
* March 15 – Santa Clara, CA: PyCon US
* March 23 – Cambridge, MA: LibrePlanet
* Find more events near you on the Events Calendar

Get Involved
These are just some of the available contribution opportunities. Learn more about other ways to get involved and find other Mozillians in our community who share your interests.

About about:mozilla
The newsletter is written by Mozilla’s Community Engagement team and is published every Tuesday. For more on what has been happening this week also checkout the Mozilla Project Meeting. If you have anything you would like to include in our next issue, please contact: about-mozilla[at]mozilla[dot]com or send us a status message on mozilla.status.net or a tweet @aboutmozilla. You can also subscribe to the email version.

Have a good week folks and keep rocking the Web!

about:mozilla is a weekly round-up of news and contribution opportunities. Here’s what’s happening this week.

WebKit: An Objective View
If you love reading online news websites, you’ve probably stumbled across something like this: “Oh no, Opera will move from Presto to WebKit!”. While this seems to be pretty alarming, it’s hard to have an objective view on this. But luckily, Robert Nyman and Rob Hawkes wrote an objective blog post, in which they explain what WebKit actually means, how new features get into it and what it actually means that Opera moves to WebKit.

Summer of Code 2013

Google Summer of Code (“SoC”) is an annual program that pays students to work on free software projects over the summer. This program has already led to some great results: Tilt for example also used to be a SoC project. Mozilla has been invited to participate in SoC each year since the program began in 2005, and for this year, we are already collecting interesting 8-week tasks. If you can think of one that you might be able to guide a student through, read Gervase Markham’s blog post to find out how to propose your idea.

SUMO in 2013: Firefox for Android
David Tenser’s series of blog posts continues and this week, it’s all about Firefox Android and SUMO. The goals can be summarized in three words: Community, mobilization and, oh, community! One of the aims is to allow contributors to help others on their mobile while for example waiting for the bus to arrive in the morning. But this year, SUMO will also aim at some other things: Read David Tenser’s blog post to find out how we can enable fully community-driven self-service support for Firefox for Android.

Creating a Mozilla workshop
In her latest blog post, Lukas Blakk describes how she organized a Mozilla workshop for beginners that consisted of hacking on mobile HTML5 games. After a few lunch time meetings, she drove to Redwood City with 20 laptops and 15 Firefox OS test devices. At Dare 2B Digital, an annual conference for 300 young women, the future webmakers have created customizations to their matching game. More importantly, they’ve earned first-hand experience with the power of creating web apps that can run on any web-enabled device. Read Lukas Blakk’s blog post to see the results and find out what’s next.

Contribute Form for Everyone
In the last few months, our contributors and developers worked hard on improving the Mozilla.org contribute page‘s functionality in terms of localization. The outcome is mind blowing: You can now translate the site, make it respond automatically and embed the “Want to help?” form on any website. Read Rubén Martín’s blog post to find out why this is important, how it works for you and what the next steps are.

Photo of the Week

Because we got such a great response from our last wallpaper giveaway, we thought we’d do it again. Download the Firefox for Android wallpaper for free.

Meet Some Mozillians
Mozilla says bonjour to Lucas Rocha, Claire Clarista and Mozilla Bangladesh. Read more about how they contribute to Mozilla.

Upcoming events
* February 21 – Zürich, Switzerland: Mozcoffee Switzerland
* February 21 – In over 10 cities in Mexico: Translathon
* February 22 – Los Angeles, US: SCALE 11x
* February 23 – Cambridge, MA: LibrePlanet
* February 23, Manado, Indonesia: MozKopDarManado
* See more in our weekly event guide about:events or find more events on the Mozilla Community Calendar

Get Involved
These are just some of the available contribution opportunities. Learn more about other ways to get involved and find other Mozillians in our community who share your interests.

About about:mozilla
The newsletter is written by Mozilla’s Community Engagement team and is published every Tuesday. For more on what has been happening this week also checkout the Mozilla Project Meeting. If you have anything you would like to include in our next issue, please contact: about-mozilla[at]mozilla[dot]com or send us a status message on mozilla.status.net or a tweet @aboutmozilla. You can also subscribe to the email version.

Have a good week folks and keep rocking the Web!