Help us Test the Social API with Facebook Messenger for Firefox

Johnathan Nightingale

Social integration in Firefox is here and ready for Firefox Beta testing! For the last few months we’ve been building the Social API – a way to allow you to plug your favorite social sites into Firefox – and we are ready to start our first Social API test with Facebook Messenger for Firefox. We’re really excited about it and need your help testing the feature to make it better as we get ready to release to all Firefox users.

Social sites aren’t like other Web applications. Rather than being focused on a particular task, we use social sites throughout our day: we check back for updates, we chat with friends, we share. When we started to integrate social into Firefox, this was our guiding principle: make it easy to stay connected; stop treating social like “just another tab.” We see potential for Social API integrations beyond traditional social sites, too – imagine using the sidebar as an easy way to keep up with group projects, email, or new music.

We think we’ve built something really cool. When you turn on social integration, you get a sidebar of social news and chat which stays put as you browse around the Web – no need to switch between or open a new tab. You also get the ability to share the page you’re visiting with a single click in the address bar. The site can even let you know when you have new notifications, all without leaving the page you’re visiting. Of course, when you need to focus, you can also hide it away.

While we built our side of the Social API, the Facebook Messenger team built theirs, as our first supported social provider. Our teams worked together to check assumptions and debug issues, but we also pushed each other to build something excellent. The Social API isn’t provider-specific, though. We want to build a social standard for the Web, much like we did with our work on OpenSearch. We’ll soon add more support for more providers, and eventually even for multiple social sites at once, but for our initial launch we couldn’t have asked for a better partner.

To get started just upgrade to the latest Firefox Beta and then visit this page and click “turn on.” When Facebook offers you Firefox integration, it’s a single click to install and give it a try. It’s just as easy to remove, and obviously if you decline the initial offer nothing will ever be installed. The Social API doesn’t change what social providers can see about your online behavior unless you explicitly decide to share it, but it does make it much easier to stay connected.

What you see today is just the first version of something we know will be a big part of Firefox for years to come. Remember that Mozilla’s a non-profit; we build Firefox only for you, and features like the Social API exist solely to give you a more integrated, human, awesome Web experience. How did we do with this one?

Firefox Marketplace Opens Doors with Aurora Release; Developers can gather feedback

Mozilla

The first Aurora release of Firefox Marketplace is available to early adopters and testers who are using Firefox for Android Aurora. This release gives developers a means to get feedback on their apps as the Marketplace grows and progresses. At Mozilla, we develop in the open and this initial release will help lead the way for future Marketplace Aurora, Beta and Firefox OS releases in 2013.

This release features a selection of showcase apps in the areas of games, productivity and news & media that users can browse, install and use. Among the first apps ready for testing are Distant Orbit, Jauntly, Soundcloud and Twitter.

It’s still early days for Firefox Marketplace Aurora – we’ll be adding payments, ratings, reviews and more soon- stay tuned.

Just last year, we started working to turn the Web into a viable apps development platform. We created the Firefox Marketplace to allow developers to build, distribute and monetize rich, immersive apps that use Web technologies like HTML, JavaScript and CSS. We’ve made amazing progress developing Web APIs across platforms as we work to unlock the power of the Web on mobile, just as we did on desktop.

To get started:

1. Download Firefox Aurora on your Android phone
2. Open Firefox Aurora and in the Options Menu, choose “Apps” (if you don’t see “Apps” as an option, choose “Tools” then “Apps”)
3. Browse the Marketplace, install and use apps
4. Click settings (in the Options Menu), then tap on “Feedback” to let us know what you think

The Firefox Marketplace will initially be available with Firefox for Android Aurora. Support for Firefox OS and Firefox on other platforms will come in the future.

To find out more about developing Web apps for the Firefox Marketplace, you can read this Hacks blog post.

You can learn more about the Aurora release of Firefox Marketplace and the Firefox apps platform here.

Firefox Beta Introduces Preliminary Support for Social API

Mozilla

Firefox Beta for Windows, Mac and Linux introduces preliminary support for the new Social API, with a set of social features developed by Mozilla. The Social API is the result of a lot of research and experimentation with integrating social functionality into Firefox.

Much like the OpenSearch standard, the Social API enables developers to integrate social services into the browser in a way that is meaningful and helpful to users. As services integrate with Firefox via the Social API sidebar, it will be easy for you to keep up with friends and family anywhere you go on the Web without having to open a new Web page or switch between tabs. You can stay connected to your favorite social network even while you are surfing the Web, watching a video or playing a game.

We will begin testing the Social API soon and Firefox Beta testers will be the first to experiment with this new feature in the coming weeks. As part of this testing we are working with Facebook to test Facebook Messenger with the Social API.

The Social API will ultimately support multiple providers and has endless potential for integrating social networks, e-mail, finance, news and other applications into your Firefox experience.  If you would like to learn more about the Social API, information is available here.

Beta testing of Social API will begin soon – stay tuned!

Firefox for Android Beta Is Now Available for Download and Testing

Mozilla

Firefox for Android Beta adds new accessibility features and more ways to view videos to deliver the best mobile Web experience to more people around the world.

Firefox for Android Beta integrates seamlessly with TalkBack, the Android screen reader, with no need for additional configuration or installations.

In this beta, we also support advanced accessibility features recently introduced to the latest versions of Android, including Explore by Touch and Gesture Navigation. Explore by Touch is an Android platform feature that allows the visually impaired to browse the Web more easily. When enabled, you can drag your finger across the screen and your device will provide you with feedback through speech, sounds and vibrations. Gesture Navigation builds on top of Android platform features to allow the visually impaired to use speech output to quickly search a page for certain elements.

Firefox for Android Beta also supports the H.264 video format to let you watch more video content and make browsing on video heavy sites even easier.

For more information:

Firefox Metro Preview for Windows 8

Asa Dotzler

Today’s preview marks the beginning of Mozilla community testing for the Firefox Metro browser designed from the ground up for Windows 8.

Earlier this year, we began development on a version of Firefox that runs on x86 Windows 8. This version of Firefox runs in both the Windows 8 “classic Desktop” environment, and in the new “Metro” environment. We’ve made a lot of progress since that first development update. We’re excited to share it with you and we’re looking forward to your feedback.

For those of you running the 64-bit RTM release of Windows 8, you can now download a nightly build of Mozilla Firefox from the Elm development branch and start testing. Elm is the experimental repository where most of our Metro development work has been happening. This repository produces nightly builds, much like the Firefox Nightly channel. Once installed, these builds will self-update so that you can track Metro Firefox development.

The preview includes a new Metro style Firefox Start page, support for Firefox Sync, Metro touch and swipe gestures, integration with Windows 8 “charms”, and a simple but powerful Australis interface that is streamlined, modern, and beautiful. Over the coming weeks and months, we’ll be adding more features, tightening up Windows integration, improving performance and responsiveness, and finishing up all the necessary work to deliver a first class Firefox experience for Windows 8.

This is an early preview and we know there are bugs and missing features, so please don’t hesitate to share your feedback and file any bugs you find. Stay tuned to this channel for further updates.

We bid you adieu, spotted cat

Alex Keybl

On November 20th, Firefox will end support for users operating Mac OS X 10.5 (Leopard). After this date, users will stop receiving Firefox updates, including new features and security fixes. If you are a Mac OS X 10.5 user and would like to continue to use the latest Firefox, you must upgrade to a computer running Mac OS X 10.6 or later.

Mozilla bases changes in supported operating systems on population size and trends, vendor support, testing resources, and technical feasibility. Ending support for Leopard will free up resources for new Mac features like Native Full Screen support and new Mac accessibility tools.

Over the next month, Firefox users running Mac OS X 10.5 will see prompts letting them know that they’ll no longer receive updates. Barring any major stability or security issues found over the next few weeks, Firefox 16.0 will be our last release to support 10.5.

After a five year run, it’s time for a big cat nap. Firefox support for Leopard ends on November 20th, 2012.

Firefox Schedule Changes Around Year End

Alex Keybl

We’re going to extend the 11/19/2012 – 12/31/2012 cycle by a week, with a revised end of 1/6/2013. Given the timeline change, we’re targeting release of Firefox 18 for the middle of that week.

The last couple of weeks in the year are a great opportunity to spend time with family, enjoy the holidays, and prepare for the new year. Mozillians are no different – from past experience we know that our offices and IRC channels clear out. Our developer, QA, and contributor engagement of course also drops significantly. In 2011, there were about 150 bugs landed per week during the holidays as opposed an average of about 350 bugs per week the rest of the year.

While the Fox takes a quick breather from fighting for the open web, we’ll still maintain a response team during the break to address any new issues that arise. Nobody’s completely off the hook – make sure to put down the egg nog for a couple of minutes to update your family and friends to the latest version of Firefox, so that they can enjoy silent updates for years to come!

The details:

  • Firefox 18 beta 1 will be released on Monday, Nov 26th
  • Firefox 18, 19 and 20 will spend an extra week in development before release
  • We’ll support Firefox 17 for an additional week as well (7 weeks), and Firefox 18 will be released the week of 1/6/2012
  • The following cycle, we’ll return to our normal 6 week cadence for all releases riding the trains
  • Please see the release calendar for the full set of future merge and release dates

Firefox for Android Beta is Expanding Support to New Devices: Help Us Test!

krudnitski

The Firefox team is dedicated to bring the best of the mobile Web to everyone we can reach. It is our mission to make the Web and the world a better place. Just recently, we announced a redesigned Firefox for Android for phones and tablets to make it faster and easier to get where you want to go on the mobile Web.

And we’re not done yet. Today, we’re expanding the devices we support on Firefox for Android Beta with an experimental build to include phones running on an older processor architecture – ARMv6 – in order to make the mobile Web accessible to even more people! This includes popular phones such as the Samsung Galaxy Pro GT-B7510, HTC Status, Motorola XT531, and Motorola Fire XT.

Why do we think this is important?

To date, Firefox for Android has supported phones running Android versions 2.2 and higher, but only on phones equipped with ARMv7 processors. But now, Firefox for Android Beta includes preliminary support to run on a subset of phones using ARMv6 processors.

And now we need your help to test and provide feedback to help us make the best browser for even more phones!

Given that 55% of the 133 million Android phones out there run on the ARMv6 architecture, there are a lot of new people to whom we can introduce the open Web, but we can’t support every phone all at once.

We are planning a phased approach to expand the set of minimum system requirements needed for Firefox for Android to run. To get us started, we’re opening up the build to phones running 800 MHz with an ARMv6 processor and 512 MB of RAM.

And this is where you can really make a difference. We are inviting you to try out our experimental Firefox for Android Beta and provide us feedback, so please take part and tell us how it goes!

You can help by answering these questions:

  1. Does Firefox for Android Beta download properly to your phone and install as expected?
  2. Are you able to browse as you normally would? Do your favorite websites load correctly? Does Firefox for Android Beta unexpectedly crash?

Share your experience with us using one of the following ways (and don’t forget to tell us what phone you’re using!):

If your phone isn’t listed as being compatible with Firefox for Android Beta, but you still want to help, visit us on the Firefox Aurora site and let us know what device you’re using and if you’re able to download Firefox for Android.

So grab your phone – more than one if you’re really eager – visit the Google Play Store, and download Firefox for Android Beta!

Thanks for helping us push innovation forward on the Web. With your help, we’ll be able to expand the reach of the open Web to millions more people – one phone at a time!

Firefox Beta Now Available for Download and Testing

Mozilla

What’s New in Firefox Beta for Windows, Mac, Linux:

Firefox Beta for Windows, Mac and Linux introduces an easier way for developers to interact with Firefox’s new developer tools and adds support for a number of Web standards.

  • Developer Toolbar: Firefox Beta introduces a new way to access Firefox Developer Tools. Selecting “Developer Toolbar” on the Web Developer menu of your Firefox toolbar will bring up a bar at the bottom of the screen that provides quick and easy access to all the Firefox Developer Tools. A unique-to-Firefox command line allows you to rapidly control your tools without removing your hands from the keyboard.
  • Unprefixing of Stable CSS4 Features: Developers no longer need to add vendor prefixes for CSS3 Animations, Transitions, Transforms, Image Values, Values & Units and IndexedDB. Firefox Beta also unprefixes Battery API and Vibration API, two Web APIs that Mozilla helped create.

For more information:

What’s New in Firefox for Android Beta:

Firefox for Android Beta introduces an easier way to read articles on your mobile phone or tablet.

  • Reader Mode: Firefox for Android Beta makes it easier to view and read website articles with Reader Mode. When viewing articles and stories on text-heavy pages like news sites and blogs, tapping the “Reader” icon in the Awesome Bar will activate Reader Mode. Reader Mode removes advertisements, reformats pictures and increases font size to show a clearer view of what you’re reading. Reader Mode also lets you share the pages you are reading over Bluetooth, email and SMS with the Share button on the bottom right of the screen.

Tap “Reader” icon in the Awesome Bar

Reader Mode

For more information:

More on Firefox Memory Improvements

Asa Dotzler

We’ve worked non-stop for the last year to improve the way Firefox uses memory, and our newest Firefox release contains one of the biggest improvements yet. We’ve gone beyond optimizations of Firefox code itself, and have now plugged the main cause of memory leaks in Firefox add-ons, as well.

Browsers do a lot more work than they used to. Typical Firefox users today don’t just load pages of text, we run high performance Web applications with a rich set of HTML5 features. We keep those pages open for longer, and have more of them open at once. We’re living so much of our lives online that browsers have become like operating systems, sometimes running dozens of applications at once.

To do that work well, Firefox memory usage needs to be excellent. For the last year, we have worked to make Firefox incredibly memory efficient. Not only does that let us run lean and fast, it also leads to big improvements in responsiveness and stability. We’ve addressed hundreds of issues, from fixes for dozens of small memory leaks to major new architectural changes. The Firefox of today is a significantly different product than that of a year ago, and our users feel the difference.

Having fixed the larger Firefox issues, it was time to tackle the next big source of memory leak: poorly written add-ons. Add-ons are a core part of the Firefox experience, so we began to test popular add-ons and work with their authors to plug leaks and use memory more efficiently. Add-ons aren’t intrinsically leaky, but the memory team identified dozens of add-ons that were causing huge memory leaks and made significant process improving the experience for Firefox users.

There are lots of add-ons, though. Testing and patching each of them in turn is an impossibly difficult project, and new problems can be introduced to add-ons after our testing. The most common cause of these leaks is when an add-on accidentally holds on to extra copies of a web site in memory after our user has closed the tab. These pages pile up, and can eat massive amounts of memory for no user benefit. They leak.

In the newest Firefox release, we developed a mechanism to prevent this form of leak from happening in the first place. Firefox will now detect this pattern, recapture the leaked memory, and free it up. This means that Firefox stays responsive and stable even if an add-on is making this mistake.

As the web continues to evolve as the world’s best platform for development and innovation, we will continue to performance tune Firefox. Add-ons are a great way to customize Firefox to your needs and interests, but you shouldn’t need to worry that they are harming your browser’s performance. There will always be more work to do, but with the latest Firefox release, our users are going to see a leaner, faster, more stable browser; take it for a spin.