Categories: Contributor News

Firefox 3.5 Support knowledge base status update

It’s been a while since our last post about updating the knowledge base for Firefox 3.5. It’s especially a good time to get involved, now that Firefox 3.5 development is getting close to a release candidate.

We’ve already made great progress! support.mozilla.com has been updated and now supports marking knowledge base content specific to 3.5.  The Options window article and some other articles were then reorganized to make the transition easier.  As a community, we’ve been keeping track of changes to Firefox and many of the new features in Firefox 3.5 already have new articles.  Now, we have to just do to following to finalize the knowledge base:

  1. The first thing to do is to through the items on our Updating articles for 3.5 page, and make sure each of those updates is done. If you see one that hasn’t been done, please help make the edit.
  2. Thanks to support-conscious developers, relevant changes to Firefox 3.5, have been marked with the keyword “user-doc-needed”. We’d also like your help going through this list of user-doc-needed bugs, and making sure the knowledge base reflects these changes.  Once a change has been made, change the keyword to user-doc-complete and comment in the bug with a link to the documentation.
  3. Lastly, we will do a full audit of the en-US knowledge base. It’s a great way to refresh your knowledge of Firefox and isn’t very time consuming. Essentially, it’s just going through each article and asking:
    • Does it apply to Firefox 3.5? If so, the “Firefox 3.5” category should be check marked in the article editor.
    • Does it need to be updated/changed for Firefox 3.5? If so, update it accordingly, check mark the Firefox 3.5 category for the article, and check mark the “Alert translators” box.
    • Do the screenshots need to be updated for Firefox 3.5? If so, just post to our tracking page, but don’t update the screenshots yet. We will wait until there’s a release candidate and the interface is finalized before adding screenshots.

Once all of that is done, knowledge base localizers should have a solid en-US foundation of changes to translate in time for the Firefox 3.5 release, without having to worry about changes being translated prematurely.

On the whole, most changes revolve around privacy information, tabbed browsing, and small text changes. For user support contributors, now is the time to get acquainted with Firefox 3.5. When Firefox 3.5 is released, there is going to be a large volume of users asking questions about it. It’s the second most wonderful time of the year!