In this issue…
Firefox 2 gets a major update Monthly Labs Meetup - Thurs, Aug 28 in SF Toronto MozCamp: Workshops - Sep 15-16 Mozilla Camp Europe - Oct 25-26 Mark Surman: New Mozilla Foundation Executive Director New Mozilla Web Tech weblog New and improved Mozilla Developer Center JavaScript performance improvements coming for Firefox 3.1 Firebug 1.2 released Extend Firefox 3 contest winners Firefox Mobile design session: bookmarks Developer calendar Subscribe to the email newsletterFirefox 2 gets a major update
Starting yesterday evening, users with the latest version of Firefox 2 will receive an automated offer to update to Firefox 3. If you’re running Firefox 2.0.0.17 you will see the offer in the next couple of days, but if you’re eager you can always “Check for Updates” in the “Help” menu. The Firefox team has posted extensive details about this update over on the Mozilla Developer News weblog if you would like more information.
Monthly Labs Meetup - Thurs, Aug 28 in SF
Rhian Baker writes, “It’s time for another Monthly Meetup. This month’s meetup will be Thursday, August 28th, 6pm at the Twitter office — 539 Bryant St. Suite 402, San Francisco. There will be progress updates on the various active Labs projects as well as plenty of opportunity for discussion and hacking. And, of course, pizza. If you are in the Bay Area, we’d love to see you!” If you’re planning to attend, please take a moment to RSVP by commenting on the Mozilla Labs weblog.
Toronto MozCamp: Workshops - Sep 15-16
Mark Finkle has posted more information about the upcoming Toronto MozCamp that is being held on September 15-16 at Seneca College. “We decided to use the second day as a ‘Hands-on Workshop’ day. The workshop will be split between development and testing tracks.” The development track will be run by several Mozilla developers who will help participants work on tutorials and projects, and there will be some XUL applications, extensions, and XPCOM components for people to hack on. The testing track will be covering topics related to Mozilla’s testing processes, including how to write unit tests and how we automate testing of Firefox. Clint Talbert has more information about this workshop.
Mozilla Camp Europe - Oct 25-26
Mozilla Europe has announced Mozilla Camp Europe, a large two-day Mozilla conference that will be held in Barcelona on the weekend of October 25-26, 2008. “The aim of the event is to bring together Mozillians from three main areas: Development, Localization and QA. The event will be held at Citilab in Barcelona and we hope to have enough places to invite 150 community members from across Europe.” For more information, see the Mozilla Camp Europe wiki page, which includes a tentative schedule, tracks, and other details. The Mozilla Europe team will post further information on William’s weblog and the wiki page as it is available.
Mark Surman: New Mozilla Foundation Executive Director
After a long and extensive search, Mitchell Baker has announced that Mark Surman will be joining the Foundation as the new Executive Director. Mark has also posted about this move, writing, “I am totally psyched about this. Mozilla is a new kind of foundation, one with participation, transparency and innovation at its very roots. It’s not just about giving out grants or making bold statements (although these are useful things to do), but also about getting large numbers of people involved in making things. In particular, things that make the Internet more open. For someone obsessed with reinventing how foundations work, there could be no more exciting job than this.” Mark will be officially starting his work with the Mozilla Foundation on September 22nd, 2008.
New Mozilla Web Tech weblog
Keeping track of Mozilla development is never easy, especially the minute details related to new or improved web technology development and support. The Mozilla development community has set up a new “Web Tech” weblog to help fix this. There, Mozilla developers will be posting about and discussing topics of interest to web developers. For example, recent posts include: word-wrap: break word support, CSS 2.1 generated content, and querySelector[All]. Questions and discussions are welcome, so check out the weblog and stay up to date on all the latest Mozilla web technology.
New and improved Mozilla Developer Center
Last week, the Mozilla Developer Center switched from using MediaWiki to being powered by MindTouch Deki, a huge task that’s been underway since late last year. The new site has a user-friendly WYSIWYG editor, an easier to work with scripting system for customizations, software that’s much easier to maintain, and a polyglot solution that allows all the localizations to live in a single wiki. The team is also working directly with MindTouch to add features so Deki will fit MDC’s needs even better. If you’re interested in further developments, you should watch Eric Shepherd’s blog and the dev-mdc newsgroup.
JavaScript performance improvements coming for Firefox 3.1
Mike Shaver writes, “Over the past year, JavaScript performance on the Web has undergone a striking revolution. Virtually every browser has improved its engine to produce significant gains in execution speed; Firefox 3 is about 3 times faster than Firefox 2 in various JavaScript benchmarks, for example. We’re not done. In addition to continuing to work on our existing JavaScript interpreter, we’re also looking farther into the future of JS performance. Yesterday we landed TraceMonkey in the Firefox 3.1 development tree, [and] we’re charging full speed ahead on the work we need to do for this to be part of Firefox 3.1″. Early tests are showing significant speed and performance improvements. TraceMonkey has been blogged about at length by the various people involved:
Firebug 1.2 released
The final version of Firebug 1.2 has been released and is available through the Mozilla Add-ons site and GetFirebug.com. There have been a huge number of improvements and bug fixes made, including the addition of Firefox 3 support, quality improvements, selective panel enablement, and the ability to suspend/resume the add-on. Additionally, Firebug 1.3 development is already underway and will be focused on performance, quality, and testing. For more information, see John Resig’s blog post announcing the Firebug 1.2 release.
Extend Firefox 3 contest winners
Extend Firefox 3 — the contest in which participants submitted new or updated add-ons for the Firefox 3 web browser — has wrapped up and the winners have been announced. Many of the winning add-ons are in the early stages of experimental development, but all are powerful new tools and prototypes that the judges felt were worthy of recognition. For the list of winners and further details about the contest, please see the Mozilla Labs weblog.
Firefox Mobile design session: bookmarks
Aza Raskin writes, “For the third installment of the Firefox Mobile design discussions, it’s bookmark time. Bookmarks have been a fundamental feature in the browser since Mosaic days. Do they have a place in Mobile? Are there better paradigms? How are they displayed? What’s the difference between a tab and a bookmark? Is it only a matter of one being in the device’s memory?” These are some of the questions that are asked and answered in the third video installment of the Firefox Mobile design sessions. The team looks forward to your thoughts and feedback. More information is available at Aza’s weblog.
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.
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by Genís