Planet Mozilla L10N

Although I got into the mozilla project through en-user documentation and support around 2001, I really got involved in Web localization in 2003 when I started to build a Spanish Mozilla community around the Mozilla Suite and I convinced Bob Clary (who also gave me my canconfirm rights in bugzilla, thanks for that!) to publish a page in Spanish on mozilla.org so as to promote Tech Evangelism activities in Spanish.

That was the first non-English page on an official mozilla site ever and the funny thing is that... this page is still online! 

We are now in July 2009 and we just shipped Firefox 3.5 in more than 70 languages, all with a set of in-product pages hosted on mozilla.com. But more than in-product pages, we now have with this release a localized home page on mozilla.com for ALL of our locales!

Now that the release is done and millions of users are downloading the best version of Firefox ever every day, I have some time to thank all of the people that have made such an achievement possible.

Thank you to our localizers first, without them, the Mozilla project would not have the international outreach it has and I really think that our localizers are way more than translators, they are involved in every corner of mozilla activities, from code, to marketing and documentation. It is a privilege for us to work with people having so many skills and passionate about FLOSS and the open web!

Thank you also to the rest of the l10n-drivers team (Seth, Axel, Stas, Gandalf...) and thank you to Delphine who did an awesome job with QA of all of the localized pages over the past weeks on our sites!

Happy international browsing

Pascal

July 02, 2009 01:33 PM

Those who read this blog may remember that we are trying to finalize a version of Firefox in Swahili.  As it happens now and again, we have two groups who have completed translations at nearly the same time.  The l10n-drivers team is now trying to find the most judicious solution to the problem: determining fairly which translation is best and shipping that.  Amazingly, the differences between the the strings for the two localizations number in the thousands, and properly evaluating the discrepancies is a sizable undertaking for us to find the better version of the two.  If you’d like to see the existing diff, comment here and we’ll send it your way.  Now that we have a finalized Firefox 3.5, I’ve asked each team leader to update the strings in their language pack for final evaluation and we’ll prepare the final diff.

Sadly, amidst all we have done to ship Firefox to seventy-five locales, it was frustrating to read a blog post from one person suggesting that Mozilla’s l10n-drivers team is playing politics when it comes to shipping the Swahili version.  If it needs to be made explicitly clear, we are in the business of shipping excellent localized software to as many locales as possible.  If our team allowed politics to disrupt prudent judgment, I am not sure we would scale at all.

In his post, huarya writes, “The Mozilla people want to play nice with everyone instead of giving priority to the team that has actually showed results, real result!”.  I responded extensively in the comment thread, an d here is a copy of my lengthy response for those who care to read it:

huayra:  I’m not sure if we have ever spoken personally, so it seems a bit careless to suggest that we are playing politics.  If we have spoken via email or IRC, then my apologies.  You can find me on irc.mozilla.org, nick: sethb.

We ship Firefox now in 75 locales.  We are not in the business of playing games.  It’s about scaling our localization communities in the most sustainable way possible AND providing an excellent finished product.

But, as you can see through the comments in this post, you’ve planted the seed that our team at Mozilla is doing something dubious.  We are not and that’s irresponsible on your part since you do not mention the full story in your post.  Exactly what do you mean by “The Mozilla people want to play nice with everyone instead of giving priority to the team that has actually showed results, real result!”?

Here are the facts and consider rewriting your post:

We do have two language packs from the two teams with thousands of differences.  With those two language packs, my team prepared a presentation of grammatical and translation differences between the two versions and reached out to many different linguistic professors who have expertise in East African Language Studies.  One was eager to help and we are trying to get a final evaluation from him since he wants to get sw-TZ users a version of Firefox.  Another academic contact requested tens of thousands of dollars to do the evaluation and we cannot fund that since no other locale has been afforded any funding to help settle disputes.  A final academic contact did a rough evaluation, said that both translations contained many errors, he wouldn’t be comfortable with either, and would need to charge Mozilla a fee for him to do the thorough evaluation.  These responses come from department heads at leading universities.

Playing politics would be something less prudent.

Please also keep in mind that we have several things going on right now, not the least of which is shipping Firefox to 75 locales to our 300+ million users who want updates to Firefox 3.5.  In addition, we are actively working with many other new locales who want to participate.  Yes, sw-TZ has been trying to localize Firefox for many years now.  But, we are responding to requests from all over the world and do our best to manage it all and have done fairly well since we have scaled to 75 localizations.  Most importantly, we want our end users to have something that is an excellent finished product.

sw-TZ is unique because we have two translations asking to be the official one.  We are seeking the most judicious result as possible because surely one team will be quite disappointed if their translation is not chosen.  The team at Mozilla is the group who deals with the aftermath of that decision.  And, not making a wise decision would only complicate things.

I’d ask for your patience and understanding as we come to a resolution. And, please minimize the flaming when you don’t have all the facts. Not sure how that helps.

ShareThis

July 02, 2009 10:10 AM

In this issue…

• Firefox 3.5 now available
• Firefox Hacks
• Discover Shiretoko
• Firefox in context
• Weave 0.4 released
• Two new Fennec releases
• Firefox browser for CyberMentors
• Open Video Conference roundup
• Mozilla Service Week
• Design Challenge: vote now!
• Upcoming events
• Developer calendar
• About about:mozilla

Firefox 3.5 now available

Firefox 3.5 has been released and is now available for Windows, Mac, and Linux in more than 70 languages. This release represents the hard work, dedication, and perseverance of thousands of contributors throughout the Mozilla community and around the world.

Firefox 3.5 has a huge number of additions and improvements for both users and web developers alike, including: robust new user privacy features; support for high quality open video and audio; a new, high performance JavaScript engine (and a host of other performance and speed improvements); downloadable fonts that will fundamentally change how we view typography and the web; powerful new developer features such as location aware browsing, canvas features, worker threads, native JSON, and media queries; and so much more. Firefox 3.5 is essentially an upgrade to the Web itself.

Mike Beltzner, Firefox Product Director, stars in this quick video introduction to Firefox 3.5. Visit GetFirefox.com for more information about and to download this release.

Firefox Hacks

The Firefox Hacks team continues to focus on the new features that are part of Firefox 3.5, posting an article and demo every day. Recent posts include: Open video codecs and quality, a short introduction to media queries, 3d transforms, better security and performance with native JSON, and HTML5 video and the web. Check out the Firefox Hacks weblog to read about all of these new features and more.

Discover Shiretoko

Mozilla Japan has started a new “Discover Shiretoko” campaign in cooperation with the non-profit Shiretoko Nature Foundation in Hokkaido, Japan. “As some of you may know, each version Firefox has a code-name that is the name of a national park. The code name for Firefox 3.5 is ‘Shiretoko’ which is taken from the name of the Shiretoko National Park in Northern Japan. Mozilla and this organization have a number of common goals and you can read 4 stories about Firefox and Shiretoko on the Discover Shiretoko site.” The team is also running a new web banner campaign, featuring a unique and creative use of the Canvas element to grow a virtual tree on your website or blog. Read Foxkeh’s weblog to find out more.

Firefox in context

Mitchell Baker has written an article that talks about Firefox in context of Mozilla’s larger mission to promote choice and innovation on the Internet. “Firefox enables the web and web applications to be ever more robust and exciting. The web enables Firefox to be more flexible, more agile and more responsive. Firefox builds an experience where the center of the entire system remains a person. Not a website, not a business, not a piece of software. The most important actor in the entire picture is a human being; an individual. You. Me. Each person living part of his or her life online.” Read Mitchell’s full post on her weblog.

Weave 0.4 released

Weave Sync is a prototype add-on that encrypts and securely synchronizes the Firefox experience across multiple browsers, so that your desktop, laptop and mobile phone can all work together. It is part of the Weave project, which aims to integrate services more closely with the browser. This new release includes a major rewrite of many of Weave’s key components since the last major release in June. For more information, see the Weave 0.4 release announcment.

Two new Fennec releases

Stuart Parmenter has announced the release of Fennec 1.0 Beta 2 for Maemo and Fennec 1.0 Alpha 2 for Windows Mobile. “For these releases we have worked on improving the user experience, replacing our old theme with a much nicer looking one and fixing numerous usability issues. We’ve continued to increase performance and responsiveness.” Other changes include how add-ons are installed, how the download manager works, and several improvements to web forms.

Firefox browser for CyberMentors

Jane Finette has posted about Mozilla’s involvement with the UK-based charity that works to help Britain’s youngsters deal with and protect themselves from bullying. “Earlier this year they launched their CyberMentors program, offering help and advice from trained mentors to anyone who is being bullied online. Mozilla supported CyberMentors straight out of the gates, whereby members of the Mozilla community volunteered to be trained as CyberMentors. Yesterday, we took our partnership a stage further for this worthwhile cause by building and launching a new custom Firefox browser for CyberMentors.” To learn more about this project, see Jane’s weblog post.

Open Video Conference roundup

Mark Surman posted an interesting round up of the goings-on and takeaways from the Open Video Conference that took place recently in New York. “It was an amazing confluence of people from the worlds of online video, art, free culture, open content and web technology.” Mark’s takeaways, summarized, are: “people who make video are great potential allies”, “we have a long way to go”, “there are some simple things we can do now to build momentum”, and finally “open video is both important and fun”. Mark’s post finishes up with some potential next steps, and you can read it in full over at his weblog.

Mozilla Service Week

There are two new stories about the exciting new Mozilla Service Week project that’s taking place Sept 14-21. The first article asks that non-profit and community organizations that are in need of technology help get in touch with Mozilla, so your organization can be included in the program. If you already have ideas about what sort of help you need, you can register directly at the Idealist volunteer organization. The second post is about how individuals can get involved with and get a head start on the Service Week. The team is looking for help promoting the Mozilla Service Week event over the summer, both to volunteers worldwide and to non-profits and local organizations that could use help. For more information, check out both articles: Public benefit organizations: How can we help you?, and Mozilla Service Week: How to help!

Design Challenge: vote now!

The submission deadline for the Mozilla Labs Summer ‘09 Design Challenge has passed, and over 120 concepts have been submitted around the theme of reinventing tabs in the browser. The nine panelists will be going through the submissions and determining the four “best in class” honors, but there’s an additional honor to be bestowed, and we need your help! You can participate by going to the Design Challenge showcase site, reviewing the concepts, and voting for your favorite to help determine which entry should receive the “People’s Choice” award. Voting closes on July 5th, so now’s a great time to start checking out some of the incredible work that’s been submitted for this Challenge. More information is available on Pascal’s weblog post.

Upcoming events

The Mozilla community is organizing an increasing number of events and meetups all the time, and we include a list of these here every week. If you have events you would like listed, send them along to: about-mozilla*at*mozilla.com.

* Fri, Jul 10 – Online – Firefox 3.5 Security Testday
* Sept 14-21 – Everywhere! – Mozilla Service Week

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 Deb Richardson and is published every Tuesday morning. If you have any news or announcements you would like to have included in our next issue, please send them to: about-mozilla[at]mozilla.com.

If you would like to get this newsletter by email, just head on over to the about:mozilla newsletter subscription form. Fresh news, every Tuesday, right to your inbox.

June 30, 2009 04:03 PM

Mozilla is proud and pleased to present Firefox 3.5, now available for download. Firefox 3.5 has been under development for the past year, contains many new exciting features for users and web developers, and is our fastest Firefox release ever. A video highlighting some of these new features is available, describing how:

• Firefox 3.5 is available in more than 70 languages – get your local version.
• We have included tools for controlling your private data, including a Private Browsing Mode, and the ability to go back in time and Clear Recent History.
• Firefox 3.5 has support for the HTML5 <video> and <audio> elements including native support for Ogg Theora encoded video and Vorbis encoded audio.
• The browser features faster performance on complex websites thanks to the new TraceMonkey JavaScript engine.
• Users can enjoy Location Aware Browsing using web standards for geolocation.
• Web developers can make use of native JSON parsing, and web worker threads.
• This release includes improvements to the Gecko layout engine, including speculative parsing for faster content rendering.
• Firefox 3.5 supports new web technologies such as: downloadable fonts, CSS media queries, new transformations and properties, JavaScript query selectors, HTML5 local storage and offline application storage, <canvas> text, ICC profiles, and SVG transforms.

As always Firefox 3.5 is available as a free download. Firefox 3.0 users can update their existing browser by selecting “Check for Updates…” from the “Tools” menu in Firefox.

We encourage web and Add-on developers to read the Firefox 3.5 for Developers article on the Mozilla Developer Center.

Note: users already running a Firefox 3.5 Beta or Release Candidate can also obtain an update by selecting “Check for Updates…” from the “Help” menu. If no update is available, you already have the final version!

June 30, 2009 03:59 PM

I’ve spent half of last week in Amsterdam joining the “Open Translation Tools 2009” unconference. It was a pretty interesting and diverse crowd to be with, and by far not as tool-author-only as it would sound like. Folks coming spread all over from sex-worker activists over global voices to translate.org.za to folks from the “professional translation companies”.

We started out with a few opening ceremonies. First of which was an introduction, the regular “who are you and where are you from”, along with a “how do you feel”. I was the only one that didn’t give a geolocation, but disclosed Mozilla as my point of origin. It’s obviously a more common theme in such events that localization folks are much more focused on their geographical background as defining their cultural background (what this should be about, right? This is not couch-surfing.) and not so much what they work on. The “how do you feel” was one of the hippie-pieces, along with a lot of twinkling. Reading the urbandictionary on twinkle makes me wonder, but it was just hands-not-clapping. Honestly.

Next up was a round of spectograms in the room. Two opposite oppinions where offered, and you had to stand across a line in the room on where between the two your opinion would be. Then Gunner, our head master of ceremonies, went in and poked people on why they’d be where they were. It’s an interesting exercise to figure out what kind of crowd you’re with, and scales pretty well.

Agenda-building worked pretty much like it does in most unconferences these days, we created tons of sticky notes and then tried to build themes and agendas from that. The resulting sticky notes are transcribed on the wiki. Mighty job by Lena. I feel quite fortunate that I didn’t have to distill those notes into an agenda. Gunner did that pretty loosely, which was probably a good combination. The resulting schedule is on the wiki, too. In the rest of my coverage, I’ll focus on those sessions that I’ve been in. The schedule links to the full notes of each session, the note takes were usually in good shape, so do take a look.

The session that Ed Zad (both of which are shortened, the parents are not to blame for this one) led about the professional translation companies and ecosystem was OK. The actual translation is almost never done in-house, but contracted out to freelancers. The money you pay the companies goes into project management, and they hire translators, reviewers and editors to do the actual work, and get paid by the company. The interesting part here was really that those companies make their money from the project management and recruiting part. I didn’t get any useful feedback beyond “you must have hired the wrong guys” on my report that any time we had to contract translation out, the results were not really usable. Maybe asking that question the wrong guy :-). The main takeaway would be that the industry is really fragmented and diverse. I doubt there are any good rules for picking a partner when looking for a company for localization, either. The process Ed described about reviews and editing seem rather low-key compared to what you can do if you develop your localized content in the open.

The next session I was in was about machine translation, led by Francis. He introduced the group to both statistical machine translation as well as rule-based MT. Interesting here are both the enormous amount of data you need for statistical MT, as well as the different stages. Rule-based MT on the other hand works well for closely related languages. For those that heard me talking about l10n-fork, that’d be rule-based MT. Francis offered to take a look at whether we can actually do better MT to share work in Mozilla localizations for at least closely related languages. All our romance languages with the Spanishs, Portugueses and French could benefit from that, possibly even patch-based.

We “closed” Monday in Vondelpark. Matt broke the aspiration techies on Monday night, though. Amsterdam is good at that. I ended up at Petra’s place, together with Tanya and Pawell. Thanks to Petra for a fun evening.

Tuesday started off with a crazy “crawl on the floor and draw as many workflows as you have”. I figured that I don’t know enough about 90% of the workflows we use at Mozilla, and just sketched out two extremes when it comes down to localizing Firefox. One is localizing patch by patch, like for example the French team does. And then we have a long tail of localizations that work within their toolchain and just occasionally export to hg and update the upstream repos. For the cats among you, there are 40 pictures of the workflow diagrams on flickr.

Next was a pretty interesting session on translating wiki content. That made it a good fit for me to kill the session on “Localizing a hybrid organization - BOF on Mozilla”. I wanted to clone myself three or four times already, so not having to do a session myself was a win. Anyway. We had tikiwiki and mediawiki represented in the group. And me with some experience on those two, plus deki via MDC. The discussion turned up two fundamentally different ways of working:

• Forking documents into different documents for different languages, with some cross-referencing that localizations exist. You’d know this from wikipedia.
• Maintaining the different translations as variants of a single document. This is what tikiwiki does, as we see it on SUMO.

The discussion around one single living document in multiple languages was more lively, which gave me a good sense of what’s out there to address our needs at SUMO/MDC etc. There doesn’t seem to be anything blowing tikiwiki out of the water, so in terms of finding a wiki engine with l10n, SUMO made a good choice. We talked quite a bit about the multiple edits in various languages of the document, and what tiki defines to be 100% in the end. I showed off the l10n dashboard page we have on SUMO now, which was well received. The idea to not demand that people do as a bot tells them, and instead to empower them with relevant information seemed to resonate well. There was a different session about CMSes and l10n, read drupal etc. I only overheard the last bits, didn’t seem to have great answers over there. Judge yourself from the notes. Finding the right UE and UI paradigms for keeping a living document in multiple languages in sync seems to be an open item of work. In particular if your document isn’t bound to get value contributed in one single source languages. We would want to understand which changes are ports of fixes in other languages, and which are new fixes to the actual document that other translations of this document including the original source language would benefit from.

Next up was a round of speed-geeking. That’s similar to speed dating. A few geeks get a table each to present something to the rest of the group. The rest of the group is split up to watch one at a time. Each presentation is 4 minutes, then the groups rotate to the next table. If you’re bored by something presented, you just wasted 4 minutes. I took the challenge to present l20n 8 times in a row. That’s a pretty technical topic and a pretty diverse audience, so apart from being a stress test on ones vocal chords, it’s also pretty heavy on your brain. I must have been doing allright, though. The feedback was generally interested to positive. I got out with an action item to work with Dwayne on how we could actually present localization choices so that they’re options to fix and not just hell-bound confusion. On a general note, if you’re ever found speed geeking: Don’t sit in front of your computer. Don’t make people walk around the table to see something. It’s perfectly fine to sit next to your computer and have your laptop and yourself face your audience. Or do it like Dwayne did, just present without your damn laptop open :-). If feasible.

The last session on Tuesday was about building Volunteer Translation Communities. We had a few people there that are just starting to build such a community, but also a few people from Global Voices Online and yours truly from Mozilla. It’s pretty interesting how easy it is to think “I need to get such and such in language other, how do I ask for volunteers?” and how easily that fails. The common ground of those with living communities was that you don’t ask for translators, but you need to be open for contributors. At Mozilla, we’re hackable. We offer opportunities for all kinds of volunteer contributions, among which localization is one. That is something different than asking for some unit of work to be done for no pay. Another key is that you find your volunteers among those that are interested in the outcome of the localization work. The project management work you need to do to empower your translation community to actually do some work and get to the results shouldn’t be underestimated, too. There’s a reason why people make a living out of this one.

I moved from Tuesday to Wednesday through the Waterhole. As good as it used to be. Getting up in time was tough, but not as bad as it initially felt.

The first session I joined on Wednesday was on localization issues in Africa. We had similar sessions for Central Asia, South Asia, and Asia Pacific, which I didn’t manage to get to. I even didn’t get to read the notes from those yet. Anyway, back to Africa. The challenges there aren’t all that surprising. Connectivity is really bad, cell phones are really big. During the OTT, though, the first cable made it to Kenya, so in terms of connectivity, things are changing. Fonts in Africa are mostly based on Latin script, so there’s not too much to do there, though a few characters usually need fixing. At least for web content, downloadable fonts offer a smooth upgrade path. In terms of technical abilities, a lot of the techies for African languages end up in Europe or the US and only occasionally visit home. For actual translators, there isn’t enough work to actually make a living of that, so you likely end up with part time night shifters. For many people with access to computers and internet, localization is a good thing, but not something on their own list of priorities, which leaves us with a rather small potential community there. Localizing really obvious things like cell phones or Firefox is a good way to start of a community, though. I’ve had some off-track discussions with Dwayne on how to work together with the ANLoc project he’s running, too.

The discussion about open corpora to be used for linguistic research and statistical machine translation training was OK, but not of that much interest for Mozilla. It’s a good thing to do, and if we can help in asking the right people, that’d be cool, though. There’s tons of politics to resolve first though, and they got enough folks for the initial group.

The next round of speed geeking had me on the consumer side. I already mentioned that you shouldn’t sit in front of the laptop that you use for presenting. John talked about Transifex, which is designed to be a system to bridge various version control systems for localizers, by having write access itself to the upstream repos. They start to offer an interface to actually translate a few strings in place, which they reuse from somewhere. It’s not pootle code, though. That was the one with most immediate touch point to what we do.

The last session for me was one driven by Dwayne again, closing the loop. We tried to find out how to get feedback from the localizers into tools, and into the software they localize. This was pretty interesting, thanks to the input from Rohana and Gisela, the two are actually localizers and could hint us at what they do and how. The main take away was that Localizers and l10n tool authors don’t talk enough to each other. Gisela, Dwayne and I have a follow-up conference in our heads to actually do that, I’ll talk about that in a different post. The other main point was that we need to get tools to support “l10n briefs” and annotations, and need to establish ways for that information to be exchanged. A localization brief might be something like a file-wide localization note that explains what the context for these strings is. Or that it’s about XSLT error messages, that you should leave in English unless you have a thriving local community in your language on that technology. Annotations are more diverse, and are both to communicate among localization teams and back to the original author. The idea is to create a system that allows localizers to communicate over a particular string or set of strings in an easier fashion than using hg blame to find the bug, and then having to read through all of the bug to find out how to reproduce a problem. We might want to have annotations as simple as “star a string”. If it’s helpful that a string is tricky, someone else can go in and offer help or a more constructive annotation beyond “I didn’t get it”. How to communicate that back and forth is another follow-up project from this session.

Adam Hyde ran a book sprint on open translation tools aside all sessions, with a real face-to-face book sprinting event that closes today. It’s going to be interesting to see what that comes down to. As I suck at writing (you can tell by reading this post), I didn’t participate in that one myself. There is a version on the net already on flossmanuals.net.

So much for the actual sessions. As always, floor communication was essential, too. I made contact with folks from the Tajik, Khmer, and Nepali localization efforts for Firefox, and there’s already traction on some. If you know someone willing to help with Nepali, please make them introduce themselves in m.d.l10n. I have met a ton of other interesting people, of course. I had some really great conversations with Dwayne on a bunch of different topics, ranging from technical bits in tools to mission statements. Generally, there was a lot of interest in Mozilla, and how we do things. Thanks to Aspiration for inviting me, and thanks to all the people at OTT for the warm welcome to this new community for us.

Last but not least, thanks to Mozilla. In environments like OTT it becomes really obvious how rare organisations like Mozilla are. We had a lot of discussion on how hard it is to do localization as an afterthought, and we just don’t. How valuable it is for the localization community to get acknowledged. Which happens throughout Mozilla, pretty independent on whether it’s John and Mitchell most anywhere they talk, or our developers fixing their patches to have a prettier localization note, or our marketing folks empowering our local communities to localize the message. And we’re still learning and eager to get better. It is an honor to represent such an organization.

Pictures in this post are by Lena under CC by-nc-nd.

June 29, 2009 03:42 PM

Here's a summary of SeaMonkey/Mozilla-related work I've done in week 26/2009 (June 22 - 28, 2009):

• SeaMonkey Build/Release Harness:
  Followup work on getting SeaMonkey release automation (also has wiki documentation now) from testing into production to actually work is continuing. The main bug now has the SeaMonkey-specific configuration files attached for review, I tried to make repack independent of ChatZilla or venkman being enabled (doesn't correctly work yet, though), filed a bug and (trivial) patch for pretty names in Windows installer and added shipped-locales files to both trunk and the 2.0a3 release tag (release automation needs to fetch that file from the last release to determine what to generate updates for). The removed-files.in fixup I wrote up after analyzing update verification logs from the release harness has landed, which should also make us ready for shipping static builds in nightly updates.
  I did a small update to the patch for DMG unpackaging in the buildsystem and updated the patch for repack factory abstraction once again for some bitrot from buildbotcustom changes.
• Release Process:
  SeaMonkey 1.1.17 has been released on Monday, containing a good number of security fixes compared to 1.1.16. I continued uploading contibuted builds as they came in.
• Download Preferences:
  As I start to see more and more people being confused about the behavior preference on the download panel not working I started the work on updating the download preference panel to reflect changes from the download manager switch. This will focus on making the behavior and location prefs work correctly so that 2.0b1 will behave itself, more improvements can be done in later followups building on this.
• Bug Triage, Support Mails, Start Page:
  I spent some time looking at bugs that were changed again after the large NEW->UNCONFIRMED change, trying to get actions to happen where possible, or deciding to WONTFIX them in a number of cases (such decisions need module owners or Council members in most cases).
  Also, I finally came around to work the backlog of support mails I had in a subfolder of my inbox (I don't feel responsible for support, so I push them in there, but try to at least give some reply with pointers when I come around to it - might take weeks to months though). I ended up writing 70 replies in 4 hours, taking 3:30 minutes per mail, mostly with standardized replies, sometimes one or two sentences containing more specific help.
  The "start" page on the SeaMonkey project website has been warning people that their alpha/beta builds were outdated when they were older than four weeks which is not the best idea in the light of e.g. Alpha 3 being four months old and still "current" right now. I finally came around to modifying the page to restrict this warning to nightlies and doing a special warning for non-current alpha/betas.
• German L10n:
  Fixed some ChatZilla and general SeaMonkey strings to keep the de locale green.
• Various Discussions:
  Checkin for packaged tests uploading glitch, DEL and other keys in download manager, OpenWebCamp Vienna, Parallels VM adjustments, FF 3.5 release preparations, Scheduling of Mozilla's Weekly Update Meeting, thundertab restore and SeaMonkey, etc.

I have a very strong opinion about how successful our planning of SeaMonkey 2.0 Beta 1 in sync with Thunderbird 3.0 Beta 3 went - and believe me, there's nothing positive on it. Since we defined a freeze for our first alpha, we have learned that only a definitely scheduled freeze date will bring people to pick up speed and concentrate on the really needed stuff for that release. Sure, there's a lot of stuff to do in general, but usually only a few items that really need to go into a release. Most people fail to deliver on those things unless there are deadlines for making it happen. Thunderbird 3.0 Beta 3 is a glaring failure in that kind of scheduling, and with making SeaMonkey 2.0 Beta 1 dependent on that milestone, we ended up with a miserable performance on scheduling and delivering ourselves. If we had know how long that short delay would take, we might have done an Alpha 4 just before the download manager landing and still would be ready to wrap up the beta right now.
In any case, I'll propose uncoupling this beta from the Thunderbird cycle, set L10n and code freezes to happen soon and deliver SeaMonkey 2.0 Beta 1 within the next few (meaning really few) weeks, independently if Thunderbird ships a Beta in the fifth month after their most recent one or not.
We'll set freeze dates at this week's SeaMonkey Status Meeting and follow up with posts on the relevant groups and lists.

June 29, 2009 03:35 PM

June 28, 2009 10:05 PM

Please note: the Firefox 3.5 Release Candidate is a public preview release intended for developer testing and community feedback. It includes many new features as well as improvements to performance, web compatibility, and speed. We recommend that you read the release notes and known issues before installing this release candidate.

A new version of the Firefox 3.5 Release Candidate is now available for download, containing fixes based on the feedback obtained from the previous release candidate. This updated milestone is focused on providing a preview of the functionality provided by the new features and changes that will be included in Firefox 3.5. A video highlighting some of these new features is also available. Ongoing planning for Firefox 3.5 can be followed at the Firefox 3.5 Planning Center, as well as in mozilla.dev.planning and on irc.mozilla.org in #shiretoko.

Testers can download Firefox 3.5 Release Candidate builds for Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux in over 70 different languages. Developers should also read the Firefox 3.5 for Developers article on the Mozilla Developer Center.

Users already running a Firefox 3.5 Beta or Release Candidate can obtain an update to this latest Release Candidate version by selecting “Check for Updates…” from the “Help” menu.

Note: Please do not link directly to the download site. Instead we strongly encourage you to link to this Firefox 3.5 Release Candidate milestone announcement so that everyone will know what this milestone is, what they should expect, and who should be downloading to participate in testing at this stage of development.

June 25, 2009 05:13 AM

Here's a summary of SeaMonkey/Mozilla-related work I've done in week 25/2009 (June 15 - 21, 2009):

• SeaMonkey Build/Release Harness:
  After lots and lots of hours spent testing and fixing things, I could get the automated release harness for SeaMonkey to actually work, producing a bogus test-only "2.0a4" from current code, the resulting patches for buildbotcustom factory abstraction, dealing with brand names in update tools, DMG unpackaging in build and same in tools are all awaiting reviews.
  As a followup, I added a few files to be removed on update so that resulting complete or partial updates (yes, we can do the latter now for releases) end up as clean as they should be.
  I also updated the patch for repack factory abstraction for some bitrot, attached a patch for a small unit test packaging followup and made package-compare run in comm-central builds.
• Release Process:
  Continued the SeaMonkey 1.1.17 release process towards a planned public release in sync with Thunderbird 2.0.0.22, containing a good number of security fixes compared to 1.1.16.
• Misc Work:
  Did some changes in how my SeaMonkey development website retrieves and stores data: Weekly Bugzilla stats are now requested more efficiently using the microsummary ctype instead of full lists to retrieve the count and the results are kept in a DB, once I have more data and time, I'll make more than 3 weeks available on a separate page. Also, SeaMonkey 1.x update notification ping stats are now stored in a DB on the server, still need to write a report on those.
  I also fixed the Thunderbird and SeaMonkey nightly file paths on www.m.o/developer.
• Various Discussions:
  DEL and other keys in download manager, OpenWebCamp Vienna, Bugzilla improvements, NEW->UNCONFIRMED mass change, etc.

With all the work I did put into that in the last weeks, I hope we will be able to actually ship the SeaMonkey 2.0 Beta 1 release off the automated harness which can produce L10n builds as well as partial updates, both of which we didn't have previously. Additionally, using that buildbot-based mechanism makes it much less manual work to get the release done. We still need to do a bit of discussion if we can live with using so-called "pretty" file names for the release (e.g. "SeaMonkey Setup 2.0 Beta 1.exe" instead of "seamonkey-2.0b1.en-US.installer.exe") and we also have no signing infrastructure for Windows builds, but we can fake it by copying unsigned builds to the final place and continue to ship unsigned releases as we did up to now.

Next to that, I'm realizing that a few areas of our project are pretty dormant and I can't find time myself to move them much forward myself. this especially concerns QA and marketing. We really would need people to help making progress there - if you can support us in any of them, please contact me!

June 23, 2009 07:25 PM

In this issue…

• Firefox 3.5 Release Candidate!
• Extend Firefox 3.5 contest
• Help Firefox users transition to 3.5
• More Firefox 3.5 hacks and demos
• Multi-process Firefox, Phase I demo
• SUMO 1.1 – screencasts are here!
• Localizing the Getting Started page
• Open video and the price of freedom
• Mozilla Add-ons: a week of collections
• Infectious Designs + Mozilla Firefox
• Embedding the error console in Fennec
• Shutting down XSS with Content Security Policy
• Madrid Mozilla Technologies Course
• Lifehacker’s Top 10 Firefox 3.5 features
• Upcoming events
• Developer calendar
• About about:mozilla

Firefox 3.5 Release Candidate!

The Firefox 3.5 Release Candidate is now available for download and testing. We need feedback on several things in this milestone, including all 70+ localizations, new privacy tools, open audio and video, performance and stability improvements, geolocation features, native JSON support, web worker threads, downloadable fonts, CSS media queries, and a whole host of other changes and new features. Developers should read the Firefox 3.5 for Developers article, and everyone should read through the release notes before installing this release candidate.

Extend Firefox 3.5 contest

Extend Firefox is a worldwide developer contest that will be giving out prizes for the best new Firefox Add-ons developed for Firefox 3.5. Last year’s contest (for Firefox 3) received over 100 add-on submissions, and with Firefox 3.5 raising the bar in terms of features, we expect this year’s competition to be intense. Top prizes include MacBook Pro laptops, professional development tools, software and books. For all the details, head over to the Mozilla Add-ons blog and read the full contest announcement.

Help Firefox users transition to 3.5

The Firefox Support (SUMO) team is looking for help! When Firefox 3.5 launches they’re hoping to provide friendly, prompt and personal support to new Firefox 3.5 users through the knowledge base, forums, and live chat service. If you’re an experienced Firefox user, you can help the team by joining the dedicated SUMO community for the first week or two after the final Firefox 3.5 release and volunteering some of your time and expertise to help new users. If you would like to help, there’s more information about what you can do and how to get started over at the Firefox Support Blog.

More Firefox 3.5 hacks and demos

The Firefox Hacks team has continued to post feature articles and demos for some of the new Firefox 3.5 features at the Hacks weblog. Recent topics include: DOM traversal in Firefox 3.5, Using HTML5 video with fallbacks to other formats, Color correction for images in Firefox 3.5, an update on open video codecs and quality, and geolocation with open street maps. All of these demos and more can be found at hacks.mozilla.org.

Multi-process Firefox, Phase I demo

Benjamin Smedberg recently posted about the motivation for splitting Firefox into multiple processes, and now Chris Jones has posted a video (Ogg format, viewable with Firefox 3.5) that demonstrates what the team has accomplished so far. The demo is of the nearly-Phase I-complete browser, and represents a lot of hard work done by the team. See Chris’ blog post for more information.

SUMO 1.1 – screencasts are here!

Chris Ilias writes, “Last week, the fixes for SUMO 1.1 were applied to support.mozilla.com. The big news: SUMO now supports screencasts! Firefox 3.0.x users will be able to view screencasts in Flash format, but we also support the open video format called Ogg/Theora. Firefox 3.5 users will be able to view Ogg/Theora videos without the need for a plugin. What makes screencasts on SUMO especially great is that the SUMO knowledge base is a wiki. Adding a screencast to an article can be done by anyone!” The SUMO team has put together a tutorial about how to add screencasts, including a list of software you can use to create them. Other details are available on Chris’ post.

Localizing the Getting Started page

Seth Bindernagel has written an interesting article in which he talks about the power of localized Getting Started pages, and why he believes they are a critical step in helping users optimize their experience on the Web. The example he uses is the Danish version of the Getting Started page, where the team experimented with featuring the Danish dictionary add-on. “The experiment resulted in a bit of a surprise. The link became the most popular click-through on the page!” Read the rest of Seth’s article on his weblog.

Open video and the price of freedom

Robert O’Callahan writes, “With the imminent release of Firefox 3.5 and the big step forward for unencumbered video and audio that this represents, there’s been a lot of discussion about the merits of the free Ogg codecs vs the flagship encumbered codecs. The real question that matters is this: at comparable bit rates, in real-world situations, do normal people perceive a significant quality advantage for H.264 over Theora? Because if they don’t, theoretical technical advantages are worthless.” Some tests have been run and, “in these tests, it seems pretty clear that there is no real advantage for H.264, or even that Theora is doing better.” Robert’s full post is available on his weblog.

Mozilla Add-ons: a week of collections

The Add-ons team launched the new collections feature on addons.mozilla.org (AMO) over a week ago, and the response has been amazing. Justin Scott writes, “Above the Fold has details on press coverage, and we’re happy to see so many bloggers and news sites creating their own collections. Reading the articles, it was very exciting to see that people really understood collections and their potential.” During the first week, add-on users created more than 11,000 collections, comprising 140,000 instances of 3500 different add-ons. Over 245,000 add-on downloads were served from collection view pages, not including downloads served from other pages accessed through collections. In addition, the Add-on Collector has been downloaded 46,000 times.

Infectious Designs + Mozilla Firefox

Jay Patel has been heading up a new Community Art Project to inspire creative contributors to join us in making the internet better for everyone. “Today we unveil some amazing designs by 5 Infectious artists that we asked to help kick off the project. We challenged them to create art inspired by Firefox and the values that drive the Mozilla project. The result? Original art pieces that reflect the innovation, openness, opportunity and idealism that Mozilla represents.” The designs are available as iPhone skins, car decals, desktop wallpaper, and iPhone wallpaper through Infectious.com, as T-shirts at the Mozilla Community Store, and as Personas for your Firefox browser. To read more about this collection and the Community Art Project, read Jay’s post.

Embedding the error console in Fennec

One thing many developers don’t realize is that any Mozilla-based application automatically supports displaying and using the JavaScript Error Console, you simply need to launch the application using the -jsconsole command line flag. Making this work on a mobile device, however, is a bit trickier. Mark Finkle writes, “Trying to debug problems in Fennec while running on a mobile device can be a pain. To make it easier to view errors, we added the Error Console as a browser panel in Fennec. It’s hidden by default — you need to use about:config to display it.” Read the rest of Mark’s post (which includes screenshots of the Fennec Error Console) at his weblog.

Shutting down XSS with Content Security Policy

For several years, Cross-Site Scripting (XSS) attacks have plagued many of the web’s most popular sites and victimized their users. At Mozilla, a team has been working on a new technology called Content Security Policy (CSP), designed to shut these attacks down. Brandon Sterne has written an article that gives some of the background of the project and provides an update of the progress so far.

Madrid Mozilla Technologies Course

The Madrid Mozilla Technologies Course is a three-month blended learning course organized by the Mozilla Foundation, Mozilla Europe and the Universidad Rey Juan Carlos (Madrid Spain). The course starts July 1st 2009 and will finish October 15th. Most of the course is on-line and can be followed by students using the web, mailing lists, wikis, IRC, etc. Students who follow the course with success will obtain a degree from the Universidad Rey Juan Carlos and a diploma from the Mozilla Foundation/Mozilla Europe. For more information, see the course website. Note that registration closes on June 30th.

Lifehacker’s Top 10 Firefox 3.5 features

With the release of Firefox 3.5 right around the corner, Lifehacker has put together its list of “Top 10 Firefox 3.5 Features“. These include: open video, the geolocation API, TraceMonkey JavaScript engine, Color profile support, Private browsing mode, Smarter session restore, Keyword AwesomeBar filters, tear-off tabs, Forget this site, and Undo closed window. If you’re champing at the bit to get a look at these, you can download the newly released Firefox 3.5 Release Candidate now (and help test!)

Upcoming events

The Mozilla community is organizing an increasing number of events and meetups all the time, and we include a list of these here every week. If you have events you would like listed, send them along to: about-mozilla*at*mozilla.com.

* Wed, Jun 24 – Mountain View, CA – Testing Mozilla web properties
* Thu, Jun 25 – Online – Support Firefox Day
* Thu, Jun 25 – Mountain View, CA – Mozilla Labs Meetup
* Fri, Jun 26 – Online – Fennec web compatibility testing
* Sun, Jun 28 – Fastest Firefox videos deadline!
* Fri, Jul 10 – Online – Firefox 3.5 Security Testday
* Sept 14-21 – Everywhere! – Mozilla Service Week

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 Deb Richardson and is published every Tuesday morning. If you have any news or announcements you would like to have included in our next issue, please send them to: about-mozilla[at]mozilla.com.

If you would like to get this newsletter by email, just head on over to the about:mozilla newsletter subscription form. Fresh news, every Tuesday, right to your inbox.

June 23, 2009 03:48 PM

As part of Mozilla Corporation’s ongoing stability and security update process, Thunderbird 2.0.0.22 is now available for Windows, Mac, and Linux as a free download from www.getthunderbird.com.

Due to the security fixes, we strongly recommend that all Thunderbird users upgrade to this latest release.

If you already have Thunderbird 2.0.0.x, you will receive an automated update notification within 24 to 48 hours. This update can also be applied manually by selecting “Check for Updates…” from the Help menu.

For a list of changes and more information, please review the Thunderbird 2.0.0.22 Release Notes.

Please note: If you’re still using Thunderbird 1.5.0.x, this version is no longer supported and contains known security vulnerabilities. Please upgrade to Thunderbird 2 by downloading Thunderbird 2.0.0.22 from www.getthunderbird.com.

June 22, 2009 10:13 PM

Please note: the Firefox 3.5 Release Candidate is a public preview release intended for developer testing and community feedback. It includes many new features as well as improvements to performance, web compatibility, and speed. We recommend that you read the release notes and known issues before installing this release candidate.

The Firefox 3.5 Release Candidate is now available for download. This milestone is focused on providing a preview of the functionality provided by the new features and changes that will be included in Firefox 3.5. A video highlighting some of these new features is also available. Ongoing planning for Firefox 3.5 can be followed at the Firefox 3.5 Planning Center, as well as in mozilla.dev.planning and on irc.mozilla.org in #shiretoko.

New features and changes in Firefox 3.5 include:

• This beta is now available in more than 70 languages – get your local version.
• Improved tools for controlling your private data, including a Private Browsing Mode.
• Support for the HTML5 <video> and <audio> elements including native support for Ogg Theora encoded video and Vorbis encoded audio.
• Better performance and stability with the new TraceMonkey JavaScript engine.
• The ability to provide Location Aware Browsing using web standards for geolocation.
• Support for native JSON, and web worker threads.
• Improvements to the Gecko layout engine, including speculative parsing for faster content rendering.
• Support for new web technologies such as: downloadable fonts, CSS media queries, new transformations and properties, JavaScript query selectors, HTML5 local storage and offline application storage, <canvas> text, ICC profiles, and SVG transforms.

Testers can download Firefox 3.5 Release Candidate builds for Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux in over 70 different languages. Developers should also read the Firefox 3.5 for Developers article on the Mozilla Developer Center.

Note: Please do not link directly to the download site. Instead we strongly encourage you to link to this Firefox 3.5 Release Candidate milestone announcement so that everyone will know what this milestone is, what they should expect, and who should be downloading to participate in testing at this stage of development.

June 20, 2009 12:19 AM

June 18, 2009 09:38 PM

Have you had a chance to look at the Getting Started page lately?  I really like the design, interaction, and contents of the page.  Each localized version has a Work, Learn, Play, and Connect section where we feature websites or add-ons for end-users to check out.  That’s right, each l10n team works with the l10n-drivers to determine the best local services to feature on this page.  Subsequently, the l10n-drivers team has compiled research on websites and services that are popular in roughly seventy-five local markets.  Not every locale has a robust set of local services, so sometimes the en-US defaults ship.  But, I really believe this page can be a critical step in helping users optimize their experience on the Web.

Here’s a little anecdote on why I believe that.

Although it may be known by some, we try to ship each localized version of Firefox with a language dictionary so users can have the same spell-checking functionality in their native language that en-US users have when writing web mail, blogs, or whatever.  Sometimes, licensing issues determine if we can ship Firefox with a particular dictionary.  If an open source license prevents us from shipping that dictionary, the dictionary still can be created as an add-on and offered to end users from our Add-ons website via the Getting Started page.

This was the case in Denmark.  When a license prevented a dictionary from shipping, our localizers thought creatively and suggested that we feature the Danish add-on on the Getting Started page.  The experiment resulted in a bit of a surprise.  The link became the most popular click-through on the page!  See the attached image I mocked up.

The above image is a “heat map” from the month of May that shows total number of user clicks and the ranking of those links out of the total number of points of interaction on the page.  You can see that the dictionary ranked one out of twenty-eight with 2,216 clicks.  I’d like to think that over 2,000 users added the dictionary after clicking.  When you check the download statistics on the add-on’s page, you can see that it is quite popular.

Where else could we see this benefit to dictionaries?  I suspect that it would be useful to present dictionary add-ons on the Getting Stared pages where bilingual users are prevalent.  Don’t hesitate to make the suggestion to us and we’ll make the change if feasible. And, if you are a localizer who faces a licensing conflict with a dictionary, please let us know.  Let’s put it on the Getting Started page.

ShareThis

June 18, 2009 12:39 AM

Here's a summary of SeaMonkey/Mozilla-related work I've done in week 24/2009 (June 8 - 14, 2009):

• SeaMonkey Build Machines:
  Started working on the automated release harness for SeaMonkey, which needs a quite extensive list of new buildbotcustom factory abstractions, including some in the CC*Factory classes. I'm testing with my own Mercurial user for now while still waiting for seabld hg access.
  Followed through a Parallels update and upgraded our Mac VMs to 10.5.7, but that unfortunately didn't fix our network losses, application losses and VM crashes we're seeing esp. with Mac VMs there. Tickets are filed with Parallels, we hope to see a resolution soon.
• Release Process:
  Continued the SeaMonkey 1.1.17 release process towards a planned public release in sync with Thunderbird 2.0.0.22, containing a good number of security fixes compared to 1.1.16.
• Download Manager:
  The missing download icons on Mac are checked in now.
• Extension Updates:
  We're now sending the app version for extension update requests so that AMO can determine if the add-on is compatible with our version or not.
• SeaMonkey L10n:
  search-rdf.dtd is now included in the build, so that the advanced search sidebar works correctly again.
• German L10n:
  Updated the tree for a few mailnews changes and the exclusion of PalmSync as well as a ChatZilla change and a mozilla-central change to about:plugins, but only after verifying that the "merged L10n" SeaMonkey builds worked even without those changes, displaying the missing strings in English.
• Various Discussions:
  Bugzilla improvements, NEW->UNCONFIRMED mass change, Thunderbird API refactorings, Firefox 3.5 going for RCs, etc.

Our friends in the Thunderbird project are making nice steps towards cleaner APIs for the mail and news back- and frontends (this week it was folder display and thread pane, earlier they already improved the folder pane itself), it would be nice if someone could help bringing those improvements to SeaMonkey, which would make it easier to work on other code improvements - something you, my dear reader, could help with?

June 17, 2009 10:41 PM

Please note: beta and release candidate versions of Firefox 3.5 are intended for developer testing and community feedback. If this makes you nervous, we recommend that you wait for the official Firefox 3.5 release, which is coming soon and will be available at www.getfirefox.com

Our 800,000+ Firefox 3.5 beta users will be receiving an update to the first Firefox 3.5 release candidate (3.5rc1build2) in order to continue to help us with daily testing and public feedback. This update contains bug fixes which will be included in the final release of Firefox 3.5, expected later this month. While Mozilla has not yet completed the quality assurance testing required before an official product release, this update is considered stable for daily browsing use and we appreciate your assistance in helping us test and evaluate this version of the release candidate.

If you’re running a beta or preview version of Firefox 3.5, you should be receiving the update automatically within the next 24 hours. To get the update immediately, select “Check for Updates…” in the “Help” menu.

This version is not yet being made available for direct download. If you’re not yet a Firefox 3.5 Beta tester, we recommend that you wait for the upcoming Firefox 3.5 Release Candidate, which should be released on our website within the next week. If you’d like to become a beta tester for Firefox 3.5 and subsequent releases, please feel free to install the latest available beta and then manually “Check for Updates…” in the “Help” menu.

(Developers should also read the Firefox 3.5 for Developers article on the Mozilla Developer Center.)

Note: We strongly encourage bloggers and media to link to this Firefox 3.5 Beta User update announcement so that everyone will know what this update is, what they should expect, and who should be downloading to participate in testing at this stage of development.

June 17, 2009 08:11 AM

In this issue…

• Mozilla Service Week launches!
• New AMO and Add-on collections
• Show us your speed
• Get creative with the Firefox 3.5 launch
• Firefox 3.5 feature demos
• Update to Firefox 3.0.11 now available
• FSOSS 2009 accepting proposals
• Commit access policy revised
• Audio and video elements and assistive technologies
• Design Challenge submission deadline: June 21st
• Weave update
• Personas reaches 5 million downloads
• Major Jetpack update
• How Firefox gets grass-roots marketing right
• Upcoming events
• Developer calendar
• About about:mozilla

Mozilla Service Week launches!

Yesterday marked the launch of the very first Mozilla Service Week. During the week of September 14-21, 2009, we’re asking people to step up and make a difference by using the Web to better their community. We’re looking for people who want to share, give, engage, create, and collaborate by offering their time and talent to local public benefit organizations, non-profits, and people who need their help. “We’re inviting people to get involved with Mozilla in an active way, even if they can’t code, test or localize. It lets anyone and everyone feel like they are contributing to the cause of building a better internet.”

For all the details about what you can do and how to get started, see the announcement blog post or the Mozilla Service Week website.

New AMO and Add-on collections

Last week the Add-ons team rolled out a major redesign of the addons.mozilla.org (AMO) website. This is a huge release that improved both the overall user-interface for the site, and the organization and discoverability of add-ons. One of the coolest new features is Collections. With Collections, you can create a list of your favorite add-ons and publish it to the web for others to use. This makes it really easy to expose your friends and family to really useful add-ons by organizing them using this tool. For more information about the new AMO site and its Add-on Collections feature, see Rey Bango’s blog post about the launch.

Show us your speed

Firefox 3.5 will be here soon, and its shaping up to be by far the fastest Firefox yet: more than twice as fast as Firefox 3 and 10 times as fast as Firefox 2. We’re asking for your help to spread the word by making a short (30 seconds, max) video of you doing your speediest skill. It doesn’t matter if it’s making a sandwich, changing a tire, or mowing your lawn…it just has to be fast. Then head over to www.fastestfirefox.com and submit your video. We’ll be editing the best submissions into a compilation video that really shows off what our community is capable of, so check back about a week after the Firefox 3.5 release. If we use your clip, you’ll get a Firefox 3.5 t-shirt!

Get creative with the Firefox 3.5 launch

The Mozilla Community Store is looking for your help in promoting the launch of Firefox 3.5 with new t-shirt designs, and Tara has posted a quick summary of how to get started on her weblog. If you’re interested in learning more about this and other design initiatives at Mozilla (such as the Creative Collective), be sure to read John’s and Tara’s weblogs for details. You can also join the Creative Collective mailing list, or follow their tweets for updates.

Firefox 3.5 feature demos

As promised, the Firefox Hacks team has been posting articles and demos for new Firefox 3.5 features every day. Recent posts include: Pushing pixels with canvas, Content aware image resizing, Geolocation in Firefox 3.5, Add some ambiance to your videos, Stylish text with text-shadow, Beautiful fonts with @font-face, What does tracemonkey feel like?, and Geolocation with open street maps. This is just the beginning of the series of hacks and demos the team plans to post, and you can read all these articles and more over at the Mozilla Hacks weblog.

Update to Firefox 3.0.11 now available

As part of the Mozilla Corporation’s ongoing security and stability process, Firefox 3.0.11 is now available for Windows, Mac, and Linux users as a free download from getfirefox.com. We strongly recommend that all Firefox users upgrade to this latest release. If you already have Firefox 3, you will receive an automated update notification, or this update can be applied manually by selecting “Check for Updates…” from the Help menu. For a list of changes and more information, please see the Firefox 3.0.11 release notes.

FSOSS 2009 accepting proposals

David Humphrey writes, “This year’s Free Software and Open Source Symposium (FSOSS) is now accepting presentation proposals. In addition to the regular talks and workshops at FSOSS, there will also be a one-day Teaching Open Source Summit. If you’re working in open source or open source education, consider submitting a talk proposal to one of these two amazing events.

Commit access policy revised

Mozilla’s policy on obtaining commit access to our main mercurial and CVS repositories has been updated. The discussion leading to this can be found in mozilla.governance. The revised policy has been posted and is official as of today. A log of the changes can be found in bug 495867.

Audio and video elements and assistive technologies

Marco Zehe, part of Mozilla’s Accessibility effort, writes that the Firefox 3.5 Preview release included “exposure of the HTML5 audio and video elements through the MSAA/IAccessible2 and ATK/AT-SPI accessibility interfaces, further strengthening our commitment to Open Video. What this means is that, using NVDA or Orca, you now have access to an HTML5 audio or video file embedded in a web page. If the ‘controls’ attribute is specified within the audio or video tag, Firefox 3.5 creates its own set of playback controls. These are now exposed to screen readers using MSAA or AT-SPI to traverse our trees. Exposure through iSimpleDOM interfaces on Windows will come at a later stage. Previously, these controls were unreachable.” For more information about these new features, see Marco’s post.

Design Challenge submission deadline: June 21st

The submission deadline for the Design Challenge Summer 2009 is right around the corner! All ideas must be submitted to conceptseries@mozilla.com by Sunday, June 21st. Please note that your submission must consist of a mockup and a video explaining your concept and the thinking behind it. The theme for this design challenge is “Reinventing Tabs in the Browser — How can we create, navigate, and manage multiple web sites within the same browser instance?” For further information about the Design Challenge, see the Challenge website.

Weave update

The Weave project team has posted a quick status update. “Over the last few weeks, we’ve been busy with the usual hacking making Weave more useful and stable for our users. We’ve also been doing some hard thinking on where we would like to see Weave go next. Most of this thinking is still in the very early stages.” Two major concepts the team has been thinking about include increasing Weave stability and scalability, as well as possibly revising the initial vision for Mozilla Weave that was written in 2007. “While the core concepts outlined in that vision still remain true and continue to guide the project, we are also increasingly aware of rapid change and innovation across the open, social web. We feel that this is a good time for us to revise some aspects of the original vision.” For more information, including the announcement of three new Weave team members, see the Mozilla Labs weblog.

Personas reaches 5 million downloads

The Mozilla Labs team has announced that only ten weeks since the Personas launch, the add-on has been downloaded more than 5 million times. The downloads have been worldwide, with approximately 60% coming from outside the United States. The 9,000-strong artist community has also produced more than 13,000 designs. Check out the post on the Mozilla Labs blog for more details, and to find out what’s next for Personas.

Major Jetpack update

The Labs team recently released Jetpack 0.2, adding an experimental new UI element to Firefox as well as a number of useful APIs. In the few weeks since launch, people have created Jetpacks that do everything from extend the capabilities of the web to adding a Cylon to the browser. Even though Jetpack is still primarily a technology preview, it has been downloaded over 40,000 times and more than 40 Jetpacks have been created by people who previously had only written for the Web. To find out what’s new, including the new “slidebars” UI element, see the Mozilla Labs weblog.

How Firefox gets grass-roots marketing right

Advertising Age magazine has published an article talking about Firefox and the ongoing Mozilla Community marketing efforts. “Mozilla Corp. practices grass-roots marketing at its finest. Last month I had the opportunity to meet with Paul Kim, Mozilla’s VP-marketing, and some of his team to discuss Firefox’s unique approach to marketing — one where T-shirts have more cultural currency than 30-second spots and where accomplishments of the Obama and Howard Dean campaigns are far more admired than the latest efforts from Nike or Apple.” The full article is available on the Advertising Age website.

Upcoming events

The Mozilla community is organizing an increasing number of events and meetups all the time, so we’re going to start including a list of these every week. If you have events you would like included here, send them along to: about-mozilla*at*mozilla.com.

* Wed, Jun 17 – Munich, Germany – Munich Mozilla meetup

* Fri, Jun 19 – Online – Website Testing testday (rescheduled!)

* Wed, Jun 24 – Mountain View, CA – Testing Mozilla web properties

* Fri, Jun 26 – Online – Fennec web compatibility testing

* Fri, Jul 10 – Online – Firefox 3.5 Security Testday

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 Deb Richardson and is published every Tuesday morning. If you have any news or announcements you would like to have included in our next issue, please send them to: about-mozilla[at]mozilla.com.

If you would like to get this newsletter by email, just head on over to the about:mozilla newsletter subscription form. Fresh news, every Tuesday, right to your inbox.

June 16, 2009 02:35 PM

Our brave build folks have cut the tags on Firefox 3.5 RC 1, and I figured I give a little feedback on that from the l10n side.

As RC 1 was based on new strings, we required each localization to sign-off on the status of their localization to be ready for release. We’re still doing this by opening what we call a “opt-in thread”, a message sent to .l10n after the last l10n-impact landing to which localizers reply with a link to the revision of their localization that is good to go. Part of that communication is the message when code-freeze is planned to be, and the message that plans don’t always work out. So we’re keeping the the opt-in thread open actually up to the point where we really kick off the builds.

The output of that process are two files which control our release automation process, shipped-locales and l10n-changesets. For the curious, we’re tracking which locales ship on which platforms in the first, and it’s part of the code repo, and which locales ship which hg revision in the second, which is in the buildbot-configs repo.

The whole process lead to 150 different opt-in sourcestamps which came in by either public replies in the newsgroup, or as private mails in my inbox (or both). I pick those up, and click on some buttons on a version of the l10n dashboard running on my home machine, review the changes to previous sign-offs (yes, I do have a web interface that does comparison between two revisions in hg), and accept or reject the sign-off. If I reject, I follow up in .l10n with why I did that. That adds up to 159 posts in that thread, by 72 authors. Dependent on how imminent the release is, or seems to be, I “back up” my local data by attaching files to the tracking bug. This led to one version of shipped-locales, and a whopping 16 versions of l10n-changesets. Or, in short …

<bhearsum|afk>	Pike: when should i expect an updated l10n-changestets?
<Pike>	bhearsum: …
<Pike>	…
<Pike>	…
<Pike>	now
<bhearsum>	heh
<bhearsum>	cool!

What’s really cool here is that we’re actually at a point where we pick up improvements to our localization up to the last minute, with tools that make us feel comfortable about that, and with a release environment that is able to digest all that noise and produce builds for 73 localizations in a matter of a few hours.

73

June 12, 2009 04:51 PM

As part of the Mozilla Corporation’s ongoing security and stability process, Firefox 3.0.11 is now available for Windows, Mac, and Linux users as a free download from getfirefox.com.

We strongly recommend that all Firefox users upgrade to this latest release. If you already have Firefox 3, you will receive an automated update notification within 24 to 48 hours. This update can also be applied manually by selecting “Check for Updates…” from the Help menu.

For a list of changes and more information, please see the Firefox 3.0.11 release notes.

Please note: If you’re still using Firefox 2.0.0.x, this version is no longer supported and contains known security vulnerabilities. Please upgrade to Firefox 3 by downloading Firefox 3.0.11 from getfirefox.com.

June 11, 2009 11:13 PM

I’ve blogged previously on how to set up a staging environment to test the l10n build system, but I didn’t go into any detail on how to actually do builds in that set up. That shall be fixed.

I’m picking you up at the point where

twistd get-pushes -n -t 1 -s l10n_site.settings

is running stable. You probably want to tail -f twistd.log to follow what it’s doing. This piece is going to watch the hg repositories in stage/repos and feed all the pushes to those into the db. Next is to make sure that you actually get builds.

The first thing you need to do is to configure the l10n-master to access the same database as the django-site. Just make sure that DATABASE_* settings in l10n-master/settings.py and django-site/l10n_site/settings.py match. The other setting to sync is REPOSITORY_BASE, which needs to match in both settings.pys. I suggest setting that to an empy dir next to the l10n-master. I wouldn’t use the stage/repos dir, mostly because I didn’t test that. Now you set up the master for buildbot, by running

buildbot create-master .

inside the l10n-master clone. Next thing is to create a slave dir, which is well put next to the l10n-master. Despite what buildbot usually likes, this slave should be on the same machine that the rest is running on.

mkdir slave
buildbot create-slave slave localhost:9021 cs pwd

So much for the general setup. With the twistd daemon running to get the pushes, you can now switch on the master and the slave, by doing a buildbot start . in both dirs. I suggest that you keep a tail -f twistd.log running on the master. If you decide to set things up to track the upstream repositories, I start the master, then the slave, and if both are up fine, I start the twistd daemon for get-pushes.

Now let’s trigger some builds:

Open stage/workdir/mozilla/browser/locales/en-US/file.properties in your favorite editor, and do a modification. I suggest to just do a whitespace edit, or to change the value of the existing entity, as that is going to keep your localizations green. Check the change in to the working clone, and then push. The get-pushes output should show that it got a new push, and then on the next cycle, feed the push into the database. You’ll notice by the output of a hg pull showing up in the log. On the next poll on the l10n-master, builds for all 4 locales should trigger. You should see an update of four builds on the waterfall, and 4 locales on the test tree on the local dashboard.

June 10, 2009 05:29 PM

Visibilité et participation des femmes dans Mozilla et le Libre :

Réunion à Paris ce soir avec Delphine et Julia à 18h30 au Hall's Beer Tavern 

La rencontre est ouverte à toutes et à tous.

June 10, 2009 01:59 PM

Here's a summary of SeaMonkey/Mozilla-related work I've done in week 23/2009 (June 1 - 7, 2009):

• SeaMonkey Build Machines:
  Updated the L10n repack factory abstraction patch for a syntax error, and while I was there, filed a bug and patch for moving comm-central repack factories into buildbotcustom.
  I also filed a bug for seabld hg access, which is a prerequisite for release automation, but didn't come around to actual work towards that goal.
• Release Process:
  As Thunderbird 2.0.0.22 is upcoming, I started the SeaMonkey 1.1.17 release process the same day the Gecko release branch was cut for those versions. People are encouraged to test the candidate builds. This release will contain a good number of security fixes compared to 1.1.16.
• Download Manager:
  I obviously missed that reusing toolkit icons works badly if they use differently arranged images for different platforms, so I needed to fix missing download icons on Mac and made us safer against toolkit changes in the process.
• Fishcam:
  Our famous Ctrl+Alt+F "easter egg" displaying the Amazing Fishcam website has been throwing up warnings for some time about that key combination potentially not being available on all platforms. When I read a discussion about a similar problem in Firebug, I also found a possibility to suppress the key warning, which I implemented. This is no important function, it's a fun thing, so we just don't care if there's some systems out there where the OS uses the key combination otherwise and it doesn't call the fishcam.
• SeaMonkey L10n:
  As I didn't come around to land the necessary string changes for German this week, I could test with its L10n builds that "L10n merge" is indeed working on the new "comm-1.9.1" buildbots: If some strings are missing, the L10n repackaging system inserts the original en-US strings and the localized nightlies end up actually working! Thanks to Axel for figuring out all the hard work, I just needed to turn this on.
• Various Discussions:
  Target milestones in the SeaMonkey Bugzilla product, waiting for Parallels fix, comm-central commit access, sr policy, Fennec L10n, ISP info for account autoconfig, Firefox 3.5 nearing finish line, etc.

While tabbed mail for SeaMonkey is getting reviewed slowly but surely, the Thunderbird guys are working on a lot of internal reworks and code improvements in their UI code (e.g. included in the easy mail search work), and I strongly believe that we should get those applied to SeaMonkey code as well as those built a good basis for future improvements on the UI as well as make it easier to port Thunderbird work to SeaMonkey and our work back to their product. This is nice stuff to work on for someone who doesn't know our code that well yet, as most is just applying their patches on our side and refining that following review comments. Some work for you to pick up?

June 10, 2009 01:41 PM

June 10, 2009 03:41 AM

In this issue…

• Firefox 3.5 preview release
• Firefox hacks: Firefox 3.5 in 35 days
• Improving the add-on install experience
• Design Challenge update
• Scaling the Mozilla localization community
• Firefox Mobile start page discussion
• Camino 2.0 beta 3 available
• Firebug 1.4 beta 1 on AMO
• Firefox Mobile add-ons
• Upcoming events
• Developer calendar
• About about:mozilla

Firefox 3.5 preview release
The 800,000+ users of Firefox 3.5 Beta 4 will be receiving an update to a “Firefox 3.5 Preview” release in order to assist us with further testing and feedback. This update contains many fixes for stability bugs, correctness fixes for our JavaScript engine, and improvements to our built-in support for open Ogg based video and audio playback.

While this release has not yet completed the testing required to be declared a release candidate, it is considered stable for daily use and we appreciate your assistance in helping us test and evaluate this preview release. Please note that this release is intended for developer testing and community feedback. We recommend that most users wait for the official Firefox 3.5 release, which is coming soon.

Please see the release announcement for more information.

Firefox hacks: Firefox 3.5 in 35 days
The upcoming release of Firefox 3.5 is a big upgrade for users, but what it really represents is a huge upgrade to the web itself. New features include support for open audio and video, threads in JavaScript, new canvas features, tons of new CSS features, downloadable fonts, geolocation, and more. Over the next 35 days, the Mozilla Evangelism team will be posting new articles every day that talk about and demonstrate all of these new features. The first articles have been posted, and you can check them out over at the brand new Firefox Hacks weblog.

Improving the add-on install experience
Dave Townsend has been spending a lot of time thinking about how to improve the add-on install experience for both users and add-on developers. He has written a blog post discussing one idea in particular, including mockups and an explanation. “The goal is both to let users know that new add-ons have been installed and let the add-on help the user move forward without needing to show popup dialogs or inundate the user.” Dave is looking for feedback and further discussion, so head over to his weblog if you would like to help.

Design Challenge update
The Summer 09 Design Challenge started a couple of weeks ago, and already there have been more than 30 submissions and lots of discussion taking place in the forum. Pascal Finette has also announced this Challenge’s panelists: Janna DeVylder (IxDA), Kevin Silver (IxDA), Jeroen van Geel (Johnny Holland), Steve Baty (Johnny Holland), Aza Raskin (Mozilla), and Ecaterina Valica, Amine Zafri & Valentin Laube (”Best in Class” honorees from the Spring 09 Design Challenge). The submission deadline for this Design Challenge is June 21st.

Scaling the Mozilla localization community
Between the release of Firefox 3 and the upcoming release of Firefox 3.5, Mozilla has added twenty-six new localizations for Firefox, meaning that the new version will ship in a total of 75 locales. Seth Bindernagel, who heads up the Mozilla localization effort, has recently written an article where he talks about the magic behind scaling up the Mozilla localization project this quickly and effectively.

Firefox Mobile start page discussion
Madhava Enros, the Fennec (Firefox Mobile) user-experience lead, has been thinking a lot about start pages and what they should do in Fennec. “In Firefox, by default, we show a Google search field when you start the browser, but also give you the option to change it to whatever homepage you want. Occasionally, as on the very first time to run the browser, we show you a welcoming message instead. Recently, there’s also been work to try to further refine what shows up when you open a new tab. All of these ’start page’ variants are attempts to speed you on your way to whatever it is you’d like to do with the web. What should we do in Fennec? Where does the usage landscape differ from how Firefox works on the desktop?” See Madhava’s blog for the full article.

Camino 2.0 beta 3 available
After months of hard work following the release of Camino 1.6, the Camino Project is proud to announce the fourth preview release of Camino 2. Camino 2.0 Beta 3 contains several notable improvements, including enhanced AppleScript capabilities, a new crash reporting system that works on all Macs, Growl notifications for completed downloads, and a lot more. Camino 2.0 Beta 3 also has all of the improvements in version 1.9.0 of Mozilla’s Gecko rendering engine, leading to better performance with popular plug-ins and enhanced support for web standards. For more information and to download, visit the Camino Preview site.

Firebug 1.4 beta 1 on AMO
The Firebug team has pushed Firebug 1.4 beta 1 to addons.mozilla.org (AMO). “Currently, we’ve only turned it on for users of 3.5b4 and later, but this version is fully-compatible with Firefox 3.0 as well. Users of Firefox 3.0 who want to try out Firebug 1.4 should download it from GetFirebug.com, or disable version checking on AMO. When we ship the final version of Firebug 1.4.0 we will set the compatibility for all users of Firefox 3.0 and 3.5.” For more information see Rob Campbell’s announcment about this beta release.

Firefox Mobile add-ons
Brian King has posted a great overview of the Mozilla/Maemo meetup recently held in Copenhagen. “Present were a large chunk of the Fennec development team, add-on developers, localisers, and community members. The weekend was a mix of sessions and hacking, with the focus more on the latter. We ported add-ons, made new ones, found bugs, and had discussions on best practices and ways to improve the user experience.” For Brian’s full report, see his weblog.

Upcoming events
The Mozilla community is organizing an increasing number of events and meetups all the time, so we’re going to start including a list of these every week. If you have events you would like included here, send them along to: about-mozilla*at*mozilla.com.

* Wed, Jun 17 – Munich, Germany – Munich Mozilla meetup
* Fri, Jun 19 – Online – Website Testing testday (rescheduled!)
* Wed, Jun 24 – Mountain View, CA – Testing Mozilla web properties
* Fri, Jun 26 – Online – Fennec web compatibility testing
* Fri, Jul 10 – Online – Firefox 3.5 Security Testday

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 Deb Richardson and is published every Tuesday morning. If you have any news or announcements you would like to have included in our next issue, please send them to: about-mozilla[at]mozilla.com.

If you would like to get this newsletter by email, just head on over to the about:mozilla newsletter subscription form. Fresh news, every Tuesday, right to your inbox.

June 09, 2009 03:35 PM

Please note: This Firefox 3.5 Preview is intended for developer testing and community feedback. We recommend that most users wait for the official Firefox 3.5 release, which is coming soon.

The 800,000+ users of Firefox 3.5 Beta 4 will be receiving an update to a “Firefox 3.5 Preview” release in order to assist us with further testing and feedback. This update contains many fixes for stability bugs, correctness fixes for our JavaScript engine, and improvements to our built in support for open Ogg based video and audio playback. While this release has not yet completed the testing required to be declared a release candidate, it is considered stable for daily browsing use and we appreciate your assistance in helping us test and evaluate this preview release.

If you’re a Firefox 3.5 Beta user you should be receiving this update automatically within the next 24 hours. To get the update immediately, select “Check for Updates…” in the “Help” menu.

If you’re not yet a Firefox 3.5 Beta user, we recommend that you wait for the upcoming Firefox 3.5 Release Candidate, which should be in the next 1-2 weeks. If you’d like to become a beta tester for Firefox 3.5 and subsequent updates, please install the latest available beta and install any offered updates.

Developers should also read the Firefox 3.5 for Developers article on the Mozilla Developer Center.

Note: Please do not link directly to the download site. Instead we strongly encourage you to link to this Firefox 3.5 Preview milestone announcement so that everyone will know what this milestone is, what they should expect, and who should be downloading to participate in testing at this stage of development.

June 09, 2009 12:15 AM

Between the release of Firefox 3 and the upcoming release of Firefox 3.5, Mozilla will add twenty-six new localizations to the Firefox’s list of localized versions.  It’s likely that we will ship Firefox in seventy-four locales, not including the en-US version.  What does it take to scale our community and increase our locale count by over fifty-four percent?

It turns out that many who learn about our growth often ask if we can articulate any of the magic behind this scale.  It’s not really magical, and it’s pretty straight forward.  In fact, I’ve been meaning to write something on my blog about our process to describe the many things that make this possible.  Coincidentally, Greg Bell, who helps run the website Open Logic, learned of our growth and asked me if I’d answer this very question in a post for his site.  This seemed like the best opportunity since Greg provided a deadline that would force me finally to write it.  He and his staff titled the article Go Local, Be Global: Scaling the Mozilla Localization Community and they wrote a very nice introduction about Mozilla.  I hope you find time to read it.

Of course, it’s quite easy to write a piece like this when we have a remarkable community of contributors.  Special thanks has to go out to the l10n community and l10n-drivers team who have been building for years the foundation that has made this scale possible.  Most of all, Axel Hecht and Pascal Chevrel have been the two Mozilla employees most responsible for our global growth.  Hats of to them.

Finally, many thanks to Greg for offering me the opportunity to write.  He caught me at the height of our Firefox 3.5 release work, so it took me a few more weeks than expected to write it. Luckily, he let me slip my deadline twice until I finally got this together.

ShareThis

June 05, 2009 06:18 PM

’nuff said? Not even remotely.

We’ve had l10n builds as long as I’m working on l10n, actually, I got involved around the time when we started to do them upstream. They always were considerably better than each localizer doing their build at home on whatever (virus-infected) hardware they found, with help from other community members for the platforms they didn’t have. But at the light of day, it was more

That? Yeah, I know. That’s crap.

And I know you can hear my voice in your head right now :-).

Those days are gone. We’re running Firefox and Fennec builds on the releng infrastructure now for a few days that are actually sound builds made to service our l10n community. Some highlights:

• Builds are finished some 10 minutes after a localizer landing, on all three platforms.
• There’s no deadlock between different locales, thanks to all l10n builds running on a pool of slaves.
• Builds are “l10n-merged”, against the actual build that’s repackaged. Independent of missing strings or files, you have a build that can be tested.
• No more race conditions between nightly and trunk source status.

The impact of this shouldn’t be under-estimated. We are, for the first time in years, producing builds that allow a localizer to actually immediately test. Localizers can work incrementally, translate one feature, check-in, test. No worries if something landed in en-US in the meantime, or whatnot. With the new builds, I have seen various localizers coming from hundreds of missing strings to a tested build on two or three platforms in a matter of a few hours. Back in the days, that was the waiting time for the first build. The new locales all pull all-nighters to get their final bits in. They want to, and now they actually can.

I want to thank coop and armenzg for their great help in making this happen, aki for porting it over to fennec. Of course thanks go to joduinn and sethb, too, for bearing with the ongoing meetings we have, trying to battle the crap down. To dynamis for the initial work on l10n-merge. Also thanks to bsmedberg and Chase for the initial works on both automation and build process, and ted for the various reviews on making our build system catch up.

Finally, we’re not going to stop here. Armen is working on creating the necessary files to get l10n builds on a nightly update channel. Yep, you heard right, that’s where we are right now. I know that KaiRo is working on getting the goodness over to the comm-central apps. And yours truly is hacking on the dashboard together with gandalf, more on that in a different post.

June 05, 2009 10:22 AM

Here's a summary of SeaMonkey/Mozilla-related work I've done in week 22/2009 (May 25 - 31, 2009):

• SeaMonkey Build Machines:
  Some more work on the new buildbots, enabling static builds for nightlies but not normal builders. This reduced download size between 3% and 10% depending on platform, I would be glad if someone could do some performance testing on nightlies from the new and old buildbots to get numbers on static vs. shared builds in that regard as well.
  PalmSync will be removed from the comm-central tree soon and doesn't work with static builds, so I removed it from the new buildbot config right away.
  I also cared that the work for uploading packaged tests done by Serge was enabled on the new buildbots - this now enables anyone to run our test suites, even without having a full build system installed.
  The patch for L10 repack factory abstraction was updated for some bitrot, but not changed significantly. While I fixed that bitrot, I found some trailing whitespace and decided to fix whitespace in all of factory.py while I was there.
  When I investigated package file changes for static builds, I realized the the new CCMercurialBuildFactory doesn't call package-compare and wrote a patch for it.
  And after updating our new config for running compare-locales, the L10n build cycles now do that additional check and might even try "L10n merging", i.e. trying to produce working builds even when the localization isn't complete by merging in en-US strings - but I have not proven this to work for SeaMonkey in any way yet.
• Static Nightly Builds:
  As said above, I enabled static nightlies on the new buildbot configuration, and therefore looked into open issues we still have with making this the official configuration. Therefore, I made a patch for missing icons on Windows and finally even did a large fixup for package files and the removed-files list so that those are easier to manage in the future and so that static builds ship the right files without too much noise (and remove shared libs when a shared build is upgraded to a static one).
• Download Manager:
  The really big story of this week is the download manager landing.
  My work on the new tree-based download manager UI and download progress window rewrite as well as a prefs followup could land right away with the main work for switching from the xpfe to the toolkit backend.
  As followups, I filed and landed patches for making an ifndef really work and fixing a Mac-only test, both oversights by Callek or me from earlier patches.
• SeaMonkey L10n:
  Finally, the Build SeaMonkey locales from Mercurial bug could be marked FIXED, as with the download manager landing, we finally have all strings in the appropriate locales/ directories and picked up correctly by the "source L10n" build/(re)package mechanisms, so that localized SeaMonkey builds should be fully working (as long as dashboard is green for the used locale and the strings don't have syntax errors).
• German L10n:
  New strings for download manager and mail archiving UI landed, de was the first locale to be green after the download manager landing.
• Various Discussions:
  Mail archiving UI for SeaMonkey, 1.8 branch landings and 1.1.17 planning, tracking OSX buildbot failures down to a "hardware" (Parallels) issue, waiting for Parallels fix, Qt build bustages, comm-central commit access, sr policy, etc.

We're seeing some small followup issues with download manager, but general feedback is quite good so far. We are definitely coming into beta state now, and current SeaMonkey 2 nightlies are in some ways more mature than stable 1.1.x releases. Tabbed mail is going through the review process and with the current patch, Lightning is usable. The future looks bright.
Well, it would look brighter if we had some schedules for beta or final. As we need to build stable milestones and releases upon a stable mailnews backend, we need to closely coordinate with Thunderbird, and that team has been pushing out their upcoming beta further and further while waiting on their feature of vastly improved search to land. That also has been pushing out our SeaMonkey 2.0 Beta 1 release. And with them adding a further beta, it now looks very clear to us that we will add a SeaMonkey 2.0 Beta 2 after this one as well. We unfortunately still need to wait for the clouds over the Thunderbird schedules to lift before we can come up with schedules for those milestones and releases on our side, but we count on being close to their betas and final in terms of dates.
Depending on the speed of the review process, tabbed mail will either make Beta 1 or be pushed to Beta 2, I hope we can take a few more of the Thunderbird 3 improvements in Beta 2. The current code is quite ready for Beta 1 right now, so it can only get better.
Oh, and we now know for sure that we will have fully localized builds for all major platforms right with the Beta 1 release - for the first time ever in suite history!

June 03, 2009 05:21 PM

The beginning of the title to this post is either a really poor set of letters for a game of Scrabble, or…

In December, 2008, the Community Giving Program provided five Mac Minis to the NSS community that are being used as 1) an internal build machine, 2) an internal nightly automated QA machine, 3) an NSS stable branch tinderbox, 4) an NSS trunk tinderbox, and 5) a developer test/QA machine.

Today, on behalf of the NSS community, Glen Beasley updated me with a quick report:

“We have been running full internal build/QA on two of the Mac Mini’s. These reports can be sent to external NSS users if they request to be on the list. We also have tinderboxes for 32 bit and 64 bit Mac OS X builds.”

http://tinderbox.mozilla.org/NSS/

“In the past months the Mac OS tinderbox’s have revealed a few developer build breakages and QA issues that likely would have gone unnoticed for several days/weeks had we not had the tinderbox/build machines in place.”

The first four machines benefit Mac OS X support because, in the past, we have gone weeks before finding out that a Mac OS build had been broken by a checkin.   With more solid Tier 1 build/QA support for Mac OS X, the community has been able to find breakages sooner.  Finally, the last Mini is accessible by NSS developers to address build/regression failures and develop Mac OS X specific functionality.

It should also be mentioned that anyone interested in contributing to the NSPR/NSS/JSS team should comment here and I will be sure to make the introductions to Glen and the team.

As always, if you know of any potential recipients for Community Giving program that would empower someone or a community with Mozilla, please let me know.  Though I focus mostly on Localization, this program is still thriving and we are always seeking leveraged opportunities to support recipients.

ShareThis

June 03, 2009 02:48 AM

In this issue…

• Dailymotion supports open video
• Fastest Firefox
• Jetpack FAQ
• New Open Web Games group
• Website testing project
• iSight camera streaming with <video>
• Adding Weave support to an extension
• Help launch Firefox 3.5 by hosting an event!
• New about:SUMO newsletter
• Upcoming events
• Developer calendar
• About about:mozilla

Dailymotion supports open video
Last week, Dailymotion, one of the world’s largest video entertainment websites, announced support for the new open video and web standards available in the current beta release of Firefox 3.5. Dailymotion issued a press release about the news, and Chris Blizzard has a great post about it as well. You can also grab the Firefox 3.5 beta and check out the demo for yourself.

Fastest Firefox
Firefox 3.5 will be here soon, and it’s shaping up to be the fastest Firefox yet: more than twice as fast as Firefox 3 and 10 times as fast as Firefox 2. That’s a fact worth celebrating, and to spread the word, we’ve reached out to some of our fellow Guinness World Record holders, each of whom knows a few things about speed. Our first record holder is Kent “Toast” French, whose ability to clap his hands 721 times in a minute officially earns him the title of the world’s fastest clapper. Along with his son Joshua, Kent put on a truly astounding display in honor of Firefox 3.5.

We know that Kent isn’t the only person in the global Mozilla community with a talent for speed, and we want your help in telling the world about Firefox 3.5. We’re looking for you to contribute short videos of you doing your speediest skill — it doesn’t matter if it’s making a sandwich, changing a tire or mowing your lawn — it just has to be fast. If you would like to participate, visit www.fastestfirefox.com and follow the instructions on how to get started.

Jetpack FAQ
In less that a week after launch, the new Mozilla Labs Jetpack project had been downloaded more than 25,000 times, and over 100,000 people had watched the tutorial movie.

Jetpack is a newly formed experiment in using open Web technologies to enhance the browser, with the goal of allowing anyone who can build a Web site to add features to Firefox.

Aza Raskin has posted a quick FAQ about Jetpack where he talks about things like why Jetpack is important, how it does (or doesn’t) compete with “regular” add-ons, key development challenges, and future work and releases. You can read his full post over on his weblog.

New Open Web Games group
In response to an extensive discussion after a BarCamp session about “Developing Non-Flash Web-based Games”, Dietrich Ayala and others have created a new Open Web Games group with a discussion forum on Google Groups. Everyone is welcome to join the discussion and take part in “finding ways to make the Web more funnerer than ever!” More information is available on Dietrich’s weblog.

Website testing project
Henrik Skupin would like to remind everyone about the Website Testing project discussion taking place this Friday. The Website Testing project arises from the difficulty our QA community has encountered when trying to test sites that require fairly specialized user logins. Henrik’s project focuses specifically on banking and financial sites, and we need your help. If you would like to get involved and help make sure Firefox 3.5 works on your bank’s site, you can find out how to get started through Henrik’s blog post and the Website testing project page.

iSight camera streaming with <video>
Dietrich Ayala has put together a quick demonstration of live video streaming using the video tag for his talk at the upcoming Open Source Bridge conference. He has written up the instructions for creating this demo on his weblog and, while not simple and still somewhat buggy, it is an interesting example of what Firefox 3.5’s support for open video technologies makes possible.

Adding Weave support to an extension
Wladimir Palant, author and maintainer of the ever popular Adblock Plus add-on, has written a detailed tutorial about how to add Weave support to an extension. Weave lets you sync your Firefox/Fennec data (history, bookmarks, etc.) across multiple computers without having to restart your browser. Wladimir’s post goes over general setup, forward compatibility, records, store, and hooking everything together.

Help launch Firefox 3.5 by hosting an event!
Community events have always been a huge part of Mozilla history, helping to celebrate successes, garner awareness for Mozilla and Firefox, build community and draw in new members, and more. If you would like to be part of the Firefox 3.5 launch, there are a number of ways you can help by organizing local community events in your area. Examples include organizing a launch party, holding installfests and helping new users get started, hosting a booth at your university, organizing a meetup for other Firefox fans, organizing a Mozilla “walkabout”, speaking at a conference, or holding a virtual presentation with a Mozilla speaker. The Community Marketing Team has more information and a bunch of resources to help you.

New about:SUMO newsletter
The Mozilla user support project, SUMO, has published its first monthly newsletter. Stories include information about the new localization dashboard, a new SUMO search engine, getting ready for screencasts, a knowledgebase status update, and more. You can read the full newsletter at the SUMO weblog, and sign up for future editions using the handy subscription form.

Upcoming events
The Mozilla community is organizing an increasing number of events and meetups all the time, so we’re going to start including a list of these every week. If you have events you would like included here, send them along to: about-mozilla*at*mozilla.com.

* Thu, Jun 4 – Washington, D.C. – Mozilla QA meetup
* Fri, Jun 5 – Online – Website testing testday
* Wed, Jun 17 – Munich, Germany – Munich Mozilla meetup
* Fri, Jun 19 – Online – Fennec web compatibility testing
* Wed, Jun 24 – Mountain View, CA – Testing Mozilla web properties

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 Deb Richardson and is published every Tuesday morning. If you have any news or announcements you would like to have included in our next issue, please send them to: about-mozilla[at]mozilla.com.

If you would like to get this newsletter by email, just head on over to the about:mozilla newsletter subscription form. Fresh news, every Tuesday, right to your inbox.

June 02, 2009 03:59 PM

I’m contemplating adding search in l10n to the dashboard, and I figured I’d put my thoughts out for lazyweb super-review.

Things we might want to search for:

• Localized strings
  • in a particular locale
  • in all locales
  • going into a particular app
• entity names
  • in all of the above

As with the rest of the dashboard, I’d favour a pythonic solution. I’ve run across Whoosh, which seems to offer me what I’d need. In particular I can mark up searches in just keys or just values of our localized strings with the Schemas it offers.

All sounds pretty neat and contained, I’m just wondering if there’s something cool and shiny elsewhere that I’m missing, or if someone came back with “ugh, sucks” from trying Whoosh.

Ad-hoc design for the curious:

For each changeset, we’d parse the old and the new version of the file, getting a list of keys and values, and I’d create two searchable TEXT entries for all changed keys, and added entries. We’d tag that “document” with path, locale, apps, revision, branch. That way, you could search even for strings that aren’t currently in the tip, and get a versioned link to where it showed up first, and last, possibly. Given that we have a lot of data and history, I wouldn’t be surprised if that corpus would get large pretty quickly. I’d expect to not only index l10n but en-US, too. Thoughts?

June 02, 2009 02:20 PM

At the beginning of this quarter, the l10n-drivers set a goal to improve our dashboards so people could begin to use them as both communication platforms and better aggregators of l10n information.  Among the many things he is presently doing for our localization community, Pascal has been hard at work on improving Mozilla’s web l10n dashboard.  Here is a summary of his changes:

Communication improvements

• Placed a highly visible subscription link to the RSS feed so updates to relevant bugs are seen immediately by localizers
• Began sorting feeds chronologically with better description of tasks
• Fixed a bug on feed page so that the feed now leads directly to a locale’s page
• Added “last update of data” information on pages
• Improved the readability with CSS and template changes

Organization of locales

• Added the metalocale ‘es’ Spanish for tracking of projects shared by all Spanish-speaking teams (mostly marketing sites and support)
• Added the locales es-CL, ms, or, rm, ta-LK

Projects views

• Added support for a bug to belong to multiple projects in tracking sections
  • ex: Major Update for 3.5 is displayed in the “3.5 in-product pages” and “Major updates” projects
• Added new subsections for Firefox 3.5 release for tracking
  • Projects and sections can be added/removed editing a config file, useful for short term projects like mini-sites

New tool  

• main.lang checker, which I blogged about in the past
  
• Warns the localizer of UI strings missing or identical to en-GB (as the reference locale) on mozilla.com/mozilla europe/mozilla messaging
• Added main.lang checker data to the web dashboard
  • if main.lang files are out of date, it is displayed in the rss feed and the web dashboard page

Other

• Added raw json output of all bugs (http://l10n.mozilla.org/~pascalc/includes/projets/dashboard/data/data.bugs.php?json=1)
• Externalized and shared with Stas list of bugs and progress
  • http://granary.stage.mozilla.com/
  • Not sure if it is going to be used all the time as it is slow to update and makes the dashboard code more complex as well, but it will allow other people to update the web dashboard when Pascal is busy with other items

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June 01, 2009 08:57 PM

June 01, 2009 04:18 PM

Building the infrastructure for our l10n builds is hard, mostly because it’s consisting of a ton of things that you don’t have control over. We’re building 3 and a half applications, Firefox, Thunderbird, Fennec, and Sunbird for calendar. Firefox is built on three versions, one of which is still coming from CVS. Thunderbird is one version on CVS, one on hg. We’re touching some 170 hg repos, and a single check-in can do anything between no build, one build, or up to almost 200 builds. Rinse, repeat, yeah, 200 builds for a single landing. Worse than that, you don’t have any control over who’s landing what when where. Bottom line, you really can’t test a change in the l10n build automation reliably in our production setup.

You can create a fake ecosystem, though, and I’ll explain a bit how that works. Of course it doesn’t end up being trivial, but it’s contained. It’s not trying to cover the CVS branches, those would require a setup of bonsai, which I chicken away from. Take this post with a grain of salt, I assume there are some errors here as most of it is typed from memory.

As with any recipe, here are the list of ingredients:

• A set of hg repositories, both for a fake application and some fake l10n repos.
• An hg server serving those repositories (make that port 8001).
• Some buildbot infrastructure working on top of these repositories that you’re trying to test.
• Possibly an instance of the l10n dashboard presenting both the build and the l10n data.

The initial chunk is creating the repositories. I created a helper script create-stage that does that, which is part of buildbotcustom/bin/l10n-stage. It’s main purpose is to get the templates, hooks etc that are part of our server-side setup on hg.mozilla.org, create some upstream repos for en-US and l10n, and push some initial content from a set of working clones. You call it like

python l10n-stage -l stagedir

The -l keeps the l10n repositories from pushing their initial content, which yields a scenario that is closer to what we have upstream, i.e., a flock of en-US pushes before the l10n repos start. This command creates a bunch of main repositories in the repos subdir of stagedir, and a bunch of working clones in workdir. It also creates a webdir.conf, that you’ll use to run the local hg http server. Let’s run that now, in stagedir:

hg serve -p 8001 --webdir-conf=webdir.conf -t repos/hg_templates

Now you have a local setup of a application repository called mozilla, and 4 localizations in l10n, ab, de, ja-JP-mac, x-testing. They’re all equipped with the same hooks that we run on hg.m.o, in particular, they support pushlog.

Now on to the buildbot infrastructure. There’s a sibling script to create-stage, create-buildbot, which should create a master setup that is rather close to what we run on releng. It supports various degrees of parallelism for multiple slaves on three platforms, does only dummy builds, though. IIRC. I want to go into more detail on how to set up the new dashboard master, though.

The dashboard master is merely running compare-locales on the actual source repositories. It does come with our bonsai replacement pushes, though. That’s basically a pushlog spanning repositories, including file and branch indexing. Here’s the basic software components you’ll need:

• django 1.0.x (1.1pre might work, too)
• buildbot 0.7.10p1, older versions won’t work

and from hg.m.o, you’ll need compare-locales, locale-inspector, l10n-master, buildbotcustom and django-site.

Firstly, you set up the db. sqlite and mysql should both work, mysql is actively tested. Edit the various settings.py files to reference your db, with an absolute path if sqlite, and create the schema. The main entry point to the django site is l10n_site, go in there to run python manage.py syncdb. Another edit you want to do is to point REPOSITORY_BASE to a dir where you can stage another set of clones of your repos. I suggest to not share the hg master repo dir here.

Next, create a buildbot master and a slave. You do that by running the buildbot create-master command on your local clone of l10n-master. You’ll need to adapt l10nbuilds.ini to the test set up,

[test]
app = browser
type = hg
locales = all
mozilla = mozilla
l10n = l10n
repo = http://localhost:8001/
l10n.ini = browser/locales/l10n.ini
builders = compare

I should put that into the repo somewhere, I guess.

Setting up the slave is trivial, you need to make sure it’s on the same machine, though. It will run on the django clones directly.

Before starting master and slave, make sure that all the deps are in your PYTHONPATH.

Last but not least, you need to get all the pushes from your repo setup into your django setup. First, you need to tell the db which repositories it’s supposed to get from where. I created sample data for the test app, which you can load by

python manage.py loaddata localhost

The repositories I use for the production environment are in hg_mozilla_org, fwiw. You fill the database with the actual push data by running a twisted daemon. Inside django-site, run

twistd get-pushes -n -t 1 -s l10n_site.settings

That will ping one repo per second, not update, with data from l10n_site.settings. Now you have everything set up, and you can start to edit en-US and l10n files in your workingdir, and push, and see how that changes your builds and dashboard.

The buildbot waterfall will be on port 8364, and with python manage.py runserver, the dashboard will show up on port 8000. None of this is setup to be on a production server at this point, but it’s good for testing.

Update: Forgot to mention that you need to bootstrap the repo lists.

June 01, 2009 02:02 PM

Seth has blogged his response to Walt Mossberg’s interview with Mitchell and John, on top of the already great answer the two provided in the interview on

Why wouldn’t it just be better for the consumer to go with the company that’s hired experts to do its translations?

and here’s my take.

The essential point to me is that we do get experts. We get experts in localizing Firefox. And we get experts we know. The people that spend their free time and passion to create Firefox in their language don’t do it because they can lip sync Shakespeare into Portuguese, but because they share the values and mission that make Firefox Firefox. They care about the experience that people have with the web in their language.

The reason why our localizations rock is that our localizers know us, and we know them, and that we actually speak the same language.

May 29, 2009 09:13 PM

If you advance to the two minute thirty-five second point of this interview of Mitchell Baker and John Lilly, you’ll hear Walt Mossberg remark about the quality of Mozilla’s localizations by saying,

“I have a deep distrust of somebody who I don’t know to be actually responsible for the quality of the end product.”

We’ve heard that before, haven’t we?  To entertain the point, I’ll answer a question, “Just how do we know that our translated product is high quality?” by linking to several posts (with very brief summaries) as a response to Mossberg’s rhetorical criticism. 

• Testing the latest localized version of Firefox 3.5 — In this post, I ask our localizers to test a release, with specific steps that each locale can follow.
• Moving a locale out of beta — This is a basic software release principle.  No, our localizers don’t get a free pass into “official status”.  We give each locale a proper amount of time to bake so the beta users can provide feedback to our localizers.  After feedback is “triaged”, bugs are fixed, and signs of user adoption become obvious, we move a locale out of beta.
• Localization-QA survey results — At the end of 2008, we conducted a survey to gauge our teams’ testing efforts.  The posted results point us to where localizers might need our assistance.  From this, we have begun an experiment to provide a third-party QA service to help test a sample of our localized versions.
• Adding contextual information to a localized build –  Some of our localizers even create, share, and use customized tools to help perfect translations

Perhaps it’s hard to express without sounding naive or idealistic, but maybe there is an important theme that didn’t make Mossberg’s conversation that should be articulated:

We take localization very seriously.  This is not just a hobby for our community, and many have the battle scars to prove it.  Just ask someone who has stayed up all night to perfect a translation before a code freeze and you’ll understand what I am getting at.  Each of our localizers is keenly aware that greater than fifty percent of our end-users are NOT using an en-US version.  When a localizer is responsible for a translation, the quality of their work impacts a massive amount of end users.  We could ask our German localizer Kadir, whose localized version of Firefox is being used by an estimated twenty-five million people.  Or, Romi, our Indonesian localizer, who’s translated version has climbed to sixty-three percent market share.  That level of impact keeps our localizers sharp and tremendously dedicated.

Other highlights from the transcript:

“Walt: 71 of the foreign-language versions of Firefox are written by volunteers. Why should I use a product like that? Lilly says Mozilla has a system for verifying the quality of these other versions and vets them prior to release. Beyond that, users will alert the company to any problems.”

“Walt: Why wouldn’t it just be better for the consumer to go with the company that’s hired experts to do its translations? Baker: How much software do you really think is great? Walt: Not very much. Lilly: But it’s all written by experts. Walt nods, point taken.”

NB:  John Lilly mentions that we’ll have seventy-one localizations for Firefox 3.5.  We’re growing everyday!  We are actually going to ship seventy-three localizations for Firefox 3.5’s release candidate, with an outside chance of seventy-five for final release.

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May 29, 2009 06:41 PM

May 28, 2009 08:01 PM

A volunteer from the Tanzanian Linux User Group passed me this blog post that describes a tool he created to help localizers with context of strings in the Firefox user interface. As Alberto writes,

“It is difficult to translate something that you have never used before, functionalities that the translation team is not familiar with or English words that can be understood in several ways.”

His tool allows a localizer to add tags to each string so that when the localizer builds Firefox locally, they can see the translation with a tag in the UI.  If the translation seems incorrect in the context, the localizer can use the tag to find the file that needs adjustment.  See the screen shot below and check out his post for more information.

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May 27, 2009 01:30 AM

Many of you may remember our localization intern, Adrian Kalla, from last year.  A dedicated community member before his internship, Adrian returned to school to continue his contribution to Mozilla.  Recently, he approached us with a request to support a project that would help complete his course of studies.  After expanding the idea with Axel, he had a project idea to pursue and the l10n-drivers jumped at supporting such an interesting experiment that Adrian calls “Koala”.

He will be blogging about his project on a regular basis, but he asked me to post the following initially to describe the idea:

During my internship at Mozilla last year, I developed a Silme-based “compare-locales” version. It is a command-line only tool, that requires from the user to have experience in working with a console. Well - we all know that a text-interface is not necessarily a user’s first-choice, so Axel came up with a great idea to develop a user-friendly graphical front-end for it.

Being back at my University, one part of my major is to work on a project, which may be done in cooperation with external companies. This project is officially scheduled for the term directly after the internship - that is, the chance to move Axel’s idea from the ‘ideabox’ to the ‘real’ world.  I see it as a great opportunity to continue my work on Mozilla L10n tools and my major at the same time.   Everything went quickly: Axel defined the project and its details, which was then accepted by my professor as an official university project. Together with my fellow computer science students, namely Adam Kowalewski and Florian Schloegl, we created a project team. And…

What exactly are we working on?

Calling the project just a “graphical interface for compare-locales” would underestimate the objectives we have set for it. It will be an extension for the Komodo Edit & Komodo IDE developer-editor/IDE applications, which are based on Mozilla technologies, that will help with the daily work of holding Mozilla localizations up-to-date. Starting with pulling Mercurial repositories, comparing the changes, showing that changes to the user directly in the work files, …, ending with helping during the translation process (e.g. translation-suggestions, syntax highlighting) and committing the changes back to a repository – everything in just one tool.

We named the extension “Koala”, which stands for “Komodo Advanced Localization Addon”.

More information will be available soon on http://koala.mozdev.org .

To accomplish the project, we have a September, 15 (2009 of course ) deadline. But you will hear of us sooner. Stay tuned.

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May 26, 2009 09:55 PM

Here's a summary of SeaMonkey/Mozilla-related work I've done in week 21/2009 (May 18 - 24, 2009):

• SeaMonkey Build Machines:
  Lots of work still ongoing with the new buildbots with the ultimate goal of getting L10n builds from them, which I was able to resolvein the end with somewhat more work than anticipated. This involved fixing up locales Makefiles, fixing the fix to them, making our applications provide the info printed by part of those fixes and be nicer with including the Mac README in SeaMonkey.
  As a result, I could post a patch for L10 repack factory abstraction that I had proven to work for us and hopefully can land in the shared buildbotcustom repo.
  In other news, I found that the Linux x86_64 build problem was actually being out of disk space because I forgot to add the extra disk on the VM. As soon as I had added it, builds started to work fine.
  I also slightly fixed up the slave name TinderboxPrint functionality thankfully introduced by gozer into the buildbotcustom factories.
• Geolocation:
  Network Geolocation Provider could land on SeaMonkey with some more ported-from-Firefox improvements but without the actual URL for a provider on the network. This has been split off into its own bug, we need to get permission from Google to use their service before actually adding it.
  I filed dependent bugs on web page and help updates - help wanted (literally)!
• Build System:
  The automatic update of Windows file versions has landed on Mozilla 1.9.1 and comm-central for the SeaMonkey part. No worry about forgetting something and the Windows .exe reporting a different versions as the app itself any more (both for Firefox and SeaMonkey, by the way)!
  Release automation was updated to work with that change, some unused code in its tools can be cleaned up later as well.
• German L10n:
  A number of new strings to keep up with mostly mailnews development, also fixing 1.9.2 toolkit for German.
• Various Discussions:
  SeaMonkey tabmail work, mozilla.org planning, Mozilla meeting times, starting thoughts on new stable security release, etc.

We are fighting Parallels problems for our new buildbots still even though we're avoiding the more-than-8-VMs networking issue for the moment. I'll keep the SeaMonkey-Ports waterfall page updated with the open issues.
That said, the machines are producing and uploading nightly builds for Linux i686, Mac OS X, Windows and the somewhat unofficial Linux x86_64, as well as localized builds for all languages that build successfully on the three official platforms.

In other news, the download manager switch is getting pretty hot, as of today I have positive reviews even on the progress dialogs/windows, and the main switch patch is shaping up nicely now that Frank ("mcsmurf") took over driving it from Justin ("Callek") who is temporarily unavailable. We'll likely land all the reviewed changes in one push, which is now likely to contain 5 patches from 3 bugs and a combined diff set of 63 files changed, 5850 insertions and 660 deletions, according to diffstat output on the not-yet-completely-finished patch set I have in my Mercurial queue right now. I hope this will happen soon, it surely will be a significant change that brings us one giant leap nearer to a SeaMonkey 2 release.

May 26, 2009 07:15 PM

May 22, 2009 09:57 PM

Many of you know Romi Hardiyanto as our Indonesian localizer who has helped grow Firefox’s market share in Indonesia to 50% since he started localizing in 2007.  Romi is also a dedicated Mozilla contributor who recently hosted a terrific add-ons workshop at the Information System Department Park, ITS Campus in Sukolilo, Surabaya, Indonesia.  (But, I know you’ve read Gen’s post about that.)

Recently, Romi responded to a Google Summer of Code idea I had posted about helping to enhance Mozilla’s dashboard.  The l10n-drivers knew that this project was a bit of an imperative, so we decided to take on development within our team before we had any guarantee from GSoC if our proposal would be accepted.  (Some blog post about the dashboard vision and progress are coming from me and Axel.)  Given the amount of ambiguity on the resources Mozilla would commit to the idea, the GSoC proposal was rejected.

But, from the ashes came an idea to do a similar summer of code style project within Mozilla.  What if we could redirect Romi to do another experimental project that would have some benefit to the localization community?  Could Romi contribute to Silme by working on an implementation?  In the past, we’ve supported some of our tool authors with funding and development resources.  It turns out that Narro, another tool used by many of our localization teams, seemed like a good fit for the experiment.  Voila, a new proposal took shape.

I am pleased to announce that Romi will be working to integrate Silme, a library of localization scripts created by Gandalf, into Narro.  With Silme integration, we should be able to get exports of translated strings from Narro that are file-type independent (because Silme does that nicely) and can be used by the localizers and l10n-drivers to smooth out any commit bugs when it comes time to push changes back to the l10n code repositories.

Why is this important?

I’ve blogged in the past about the uniqueness of Mozilla’s DTD and property file types.  Our file structure and file types can create conflicts with the output people who choose to localize with tools send to us.  With Silme integration, we’ll have something that maps a bit more nicely to DTD and property files with less conflict.  You can read more about Silme on Gandalf’s blog, including this wiki page that describes what features we hope to add in the 0.7 release.

The early challenge for Romi’s project is going to be embedding a Python interpreter into Narro’s PHP code base  He researched a bit about PECL and will blog soon about his findings.  If you can provide any ideas on how to do this, Romi would love to hear your remarks.  We also have some stretch goals to hit if Silme gets integrated into Narro, and Romi will continue to blog about his progress, and those goals, over the next couple months.  Please welcome Romi when his first post to Planet appears and provide any advice you might have.

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May 22, 2009 08:08 PM

I posted this to the Mozilla L10n newsgroup, but for maximum coverage, I’ve reposted it on my blog.  Special thanks to Marcia, Axel, and Chofmann the various resources I reference below.

——————————————–

To all of our great community localizers and testers…

Over the past few weeks, many of our Mozilla community members have done testing and landed fixes for Firefox 3.5 as we close in on our release.  We are now in the last hours before we ship our release candidate that we can comfortably call Firefox 3.5. If you have time this weekend, it is a great opportunity to do some last minute testing for your localization.

Where to download the latest localized nightly version of the Firefox 3.5

http://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/mozilla.org/firefox/nightly/latest-mozilla-1.9.1-l10n/

Please hammer on these builds mercilessly to make sure that things work well.  If you notice things that worked in Firefox 3.5 beta 4, but do not work in this release, we would like to know about it right away.

What to Test

You can run a set of localization test cases by going to Litmus, Mozilla’s testing suite.  This URL will take you to the “l10n run”.

https://litmus.mozilla.org/run_tests.cgi?test_run_id=36

If you don’t have a Litmus account, you should be able to create one quickly.  Please email us if you need any help.

How to report feedback

Please try filing a bug for your locale with Bugzilla.  The basic set of instructions are below.  If you are not comfortable filing a bug, you can report it to your locale leader who should be listed in the specific locale on this main Teams page:

https://wiki.mozilla.org/L10n:Teams

Things to remember when filing a bug in https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/:

1. Always include the Build ID that you tested on.  If you type about: in the URL bar, this will give you the Build ID.
2. Always include clear “Steps to Reproduce” the bug.
3. Always check to see if your bug has already been filed.  This link will help: http://tinyurl.com/2465be
4. Use the regression keyword if it indeed a regression from a previous release.  And, please tell us in the main comment of the bug if it is a regression from a previous release.
5. If you happen to crash, please include the Breakpad ID in the bug.  You can get this by typing about:crashes in the URL bar.

If you don’t wish to file a bug, report issues through http://feedback.mozilla.org or through the mozilla.feedback.firefox.prerelease newsgroup (I just linked to the Google Group).  However, we prefer bugs as feedback since those are easier to track.

Finally, keep in mind that no comments or questions are off limits.   Please send along any remarks or questions that you think are appropriate at you test.   It’s all appreciated.

Thanks to all of you for helping test Firefox and making it the browser of choice for millions and millions of people all over the world!

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May 22, 2009 06:17 PM

We’ve added four more locales for Firefox 3.5. These include Oriya, Romansh, Spanish (Chile), and Tamil (Sri Lanka).

Many thanks to Manoj (or), Sarves (ta-LK), Gion-Anrdi (rm), and Emilio (es-CL) for putting in some great effort in the last hours to complete their translations. Although a set of productization bugs still exists for these languages and Staś is working with these folks to resolve them, we’ll still ship the four new locales with Firefox 3.5 RC1.  Malayalam will also join us for this release after translating 148 strings in the final push. ml has been with us in the past but slipped last time.  Welcome back, Ani and Joyce.

If you’ve been counting, we *should* get up to 75 localizations for the final release of Firefox 3.5, shipping simultaneously across three platforms.  Yesterday, I was skeptical we would not even come close to the number from beta 4.  But, here is what happened…

Over the evening time in California, we lost a bit of sleep as we checked throughout the night on the status of teams and responded to emails.  After midnight, we noticed that Alexandru (the maintainer of Narro) had seen a couple of localizations with translated strings that hadn’t been pushed back to us.  He sent us one changeset and we waited a bit longer.  At 4:30 AM, Staś got up and landed ta-LK in its repository since the team had not had the chance.  Then, by the 5 AM code freeze, Alexandru committed the Vietnamese team’s final changes.  Axel continued managing that opt-in thread I mentioned in my post yesterday.  He and Staś also helped sort out some Mercurial landings that got a bit twisted around.  By 11 AM in Mountain View, Axel was reporting on code freeze to the Firefox product team.  We learned when builds would start (Sunday May 24), buying us a bit more time to finish our l10n, allowing a few more locales to make it in the process.  We’re not finished yet, but we are very close…

This morning the l10n-drivers were chatting about how every time we go through a release, we are blown away by the responsiveness, dedication, and professionalism of this group of volunteers.  Hats off to the localizers one more time.

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May 20, 2009 11:02 PM

Here's a summary of SeaMonkey/Mozilla-related work I've done in week 20/2009 (May 11 - 17, 2009):

• SeaMonkey Build Machines:
  I once again spent almost all my time on the build machines, trying to get things running more stable, evaluating what a Parallels server upgrade helped us, setting up the 64bit box and getting it imaged, making automatic start of buildbot on slave reboots work everywhere (though a windows slave has problems apparently caused by that), getting our improvements into buildbotcustom, and closing step 1 of that new buildbot setup.
  We now have that setup produce nightlies that are put into latest-comm-1.9.1 for testing and should work identically to the still official nightlies from the old configuration.
  A number of things still have to be resolved until the new configuration can move to production (sucking the old buildslave machines into the new generic pools) and beyond, for all of which I have filed bugs now: localized builds, Mac VM crashes/reboots, x86_64 build/linking problems, getting graphs up, finally getting the release harness to work.
• Various Discussions:
  SeaMonkey tabmail work, mozilla.org planning, Mozilla meeting times, starting thoughts on new stable security release, etc.

I hope we can figure out the Parallels VM network losses and the Mac VM instability cited above, as once I have figured out the L10n build stuff, the new configuration should be on par with the old and able to take over production, which will make maintenance of our build and test boxes easier and ultimately enable us to do builds with Mozilla trunk as well as move towards release automation, which again will be a huge leap forward.
All that currently needs almost my full work time although I should take care of other stuff as well, but once this all is finished, the build and release processes should be easier to take care of, so ultimately I should have more time for other things. Let's hope it actually will work out that way!

May 18, 2009 03:48 PM

Firefox 3.5 is soon to be released and everybody is working hard in the Mozilla community to make it as great a release as were the previous ones!

This is the perfect moment for you to get involved by helping you local localization team preparing translations for our websites, the sooner our websites are ready in 70 languages, the sooner Firefox 3.5 will be released.

Pages called directly from Firefox like the start page, download pages on mozilla.com, product pages on regional sites, documentation for web developers explaining what new technologies they will find in the product, end-user support documentation, translation of Add-Ons, marketing mini-sites being created for the release...

There are tons of ways you can make a real difference in the Mozilla project, especially if you are not an English speaker as the majority of our users are now using a non-English version of Firefox.

if you want to help change the web in your language, just contact your localization team and ask them how you can help, you can also contact me directly of course (pascal AT mozilla DOT com).

May 17, 2009 01:36 PM

Ce samedi je donnerai une conférence présentant le projet Mozilla et sa communauté lors de l'Ubuntu Party Paris à la Villette , bon comme d'hab en fait

Par contre, j'ai réussi à convaincre Delphine de faire une petite présentation de son projet visant à améliorer la visibilité et la participation des femmes dans le projet Mozilla et le libre en général.

La présentation sera à la fin de la mienne et j'engage toutes les personnes intéressées à venir à l'événement et à discuter avec nous du sujet (pour les plus intéressées, on peut aller prendre un café à côté après la conf pour ça d'ailleurs).

May 14, 2009 03:24 PM

Here's a summary of SeaMonkey/Mozilla-related work I've done in week 19/2009 (May 4 - 10, 2009):

• Download Manager:
  The patch for making toolkit UI tests not fail with our new UI has now landed, and so has a first build system part of the backend work so that a correct rebuild will be triggered when we change app-config.mk with the main switch.
• Build System:
  A patch to make version changes apply to the Windows .exe automatically could also go into mozilla-central this week, I hope to get it into 1.9.1 so it actually helps the SeaMonkey release process.
• Geolocation:
  My geolocation patch has review now, but we need to seek permission from Google to actually use their service by adding that URL to our default prefs, and they don't have official policies up for that as it is a new service. I'm in talk with them and hope we find a solution soon enough to be able to ship final, possibly even beta with it.
• SeaMonkey Build Machines:
  The vast amount of time this week ran into the new SeaMonkey build machines. I did set up all the slaves and got them to a build configuaration that does most of what we need, even though a few bugs are left and l10n repackaging isn't on yet (needs more work).
  With having that to test, I could do an actual patch for mozilla dir abstraction in buildbot factories and for adding comm-central build classes to the shared buildbotcustom repo.
  There was a lot of fallout in bugs I filed during that work a some patches attached for the buildbotcustom stuff, also some more requests to IT.
  The plan is now to suck the suck the "old" Windows and Linux VMs into the generic slave pools of the new configuration and replace the old Tiger Macs with additional Leopard VMs and make the new buildbot master drive both trunk and branch with those pools then.
  We still have some distance to go with that, but things start to look quite good for the future of the SeaMonkey build infrastructure now. Thanks to everyone involved to make this possible.
• German L10n:
  Updates for string changes in mailnews so that German goes green again.
• Various Discussions:
  Error console, xpcshell-tests target and test directories, multi-process plans for platform, test reporting on tinderbox, mozilla.org planning, redundant master password prompts, cleaning up personal bugmail folders, polish bugs, etc.

The bug for them was filed half a year ago and it took some poking of people and some time, but the great thing has happened and we now have 14 virtual machines for building SeaMonkey instead of the 6 we had up to now, and we get to have our all-virtual Macs running on Leopard instead of the physical Tiger machines that are being obsoleted with the new configuration going into production. We also have the ability of all machines for one platform being able to run any cycles, so that we don't end up with build machines being idle all the time and unit tests not getting run enough or branch machines being idle and trunk being clogged (once we have both trunk and branch running, which is the primary purpose of all this). And we even will be able to run automated release building off those machines - once I have fully configured and tested that. And we will be sharing a lot more of the custom buildbot class code with Thunderbird and even Firefox so we all can profit from each other's work.
It has been long in coming and there's still some work left to do, but this is really great and should help us immensely.

Once again, thanks to everyone involved, from Community Giving via IT to Build & Release and others who care and help!

May 12, 2009 05:19 PM

In this issue…

• Download Day gets a Webby!
• Design Challenge “Best in Class” announced
• Prism 1.0 beta available
• Weaving identity into the browser
• Front-end performance in Firefox 3.5
• QMO: Introducing Test Dev Thursdays
• Multiprocess Firefox project underway
• Relicensing Wiki.mozilla.org to CC-BY-SA
• Mozilla as a data driven community
• The future of Add-ons
• AMO: Contributions pilot
• Getting insight into your email
• Upcoming conferences + meetups
• Developer calendar
• About about:mozilla

Download Day gets a Webby!

The Firefox 3 Download Day event was recently named the People’s Voice Winner in the Webby’s Interactive Advertising Online Campaign category. Mary Colvig, who lead the project, writes, “while the International Academy of Digital Arts and Sciences named Absolut the category winner, I’m thrilled we snagged the People’s Voice. Our campaign was entirely people-powered — 8 million of us taking the time to download Firefox and nab a Guinness World Record.” Mike Morgan has written an accompanying post where he talks about how Download Day succeeded, describing the anatomy of the project and how teamwork and the Mozilla ecosystem made it all possible.

Design Challenge “Best in Class” announced

Three months ago Mozilla Labs launched its first Design Challenge, inviting design-focused students from around the world to try and answer the question, “What would a browser look like if the Web was all there was?” A panel of design experts evaluated the 18 prototypes submitted, and have now selected four “Best in Class” entries. Pascal Finette’s announcement includes links to all the prototypes and the list of “Best in Class” submissions.

Prism 1.0 beta available

Prism started as an experiment with the goal “to bridge the divide in the user experience between web applications and desktop apps”. Last week the Prism team announced the beta version of Prism 1.0, the culmination of more than a year of real-world use by companies like Yahoo! Zimbra, DesignLinks International, and many others. “Tens of thousands of end users have installed Prism-enabled sites. Based on their feedback, as well as the experience of website creators, we’ve added new features to bring the user experience of web apps even closer to that of their desktop counterparts.” For more, see Matthew Gertner’s post at the Mozilla Labs weblog.

Weaving identity into the browser

The Mozilla Weave team, headed up by Dan Mills, has unveiled a new Weave-related experiment that builds a form of identity management right into the browser. The experiment “changes the browser to provide single-click login to sites with saved passwords as well as sites that support a federated identity (OpenID in this case). It also provides the option to automatically sign in when the page is loaded, essentially providing a single-sign-on-like experience regardless of the login method being used.” For more on this exciting new experiment, see Dan’s post (with video!) at the Mozilla Labs weblog.

Relicensing Wiki.mozilla.org to CC-BY-SA

Gervase Markham has announced a new initiative to relicense the content in the Mozilla Wiki from the GNU Free Documentation License to the Creative Commons Attribution-Sharealike license. “We believe that this is consistent with contributors’ expectations based on their experience with other Mozilla sites, and it will simplify moving wiki.mozilla.org content to other sites and remixing it with content on those sites.” If you have an objection to this plan, please post it in the thread in the mozilla.legal discussion forum.

Front-end performance in Firefox 3.5

Dietrich Ayala has written an article that discusses front-end performance improvements that are being included as part of Firefox 3.5. “Firefox 3.5 contains a large number of internal changes to how we store, manage and display [history and bookmark data], in order to improve performance. Shawn Wilsher and Marco Bonardo spent an immense amount of time and effort altering almost every SQL query in Places, the bookmark and history infrastructure.” Ed Lee has also been able to drastically speed up searching in the Awesomebar, and further work will vastly improve the performance of the history menu, sidebar, and smart folders. For the full story, see Dietrich’s weblog.

QMO: Introducing Test Dev Thursdays

Mozilla’s crack QA team has launched a new initiative: Test Development Thursdays. These all-day events will be happening every two weeks, with the next occuring on May 21st. “Writing tests is a fun way to see your code get into the Mozilla Central tree. Also, this will enable us to expand our code coverage to areas where we desperately need tests.” Further information is available through the blog post, or pop into the #qa channel on irc.mozilla.org.

Multiprocess Firefox project underway

Percy Cabello, Mozilla Links lead, has posted a story about a new project that that will turn Firefox into a multi-process application, with one process running the main user interface (chrome), and another or several others running the web content in each tab. “The main benefit would be the increase in stability: a single tab crash would not take down the whole session with it, as well as performance improvements in multiprocessor systems that are progressively becoming the norm.” See Mozilla Links for the full post, and the project wiki goes into much more detail.

Mozilla as a data driven community

Ken Kovash has shared his slides from a recent talk about Mozilla and analystics. The ensuing discussion identified several ways the metrics team can work in closer collaboration with other teams across Mozilla. The team would like to see Mozilla become increasingly data-driven, relying more on the their services before decisions are made and earlier on in initiatives. Ken’s post has more information and a link to his slides.

The future of Add-ons

Nick Nguyen, Mozilla’s Add-ons lead, has been working hard to define the future of the Add-ons program. He recently gave a presentation on the topic at the Mozilla All-hands meeting, and has now shared his slides from that talk. “This was a fun presentation to create and give because I’m incredibly excited about the future of add-ons. To me add-ons are the ultimate form of user generated content, created by a group of users who are more passionate, intelligent, and principled than any user community I’ve ever seen.” Nick’s post includes a link to his slides.

AMO: Contributions pilot

The addons.mozilla.org (AMO) team is developing some new features for the site that will allow participating developers to request voluntary contributions from users in a way that helps explain how those financial contributions help with the development of an add-on. Initial mockups are now available, and include a redesign of the add-ons listing page as well as a new “Meet the developer” page. These updates will be available to all developers, not just ones who ask for financial support. The AMO team is still looking for add-on developers to participate in the pilot program, and you can sign up over at the AMO weblog.

Getting insight into your email

The Thunderbird team has been playing with some new ideas for the “Start page” of each mail folder in the application. The result is an early patch that takes advantage of the large amount of data Thunderbird has access to, summarizing critical data, marking the last message read, flagging messages that are most likely to be of interest, and presenting a histogram showing activity in that folder over the past 52 weeks, among other things. David Ascher goes into much more detail in his blog post, where he also includes some screenshots.

Upcoming conferences + meetups

The Mozilla community is organizing an increasing number of events and meetups all the time, so we’re going to start including a list of these every week. If you have events you would like included here, send them along to: about-mozilla@mozilla.com.

• May 13 - Portland, OR - Firefox Developers Meetup
• May 14 - Munich, Germany - Mozilla Meetup
• May 26 - Mountain View, CA - Add-ons Meetup

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 Deb Richardson and is published every Tuesday morning. If you have any news or announcements you would like to have included in our next issue, please send them to: about-mozilla[at]mozilla.com.

If you would like to get this newsletter by email, just head on over to the about:mozilla newsletter subscription form. Fresh news, every Tuesday, right to your inbox.

May 12, 2009 02:40 PM

Mon Sony Vaio est mort il y a trois semaines, un vendredi soir, la veille de partir aux US pour la semaine de boulot annuelle des employés Mozilla au siège social et deux jours avant la sortie de Firefox 3.0.10 et 3.5beta4, inutile de dire que j'étais un poil stressé

Pendant presque trois semaines, j'ai utilisé mon vieux portable (celeron M, 512Mo de mémoire, déconnant de temps en temps...) et c'était vraiment pas pratique, voire pénible... J'ai donc cherché sur internet un portable qui corresponde à mes besoins et qui semblerait ne pas poser de compatibilité avec Linux.

Mon choix s'est porté sur le Lenovo Y650, la première difficulté était de le trouver en France, le seul qui le proposait en ligne était Surcouf, à ce sujet, un gros bravo pour leur efficacité, livré en moins de 48 heures alors que le délai annoncé était de 8 jours, il m'attendait à mon retour en France.

Voici une critique exhaustive (en anglais) de ce portable :

Critique du lenovo Y650 sur Notebookreview

Ce portable est beau, léger pour un 16 pouces, visiblement costaud et il correspond assez bien à mes besoins. Il a quelques défauts, le clavier est légérement trop petit (mais de bonne qualité) et le touchpad trop grand à mon goût, j'ai tendance à le toucher avec ma paume par erreur, ce qui est parfois génant lorsqu'on tape. Mais sinon, c'est plutôt du tout bon et surtout, il marche sous ubuntu sans problème !!! Support de l'économie d'énergie, vitesse réglable du cpu, mise en veille, luminosité de l'écran, touches multimédia, webcam... pour l'instant tout marche sans rien avoir à régler ou bidouiller, il faut tout de même le driver nvidia proprio pour avoir la résolution d'écran HD ready.

Je suis aussi passé bien sûr à Ubuntu 9.04 (j'ai bousillé ma partoche windows dans l'opération mais bon, je la réinstallerai dans virtualbox, pour ce que j'en fais...) et en ext4. Je n'ai pas noté que le boot était si rapide que ça par rapport à ma machine précédente, par contre je trouve le bureau gnome de la 9.04 et le nouveau système de notification vachement bien fait et poli.

Le seul inconvénient est que ce portable est légèrement trop grand pour mon sac à dos, il me manque un centimètre ou deux pour le ranger dedans, je vais donc devoir m'en racheter un

Je conseille donc le Lenovo Y650 aux utilisateurs de Linux, leur gamme grand public est apparemment aussi compatible linux que leur gamme pro Thinkpad !!

May 08, 2009 07:55 PM

In this issue…

• Mozilla Service Week: Be the difference!
• John Lilly on poetry and pragmatics
• A new look for the Spread Firefox project
• Creative Collective and building social capital
• Geolocation in Firefox 3.5 and Fennec
• Improvements to Firefox.com
• Creative Collective site design: round 1
• Mozilla.org redesign: round 3
• AMO: Firefox 3.5.* maxver now available
• AMO: New developer agreement
• Personas gallery expands: help wanted!
• Developer calendar
• About about:mozilla

Mozilla Service Week: Be the difference!

Mary Colvig is heading up an exciting new project that aims to harness the amazing energy and skills of the Mozilla community to help organizations and individuals in need.

The project has been dubbed “Mozilla Service Week”, and you are invited to participate by using your skills to help people learn how to use the Web, have better access to the Web, and to have a better Web experience overall. Activities can take a variety of forms, and suggestions include helping a school set up a wireless network, refurbishing and donating hardware to a community center, creating documentation and tutorials on how to get started on the Web, or helping a non-profit refresh its website. “The possibilities are endless for people of all skill levels to jump in and make a difference.”

Mozilla Service Week will be taking place from June 22 to June 29, 2009. This is your chance to take some time to get involved and help make the Web better for everyone. Lots more information is available in Mary’s blog post.

John Lilly on poetry and pragmatics

John Lilly recently gave a talk at the Mozilla all-hands meeting, and he has posted his slides for everyone to see. “I wanted to talk about some of the context that we find ourselves in now and how we can think about becoming a longer term organization, now that Mozilla’s first 11 years are behind us. I focused on the tension between what I’ve come to call Poetry & Pragmatics. The pragmatics of an organization are how you do things; the poetry of an organization is why you do them.” See John’s blog post for some more explanation and a link to the slides.

A new look for the Spread Firefox project

Last week a new design was unveiled for the Spread Firefox project, Mozilla’s community marketing home. “With the new layout and design, we’re striving to make the site more engaging and reflective of the great personalities behind Firefox grassroots marketing. At the same time, we’re trying to make it more straightforward for users to figure out what to do and where to go next when they come to the site.” A full recap of the major improvements is available, and it’s easier than ever to get involved and help spread the word.

Creative Collective and building social capital

The Mozilla Creative Collective is an initiative to organize and build Mozilla’s visual design community. “Building a successful online community from scratch takes a lot of work and planning. To attract members and encourage active participation, you need to offer incentives for people to join and unique benefits that they can derive from their membership over time. In other words, it’s important to offer heaps of social capital.” The Collective has spent a lot of time thinking up ways members can build social capital, and Tara Shahian has written about some of these ideas on her weblog.

Geolocation in Firefox 3.5 and Fennec

Doug Turner has announced that a new feature called Geolocation is being included in Firefox 3.5 and Fennec. “Geolocation is an opt-in tool that lets users share their location information with web sites through Firefox and will enable a new range of services on the web. Geolocation can make web sites smarter and you more productive. Websites that use geolocation will ask where you are in order to bring you more relevant information, or to save you time when searching.” Doug’s weblog post goes into a lot more detail about the new features and what this new feature means for both users and web developers.

Improvements to Firefox.com

The Marketing and Metrics teams have been working to improve the user experience of the Firefox download page and to increase the visit-to-download conversion rate. After experimenting with and testing various designs, they have implemented browser detection on the en-US locale of that page so users will get different content based on whether they’re using a non-Firefox browser, an old Firefox browser, or the current version of Firefox. “It turns out that presenting visitors with relevant content actually seems to work!” Ken Kovash and David Rolnitzky have both recently blogged about this initiative.

Creative Collective site design: round 1

The team developing the Mozilla Creative Collective project is looking for feedback on the first round of site mockups from the designers at Airbag Industries. John Slater has blogged about these initial designs, and he’s looking for feedback. “A big source of inspiration was the logo itself, as Airbag incorporated its colors, style and major elements whenever possible. They also made an effort to evoke the feel of the other Mozilla sites (especially mozilla.com and QMO), resulting in subtle textures, rough edges and a generally open, handmade feel. As always, the goal is to reflect Mozilla’s ‘people-powered’ essence rather than creating something slick and corporate.” John’s blog goes into more detail about the project, and the initial mockup is also available through his post.

Mozilla.org redesign: round 3

Another Mozilla design project that is well underway is the redesign of the Mozilla.org website. David Boswell has posted the third round of designs. “It’s taken us a few weeks to complete this round because we made design changes based on feedback from the community and we coded the pages.” Three different coded pages have been posted for review, and the team is looking for help. “We are very interested in getting people to view these templates on a range of devices, including phones and netbooks. Any and all feedback is welcome.” The team is also accepting patches if you have better ideas about how to approach the “liquid layout” they’re going for.

AMO: Firefox 3.5.* maxver now available

Add-on developers take note! “With the Firefox 3.5b4 release, we’ve enabled the 3.5.* maxver in the AMO Developer tools. For the vast majority of add-ons without binary components, you can simply update your maxver to 3.5.* and it will be compatible with all versions of Firefox 3.5 through the release. If you do have a binary component, you should only have to recompile your code against the latest — for more information see the Firefox wiki.” It’s time to start updating your add-ons to ensure your users have the smoothest possible experience when upgrading to Firefox 3.5.

AMO: New developer agreement

Nick Nguyen has posted about the new Developer Agreement that is part of the Addons.mozilla.org (AMO) site. “Up until now, we’ve had a fairly basic developer agreement that hasn’t changed with the needs of our developers and our service. We’re launching a new agreement that clarifies and protects our developers’ rights and ensures that we can continue to promote add-ons via multiple ways and channels as our service expands.” Nick’s post goes into more detail, describing what has changed in the agreement and why.

Personas gallery expands: help wanted!

Since launch, the Personas add-on has been downloaded over 2.5 million times and now exceeds over one million active daily users. “More importantly,” writes Suneel Gupta, “we have welcomed over 3,000 new designers and over 5,000 new designs to the Personas community.” This incredible number of submissions is overtaking the team’s ability to review and approve them all, however, so the team is looking for help. “The immediate goal is to reduce the size of the approval queue. The near-term goal is to reduce the amount of time a community member needs to wait between submitting a design and being able to view that design in the gallery and share it with friends.” If you would like to help the team achieve these goals, check out Suneel’s blog post and get involved.

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 Deb Richardson and is published every Tuesday morning. If you have any news or announcements you would like to have included in our next issue, please send them to: about-mozilla[at]mozilla.com.

If you would like to get this newsletter by email, just head on over to the about:mozilla newsletter subscription form. Fresh news, every Tuesday, right to your inbox.

May 05, 2009 01:29 PM

Here's a summary of SeaMonkey/Mozilla-related work I've done in week 18/2009 (April 27 - May 3, 2009):

• Download Manager:
  I updated the tests for the new UI for the review comments, everything is ready for checkin there now, only waiting for the backend.
  I also worked out another approach to making toolkit UI test not fail when our UI patch is in, and reacted to review comments on progress dialogs - I need some more clarifications there before continuing work on them.
• Automated Tests:
  The random browser test orange we had in SeaMonkey should be fixed now - the problem was us relying too fast on focus() being successful, the solution to use setTimeout() to just let the focus settle. Yes, this is one of the few cases where setTimeout() makes the test more reliable when usually it's the other way round.
  When a new places test broke in SeaMonkey, I found out the problem and fixed it. I'm starting to get tired of the tests stuff though, doing it is too little fun - and that's a bad sign as tests are quite helpful overall.
• Build Infrastructure:
  Slowly, I hear that the new SeaMonkey buildbot machines are becoming a reality, unfortunately the Linux refplatform image doesn't convert as nicely to the new host infrastructure as the Window image does.
  Without those machines, it's not that easy for me to test the WIP for mozilla dir abstraction in buildbot factories, but I started this to get the ball rolling - maybe we have a chance to get as far as being able to try release automation with Beta 1.
  The patch for automatically inserting the Windows version in our .exe files should also be nearing checkin, which should ease release generation no matter what way it's being done.
• Geolocation:
  Recently, the Firefox geolocation support got a big overhaul and a network-based geolocation provider was integrated into toolkit. I hacked up a first patch for getting this all to work in SeaMonkey, but it needs a bit more work from how I read the review comments (though I don't fully understand them yet).
• SeaMonkey L10n:
  After stalling some time for review, the patch for making profiles easier to localize could make it into the tree, and though the landing was somewhat bumpy, we now should be at a state where localizers have less work to get the default profile files localized and we have more of a guarantee of what is actually in the default profile in all localizations.
• German L10n:
  I fixed a long-standing password management bug in the German localization of toolkit and mostly kept up with German SeaMonkey localization (except for stuff landed over the weekend).
• Various Discussions:
  Solaris and aus2-community, error console, EV cert UI, test failures, mail account autoconfig work, SeaMonkey statistics, Mac theme rework, etc.

Theoretically, we would already have or be about to freeze for SeaMonkey 2.0 Beta 1 right now. While this is being pushed out a bit due to our friends from Thunderbird not being ready to freeze for the next beta themselves, and us still missing the two larger features of download manager and tabmail, things start to feel more and more like being in beta phase. The feed integration suite is feature complete with having detection, preview and an internal reader for feeds now. Some minor polish might still be in order before final, but that part is surely beta-worthy now. I hope we get the last missing features as well as the better Mac theme in very soon so we can officially designate SeaMonkey 2.0 to be in beta and feature-complete, which will be a quite important milestone. Stay tuned here for more news on that and where where we're heading after that step!

May 05, 2009 11:48 AM

Voilà, après deux ans de résistance, j'ai cédé, je suis maintenant sur Twitter et j'y parlerai surtout de mon boulot chez Mozilla, un peu comme ici en fait mais probablement beaucoup plus actualisé que sur mon blog parce que le format est plus court, plus spontané et donc moins chronophage. Si vous utilisez Twitter et que vous voulez me suivre, c'est par là que ça se passe: pascalchevrel

Par contre, pour l'instant je n'écris qu'en anglais vu que je l'envisage pour le moment plus comme un outil de collaboration avec les collègues et contributeurs du projet et du libre en général qu'un truc purement perso où je raconterais que je viens d'acheter une baguette de pain ou de vider la litière du chat ;).

May 03, 2009 07:18 PM

May 01, 2009 04:55 PM

Here's a summary of SeaMonkey/Mozilla-related work I've done in week 17/2009 (April 20 - April 26, 2009):

• Download Manager:
  The new UI patch now is available in it's final, ready-for-checkin version on the bug!
• SeaMonkey Buildbots:
  common comm-central unit test class was checked in this week and also deployed to SeaMonkey testers, removing custom factory code from the config directory.
  In other news, we have now really fixed the leaks we still had from the extension manager datasource stuff on shutdown, so I could also decrease the leak thresholds for all tests to 0 - with the only exception of Windows mochitest-plain, where we still report a 200 byte leak, probably related to some plugin stuff.
• Bug Triage and Statistics:
  Reminded on the topic of bug triage, I wrote an updated post on triage targets including the idea of changing all bugs back to UNCONFIRMED that have no comments since the new SeaMonkey project began, and in a few months go and change all UNCONFIRMED bugs to EXPIRED that haven't had a comment for a number of months. This could potentially clean up our view of the SeaMonkey product on Bugzilla a lot.
  Inspired by that triage stuff, I thought it would be nice to see some numbers of the weekly "performance" of SeaMonkey in Bugzilla, and created bug statistcs on dev.seamonkey.at as described in my recent blog post.
  There's more interesting data that could be gathered, but it looks nice that in the week I created those stats, we had 14 new bugs reported while fixing 18 and closing 30 to other resolutions by triaging. Not only did we resolve more bugs than we got new ones reported, we also fixed more than those new reports!
• German L10n:
  Once again, some string updates and cleanups were needed to keep German L10n green, nothing too complicated here though.
• Various Discussions:
  GSoC project decisions, EV cert UI, test failures, mail account autoconfig work, SeaMonkey statistics, MozCamp Wien, Mac theme rework, Linux updater issue and fixes, Mozilla 1.9.2 and Tiger support, bmo workflow, etc.

Looking into those bugzilla statistics is quite interesting: For example, in April, 68 bugs have been reported so far in the SeaMonkey product, 67 have been resolved by triage (only one less than the new ones) and 41 bugs have been fixed in that period. Esp. the latter number perfectly tells that development is moving on - given that 7 of those have been ranked with "enhancement" severity, it's clear that this active development also means new stuff coming in for SeaMonkey 2 and not just fixes of problems, even though those account for the majority of fixes.

Can you make those numbers look even better at the actual end of the month or enable us to have a good start into May by those measures? Helping is as easy as triaging UNCONFIRMED bugs and either determining that they are valid (NEW) or resolving them to INVALID, WONTFIX, DUPLICATE, WORKSFORME, or INCOMPLETE if you can't confirm them (actual resolution depends on why you can't confirm them to be valid reports, of course)!

April 28, 2009 07:23 PM

In this issue…

• Firefox 3.0.10 now available
• Firefox 3.5 beta 4 released for testing
• Jumpstarting the Firefox 3.5 launch team!
• Add-ons meetup in Mountain View, May 26
• Trademarks: The Good, the Bad and the Ugly
• Security: Measure what matters
• What is a hybrid organization?
• Community store: 114 t-shirts and counting
• Focus manager How To
• Undo Close Window has landed
• Mozilla Foundation team priorities
• Developer calendar
• About about:mozilla

Firefox 3.0.10 now available!

As part of the Mozilla Corporation’s ongoing security and stability process, Firefox 3.0.10 is now available for Windows, Mac, and Linux users as a free download from getfirefox.com. We strongly recommend that all Firefox users upgrade to this latest release. If you already have Firefox 3, you will receive an automated update notification within 24 to 48 hours. This update can also be applied manually by selecting “Check for Updates…” from the Help menu. For a list of changes and more information, please see the Firefox 3.0.10 release notes.

Firefox 3.5 beta 4 released for testing!

Firefox 3.5 beta 4 is now available for testing. This milestone is focused on testing the core functionality provided by a number of new features and changes to the platform. You can follow along with planning at the Firefox 3.5 planning center as well as at mozilla.dev.planning, and in the irc.mozilla.org #shiretoko channel. New features and changes include: 70 languages, Private Browsing Mode, TraceMonkey performance improvements, Location Aware Browsing using new geolocation web standards, and support for native JSON and web worker threads, among other things.

Firefox 3.5 beta 4 is a public preview release intended for developer testing and community feedback — please read the DevNews announcement and the release notes before installing this beta.

Add-ons meetup in Mountain View, May 26

On May 26th at 7pm Mozilla will be hosting an Add-ons meetup in Mountain View, California. Pizza and refreshments will be served, and we’ll be giving presentations about what’s happening in the add-ons world both now and in the near future. The meetup will be taking place at Mozilla HQ at 1891 Landings Dr, Mountain View, CA, and please RSVP if you plan to attend — any schedule or venue changes will be sent to people on the RSVP list. If you can’t attend in person, virtual participation will be possible via air.mozilla.com, phone, and IRC.

Jumpstarting the Firefox 3.5 launch team!

The Mozilla Marketing team had an overwhelming response to their call for volunteers for Firefox 3.5 marketing help. “Over 130 people from Argentina, Bangladesh, India, Indonesia, Sri Lanka, Zimbabwe, Macedonia and more heeded the call! Our truly worldwide team will jump in on several marketing activities including public relations, events, and testimonials.” Starting soon, a series of online workshops will be held to discuss what’s being planned for each area, how you can contribute, how to go about it and, of course, to answer questions and brainstorm. The sessions will be held via Air Mozilla and archived for people who can’t attend the live sessions. The full schedule is available on Mary’s weblog, where more information will be posted about each workshop.

Trademarks: The Good, the Bad and the Ugly

Harvey Anderson has written an interesting post in which he talks about Mozilla trademarks, the various ways they’re used and abused, how those are categorized, and what we do about it. “The cases seem to fall into three different categories that I’ll nominally call the good, the bad, and the ugly. When we receive reports or identify problematic activities, we ‘exercise due diligence, care and prudence’ all of which means we analyze the reports and treat each case differently based on the intent and severity of the matter.” See Harvey’s full post for all the details.

Security: Measure what matters

Browser security is increasingly important as everyone wants to know they are safe when it comes to security. A growing number of groups are attempting to compare browsers based on their security record, which is great news — users are more informed than ever, and browser vendors have a better idea of where they stand and how to improve. Johnathan Nightingale writes, “The thing to watch when you’re measuring software security, though, is that you’re measuring the things that matter. We’ve talked about this before, but it bears repeating: if you measure the wrong things, you encourage vendors to game the system instead of actually making things better.” Johnathan’s article goes on to discuss the three elements that make for a good security metric, and what this means both now and in the future.

What is a hybrid organization?

Mark Surman, executive director of the Mozilla Foundation, has started a conversation about hybrid organizations. “Every time the hybrid term drops, it begs (or I get asked) the question: hybrid of what? I figured the time has come to push on this question with a little series of posts about hybrid orgs and why they matter. Over the next couple of weeks, I want to ask a few questions about this new territory. Why do these hybrid organizations matter? What challenges do they face?” Read Mark’s complete post at his weblog and get involved with the discussion.

Community store: 114 t-shirts and counting

The Mozilla Community Store opened late last year with around 60 designs. The exciting news is that there are now 114 different Mozilla-themed shirts available. John Slater writes, “Most of the new shirts feature Firefox-inspired artwork contributed by our design community, but we’ve also seeded it with logos from other Mozilla projects such as Camino, Bugzilla, Sunbird and SUMO. The idea is to be as participatory as possible, and to make sure the store has something for everyone.” You’re invited to check out the huge variety of designs on the Community Store and, if you can’t find anything you like, contribute your own!

Focus manager How To

The way focus works in Gecko has changed, as there is now a single focus manager service which handles everything related to it. “It keeps track of the topmost top-level window (called the active window), and the child frame window where the focus currently is located. For instance, if something within a particlar tab is focused, then the acitve window is the chrome browser window containing it and the child frame window is the DOM ‘window’ loaded within the tab.” Neil Deakin has written a “Focus How To” explaining these changes and giving developers a guide to how things work with the new system.

Undo Close Window has landed

Paul O’Shannessy writes, “I’m happy to announce the landing of Undo Close Window. This adds a menu and keyboard shortcut for reopening your previously closed windows. By default we store 3 windows (though sometimes more due to special cases involving pop-up windows).” For more information about this new feature, see Paul’s blog post where he gives a quick history of the feature and links to the relevant bugs if you want to dig into the code or other details.

Mozilla Foundation team priorities

Earlier this month, the Mozilla Foundation team held a virtual work week to go over its priorities for the year. “Mostly this was about refining ideas we’d already discussed in the past, and making some choices about where our small four person team could have the most leverage and impact.” Some of the high level goals that emerged from that meeting are: Communications, Community, Programs, and Organization. Mark Surman’s blog post goes into a lot more detail, including some of the activities the team is pursuing towards achieving these goals. As always, Mark is looking for feedback, so check out his blog post and get involved with the conversation.

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 Deb Richardson and is published every Tuesday morning. If you have any news or announcements you would like to have included in our next issue, please send them to: about-mozilla[at]mozilla.com.

If you would like to get this newsletter by email, just head on over to the about:mozilla newsletter subscription form. Fresh news, every Tuesday, right to your inbox.

April 28, 2009 06:46 PM

Please note: Firefox 3.5 Beta 4 is a public preview release intended for developer testing and community feedback. It includes many new features as well as improvements to performance, web compatibility, and speed. We recommend that you read the release notes and known issues before installing this beta.

Firefox 3.5 (formerly known as Firefox 3.1) Beta 4 is now available for download. This milestone is focused on testing the core functionality provided by many new features and changes to the platform scheduled for Firefox 3.5. Ongoing planning for Firefox 3.5 can be followed at the Firefox 3.5 Planning Center, as well as in mozilla.dev.planning and on irc.mozilla.org in #shiretoko.

New features and changes in this milestone that require feedback include:

• This beta is now available in 70 languages - get your local version.
• Improved tools for controlling your private data, including a Private Browsing Mode.
• Better performance and stability with the new TraceMonkey JavaScript engine.
• The ability to provide Location Aware Browsing using web standards for geolocation.
• Support for native JSON, and web worker threads.
• Improvements to the Gecko layout engine, including speculative parsing for faster content rendering.
• Support for new web technologies such as: HTML5 <video> and <audio> elements, downloadable fonts and other new CSS properties, JavaScript query selectors, HTML5 offline data storage for applications, and SVG transforms.

Testers can download Firefox 3.5 Beta 4 builds for Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux in 70 different languages. Developers should also read the Firefox 3.5 for Developers article on the Mozilla Developer Center.

Note: Please do not link directly to the download site. Instead we strongly encourage you to link to this Firefox 3.5 Beta 4 milestone announcement so that everyone will know what this milestone is, what they should expect, and who should be downloading to participate in testing at this stage of development.

April 28, 2009 02:22 AM

As part of the Mozilla Corporation’s ongoing security and stability process, Firefox 3.0.10 is now available for Windows, Mac, and Linux users as a free download from getfirefox.com.

We strongly recommend that all Firefox users upgrade to this latest release. If you already have Firefox 3, you will receive an automated update notification within 24 to 48 hours. This update can also be applied manually by selecting “Check for Updates…” from the Help menu.

For a list of changes and more information, please see the Firefox 3.0.10 release notes.

Please note: If you’re still using Firefox 2.0.0.x, this version is no longer supported and contains known security vulnerabilities. Please upgrade to Firefox 3 by downloading Firefox 3.0.10 from getfirefox.com.

April 27, 2009 10:05 PM

April 23, 2009 12:47 AM

As part of the Mozilla Corporation’s ongoing security and stability process, Firefox 3.0.9 is now available for Windows, Mac, and Linux users as a free download from getfirefox.com.

We strongly recommend that all Firefox users upgrade to this latest release. If you already have Firefox 3, you will receive an automated update notification within 24 to 48 hours. This update can also be applied manually by selecting “Check for Updates…” from the Help menu.

For a list of changes and more information, please see the Firefox 3.0.9 release notes.

Please note: If you’re still using Firefox 2.0.0.x, this version is no longer supported and contains known security vulnerabilities. Please upgrade to Firefox 3 by downloading Firefox 3.0.9 from getfirefox.com.

April 22, 2009 12:08 AM

Here's a summary of SeaMonkey/Mozilla-related work I've done in week 16/2009 (April 13 - April 19, 2009):

• Release Management:
  Continuing uploads of contributed builds for SeaMonkey 1.1.16.
• Download Manager:
  Based on the new patch Callek did put up for the backend switch, I did a new version of new UI patch as well as the tests, both have the needed reviews now and only need addressing of some final nits to be actually ready for landing once the backend patch is ready for that as well.
  The progress dialogs have a first patch up and a first review pass that showed a number of additional things to work on.
  Additionally, I posted a patch for making toolkit tests pass with our UI patches, it was found to not be technically wrong but not as beautiful as expected, let's see if either Shawn as maintainer on the toolkit side or I have better ideas.
• SeaMonkey Buildbots:
  A patch for getting a comm-central unit test class in a common place was created and reviewed this week, at the time I'm writing this it even has landed!
• Linuxwochen Wien:
  I spent a good amount of time both preparing my talk and hanging around with local FLOSS people at Linuxwochen Wien.
  Along with that, I converted the core of my Mandelbrot app to a web demo and started talks for a MozCamp (or OpenWebCamp?) in Vienna in October, see my related blog post for details on all of those.
• Various Discussions:
  GSoC project decisions, fixing the workaround for the (in)famous EM RDF leak, EV cert UI, "upvar2" landing, Mozilla group/list spam, mail account autoconfig work, static builds for nightlies and releases, new SeaMonkey buildbots coming "soon"?, etc.

At Linuxwochen, I once again realized I'm way too litte networked with FLOSS people locally in Austria, but I think this time I'll really start "open source beering" around and join some regular meetups of the FSFE people, OpenStreetMap contributors or Open Source Experts interest group of the local chamber of commerce. I think the Mozilla community, SeaMonkey and I can all benefit from commucation with those groups as well as them and the open Internet can benefit the other way round. And organizing MozCamp Wien should probably help there as well.

I'd advise you to do the same: connect with your local communities and spread the word to strengthen the open Internet!

April 21, 2009 09:37 PM

Now and again, we’ll come across volunteers who speak languages where we do not have a localization, but who look promising to join us for future Firefox releases.  We receive references from everywhere: Gerv forwards me names from the comments on his blog; Gen does outreach at conferences he attends and then sends us information; or we find newcomers through our l10n newsgroup. 

Soon after, one of us then makes contact to see if the people are ready or willing to start our localization process.  If the answer is yes, we give them the basic set of documents to get a localization going and we then start the work together, oftentimes with Mozilla’s l10n community helping to answer questions along the way.

Swahili, Romansh, and Oriya are a few in our near-term pipeline.  Which languages are in our longer-term list?  Maybe you saw Gen’s post about a Gecko-based browser in Khmer.  And, here’s a new one: a screen shot from new volunteers who are working on localizing Firefox into Azerbaijani. If you know of some other possibilities, please feel free to share them here.

April 21, 2009 08:21 PM

In this issue…

• This Wednesday: QA Meetup
• Cool new Firefox 3.5 demos
• Firefox 3.5 beta 4: 70 localizations
• Automating tests for Fennec
• JavaScript 3.1: Brendan Eich interviewed
• Bespin community update
• Proposed Mozilla accessibility strategy
• Friday April 24: Test day for Firefox 3.5 beta 4
• BrowserCouch: JavaScript CouchDB implementation
• Thunderbird dev docs getting a kick start
• NVDA and Firefox for website accessibility testing
• Developer calendar
• About about:mozilla

This Wednesday: QA Meetup
The Mozilla QA team is hosting a meetup at 6:30pm PDT on April 22 in Mountain View, California. The meeting will center around a testing hack-a-thon whose goal is to do some live testing of the development version of Firefox 3.5. All you need is your laptop and a desire to get involved with the development of Firefox. This really is a great chance to get involved with the project if you’re in the Mountain View area — the QA team will be on hand to help you get set up, to answer any of your questions, and to help out however they can. Pizza and drinks will be provided!

Cool new Firefox 3.5 demos
Paul Rouget, part of Mozilla’s developer relations team and crack demo maker, has been hard at work again, producing a handful of new demos of some of the new capabilities of Firefox 3.5. The demos show how Firefox 3.5 has improved support of XMLHttpRequest including two new features, how the new Web Workers implementation works, a quick experiment using Canvas and the newly supported <video> element, and an interesting demonstration of <video> combined with CSS3 and SVG. Of course, you’ll need the latest Firefox beta in order to see these demos in action.

Firefox 3.5 beta 4: 70 localizations
The Mozilla localization team has announced that Firefox 3.5 beta 4 will be available in 70 languages. Seth Bindernagel writes, “The number is huge, but it was the effort and patience from our localizers that was most successful.” 70 of the 71 localizations made it through a somewhat chaotic beta process, making this our most successful localized beta ever. Seth makes special mention of the six new locales that are participating: Spanish (Mexican), Kazakh (Kazakhstan), Bengali (Bengladesh), Assamese (India), Croatian (Croatia), and Tamil (India). This is really phenomenal news, and everyone involved with all the localizations should be immensely proud of what they have accomplished.

Automating tests for Fennec
Mozilla’s Quality Assurance team is looking for help. “The big push we are working on in the next couple of months is to add automated test cases to exercise the Fennec UI. Now that the product is starting to stabilize, we need to catch up and get some real automation for all the hard work the dev team has been doing.” If you’re interested in helping out with this initiative, the team suggests picking up (and running with) one of these projects: Fennec preferences, Fennec panning/zoom, Fennec download manager, Fennec awesomebar, Maemo Mochitest failures, Maemo Chrome failures, Maemo Reftest failures. For more information, see the original post over on the QMO blog.

JavaScript 3.1: Brendan Eich interviewed
The Software Development Times blog has posted an interview with Brendan Eich. “Today, I had the privilege of speaking with Brendan Eich, CTO of Mozilla Corp. and the creator of JavaScript. Brendan and his cohorts on the ECMAScript 3.1 committee recently finished working out the details for what will become the next version of JavaScript. Rather than cut up his words into a story, I’m just going to post the interview verbatim.” Check it out over at the SDTimes weblog.

Bespin community update
Dion Almaer has posted a new Bespin community update. Included is a video by Kevin Dangoor, showing the results of his work to integrate VCS with Bespin. Also new is support for searching within a file, with a partially implemented search design. The settings implementation has been changed, too. “We are finding that the user specific BespinSettings project is a great place to store all of your user specific data. The editor settings will now be found at settings.txt.” Bespin now also has themes. “There are some core themes that you get out of the box…simple white, black, and a recent ‘Pastels’. We will be moving this format to simple CSS soon.” For further details, see Dion’s blog post.

Proposed Mozilla accessibility strategy
Frank Hecker has published a new proposed high-level strategy for Mozilla-related accessibility efforts. It is not a detailed roadmap or a commitment to fund such work, but is intended to provide a context within which Mozilla can make overall decisions about where funding and effort should be concentrated. “This is especially important because our resources are very much finite, and we will need to make decisions about what we should do and what we should leave undone or leave for others to do.” The strategy document is a work in progress that will be revised over time to reflect changing circumstances and priorities. Frank is looking for feedback, which you can leave on his blog post.

Friday April 24: Test day for Firefox 3.5 beta 4
The QA team has announced that the Firefox 3.5 beta 4 test day will be taking place on Friday, April 24th. “We need your awesome testing skills to make sure it is as great as it possibly can be! Our community representatives will be available through IRC chat (channel #testday on irc://irc.mozilla.org), QMO forums, as well as the dev-quality newsgroup to help with your questions, comments, and suggestions.” The test day announcement has all the details, including how to get ready, some tips, and specific ways you can help.

BrowserCouch: JavaScript CouchDB implementation
Inspired by Vlad Vukicevic’s blog post outlining reasons why he’s not a fan of exposing a specific implementation of SQL to web content, Atul Varma spent some time prototyping a JavaScript implementation of CouchDB, which he has dubbed BrowserCouch. “A CouchDB-like API seems like a nice solution to persistent storage on the Web because some many of its semantics are delegated out to the JavaScript language, which makes it potentially easy to standardize, as well as easy to learn for Web developers.” Atul is clear that this is very much a work-in-progress, and more information about BrowserCouch is available through Atul’s blog.

Thunderbird dev docs getting a kick start
Eric Shepherd, Mozilla’s Developer Documentation lead, has blogged that the folks over at Mozilla Messaging have gotten themselves a documentation expert to help get the Thunderbird documentation project underway. “Jennifer Zickerman will be helping to figure out what’s needed, what needs to be fixed, and how to get everything organized. She’ll also be goading people into contributing the needed documentation.” It’s always good to have more hands on board working on Mozilla’s documentation projects, and we’re all looking forward to seeing her contributions on the Mozilla Developer Center.

NVDA and Firefox for website accessibility testing
Marco Zehe has published an article on how to use NVDA (Non-visual Desktop Access) and Firefox to do website testing. “The article is meant as an introduction, not as a replacement for the NVDA user guide, and it is certainly not meant to replace other accessibility testing tools you might use for your website testing, just as an additional tool to help you get a feel for how blind users interact with your web sites or web applications.” Marco’s article is available through his weblog, and he welcomes comments and feedback.

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 Deb Richardson and is published every Tuesday morning. If you have any news or announcements you would like to have included in our next issue, please send them to: about-mozilla[at]mozilla.com.

If you would like to get this newsletter by email, just head on over to the about:mozilla newsletter subscription form. Fresh news, every Tuesday, right to your inbox.

April 21, 2009 04:34 PM

Pascal Chevrel introduced me to an experiment he calls “main.lang string checker” that he created over the weekend.  With this tool, localizers and the l10n-drivers team at Mozilla can check the status of the main.lang file, which is a kind of “po” file we use on our static html sites.  Pascal has been meaning to create this tool for some time.  It’s not overly complex, but it will help when either the Mozilla QA team, a localizer, or Pascal (or Stas) asks about specific files not being translated.

For an example, let’s take a look at French locale’s page.  Here you’ll see a section titled “Missing strings.” and another named “Strings identical to English.”  At the bottom is a link to the French translations of the strings in the fr main.lang in SVN.  At this page, a localizer has a basic snapshot of the state of their team’s web l10n.

I see some quick and direct benefits:

1. Localizers can now see very specifically what l10n strings need examination
2. New localizaiton teams who have finished localizing the Firefox product can see the the web localization tasks ahead
3. Mozilla improves its communication regarding what specifically needs to be accomplished for a version to become official

This is just another starting point.  We’ll have to work on unifying all of the recent improvements and forthcoming changes we’ll be seeing over the next couple weeks and months.  But, please find your locale of interest to see what needs to be investigated and possibly translated.

Thanks, Pascal.

April 20, 2009 11:23 PM

Holy crap, that’s a lot!

For those who might not have been on today’s Firefox call at 11 AM (UTC -7), Axel announced that we have 69 locales participating in beta 4. (After the meeting, Macedonia went green!!) The number is huge, but it was the effort and patience from our localizers that was most impressive.  Here’s why they made it a success:

• In the initial communication about Firefox 3.5 beta 4, we mentioned that the new beta would only be about 20 strings.  It turned out to be 145 to translate!  That’s not trivial.  In terms of time required to do this, it goes from probably 1 hour to 1 day of work, depending on localizer familiarity with the process.  No one complained about the increase in strings…
• Along the way, the code freeze slipped to April 15, after we pushed everyone to be ready by April 6.  Again, no complaints from our localizers…
• Bugs regarding siteSearch and Mibbit caused some “breakage” to all of our localizations.  Stas asked everyone over a few posts to the l10n newsgroup for their patience and understanding until proper policies were established on how to resolve bugs.   And, no complaints from the localizers, once again…

In the end 70 of our 71 localizations made it into the beta process, making this our most successful localized beta ever.

Special congratulations to six new locales who will participate:

1. Spanish (Mexican)
2. Kazakh (Kazakhstan)
3. Bengali (Bengladesh)
4. Assamese (India)
5. Croatian (Croatia)
6. Tamil (India)

This one is nearly passed off to build and then we’ll be moving on to the Firefox 3.5 release candidates and final release.  Can we get over 70?  I’d bet on it.

April 15, 2009 07:16 PM

In this issue…

• Help about:mozilla with a simple click
• Firefox Support: Writing concise documents
• Mozilla Labs: On rating mechanisms
• Mozilla in Brazil update
• Experimental add-ons and logins
• Firefox.next: Tabs on the side?
• Munich Mozilla meetup in May
• Taskfox prototype: Ubiquity in Firefox
• What does the web look like?
• Developer calendar
• About about:mozilla

Help about:mozilla with a simple click

Every week, this newsletter is published in four formats — html email, plaintext email, web feed, and as a blog post (which also gets syndicated through Planet). This array of formats makes it difficult to gather any stats about how many people read the newsletter, where they’re from, so on and so forth. I know how many people subscribe to the email version, but that’s about it.

So, I would like your help. By visiting this link — http://bit.ly/12wrek — you will be taken to a post on my blog by way of a bit.ly URL redirect, allowing me to gather some rough stats about our newsletter readers. This is entirely voluntary of course, but I’d really appreciate it if you’d help me out. If you want to help even more, please leave your feedback about this newsletter on the blogpost or by sending email to deb@mozilla.com…I really do want to know what you think about about:mozilla. Thanks!

Firefox Support: Writing concise documents

The Firefox Support team has been working hard to improve our support knowledge base, most recently bringing website usability expert Neil Lee in to help with a usability audit of the site. “One observation he made was that some articles in our Knowledge Base are a bit verbose, making them harder than necessary to read. We’ve updated our Best Practices for Support Documents page to include emphasis on writing concisely and reducing redundancy.” Like all aspects of the Mozilla project, the Firefox Support site is the product of volunteers — if you’re interested in helping other people learn to use and love Firefox, you should head over to the Firefox Support site and read about how to get started.

Mozilla Labs: On rating mechanisms

Pascal Finette has been heading up the Mozilla Labs Concept Series project, and he has written a post about online rating mechanisms that the team has been thinking about for a while. “We want to add the ability for users to rate concepts in the Mozilla Labs Concept Series. The general thought behind this is that a robust rating system allows good ideas to bubble up - and thus makes them easier to spot.” Included in the post is a sketch and a link to a mockup rating slider that is being considered. Pascal is looking for discussion and feedback on the idea and his initial prototype, which you can post over in the Concept Series discussion forum.

Mozilla in Brazil update

Alix Franquet has posted an update about Mozilla activities and accomplishments in Brazil. “The community is vibrant and involved in all the current projects, and Firefox usage is increasing! Net Applications reports that market share was 38.6% in March 2009, up from 19% in November 2007 when we started increasing our activity level in Brazil.” Alix goes on to talk about some of the exciting projects that have taken place in Brazil over the past few months, including LAN house workshops, a video testimonials campaign, the new Mozilla Brasil blog, and ongoing press outreach. Upcoming events and plans are also outlined in Alix’s post, which you can read over at her weblog.

Experimental add-ons and logins

The Addons.mozilla.org (AMO) team has made a significant change to the user experience related to experimental add-ons on the site. “One of the pieces of feedback in our recent survey was that add-on developers really wanted to remove the login requirement for experimental add-ons. So we did it. Now users who are logged out can install an experimental add-on by clicking a checkbox. We felt this solution was simple while still getting users to take a moment to ponder their decision to live on the cutting edge. We feel this change will help add-on developers get feedback and reviews from the greater community.” For more details on this and some other AMO changes, see Nick’s post over at the Mozilla Add-ons blog.

Firefox.next: Tabs on the side?

Aza Raskin and the Firefox crew have been thinking hard about tabs lately. “Inspired by numerous tabs-on-the-side extensions (in particular Tree Tabs by Piro-san), hall-way conversations, and Oliver Reichenstein’s recent blog post, we’ve been thinking more about the possibilities and ramifications of putting ‘tabs’ on the side of the browser.” Aza’s blog post discusses the idea further, talking about hardware (screens are generally wider than they are tall), web applications, personalization, grouping, and workspaces among other things. “This is just the start of a conversation around tabs-on-the-side. How do you use the web, and what kind of features would you like to see on the side?” Join the conversation over on Aza’s weblog.

Munich Mozilla meetup in May

Carsten Book (aka Tomcat) is planning to host the first Mozilla Meetup in Munich on May 14th at 6pm. “The idea of the Meetups is to connect Mozilla community members in local areas. And I think meetups can be organized all over the world. The Mozilla Community and Firefox fans and Mozilla employees are spread all over the world, so if you are interested in organizing such a meetup in your local area, feel free!” For more information about Carsten’s meetups idea, check out his original blog post and his more recent announcement.

Taskfox prototype: Ubiquity in Firefox

The Firefox team is currently working on Taskfox, a project to bring some of the power of the Ubiquity experiment to Firefox, and they’ve put together a web demo/prototype written entirely in HTML and JavaScript. The demo has only been tested in Firefox, and since it’s a prototype it’s not as responsive as it could be — type slowly, or it won’t work. Aza Raskin has written up several notes about the Taskfox prototype (what’s there, what isn’t, how things have changed, etc). The team also has a weekly public meeting every Thursday at 3:00pm PDT if you would like to join in and get involved.

What does the web look like?

Asa Dotzler has done some fun number crunching to generate an illustration of how the Web has changed over time. “The chart is a mash up of about 40 different data sources from usage, to market share, to installed base, for browsers, internet connected computers, and operating systems. Working through all that data, I was able to come up with something I think approximates the Web’s user growth and browser changes over the last 13 years.” The chart and full explanation are available on Asa’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. 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 Deb Richardson and is published every Tuesday morning. If you have any news or announcements you would like to have included in our next issue, please send them to: about-mozilla[at]mozilla.com.

If you would like to get this newsletter by email, just head on over to the about:mozilla newsletter subscription form. Fresh news, every Tuesday, right to your inbox.

April 14, 2009 04:40 PM

Here's a summary of SeaMonkey/Mozilla-related work I've done in week 15/2009 (April 6 - April 12, 2009):

• Release Management:
  With getting good smoketesting on all major platform within two days (thanks a lot, folks!), I could finish the release process for SeaMonkey 1.1.16 and make it go public on Tuesday, fixing the recently found exploitable XSLT crash for which Firefox released 3.0.8 as well as two other critical vulnerabilities that enable us to stay secure even when Firefox 3.0.9 is being released and advisories go public with it.
• Automated tests:
  I split off the context menu test and fixes and finally could get plain mochitests and browser-chrome tests for suite/browser into the tree. Unfortunately one of the latter tests now shows a random orange, I hope to find a workaround for that.
• SeaMonkey Buildbots:
  I finally correctly fixed the crontab entries for restarting metacity on our Linux tests buildbot machine so that it shouldn't stay orange when something makes the window manager crash.
  Additionally, I added options for switching off ref-/crashtests and mochitest suites in the comm-central unit test buildbot factory so that Thunderbird will be able to share the same class in the future. (See bug 488116 about moving it to a generic place.)
• Download Manager:
  I ported the existing tests for the toolkit/mozapps UI to our new download manager UI implementation, which also made me find a few bugs I fixed in my patch, and a few things to address as followups after the main rework has landed.
  Additionally, I finished up everything I had in mind for progress dialogs, though not all reactions on my post about them sound positive so far. Some of the comments might be good to address, some my just appear out of being used to a somewhat different look (which I consider plain ugly, sorry) and might fade away when actually using the new implementation.
• Build System:
  I (hopefully) finally figured out a way to make Windows version numbers be dynamically changed based on the application's version known centrally to the build process. I hope it turns out to work correctly and be able to get into the tree soon, it will nicely improve the release process.
• SeaMonkey L10n:
  Following a face-to-face review from Axel in Berlin, I now did a new patch for SeaMonkey default profile L10n, I hope this will pass and make localizing those somewhat awkward parts easier.
• German L10n:
  Checked in the German L10n of the last set of changes from "card" to "contact" in addressbook to keep de SeaMonkey trunk complete.
• Various Discussions:
  Broken Linux nightly updates, GSoC applications, the (in)famous EM RDF leak, EV cert UI, "upvar2" landing, MozCamp Vienna, Debian packages, Mozilla group/list spam, mail account autoconfig work, QT port building, etc.

I spent all of Monday with the Mozilla Europe Community Tour, taking a trip from my home town of Steyr through the scenic "Wachau" valley along the Danube river right up to Vienna with Sonny, Greg and Arzhel, having an nice and small event with local open source folks and ending in a bar, coming home very late that night (or morning?). I met them again on Tuesday but couldn't spend so much time as I finally needed to get 1.1.16 out the door. It was nice to meet those folks and spend some time with them, if anyone else from the Mozilla community happens to take a trip to Vienna, please tell me, I always like to meet people!

And while we are on meeting people, I got word this week that my vacation in the US Gulf Region (or whatever you call an area roughly spreading from Houston to Atlanta) should actually be possible this November. If you happen to live or otherwise stay there, please tell me, would be nice to meet up!

April 13, 2009 03:22 PM

April 09, 2009 06:37 PM

April 09, 2009 06:35 PM

Here's a summary of SeaMonkey/Mozilla-related work I've done in week 14/2009 (March 30 - April 5, 2009):

• Release Management:
  I started the release process for a 1.1.16 release that fixes the recently found exploitable XSLT crash for which Firefox released 3.0.8 as well as two other critical vulnerabilities that enable us to stay OK from a security POV even when Firefox 3.0.9 is being released and advisories go public with it.
• SeaMonkey Buildbots:
  For getting a fix for the SeaMonkey MacOS mochitest breakage to actually work, I needed to switch our buildbot configurations to calling the make targets instead of runtests.py directly, and so I decided to give the buildbot configs a long overdue overhaul to be more similar to what the Firefox buildbots are calling. Along with that, I enabled a11y tests for SeaMonkey.
  I found one more abstraction problem that keeps us from going all the way with both builders and testers (and make both use generic pools of slaves), but I spent lots of time this week one making the tester buildbots use a configuration that is very much like what the Firefox buildbots are using. The builders will follow when the abstraction works properly and ultimately we will merge both together and even enable release automation with the same master and the then-existing generic slave pools.
• Automated tests:
  I did a new patch for browser mochitests, but correcting those context menu accesskeys along with that isn't that easy after all.
• German L10n:
  Updated German strings to current SeaMonkey code.
• Various Discussions:
  Modern theme updates, GSoC applications, www.mozilla.org redesign, mailnews disentanglement, security firedrill, stringbundle implementations and getting formatted strings, BMO process changes, etc.

The Mozilla Europe Community Tour makes stopped in my home town of Steyr on Sunday and we had quite some fun then and on Monday. If you are somewhere along their way, feel free to contact Sonny, Greg and Arzhel, they're cool guys and surely happy to meet you!

April 08, 2009 09:18 PM

In this issue…

• Design Challenge tutorial videos
• Mozilla Support announces version 1.0
• Mozilla Labs March update
• Camino 1.6.7 released
• Metrics: Why people don’t install Firefox
• Firebug tabs-on-top
• Revisiting the Fennec default theme
• Media data cache in Gecko
• Copenhagen developer camp
• QA Meetup in Mountain View
• Developer calendar
• About about:mozilla

Design Challenge tutorial videos
The Design Challenge is an event which aims to bring students from all over the world together to work on one specific question: “What would a browser look like if the Web was all there was? No windows, no unnecessary trappings. Just the Web.” Participants have taken part in mentoring and tutoring sessions that consisted of 11 talks put together by some of the folks at Mozilla. All of the tutoring sessions were recorded and have now been made available as videos, which you can check out through Pascal Finette’s blog post.

Mozilla Support announces version 1.0
Last week the Mozilla Support team launched version 1.0 of SUMO, Mozilla’s community support project. Driven by the Mozilla community, SUMO has already made a big difference to Firefox users around the world. Version 1.0 includes improvements to localization, allowing more volunteers get involved helping with translation of support articles and ultimately helping to solve more user problems. Check out the SUMO blog for more information about this project and its most recent release.

Mozilla Labs March update
Mozilla Labs posted its March Update last week. Included are status updates for the Concept Series, Design Challenge, Personas, Weave, and Bespin. Also included were short reports from both the London and Mountain View Labs Nights. As always, you’re invited to host your own Labs Night, and if you do please make sure to let the team know so it can be added to the Labs event calendar!

Camino 1.6.7 released
Camino 1.6.7 was released last week, a maintenance release which contains various security and stability updates. Camino is available in 14 languages, and can be downloaded from the Camino Project website.

Metrics: Why people don’t install Firefox
The Mozilla Metrics team devised, ran, and have since written up the results of an interesting experiment towards answering some questions around why people don’t successfully install Firefox. “Installing a piece of software can be a challenging process for the typical person to traverse. For example, with Firefox, we know that each day there are more than 50,000 people who fall into the following group — they complete the download process, but don’t then complete their installation of Firefox.” The experiment and results have been published as a fascinating series of articles on the Metrics Blog: Improving the Experience of Installing Firefox, and Why People Don’t Install Firefox - Part I, Part II, and Part III.

Firebug tabs-on-top
The Firebug team has been hard at work on Firebug 1.4, and part of that includes some user-interface improvements that Curtis Bartley is working on. Curtis recently landed his Firebug tabs-on-top UI refactoring, and has written about it on his weblog. “This change is pretty close to the one I described and prototyped in February (see Improving the Firebug UI) and which in turn follows my original proposal from late last year (see Firebug UI: Tabs on the Top).” These changes are only available in the most recent versions of the Firebug 1.4 alpha, including firebug-1.4.0a17.xpi or later, available from GetFirebug.com.

Revisiting the Fennec default theme
The Fennec team, having recently released their first Beta, has started brainstorming about how they can further improve and add to an already clean and easy-to-use interface. Sean Martell has joined the effort, and has written about some of the work they’re doing on his weblog, talking about the button look and feel, bookmarks, and endcaps (the bits at either end of things like the URL bar). As always, the team is looking for feedback as none of the current designs are set in stone. If you’d like to jump into the conversation, you should read through Sean’s post and leave your comments on his blog.

Media data cache in Gecko
Robert O’Callahan has added a new media data cache to the Gecko trunk, which should appear on the 1.9.1 branch soon. “Media applications want fast, ‘on demand’ random access to media data, for pausing, seeking, etc. But we are primarily interested in transporting media data using HTTP over the Internet, which has high latency. Also, transferring data over the Internet can be slow and/or unpredictable, so we want to read ahead to a buffer and cache as much data as possible. The job of the media cache is to resolve this impedance mismatch. The media cache reads data from Necko channels into file-backed storage, and offers a random-access file-like API to the stream data (nsMediaCacheStream). Along the way it solves several problems.” For much more detail about the media cache, you should read Roc’s weblog.

Copenhagen developer camp
The Mozilla and Maemo projects are organizing a joint developer camp in Copenhagen the last weekend of May. If you are interested in mobile development — specifically in Fennec, Fennec add-ons, and Maemo 5 applications — this event is for you. The meeting is open and free, but registration is required. The event will be taking place on May 30-31 with an opening-night event on May 29 (Friday), at the IT University of Copenhagen. For all the details, see Paul Rouget’s announcement.

QA Meetup in Mountain View
The Mozilla QA team is hosting a meetup on April 22 in Mountain View, California. The meeting will center around a testing hack-a-thon whose goal is to do some live testing of the in-development version of Firefox 3.5. All you need is your laptop and a desire to get involved with the development of Firefox. This really is a great chance to get involved with the project if you’re in the Mountain View area — the QA team will be on hand to help you get set up, to answer any of your questions, and to help out however they can. Pizza and drinks will be provided!

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 Deb Richardson and is published every Tuesday morning. If you have any news or announcements you would like to have included in our next issue, please send them to: about-mozilla[at]mozilla.com.

If you would like to get this newsletter by email, just head on over to the about:mozilla newsletter subscription form. Fresh news, every Tuesday, right to your inbox.

April 07, 2009 04:45 PM

April 06, 2009 08:45 AM

In this issue…

• Firefox 3.0.8 security release now available
• Personas: what will your browser wear today?
• Weave 0.3 released!
• Bringing accelerated 3D to the web
• Notifications and flow
• Mozilla.org redesign: round 2
• Introducing Taskfox: Ubiquity + Firefox
• Canvas 3D extension update
• Help test the new Spread Firefox!
• Mozilla @ Seneca: how it really works
• Developer calendar
• About about:mozilla

Firefox 3.0.8 security release now available

As part of the Mozilla Corporation’s ongoing security process, Firefox 3.0.8 is now available for Windows, Mac, and Linux users as a free download from GetFirefox.com. We strongly recommend that all Firefox users upgrade to this latest release. If you already have Firefox 3, you will receive an automated update notification, or the update can be applied manually by selecting “Check for Updates…” from the Help menu. For a list of changes and other information, please see the Firefox 3.0.8 release notes.

Personas: what will your browser wear today?

Mozilla Labs is expanding its effort to help you give your Firefox the look you want. Personas are free, easy-to-install “skins” for Firefox that make changing the look of your browser as easy as changing your shirt. With Personas, you can choose hundreds of artist-created designs from sports, fashion, cause, and music categories, seeded with new styles from leading brands and gifted designers. You can also turn Firefox into a canvas and create your own design to share with the community. Watch a demo and find out more by visiting GetPersonas.com. And after you give Personas a shot, let us know what you think.

Weave 0.3 released!

Mozilla Labs has announced the release of Weave 0.3. “If you have not looked at Weave recently, now is a great time to jump in and try it out. This release includes a major rewrite of many of Weave’s key components since the last major release in June.” Some of the major changes include: increased reliability and performance, support for Fennec (the Firefox Mobile project), and a whole new server architecture. If you would like to try Weave or even get involved with testing and development, you can get more information through the Mozilla Labs weblog.

Bringing accelerated 3D to the web

Last week, Mozilla and the Khronos Group announced that Mozilla will be leading an initiative to bring accelerated 3D to the web. Mozilla will work with the Khronos Group to extend the exploration and experimentation process. Mozilla’s Vladimir Vukicevic has written more about the initiative on his weblog. “People are doing more and more on the Web, and are coming to expect more from the applications that they use. Web applications already have access to features that have traditionally been reserved for desktop apps. Adding 3D to this mix ensures that current Web apps can experiment with new user experiences, while also enabling new classes of Web applications.” More information about this new initiative is available on the Mozilla Blog.

Notifications and flow

Alex Faaborg, part of the Firefox design team, has written an interesting article that discusses browser notifications and user flow. “If you think of the browser as your vehicle for exploring any type of information on the Web, it’s obviously very important that the tool cognitively fades away and disappears. Aspects like not visually integrating, or displaying a notification, will very easily break flow. Suddenly a few eye movements and brain cycles become a big deal, because it is pulling the user out of a whole cognitive state. The browser is no longer an extension of themselves.” Alex goes on to talk about what all of this has to do with Firefox, particularly in terms of the “new tab” interface the Firefox and Labs teams have been experimenting with.

Mozilla.org redesign: round 2

David Boswell is heading up the project to redesign the Mozilla.org website, and he’s posted another update. “Happy Cog has posted their second round of designs. This latest concept incorporates the feedback we received over the past two weeks and the new ideas we’ve had about how to approach the site’s content. There are two concepts that show variations on how we could approach the use of color.” As with round 1, the project team is looking for feedback, so check out David’s post or the Happy Cog blog and let them know what you think.

Introducing Taskfox: Ubiquity + Firefox

The Mozilla Labs Ubiquity experiment has been extremely successful, and it continues to grow and evolve. Blair McBride writes, “There’s a huge active community of users, command authors, and core developers. Over 200,000 people are using Ubiquity every day.” While Ubiquity may not be for everyone, there are underlying benefits that the add-on offers that are universal. “That’s where Taskfox comes in. Taskfox is the codename of a project to uplift parts of Ubiquity into a future version of Firefox.” Blair’s post goes on to talk about the Taskfox project, its underlying principles, and progress on the project to date. Alex Faaborg has also posted about Taskfox, showing some of the initial UI explorations he and the team have been working on.

Canvas 3D extension update

Vlad Vukicevic writes, “An updated version of the prototype Canvas 3D extension is finally available, with a good number of improvements. Many of these came from Ilmari Heikkinen, who’s done some great work in fixing bugs and plugging holes/errors in the implementation. Also, with this release, support for OpenGL ES 1.1-based context has been dropped in order to focus on the more forward-looking ES 2.0-based work.” See Vlad’s weblog to read more about this release and download the updated add-on.

Help test the new Spread Firefox!

Mozilla’s community marketing team is looking for help testing the new Spread Firefox website. “We’ve come a long way with the Spread Firefox redesign…but could use your critical eye on the staged site (note: you’ll get a warning that the site identity is unverified because we’re using self-signed certificates — just add an exception and you’ll be able to view the staging site).” Mary’s post includes a few things to keep in mind when testing the new site, so you should read through it before getting started. The team requests that you file any bugs you find, or comment on the blog post if you have other feedback. The project’s IRC channel is #spreadfirefox on irc.mozilla.org.

Mozilla @ Seneca: how it really works

“I’ve written before about Dave Humphrey’s Mozilla course at Seneca,” says Mark Surman in a recent post, “because it shows how a traditional college and an open source project can link up to create a killer immersive learning experience for students. It’s a model I’d love to see other colleges adopt.” Mark goes on to publish a “how it all works” email that Dave wrote to explain the nuts and bolts of the Mozilla @ Seneca program. It’s worth reading if you’re interested in that project, or in open source and education in general. Additionally, if you’re interested in working with Mozilla to teach open source, or if you are a Mozilla contributor who would like to get involved with the Seneca project as a mentor, you should get in touch with Dave.

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 Deb Richardson and is published every Tuesday morning. If you have any news or announcements you would like to have included in our next issue, please send them to: about-mozilla[at]mozilla.com.

If you would like to get this newsletter by email, just head on over to the about:mozilla newsletter subscription form. Fresh news, every Tuesday, right to your inbox.

March 31, 2009 03:37 PM

Here's a summary of SeaMonkey/Mozilla-related work I've done in week 13/2009 (March 23 - 29, 2009):

• Release Management:
  Ongoing uploads of contributed builds for various platforms and languages.
• Automated tests:
  I did some more work on the ported plain mochitests and browser-chrome tests for the browser part of SeaMonkey, but still a bit more is needed to land them.
  Somewhat more unfortunate, we saw all test slaves for SeaMonkey trunk go orange and red this week, all with different reasons now. The Linux orange is goelocation mochitest failures that are somewhat understood (and probably happening on all platforms). The Mac box fails mochitests because the xpcshell http server for serving the tests just doesn't come up for unclear reasons. The Windows red is the test_reviver.js JSON test crashing without us having any clue why that could be.
  All those failures make me really unhappy, it somehow looks like there's not really anyone who cares about them failing or not - except Serge, who usually also files bug reports on them. Unfortunately, fixing them is even more rare. And in the most recent cases, finding out what's up feels like chasing ghosts.
• Build System:
  The NO_JAR_AUTO_REG cleanup I did when finding it being obsolete when investigating my build system MAOW talk did get review and could be checked in.
• MAOW Berlin:
  I spent the weekend in Berlin at the Mozilla Add-Ons Workshop, and held talks on the build system and SeaMonkey 2 extension (both in German). During the week, I spent a significant amount of time getting those slides ready for that event.
• SeaMonkey L10n:
  I added Polish to ChatZilla this week, as Adrian has found the time to localize that large chunk of strings - Thanks!
• Various Discussions:
  Modern theme updates, GSoC applications, toolbar context menu, www.mozilla.org redesign proposals, mailnews and external linkage, mailnews disentanglement, security firedrill, security group membership, in-code and MDC documentation relationships, etc.

I'm delighted that the Mozilla Europe Community Tour makes stops in my home town of Steyr (April 5) and then in Vienna (April 6+7) very soon. If anyone wants to join us there for some talk and fun, please contact us!

In other news concerning Austria/Vienna and Mozilla, my talk at Linuxwochen Wien was approved! On Saturday, April 18th, I'll talk about "The Open Internet and Mozilla" on one of the largest open source events in the region, try to spread the word about the overall Mozilla mission surrounding the open Internet and encourage the people there to help us drive this vision forward!

March 30, 2009 02:59 PM

et on y sera !

Plus d'infos sur le stand de Solutions Linux

March 30, 2009 02:02 PM