Monday, August 4, 2008

about:mozilla - Firefox 3.1 Alpha 1, Localization news, AMO, Canvas text, and more…

In this issue…

  • Firefox 3.1 Alpha 1 now available
  • Reviewing l10N goals
  • Becoming an AMO editor
  • Canvas text goes bidirectional
  • Mozilla funds SA translation team
  • Firefox 3.1: Smart Location Bar improvements
  • Mozilla’s localization dashboard
  • Developer calendar
  • Subscribe to the email newsletter

Firefox 3.1 Alpha 1 now available

The first developer milestone of the next release of Firefox - code named Shiretoko Alpha 1 - is now available for download. Shiretoko is built on pre-release version of the Gecko 1.9.1 platform, which forms the core of rich internet applications such as Firefox. Please note that this release is intended for developers and testers only. For more information, including a list of new features and links to release notes, please see the DevNews blog post.

Reviewing l10N goals

Seth Bindernagel writes, “Last week, a subset of the l10n-drivers team met in Paris to discuss many things related to l10n, including a review of goals that had been set last November before the lead-up to the release of Firefox 3. The goals were ambitious and listed many ways in which the team could create positive impact. Part of our work week was to review these goals and to find out what we did well, didn’t do well, and could do better as we create goals for the upcoming quarter.” Seth’s weblog post continues on to go through each goal in detail, discussing what went well and where things can be improved in the future.

Becoming an AMO editor

Mozilla Add-ons (AMO) is one of Mozilla’s most popular and important sites, and our Add-ons Editors are critical to maintaining a great experience for millions of add-on users. Justin Scott of the AMO team has posted an overview of what Editors do and how to get involved with with that aspect of Mozilla over at Justin’s weblog.

Canvas text goes bidirectional

Eric Butler writes, “The patch for the last of the major outstanding bugs with the WHATWG Canvas text API landed in time for a nearly spec compliant implementation to make it into Firefox 3.1 Alpha 1. I am pleased to say that Canvas now supports right-to-left text and bidirectional text resolution on its text drawing functions.” Canvas has undergone and will be undergoing other changes, as well. More information is available at Eric’s weblog.

Mozilla funds SA translation team

As reported by Tectonic, “South Africa’s award-winning multilingual software developer, Translate.org.za, has been awarded a grant by the Mozilla Corporation to extend its translation tools. Mozilla awarded the grant to Translate.org.za to further its work on Pootle, a web-based translation tool, as well as the Translate Toolkit. The grant also covers a still to be released offline translation tool.” For more details, read the full article at Tectonic, and Seth Bindernagel’s original blog post.

Firefox 3.1: Smart Location Bar improvements

Edward Lee, one of the primary developers of the Smart Location Bar (aka “Awesome Bar”), has written a blog post outlining some of the upcoming Smart Location Bar changes that will appear in Firefox 3.1. “[T]here’s some new ways to change what shows up in the Smart Location Bar such as restricting results to show only your history (and not your unvisited bookmarks) or matching only in the URL instead of also in the title. Additionally, you can see your Smart Keywords queries show up in the drop down.” For details, see Edward’s full blog post.

Mozilla’s localization dashboard

Seth Bindernagel has posted about Mozilla’s new “localization dashboard” that was created by Axel Hecht. “As our team tries to improve efficiency and outreach/service to localizers in our l10n process, this tool will greatly help in how we focus on and respond to community needs related to localization.” Seth’s post goes on to describe some of the features of the dashboard to help you get started.

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.

Subscribe to the email newsletter

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.

This content was originally posted on http://fffacts.blogspot.com/ © 2008 If you are not reading this text from the above site, you are reading a splog

Firefox 3.1 Alpha 1 now available for download

The first developer milestone of the next release of Firefox - code named Shiretoko Alpha 1 - is now available for download. Shiretoko is built on pre-release version of the Gecko 1.9.1 platform, which forms the core of rich internet applications such as Firefox. Please note that this release is intended for developers and testers only.

This Alpha of Shiretoko / Gecko 1.9.1 introduces several new features:

  • Web standards improvements in the Gecko layout engine
  • Text API for the element
  • Support for using border images
  • Support for JavaScript query selectors
  • Several improvements to the Smart Location Bar
  • A new tab switching behavior

Anyone interested in Shiretoko should read the release notes, as well as the “Firefox 3.1 For Developers” article on the Mozilla Developer Center before downloading. Please use the following links to download Shiretoko:

  • Windows: Shiretoko Alpha 1 Setup.exe
  • Mac OS X: Shiretoko Alpha 1.dmg
  • Linux: shiretoko-alpha1.tar.bz2

We would appreciate hearing about any feedback you have, or any bugs you may find.

This content was originally posted on http://fffacts.blogspot.com/ © 2008 If you are not reading this text from the above site, you are reading a splog

about:mozilla - Executive Director, Air Mozilla, Labs meetup, Firefox 3.1, Community Calendar, and more…

In this issue…

  • Mark Surman and the Mozilla Foundation
  • Air Mozilla, this Wednesday
  • Mozilla Labs Meetup, this Thursday
  • Firefox screencast contest winners
  • Control-Tab: A new (future) feature for Firefox
  • Firefox 3.1: Support for text attributes and spell checking
  • Mozilla Community Calendar
  • Firefox 3.0.1 released
  • Firefox 2.0.0.16 released
  • SeaMonkey 1.1.11 security release
  • Developer calendar
  • Subscribe to the email newsletter

Mark Surman and the Mozilla Foundation

Mitchell Baker writes, “I’m thrilled to report that we’ve identified the person we believe should lead the Mozilla Foundation into a new stage of activity. That person is Mark Surman, the role is Mozilla Foundation Executive Director. The Mozilla Foundation Board of Directors and Mark would like the Mozilla community and Mark to meet before we make a final decision. We’re inviting interested parties to talk with Mark about the Mozilla Foundation and the Executive Director role, to develop a feel for how well Mark and the Mozilla project fit together.” More information is available at Mitchell’s weblog.

Air Mozilla, this Wednesday

Asa Dotzler will be hosting another exciting edition of Air Mozilla Live on Wednesday July 23rd at 11:00am Pacific time. The guests this week will be Mitchell Baker and Mark Surman. The Air Mozilla broadcast is your opportunity to meet Mark and ask questions about the Mozilla Foundation and the Executive Director role he is currently slated to fill. If you can’t make it to the live broadcast, you can still send your questions in ahead of time by email. More details are available at Asa’s weblog.

Mozilla Labs Meetup, this Thursday

It’s time for another Mozilla Labs Monthly Meetup. This month’s meetup will be held this Thursday, July 24th, 6pm at Mozilla’s office — 1981 Landings Drive, bldg K in Mountain View, California. There will be informal lightning talks and progress updates on the various Labs projects, as well as plenty of opportunity for discussion and hacking. We will be streaming the evening out to the Labs site. If you are in the Bay Area and would like to attend, please take a moment to RSVP by leaving a comment on the Mozilla Labs blog post.

Firefox screencast contest winners

The Firefox screencast contest is over, and there are now 50 new videos to accompany the articles in the SUMO Knowledge Base. The contest team is very happy with the result and is excited to finally announce the winners. For his work on “How to customize the toolbar,” the contest judges chose Cameron Roy as the grand prize winner. Other winners (one for the best sceencast for each article) will be contacted shortly about their prizes. Thank you to everyone who participated in the contest — you’ve helped improve the knowledge base immesurably, and your work will have a lasting impact on Firefox’s 180+ million users. Check out the SUMO weblog post for more information.

Control-Tab: A new (future) feature for Firefox

Jennifer Boriss writes, “Dao Gottwald has been working for a while on his Ctrl-Tab Firefox add-on. Ctrl-Tab has two parts: a filmstrip that allows the user to quickly jump to recently used tabs, and a tab preview mode. These features have been widely used, and lately we at Mozilla have been working to give them a home as a Firefox feature. We’re happy to announce the filmstrip of recently-viewed tabs landed today and will show up in tomorrow’s nightlies as a new Firefox feature.” It is currently expected that this feature will first appear in Firefox 3.1, and there’s lots more information about this new feature and how it will affect Firefox users’ workflow at Jennifer’s weblog.

Firefox 3.1: Support for text attributes and spell checking

Marco Zehe writes, “Friday’s nightly build will include one big new feature in accessibility for Firefox 3.1: Text attributes and spell checking support.” This means that assistive technologies will now be able to get information about the font-family, font-weight, underline style, style, color, and background color of text, and also the language that the text is in, among other things. Additionally, when editing, if a word is misspelled, that word will now include an “invalid:misspelling” attribute. These new features will be fine-tuned over the next few weeks, but the team is looking for feedback if you’re able to help. For more details, please see Marco’s weblog post.

Mozilla Community Calendar

Deb Richardson is putting together a comprehensive list of weekly/regular public project meetings and other events. The wiki page for it is “Community Calendar” on the Mozilla public wiki. The plan is to eventually publish a consolidated version as a shared public calendar that everyone can subscribe to. Please check the wiki page and make any changes or additions necessary.

Firefox 3.0.1 released

As a part of Mozilla Corporation’s ongoing stability and security update process, Firefox 3.0.1 is now available for Windows, Mac, and Linux as a free download from getfirefox. It is strongly recommended that all Firefox users upgrade to this latest release. If you already have Firefox 3, you will receive an automated update notification shortly. For more information, including a list of changes, please see the Mozilla Developer News weblog.

Firefox 2.0.0.16 released

In addition to the release of Firefox 3.0.1, Firefox 2 has also been updated, and Firefox 2.0.0.16 is now available for Windows, Mac, and Linux as a free download from http://www.mozilla/firefox/all-older.html. It is strongly recommended that all Firefox 2 users upgrade to this latest release. If you already have Firefox 2, you will receive an automated update notification. This update can also be applied manually by selecting “Check for Updates…” from the Help menu.

Please note that 2.0.0.x will be maintained with security and stability updates until mid-December 2008. All users are encouraged to upgrade to Firefox 3.

SeaMonkey 1.1.11 security release

SeaMonkey Project News reports that the SeaMonkey project released a new version of its all-in-one internet suite on July 15th, 2008. “SeaMonkey 1.1.11 closes several security vulnerabilities and fixes several smaller problems found in previous versions. With that, SeaMonkey stays at the same level of security as its sibling Firefox 2, which is issuing updates for the same problems this week as well.” The SeaMonkey team urges users of older SeaMonkey versions to upgrade to this latest release. For more information, see the SeaMonkey Project News page.

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.

Subscribe to the email newsletter

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.

This content was originally posted on http://fffacts.blogspot.com/ © 2008 If you are not reading this text from the above site, you are reading a splog

Review: oldbar

The new and improved Smart Location Bar aka AwesomeBar displays the results a little differently than in Firefox 2. In Firefox 3 each result is displayed on two lines. The favicon followed by the page title in a larger font on the top line, followed by the URL in green below. In Firefox 2 the results were displayed on one line with the page URL followed by the page title. Click the samples below for full-size images:

Firefox 3 SLB
Firefox 3 Default: Smart Location Bar displays results on two lines: Favicon, Page Title; URL in green

Firefox 2 SLB
Firefox 3 with oldbar:Smart Location Bar displays results on single line: Favicon, URL, Page Title in grey

oldbar is for Firefox 3 only and is about 2K

This content was originally posted on http://fffacts.blogspot.com/ © 2008 If you are not reading this text from the above site, you are reading a splog

Tweak: Fx 3 Address Bar

One of the biggest changes to Firefox 3 is the Smart Location Bar commonly called the AwesomeBar. You are either going to like it or hate it as it is a major change as to how the address bar behaves in comparison to Firefox 2. I am not going to get into all the technical details as to how the Smart Location Bar works other than to say it displays the results based not only on addresses you have type previously (Firefox 2 behavior) but as well as browser history and bookmarks. For more detailed information on the technical workings and frequency algorithm of the Smart Location Bar see this CyberNet News article.

  • Bar Appearance - One of the first things you will notice is each result is displayed on two lines. The favicon followed by the page title in a larger font on the top line, followed by the URL in green below. In Firefox 2 the results were displayed on one line with the page URL followed by the page title. This new format may be a little easier to read, but takes up more room.
    • Oldbar - You can revert back to the Firefox 2 style by using the oldbar add-on (note this add-on only changes the display of the results, not the method the results are obtained). See Review: Oldbar for more information and samples.
    • Number of Results - By default the Smart Location Bar will display a maximum of 12 results based on what is typed in the address bar. You can increase (or in my case decrease) this number by going to a new tab and typing about:config; (if needed click the “I’ll be careful, I promise” button) filter for browser.urlbar.maxRichResults; double-click on the entry and enter the number of results you would like displayed.
  • Removing History and/or Bookmarks - Again it is important to understand the Smart Location Bar displays the results on not just previously typed URLs but your browser history and bookmarks as well. Note: If you make these changes, the Smart Location Bar will still display results on Bookmarks and History when you start typing in the bar, but then will automatically filter based on your settings once you add a couple more letters.
    • Remove Historyand Bookmarks- Like Firefox 2, you can setup so that the address bar only displays results based on addresses you have typed. From about:config filter for browser.urlbar.matchOnlyTyped; double-click on the entry to change it from ‘False’ to ‘True’
    • Remove Unvisited Bookmarks - Your displayed results will still include your bookmarks, but only those you have visited. From about:config filter for places.frecency.unvisitedBookmarkBonus; double-click on the entry and enter ‘0′ (note this is a zero, not an ‘O’). Restart Firefox and clear history.
    • Remove ALL Bookmarks - Your displayed results will only be based on your browser history as well what has already been typed in the Smart Location Bar. With about:config change the following entries to ‘0′ (note this is a zero, not an ‘O’ also be sure to Restart Firefox and clear history after making these changes):
      • places.frecency.unvisitedBookmarkBonus
      • places.frecency.bookmarkVisitBonus
This content was originally posted on http://fffacts.blogspot.com/ © 2008 If you are not reading this text from the above site, you are reading a splog

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