Saturday, June 14, 2008

Coming Tuesday, June 17th: Firefox 3

Whenever we’re asked “when is Firefox going to be released” we endeavor to answer to the best of our abilities, but the truth of the matter is that we’ll only ever ship “when it’s ready”. We have a lot of indicators that help us understand when the product is ready for release: feedback from our pre-release milestones, excitement in the community and the press, availability of compatible Add-Ons, and a large active beta community helping us ensure that the release is compatible with all the various sites on the Internet.

After more than 34 months of active development, and with the contributions of thousands, we’re proud to announce that we’re ready. It is our expectation to ship Firefox 3 this upcoming Tuesday, June 17th. Put on your party hats and get ready to download Firefox 3 — the best web browser, period.

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 - Firefox 3 RC2, Governance, Accessibility, Bugdays, Acid3, T-shirts, and more…

In this issue…

  • Firefox 3 RC 2 released
  • Governance and module ownership
  • Jesse Ruderman answers your questions
  • Accessibility testcases now in Litmus
  • Applying SVG effects to HTML content
  • Help test Firefox and join the QA bugdays
  • Five points gained on Acid 3
  • Mozilla T-shirt history project
  • Help Mozilla set a Guinness World Record
  • Firefox Screencast contest continues
  • Developer calendar
  • Subscribe to the email newsletter

Firefox 3 RC 2 released

Firefox 3 Release Candidate 2 was made available for download and testing on June 4th. This is a public preview release that is intended for developer testing and community feedback. We recommend that you read the release notes and known issues pages before installing the software. More information about the Firefox 3 RC2 release is available at the Developer News weblog.

Governance and module ownership

As part of the Mozilla Project’s ongoing efforts to manage and maintain the health of its module ownership system, Mitchell Baker posted a proposal in March for updating the way that system is managed. That proposal has now been implemented, and Mitchell has posted the details on her weblog.

Jesse Ruderman answers your questions

As part of the “Ask a Developer” interview series, Asa Dotzler recently solicited questions for Jesse Ruderman, one of Mozilla’s security experts. Jesse has since answered those questions, and Asa has posted the responses on his weblog. Read the full interview on Asa’s blog.

Accessibility testcases now in Litmus

Litmus is Mozilla’s community testing platform that allows anyone to test Firefox or other Mozilla products by running a set of testcases and giving us feedback about whether the test passed or failed. The Mozilla QA team uses these test runs to do basic functionality tests (run before every beta release), full functionality tests (run before releases or release candidates), or at other times to ensure that certain areas of the product behave as expected.

Marco Zehe, Mozilla’s Accessibility QA guru, has created testcases for accessibility features in Firefox 3. If you’re interested in helping test Firefox accessibility, you should check out Marco’s blog post.

Applying SVG effects to HTML content

One problem Robert O’Callahan has been working on recently is that it’s currently hard to use SVG’s features to enhance HTML content. “For example, there is no reasonable way to clip an HTML element to a non-rectangular region, or to apply an alpha mask to an HTML element, or to apply image processing effects such as color channel manipulation to HTML elements. SVG has these features, but they can only be applied to SVG elements.” Robert has been experimenting with better ways to apply SVG effects to HTML content, the first step of which is to make SVG’s “clip-path”, “mask” and “filter” properties work when applied to HTML content. Robert has posted all the details in a full write up on his blog.

Help test Firefox and join the QA bugdays

Carsten Book has written an article talking about Mozilla’s QA Bugdays. We see a huge number of bug reports filed every day by our community of users and testers, and Bugdays are where unconfirmed bugs are either verified or closed. They’re a great way to get involved with Mozilla’s development efforts, and it doesn’t matter if you’ve ever been involved with the project before — anyone can participate and become a valuable contributor. Bugdays are held regularly, and the focus of the work changes from week to week. To find out more about QA’s Bugdays, see Carsten’s blog post.

Five points gained on Acid 3

Now that mozilla-central, the source code repository for the release of Firefox after 3.0, is open, a bunch of patches fixing bugs affecting our score on the Acid3 test have landed:

  • We pass test 30 since we now allow DOM events to be dispatched multiple times (bug 412567, Olli Pettay)
  • We pass test 38 since we now implement the replaceWholeText method and the wholeText attribute from DOM Level 3 Core (bug 421765, Jeff Walden)
  • We pass test 39 since we now implement the :nth-*() selectors (bug 75375, David Baron)
  • We pass test 40 since we now implement the :*-of-type selectors (bug 128585, David Baron)
  • We now pass test 68 (and show the results correctly when Shift-clicking on the A) thanks to a UTF-16 surrogate handling fix (bug 421576, Jeff Walden)

Mozilla T-shirt history project

John Slater is working on a new project, The T-Shirt History of Mozilla. As anyone who’s spent much time around the Mozilla community knows, t-shirts are an important part of our culture. John is working to collect photos of as many different Mozilla or Mozilla-related t-shirts as possible, and has collected 53 so far. Go to Flickr to view the whole collection and if you have a t-shirt that isn’t included yet, send John a note.

Help Mozilla set a Guinness World Record

The Firefox community is always up to some cool, collaborative way to declare their passion for Firefox. What better way to do this than to band together to set a Guinness World Record for the most software downloaded in 24 hours?

All you have to do is download Firefox 3 when it goes live on Download Day — some time in June. In the meantime, check out Download Day Headquarters and pledge to download Firefox 3. We’ll let you know when Firefox 3 goes out the door, kicking off the 24-hour attempt.

Firefox Screencast contest continues

The Firefox screencasts contest launched on May 19th, and is a great chance for you to use your talents and passion for Firefox to help create screencast support videos for SUMO. The SUMO team has compiled a list of the 100 most popular support articles from the knowledge base and are looking for help creating screencasts for all of them. There will be a prize awarded for the best screencast submitted for each article, and one grand prize for the best video overall. The contest only runs until June 15th, so you should head over to the SUMO blog for more information and to get involved!

Developer calendar
Monday

  • Mobile Meeting
  • SUMO Meeting
  • General Status Meeting

Tuesday

  • Thunderbird Meeting
  • Firefox/Gecko Meeting
  • Bug Day!

Wednesday

  • Mac Gecko Meeting
  • Performance Infrastructure Meeting
  • Performance/Leaks Meeting
  • Mozilla 2 Meeting
  • Crash Reporter + Analysis Meeting
  • Weave Meeting
  • Calendar Meeting

Thursday

  • Thunderbird Bugday

Friday

  • Test Day!

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

What’s Next For Firefox?

With the announcement that Firefox 3 is going to release next Tuesday, June 17th, what’s next? Firefox 3.1 coded named Shiretoko after the national park in Japan.



Shiretoko National Park

It is important to understand that this is going to be the next major version of Firefox 3. Regular usability & security updates will follow the 3.0.X numbering scheme. Mostly what is planned for Firefox 3.1 are features that did not make into the final Firefox 3 (note: this list is subject to change especially items marked with an asterisk *):

  • Visual tab switching*
  • tab searching/filtering*
  • bulk tagging bookmarks*
  • tag autocomplete*
  • support for
  • cross site Ajax requests
  • more power for the location bar
  • added support for CSS 3 selectors
  • improvements to Places



It should take about 6 weeks for the new features to be in place for the first Alpha due out in mid July. The final release should be sometime around the end of the year. What does this mean for Firefox 2? A very fast end of product support. This means updates and support for Firefox 2 will end about six months from the release of Firefox 3 which would be December 17th.  Also with the release of Firefox 3.1 around the same time will start the six-month clock ticking for the end of Firefox 3.0 support.

So, what about Firefox 4? That is about a year and half away at the end of 2009. This is going to a major platform change (much like we saw going from Firefox 1.5 to 2.0 in October 2006). Firefox 4 would “…introduce Mozilla2, an extensive update to the Mozilla platform to feature highlights like ActionMonkey, the merge of Mozilla’s JavaScript engine (SpiderMonkey) and Tamarin, Adobe’s JavaScript virtual machine open-sourced in late 2006.”

News Source:Mozilla Links

  • Firefox 3.1 (Shiretoko) planned features draft
  • Firefox 3.1 targeted for year’s end

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 RC3 Released

Due to the showstopper bug on the Mac OS X RC2 builds, a third Release Candidate was released on Wednesday, June 11th. Mac OS X (Windows & Linux do not need to update to RC3) users can download Firefox 3.0RC3 here.


Firefox 3 Release Candidate 3 Release Notes

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 RC3 Coming

Due to showstopper bug #436575 there will be a 3rd Release Candidate for Firefox 3. This bug which affects only Mac users causes Mozilla applications experience unkillable hangs after installing Mac OS X 10.5.3.  Apparently the underlying issue is on Apple’s side, but the Mozilla developers have come out with a work around/patch to fix this issue. Affected Mozilla applications include:

  • Camino
  • Firefox 2.0.0.14
  • Firefox 3 RC2
  • Songbird
  • Thunderbird



While there will be an RC3 for Windows and Linux builds as well, it is only a version bump, no actual updates will come with RC3. Only Mac builds will have updates with RC3.


Given the timing of this work around/patch, not sure if it is going to be included in the upcoming Firefox 2.0.0.15 release. That build had gone into a code freeze status right around the time this work around/patch was landed. So if it is not included we will likely see a Firedrill release for Firefox 2.0.0.16 (and like with RC3 only the Mac version will have the actual work around/patch. Windows/Linux builds will simply just get a version bump).

Even with this issue, the developers are still targeting a final Firefox 3 release by the end of this month. Also, no word yet when exactly RC3 will be coming out, I suspect by the end of this week.

News Source: MozillaLinks

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

AMO 3.4.3 deployment DELAYED

Due to a database issues (queries taking far too long) the deployment for the AMO 3.4.3 update has been pushed back to June 12th. The AMO 3.4.3 update addressed bug and security fixes along with search improvements, streamlining the editors’ queue, and making it easier to browse and discover themes.

News Source: Mozilla Webdev

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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