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.
No comments:
Post a Comment