Planet Mozilla

We now have candidate builds for Firefox and Thunderbird 1.5.0.7 and need your help testing them!
Firefox: http://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/mozilla.org/firefox/nightly/1.5.0.7-candidates/rc2/ (available now!)
Thunderbird: http://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/mozilla.org/thunderbird/nightly/1.5.0.7-candidates/rc1/ (coming soon...check back tonight)

You can get an early start testing them now...and leave your feedback, issues, bugs filed, etc in the comments. Or you can join us for the upcoming 1.5.0.7 Community Test Day this Friday, September 1st. For more info visit the 1.5.0.7 Community Test Day page.

As always, these security releases are what make Firefox and Thunderbird great products! Our work together helps to keep our users up to date and safe... so any help testing these builds is much appreciated! For more info about this upcoming release, please visit the 1.5.0.7 Release page.

Thanks!
The Mozilla QA Team

August 30, 2006 10:07 PM

Initially, one of the issues that arose about the Community Giving program related to whether or not Mozilla Corporation could legally give in-kind support to volunteers who would then might use the donation to work on matters related directly to Mozilla and its software. Although we suspected we were OK, we thought it would be good to check if there were any conflicts of interest.

Today, we had a call with Mozilla’s lawyers who helped us think about this issue. They advised us that this program likely aligns with our corporate mission and would probably not result in any conflicts of interest. In many corporate giving programs, donations of money or in-kind support may raise some issues because that support might be used by the recipient to benefit the business entity that gave the donation. However, because Mozilla’s mission is so unique, what we will do with this program advances our mission, which has always related directly to the community. The lawyers advised us that we should not consider this a charity program, it is a business expense. Therefore, it should *not* be treated as a charitable expense. We are working with Mozilla’s CFO to set up the accounting procedures for the program. I am glad we resolved this issue because in my prior grant-making experiences, properly documenting how support is given was a big issue and potential liability…believe it or not.

The second issue that came up during our call was how to move forward if our support somehow placed a tax burden on the volunteer recipients. (One example, for instance, if we gave a grant to someone, what possible financial burdens to the recipients would there be?) We decided to create a list of the things that Mozilla Corporation might provide to its volunteers and send it to the lawyers for their review. They can help us think about how to document everything so our volunteers are faced with little to no burden related to income or reporting. Although it is something the Giving program should not worry too much about right now, the lawyers did say that everything we do will have some tax consequence and we should think about it.

August 30, 2006 09:37 PM

I notice Chris Blizzard (600K JPEG) does something like me, and calls his folders things like "Z-People" to make them sort to the end (I use z__todo). Grr. Why can't you set the order?

(No, I haven't looked in Bugzilla. This is a rant; I'm exempt.)

August 30, 2006 07:38 PM

The transcriptions have finally begun to come back to us, and we are excited to announce a new oral history has been added to the Digital Memory Bank. A recording of Olivia Ryan's interview with Mike Beltzner on June 5, 2006 is now available here. We hope to be presenting a new interview every two weeks from now on.

We would once again encourage further contributions. Send us your photos, emails, IRC logs! Since we are still assembling the early history of Mozilla, and pertinent objects related to the decisions to release the source would be greatly appreciated. If you lack the time to upload these files yourself please email me at mozmem@gmail.com and hopefully we can set up an alternate method to transfer the files.

August 30, 2006 06:50 PM

“Wow!” is all I can say. I didn’t quite expect this level of response to the recent Labs survey about areas for investigation but I’m really thrilled to have your feedback and participation. Here’s the survey summary.

As of August 30th, we received approximately 1800 completed surveys. Here are some of the stats:

• Almost 20% provided comments in the survey itself or as a blog comment
• About 4.2% felt that there was nothing from the listed browsers that was interesting (or simply provided comments but didn’t check any feature)
• In terms of browser interestingness, here’s how the browsers stacked up. Opera (80%), Safari (71%), Flock (38%), IE7 (70%). (Interesting being defined as one or more features from existing browsers was selected as “interesting”.)

For features, here is the top quartile of features ranked by percentage of total votes received:

Below is the full vote result:

We’ll be using all your survey and blog comments to help populate the Ideas area of Labs. Stay tuned. There were many comments essentially saying that people didn’t want to see Firefox bloated with extraneous features…I think that message came loud and clear.

August 30, 2006 06:30 PM

I don’t see it announced on the SeaMonkey Weblog; so I’m posting about it.

SeaMonkey 1.1 Alpha has been released for developers and testers. For more info, see the announcement on the SeaMonkey website.

August 30, 2006 06:22 PM

Ilan Rabinovitch let me know that the SCALE team is getting started on version 5x of the SoCal Linux Expo.

In past years, SCALE has been a great community event - the ratio of promoters to real Linux enthusiasts is low and the attendees are friendly. Also, like most other Linux conferences, attendees have a strong interest in many other FLOSS community issues and technologies, like BSD, Firefox, Apache, PHP, MySQL, Free Software licensing and so on. Hopefully I can attend this year (and can wear both my eZ hat and my Mozilla hat for the event).

The event will happen from February 10-11 and will be held at the Westin Los Angeles Airport hotel.

Get more details at: http://www.socallinuxexpo.org/scale5x/

The URL for the Call For Papers is: http://www.socallinuxexpo.org/scale5x/cfp/scale5x.pdf

August 30, 2006 02:33 PM

Business Week is running a an article “Mozilla Goes Mainstream” mainly about the marketing effort behind Firefox. It’s a pretty interesting read. Check it out.

August 30, 2006 02:19 PM

I’ve been having problems playing CDs on Windows: if I have Windows Media Player running and I switch (audio) CDs, WMP never recognizes that the CD has changed. I couldn’t figure out what was going on; I even upgraded WMP to the latest beta (which, it turns out, I intensely dislike), but that didn’t solve the problem.

So I decided to install iTunes; I’ve been impressed with it on Mac. When running the installer, the following dialog popped up: “AutoRun is turned off. iTunes won’t be able to recognize when a CD is inserted or ejected until your computer’s AutoRun setting is turned on. Do you want iTunes to turn on AutoRun for you? [Yes] No”

Whoa! One of the first things I do with every Windows install is disable autorun. This is because I sometimes insert CDs that I don’t trust, and occasionally USB sticks as well. I don’t want autorun on! But I do want my media player to be notified by the OS when I’ve inserted a new CD. Why would the AutoRun setting have any affect on this? I hate that. But at least I know what’s going on.

August 30, 2006 02:16 PM

Some time ago, in a place far, far away in the blogosphere, I received a comment in response to a post rambling about aviation (and my admiration of it) that merely said "There is beauty in things done really well."

I was wasting some time on YouTube the other day, and much like wasting time on Wikipedia, found the following video by just clicking a bunch of links.

It expertly captures the... well... the beauty in aviation executed... really well.

I actually found this video through a bunch of random clicking from of a video that a friend of mine posted of his plane executing the ILS Runway One-seven-right Approach into KDEN.

Yes, I think it's the spot-on music that really makes both of those videos.

August 30, 2006 12:57 PM

I got a email the other day asking if it is possible by using my Mozilla addon Launchy to start the Firefox Portable with within the Thunderbird Portable. So when you use Thunderbird Portable and right click on a link you can choose Firefox Portable. And when you from within Firefox Portable right click on a mailto link can choose Thunderbird Portable. And the answer is yes.

Lets say you installed Firefox Portable and Thunderbird Portable on your USB stick. Firefox Portable is installed so that the full path to the executable is something like USB_DRIVE_LETTER:\FirefoxPortable\FirefoxPortable.exe and the full path to the Thunderbird Portable executable is USB_DRIVE_LETTER:\ThunderbirdPortable\ThunderbirdPortable.exe.

The solution is to use the launchy.xml and and the %GeckoDrive% variable. The launchy.xml file is used by Launchy to add additional applications, besides those autodetected, to the right click option. The %GeckoDrive% variable always holds the drive letter from which the Gecko application was started. So if Firefox Portable was started from the drive letter Z the %GeckoDrive% variable is set to "Z:". Not that %GeckoDrive% also includes the semicolon after the drive letter.

The gives us the possibility to create a launchy.xml file that looks like this:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<configurations xmlns="http://launchy.mozdev.org/configurations">
  <application>
    <label>Firefox Portable</label>
    <type>1</type>
    <command>%GeckoDrive%\FirefoxPortable\FirefoxPortable.exe</command>
  </application>
  <application>
    <label>Thunderbird Portable</label>
    <type>2</type>
    <command>%GeckoDrive%\ThunderbirdPortable\ThunderbirdPortable.exe</command>
  </application>
</configurations>

To get it working you have to place the above text in file called launchy.xml in these two directories:
USB_DRIVE_LETTER:\ThunderbirdPortable\Data\profile\chrome\
USB_DRIVE_LETTER:\FirefoxPortable\Data\profile\chrome\

This way the next time you start your Firefox Portable or Thunderbird Portable the right click Launchy option will show you the Portable options.

August 30, 2006 12:00 PM

Asa Dotzler wrote in to tell us that the next Lunch 2.0 event will be hosted at the Mozilla HQ in Mountain View, California between noon and 1:30pm on Thursday this week. Dubbed Lunchzilla 2.0, the food-oriented meeting is being promoted as an opportunity to "meet the people working on the next version of Firefox and other Mozilla projects". Gourmet sandwiches, salads and grilled wraps will be served.

For the uninitiated, Lunch 2.0 began in February this year and is defined by its official weblog as "a social phenomenon referring to a migration of Web 2.0 company employees to other offices around the Silicon Valley area; characterized by open communication, decentralization of authority, freedom to share food and ideas, and 'the lunch as a conversation'".

All Lunch 2.0 events are open to everyone; attendees for this Thursday's event should RSVP by adding a comment to the Lunchzilla 2.0 post on the Lunch 2.0 weblog.

Talkback

August 30, 2006 01:54 AM

Asa Dotzler writes: "Mike Schroepfer is bringing back the wonderful developer chat series started by Chris Nelson of MozillaZine so many years ago, and inviting you all to join him for a Q&A and chat at 11am PDT Friday September 1, 2006 on irc.mozilla.org, channel #mozillazine.

"I think this is a great idea and I hope we can organize a weekly event like this where we bring core Mozilla people to IRC for an hour to talk about what's going in their part of the Mozilla universe."

The chat takes place at 11:00am in Mountain View (Pacific Daylight Time), which is 6:00pm UTC/GMT or 2:00pm in New York, 7:00pm in London, 10:00pm in Moscow, 2:00am (Saturday) in Beijing, 3:00am (Saturday) in Tokyo or 4:00am (Saturday) in Sydney.

Talkback

August 30, 2006 01:26 AM

I took my time for that decision, but I have decided that Disruptive Innovations will join the World Wide Web Consortium. I cannot at the same time call for changes inside W3C and remain outside, just an Invited Expert, this is just unfair. Since 2003, I had almost all the advantages of membership...

August 29, 2006 10:58 PM

As a first step, we emailed a small sample of volunteers from the QA community to understand their needs and have been collecting their responses. As mentioned in an earlier post, we will continue to reach out across our the community to see how we can help everyone. But, for now, I thought it would be good to share a summary of some of the responses to a few of the questions.

N.B. This was a small sample and does not represent the whole community…just the responses from the first people we emailed. Also, in cases where it was necessary, I summarized answers. The responses below do not represent exactly how we have decided to help. Our next step is getting back to each person to get a specific idea on how Mozilla can provide support.

What are your biggest obstacles to working on the Mozilla Project?

• Hardware requirements.
• In need of professional development support (i.e. conference attendance, workshops, travel support).
• Software requirements.
• Free time!
• It would be nice if it were possible to get some of the main web tool developers together in the same room at some point.

What do you think Mozilla should/can do to help remove those obstacles?

• Nada.
• Not necessarily pay [people], but maybe find some other companies [or] certain development efforts to fund.
• I don’t know how much Mozilla would be able to help in terms of getting enough developers to participate long enough to become reviewers.
• As for getting the developers together, helping to cover travel expenses seems to be the biggest issue.
• Provide software and/or hardware that is needed.

Specifically, what could you use to overcome your daily challenges related to working on Mozilla?

• Nothing the Mozilla Foundation/Corporation could really provide.
• More time! Seriously though, having access to hardware for testing and building are essential. Also, tools such as version control and source management (many of which are developed in house) are also a challenge. Upgrades to some of these systems are long over due.
• I think best would be getting paid for doing Mozilla related work. Preferably part time and as a contractor. I understand that this way this is no longer a “volunteer” or “community” thing anymore but as long as money makes the world go around this is one of those harsh truths of life.
• The increased human resourced required to get patches reviewed and landed in time.
• Working part time only to have more free time to contribute to Bugzilla/Mozilla? But this means earning less money, which is not acceptable.

Do you have any thoughts about how money should be used by Mozilla to support the volunteer community?

• Indifferent.
• Given properly, some type of support is acceptable and will be received well by the open-source community.
• I am generally skeptical of involving grants, donations or in-kind support open-source. It may cause disruption.

If you have any particular responses to these questions or responses to the answers that I summarized above, please post a comment.

Up next: we are working out exactly how Mozilla can legally support to people. There may be some initial challenges, given our organizational structure. But, we will know more once we chat with the legal team…more later.

August 29, 2006 09:52 PM

I spent today writing myself a little RSS reader extension for Firefox 2.  It just adds a clickable item in the status bar that, when clicked, opens up a new window and displays the contents of an RSS feed in it, with clickable links on the titles of each article that take you to the targeted site.

Nothing fancy, but it let me figure out a lot of stuff about how the new feed content API interfaces work.  I’ve written the first bits of a document about them, and will be adding more content, including documentation for the interfaces themselves, over the next few days.

It’s actually a pretty handy API.  Once you learn the gist of how it works, it’s pretty smooth to implement stuff with.

Took me a couple days to figure things out well enough to write the initial sample and the corresponding document (which I know still needs some fleshing-out).  But now that I have a grasp on things, the rest of the document should pull together pretty easily.

I love this stuff.

August 29, 2006 04:11 AM

• Regression/Bug in a planned 1.8.1 feature
• Regression from 1.8
• Security Issue
• TopCrash
• Memory leaks or other major performance issues

Reminder that the following rules still apply for all bugs:

• Has been on the trunk with no regressions reported in 2 days
• Must have a clear explanation in the bug of:
  • Summary of the changes in the fix
  • Risk assessment
  • A reproducible testcase
  • l10n impact
• Does not change any API
• Does not change website compatibility or rendering

This means if you nominate a bug or patch that does not meet this criteria it will be rejected/minused. Please keep in mind if your bug doesn’t make it there will be plenty of opportunity to get the fix in a later Firefox release.

As always we can discuss in dev.planning or at a daily 10AM PDT triage call.

August 29, 2006 01:00 AM

August 28, 2006 05:26 PM

I’ve prepared, documented, and released a production release of the Firefox+extension repackager tool I blogged about a while back.

August 28, 2006 03:09 PM

Minor update to fix Help link, race and other issues with automatic dialog closing and to add file:// as a supported scheme. See news for the details.

August 28, 2006 08:47 AM

HP believes we are running into a 2 platform hardwares bug with our CVS server (recommended memory layout changes and ASR issues - http://forums1.itrc.hp.com/service/forums/questionanswer.do?threadId=1024238&admit=-682735245+1156660583117+28353475). We have been provided a new memory layout and a work-around for the ASR issue - will be implementing these changes tonight a 9pm PDT via a reboot. Estimated downtime is between 15 and 30 minutes - please let me know if you have any conflicts or issues with the reboot.

We apologize for the instability and recent maintenance to CVS. We are working around the clock to get this system to a stable and reliable state.

August 27, 2006 09:10 PM

Amo's iBook G4 is *just* out of range of the battery recalls. Whew! The odd thing is that all the...

August 27, 2006 01:47 PM

Edit: The title should read "Other XULRunner Software". Thanks to Anonymous for pointing that out. Guess I was sleeping on that one. :)

Just some additional information about other software based on XULRunner:

From Songbird's website:

" Songbird is a Web player built from Firefox's browser engine. Songbird is open source, will run on Windows, Mac OS X and Linux and supports user contributed, cross-platform extensions.

Songbird can do everything you'd expect a media player to do. Play music from your computer, as well as from the Web in one integrated user experience. If you run a music service, you can leverage Songbird's APIs to create deeply integrated stores and user features."

In short, a new open source media player application is out there on the cards, developed by Pioneers of the Inevitable LLC, a "small, chirpy team of digital media innovators". After I downloaded, installed and used it, I realised that this application is extremely pre-alpha quality release; it would be good for anybody who wants to contribute to a potentially great product. And maybe a new "Edge" website too. There were plenty of bugs, crashes and quirkiness but also massive potential in this proof-of-concept application.

Additionally, a new Mozilla Composer (Nvu version 2?) based on XULRunner as well may possibly be released by Daniel Glazman in the future.

Total number of possible XULRunner-related applications in the future, as of mid-2006:

• Firefox - Internet browser
• Thunderbird - Email software
• Sunbird - Calendar
• Nvu - HTML editor
• Songbird - Media player
• Chatzilla - IRC client
• Other XULRunner applications

Do note that Nvu and Songbird are not officially related to the Mozilla Foundation.

August 27, 2006 09:26 AM

My English-speaking readers may think that localization is just a step you have to think about when you make software, like burning the CDs, having promotional T-shirts printed or visuals for the press and trade-shows. That's actually a big mistake and a mistake that many projects experienced the hard way. For any big software project, localization is not one of the final steps of the software production process, localization has to be part of the whole process.

That's true for software and that's true for web content. Actually, I would compare it with designing standards-compliant web pages. Many web-designers make web pages using old crappy html hacks dating back to the late 90s and when the project is nearing completion they decide to make it standards compliant. The result is that they spend way more time twiddling with their code to make it pass the HTML validator than they would have spent learning how to directly produce well structured html.

Of course you always think that your framework is well designed, that your page template is flexible and that the text is pretty simple and therefore shouldn't be difficult to translate... Self-confidence is the biggest mistake, that's forgetting Murphy's laws: if things can go wrong, they will go wrong. Things that look simple and straight-forward to you are likely to be considered way more complex with somebody's else eyes, especially if he is from a different culture.

A few common traps we had to deal with in Mozilla Europe :

• Translations are usually 30% longer than the original text, not only because English has a less verbose syntax but also (and probably mostly) because you have to transpose an English way of explaining things into your own language. That's usually not a problem, except when you have to make the text fit in a small little graphics box like the download box or a menu item, "Free Download" or "Press area" can be a long sentence in some languages.


• What happens if there is no version of the software in the language of the visitor because it hasn't been released yet? We chose to propose both the newer English version and the last version of the software that is available in the visitor's language. But wait, wouldn't a Czech be more happy with a newer Slovak version than an English one? Isn't a Catalan or Galician more likely to prefer a Spanish version of Firefox or Thunderbird if it is not available in their language rather than an English version? That's the kind of problems that impact not only the visual design but also the script logic behind the scene, something you have to discuss with localizers because they know best.


• Screenshots. Supporting 22 languages means supporting 22 different sets of screenshots, it means using as neutral as possible webpages pictures, without references to a specific culture. The Mozilla.com Firefox screenshots on the right column are examples of something we can't really use since they are US-centric, a "way to san jose" text in the search bar or the New York Times - CNN tab titles don't really cut it in Cyrillic language...


• Text as images are usually a bad practice as they can't be re-used in other languages and are simply more difficult to update, see for example the Firefox has been updated page. This page isn't localized yet but one thing is sure, either we remove these text-based images or we automatically generate them server-side which can prove tricky. (Actually, there is a third solution which is to use SVG or Canvas, which would I think make sense for a Firefox only page).


• The original text may simply be irrelevant in the target language or need a total rewrite to make sense. Here is an example taken from mozilla.com current download page that is not really relevant outside of the US : Firefox 1.5 (Windows version) is also the first browser to meet US federal government requirements that software be easily accessible to users with physical impairments.. If you want to reuse this point, you need to know what the current situation is with your own regional laws, but most of all, it poses the problem of geography targeting vs. language targeting. This point is valid for a US citizen, who may speak Spanish as his first language, but not for an English native speaker living in Belfast. The fact that translations are planned may impact the very content of your original text.

The above points are just a few examples to show that the devil is in the details, and once you deal with many languages you have to deal with many details related to culture, fonts, visual design and even unexpected Gecko bugs in Right To Left languages for instance. Of course, if it were as easy as it looks at first sight, all big projects would have multilingual websites.

In this article, I just talked about a few technical traps to underline what kind of problems you are likely to meet when working on content meant to be internationalised, but let's not forget the human factor in a project where web content localization means dozens more people involved in the project living in different countries and timezones. We certainly have to work on making this collaborative work easier for web content just as we did in the last two years product-wise. The English-section of this blog is one of the tools I will use to get feedback from the community but more things are coming.

If you want to follow the English articles only from the blog, use this RSS feed: http://chevrel.org/fr/carnet/rss.php?lang=en

August 27, 2006 04:46 AM

I've said it many times before, but we need more and more XUL developers, as the Mozilla ecosystem is growing at an impressive pace. So here is an additional proof that you should be learning XUL and JS if your current developer job sounds boring to you...

Process-one is a company specialized in high-performance Instant Messaging solutions based on the XMPP-Jabber standard. We have opened a position for an experienced XUL / JavaScript developer, knowing advanced techniques such as OO programming and efficient code organization. The knowledge of XUL is an important strength, but is not mandatory, as long as you are a JavaScript expert and are willing to learn XUL. The developer will be in charge of a complete product and will take part in other AJAX / Web based products currently developed by the company. Process-one is opened to remote work, but remote development experience (for example on Open Source projects) is required in this case.

If you are interested in this position, please contact mickael.remond@(the domain name mentioned earlier).

August 26, 2006 07:05 PM

Anyone reading Planet Mozilla, reading a post from me called “Forcing Pop-ups Into Tabs”, and thinking “how does this help me?”

I don’t know how that got on my feed. That was a draft of a post. It was unfinished.

August 26, 2006 05:48 PM

There’s a ton of great stuff going on at Mozilla. So much so that it can be hard to keep pace at what everyone’s up to and what’s going on. So I’d like to bring back an old tradition by doing a very informal IRC Q+A/chat with Schrep. This would be a great place to discuss things like:

• What’s going on in the Mozilla project?
• What’s the future for Firefox, Thunderbird, etc.?
• How does growth of MoCo affect the community?
• What’s changed/happened over the last year?
• Who else you’d like to chat with?
• Anything else folks are curious about

I can summarize the questions and re-post here/my blog for those who can’t make it. Let’s try it at 11am1PM PDT Friday September 1, 2006 on #mozillazine.

August 25, 2006 11:58 PM

Edited to remove extraneous (y'know, productive, work-related) conversation:

11:28 < mento> say my name
11:29 < ss|work> mento: Where's the "bitch"? It's supposed to be "say my name bitch"
11:30 < mento> ss|work: yes, but this is a family channel, and i wouldn't want to upset any of the reeds
11:30 < ss|work> Ah...
11:30 < mento> ss|work: were this #camino, you better believe i would have exceeded your expectations of my vulgarity
11:31 < preed> mento: you obviously haven't seen #build around release time.
11:31 < preed> We move from TV-Y7 to TV-M
11:32 < mento> with all the D, S, L, and V that come with that rating
11:32 < preed> Mostly L and V.
11:32 < preed> I wish there were more S.
11:32 < preed> If there were more S, there'd maybe be less L and V.
11:32 < ss|work> preed: Lots of S in #foxymonkies.
11:32 < preed> but definitely plenty of D.

August 25, 2006 09:14 PM

Have you see this: http://www.aolstalker.com/ This site lets you rate users by how interesting their queries were. I would stay...

August 25, 2006 07:03 AM

For those of you who didn't already know, I was hired this summer as a full-time intern at Mozilla Corp. While I did a bit of Firefox 2 work, I was fortunate to be able to spend most of my time on Calendar bugs. Since tomorrow is my last day in Mountain View before heading off to law school, I wanted to express a few words of thanks.

If there's one thing this summer has taught me, it's the importance of working with the right group of people. Mozilla has done a fantastic job of assembling a group of incredibly brilliant people who are each passionate about what they're doing. Because of this, there was never a dull day around the office. I'd like to thank everyone in Mountain View for that.

Being able to spend so much time on the Calendar project has also given me great insight into just how big of an effort this is. There is much more to this project besides writing code and fixing bugs. This summer I've found myself doing everything from roadmapping to meeting planning to QA to release driving to community building. For helping me along with these tasks, I'd like to explictly thank Dan Mosedale, Mike Connor, Mike Shaver, and Mike Beltzner.

Seeing the true scale of the Calendar project helped me realize more than anything just how important the community we have is. The phenomenal responses we received to the QA days is just the most visible sign of this. Less obvious, but just as crucial are the daily bug-filers, testers, and forum posters who help make Sunbird and Lightning better. So, in closing, I'd like to thank everyone who's involved in this project, or even shown interest in it, for the little (and not so little) bits you've contributed.

Rest assured that this is not the end of my work with the Calendar project. I'm more convinced than ever that there are extremely interesting problems to be solved in this space and I want to be involved in finding those solutions. Until I have a better handle on what sort of time commitments law school will require of me, however, I can't make any promises of time.

For now, though, thanks to everyone for everything. It has been a fantastic summer.

August 24, 2006 10:50 PM

I’ve been continuing to work on the Theme changes in Firefox 2 document, and I think it’s getting better.  It now includes a table with a list of the XUL and XHTML files that have changed in ways that require updates to CSS files in themes.  That will be much more useful than the long list of changes made to the default theme, although I’ve left that in as well, since so many themers work by starting with the default theme and updating it.

The doc still needs some massaging, but from my perspective (as a guy who hasn’t done any theming) it’s mostly done.  If anyone has suggestions, or would like to work the doc in ways to make it more useful to real themers, please by all means do!  I want to be sure the doc is in great shape, and this is a case where I could really use some outside help.

The only other docs left to write for Fx2 are the feed access API doc (which should be frozen by now, since it’s supposed to be in for beta 2, which has frozen), so I should be asking around about that today or tomorrow, and the versioning best practices doc, which for some reason I don’t really want to write.  Not sure why.

I still want to work up a sample for using the session store API, but haven’t had a chance to do it yet.

At any rate, we’re in fantastic shape to have all the Firefox 2 docs done by the time it ships, which is very cool.

August 24, 2006 05:24 PM

I mentioned this at the weekly status meeting, but please help me in welcoming MoCo's newest addition to the seemingly-always-strapped Build Team: TR Fullhart.

TR comes to us with years of experience in build automation and scripting, and should be a huge help in the efforts to "de-insanify" our build process and infrastructure.

Just the other day in #build, he said: < trf> really, I like scripting and programming, feel free to give me stuff

That's what I like to see.¹

If you have a sec, drop by #build, and welcome trf!

Glad to have you with us, TR!

________________
¹ Anyone remember when their buglist was that small

August 24, 2006 05:36 AM

Off the topic of Labs form and structure, I’d like to get your opinion on general directions and areas for investigation.

Sherman Dickman has initiated a fruitful discussion around Firefox themes and product strategy in the mozilla.dev.planning newsgroup. There is lots of interesting efforts going on in the browser space right now. What areas being showcased by other Internet client products today should Mozilla explore?

I understand that there is a rich set of functionality already implemented by the myriad of Firefox extensions. I want to try to examine broad areas of functionality rather than details of feature operations. Let’s see if this thought experiment proves to be informative.

It’s four questions only. If you find the survey too stifling or is missing something, please just add your comments at the end of the blog post.

Admin Note: I’ve added a new look to MozLabs Blog. Thanks go out to Deb Richardson for sharing with me her Wordpress theme from Mozilla Developer Center (MDC).

August 24, 2006 12:57 AM

TR Fullhart joined Monday as a full time member of the build team. TR has been doing build and release work for the last 5 years and sysadmin work for several years prior to that. He's a top perl hacker and is fired up about being involved. We're really excited to have his help supporting the build infrastructure for all the Mozilla projects. He's around on IRC as trf. Welcome TR!

Matt Willis, whom you've definitely seen on irc as lilmatt, has been kicking butt on Calendar. He did the pinstripe theme, moved to toolkit based prefs, and done a lot of l10n and build work. We've brought him on under contract to make sure he has the time to continue to help out the Calendar team. Welcome Matt!

Lars Lohn, the author of sentry from bouncer and a hacker of mad proportions has also started working with us on contract to help out on addons.mozilla.org and other web tools projects. When he's not hacking he's playing the Oboe, riding his Harley, or working on his organic farm - hopefully not all at once. He's around as Lars on irc. Welcome Lars!

Mozilla is a collection of people gathered together working towards a shared goal. It is really exciting to be able to pull talented folks from other domains into the Mozilla projects and make it possible for those already contributing to focus more time on the project.

Welcome to all!

August 24, 2006 12:52 AM

Thank you for the feedback on the categories and popularity system. I’ll try to incorporate many of your recommendations in the next iteration of those. For categories, it looks like we’ll need to create special ones for Labs since many of the ideas and tests will not fall neatly into the buckets that AddOns currently has. It was almost unanimous that a tag-based organizational system was the way to go. For popularity, I agree with many of the comment but especially with the sentiment that we need more than Yes/No/Bury/Digg around an idea, it needs to have discussion and reasoning. So, I’ll iterate more and present some alternatives as some of you have suggested.

Admin Note: Wordpress was configured so that first-time comment contributors would have to provide their email. I disabled that, so your comments show up automatically now.

August 24, 2006 12:52 AM

Here is the test day page with all the information you should need: http://wiki.mozilla.org/Mozilla_QA_Community:BonEcho_2.0b2_Community_Test_Day

Come one, come all, but come ready to test! We are on the road to beta2 so there is plenty to do.

Don't be shy, if you are new to testing this is a great way to learn and join our growing community. We especially like Linux and Mac testers.

August 24, 2006 12:10 AM

Just so you know, my friend Ian Jacobs, head of W3C Communications and editor of the W3C Process document, editor of innumerable W3C specs, pinged me a couple of days ago to have a chat about the W3C, the bloggers, life and the rest. We spent an hour talking on the phone yesterday evening and I gave...

August 23, 2006 10:52 PM

Planet Mozilla only carries my posts which are related to the Mozilla project or free software. If you are interested in other things I talk about, like the progress of my cancer treatment (which I just did an update on), then you'll need to subscribe directly to my RSS feed in your reader, or visit the site itself regularly.

August 23, 2006 09:02 PM

Update: 12:12 PDT: Server is back up.
Last week we had a kernel panic from the main cvs.mozilla.org server. Initial investigations resulted in a quick firmware upgrade. Since then the ops team has been seeing intermittent ECC memory errors in one of the memory modules. They attempted to replace that module today - but the machine did not come up cleanly. The entire machine (except for main hard drives) is currently being swapped to new, known to be good, hardware.

As a result the server is down as of this writing - but should be back up shortly.

These issues are normally covered in our scheduled maintenance windows, but we don’t want to take any risks on further crashes or corruption.
Thanks for your patience!

August 23, 2006 06:52 PM

“The Community Giving Program will use a portion of Mozilla revenue to support and strengthen the activities of the Mozilla community. We will start by reaching out to our dedicated community contributors. As the program grows, we will look to expand to supporting new contributors and new projects.”

As always, I encourage everyone to comment and refine this. For now, I’ll post this as its own page link on this blog.

August 23, 2006 06:35 PM

TR Fullhart joined the Mozilla Build team full-time this week. Given his recent experience with build-related software tools, we’re hoping he can help us get our own software tool ship in better order (among other things).

Welcome!

August 23, 2006 04:50 PM

Does the sudden appearance of a Firefox crop circle imply which browser extraterrestrials prefer? We don't know, but it was still fun to make! Constructed by local Firefox fans and the same team that created the Firefox mural from cornstarch and kool-aid and launched the Firefox weather balloon, the Firefox Crop Circle project shows that we have so much passion for Firefox that we want it to be visible from space! Planned in under two weeks and completed in under 24 hours, the crop circle had a final diameter of 220 feet. We constructed the circle in an oat field near Amity, Oregon, where it was completely invisible from the road but unmistakable from the sky. Our team consisted of 12 people, mainly OSU students, and we carefully stomped down oats from 3:30pm Friday afternoon until 2:30am, putting on the finishing touches between 7:30am and 11:00am Saturday, August 12.

Watch the video
Read more about the project
Picture gallery

August 23, 2006 02:34 PM

A few minutes ago, I completed a set of XBL-based bindings. This set of bindings implements a repetition model (somewhat dissimilar to Web Forms 2's model, but workable for now), and uses one group of user-interface elements to set attributes for another group of UI elements.

In English, I've made a significant step forward in having XUL edit XUL.

There are still a few issues to work out (extracting the edited XUL from the binding, and feeding XUL in for editing, and making the edits nearly-WYSIWYG... they apply, but for some reason you can't see a radio button's label change). The source code is at http://www.mozdev.org/source/browse/verbosio/experimental/templates/chrome/content/editorTest (see elementTemplate.xul and elementTemplate.xml). Be aware this code is experimental, so it will change in the near future.

XUL for editing XUL has another benefit. Because I would use XUL for editing other XML languages (based on my One for one blog entry), I can use XUL to create the XUL-based editing templates for each language.

Verbosio follows this "One for one" concept. Individual language-specific editors become extensions. Now, it's becoming feasible (not just possible!) to build at least basic extensions with Verbosio itself. That's what I call eating your own dog food. I'm not there yet. But it's in sight.

August 23, 2006 08:01 AM

I honestly don't know why I even load Slashdot anymore.

I tried to make the change to kuro5hin when I tired (some years ago, now) of Slashdork's continued duplicates and awful spelling and grammar—talk about needing an editor—but it didn't take.

What do the cool kids read for their tech news fix these days?

(Do not say "Digg." Digg is on my s#!+ list for being the main reason I personally have had to do a bunch of extra [release] work due to people "digging" "news" that software has been released when it hasn't been... which brings into question the validity of anything that's "dugged." Also, there's no [easy] past tense of "digg.")

August 23, 2006 06:38 AM

The 1.8 tree has re-opened for approved checkins in preparation for RC1.  Check the Mozilla 1.8 Tinderbox page for the latest tree status and buglists.

August 23, 2006 01:36 AM

DANGER! Will Robinson! DANGER!

If you are not comfortable using beta software, do not know how to back up your profile or don’t know what bugzilla is, then please do not download nightly builds for testing!

Every little bit helps…

One of the strengths of the Mozilla community which has helped make Firefox such a success are the people who love Firefox who also help to make it better. Many people have filed bugs on issues they have discovered and I would like to ask those people for a little bit of help.

Mozilla developers have been working hard to fix bugs for the releases of Firefox 2 and Thunderbird 2 later this year. So far, there have been 3331 bugs fixed on the 1.8 branch from which Firefox 2 and Thunderbird 2 will be released. Unfortunately, only 341 have been verified as fixed so far.

Crashes and Hangs

211 bugs which cause crashes or hangs have been fixed but not verified.

Regressions

327 bugs which cause regressions have been fixed but not verified.

If you filed one of the bugs on these lists, it would be very helpful if you could download a nightly build of Firefox 2 or Thunderbird 2 and verify that the bug you filed is actually fixed. Please comment in the bug and add me (bclary at bclary dot com) to the cc list.

Tip: You can easily find the bugs you filed by clicking on one of the above links and after the query loads, clicking the “Edit Search” link at the bottom of the page. Then under Email and Numbering, click the reporter check box under Any of of: and add your bugzilla email address to the field below the contains select box.

Thanks to Brian J Polidoro for bringing this to my attention.

Better now than never!

If you are a developer for a commercial web site or web application and Firefox compatibility is important to you, your employer and your customers, please begin testing your content and applications with the nightly builds of Firefox 2! The code is very quickly being locked down so that it is becoming increasingly difficult to get changes made before the release of Firefox 2. If you don’t report a problem with your site or application soon, it may be impossible to get the fix into the next release. The most important things to look for are regressions where something that worked in Firefox 1.5 is now broken in Firefox 2. This month marks the sixth year I have been a member of the Mozilla Community and it has never failed that someone from a major web site or application developer waits until the last minute to test their content with the upcoming release. Don’t be the grasshopper! Test today not tomorrow!

August 22, 2006 11:03 PM

The Mozilla QA team has setup a Google calendar so it will be easier to keep track of upcoming testing events (.ics).

Our next testday is scheduled for this Friday, August 25th, where our focus will be on kicking the tires of some Firefox 2.0b2 candidates. Come join us in IRC, or test with Litmus at your leisure.

August 22, 2006 10:36 PM

Last night I pushed the bits for GeoLocateFox 0.2. The changes aren’t very many but it’s pretty cool.

• Add HostIP look up (disabled by default)
• Add support for newer Flock, and Firefox through 3.0 alpha

Go to the options window (open up the extension manager, right click on GeoLocateFox, and select options) and check the HostIP box. This will send the IP address of the website you visit to the HostIP.info website, and get coordinates if available. This is only used if the site provides no GeoLocation data on it’s own. It’s off by default for privacy reasons. It’s pretty cool.

Next up is a bug fix release for mozPod, no date on that just yet. It’s overdue.

August 22, 2006 07:59 PM

I’ve been busy, but I’ve got some good XULRunner announcements:

• XULRunner 1.8.0.4 Released. Get it while it’s hot, it’s a security/stability update of the developer preview.
• With the XULRunner released, we’ve finally pushed out a Gecko 1.8 release of the Gecko SDK. Thanks for being patient.
• Darin’s machine that was hosting a number of XULRunner examples including MyBrowser and XULMine has died. He sent me the files and I am hosting them on this site for the time being, until the Mozilla Developer Center gets example-hosting capabilities.
• preed has agreed that it would be good to get a release of XULRunner 1.8.1 out, and he’s going to try to arrange for some build-team time to get tinderboxes set up for that. The schedule is going to be “sometime after Firefox 2″, but it will happen. Continued thanks to the build team for their efforts, and welcome TR to the vortex!
• Javier and I have finally fixed a couple bugs that make it possible to do universal builds of XULRunner. I expect that, build-vortex willing, XULRunner 1.8.0.7 will be a universal release, as well as the 1.8.1 release.

August 22, 2006 05:52 PM

The XULRunner 1.8.0.4 security and stability update is now available. This release is a stable developer preview of the Mozilla XULRunner application framework. The underlying gecko engine of XULRunner 1.8.0.4 matches Firefox 1.5.0.4. All existing users are encouraged to upgrade. Please read the release notes for further information.

In addition, while preparing this release of XULRunner the build team released an official Gecko SDK for XPCOM component development. For more information about the SDK, see the documentation.

August 22, 2006 04:53 PM

Yes Franck (who pinged me by email with an invalid sender's email address so I can't reply...), I am the one who wrote that. Quite long before others, right. " There is a fourth way. The fourth way should be called xHTML 5 because it should not be a super-strict-XMLization of HTML produced by a...

August 22, 2006 04:43 PM

We’ve been a bit quiet lately because we’ve been cooking up something new. Shortly after April’s re-release of the addons.mozilla.org (AMO) front-end, Mike Shaver came on board. He’s given the project some direction and has been mixing things up a bit with new ideas. He’s helped us focus and move forward on:

• Drafting policies
• Gathering more complete requirements for future product releases
• Making better performance decisions
• Choosing correct data structures
• Taking advantage of web frameworks and new technology

We’ve been able to work on all this and still manage to keep things running thanks to community volunteer efforts from people like Mel Reyes, Olive, Nitallica, Alan Starr, Wolf, Pontus Freyhult, Chris Blore, Lupine, Robert Marshall, Giorgio Maone, Mike Kroger, Ed Hume, Daniel Steinbrook, Sethnakht, and Cameron. They have working hard to review add-ons, work with developers, help users, report bugs and submit patches. We all owe them a pat on the back.

Another factor has been the addition of badly needed resources:

• The attention and focus of Shaver, who genuinely cares about our project
• Additional staff to help organize and speed up development — myself, Wil Clouser (clouserw), Andrei (sancus)
• New developers and volunteers stepping up, like Cameron and fligtar (Justin Scott)
• The ongoing support and direction of Mike Schroepfer (schrep)

With the next major release of Firefox and Thunderbird around the corner, one thing was certain for addons.mozilla.org — change. Lots and lots of yummy change.

Shaver coined “remora“, the shiny-sexy codename of AMO v3. We’ve set up a public wiki where we’ve gathered and cleaned up most of your requirements, and posted a project schedule. We even had one of our volunteers create an image for us (it’s giving birth to add-ons!):

Our goals are clear:

• Make finding and installing add-ons easier
• Support localization of site pages and data
• Reduce and simplify design and layout with a fresh new look
• Take full advantage of our new hardware resources
• Provide better support through forums and threaded discussions
• Develop with a test-oriented mindset for a more robust and mature application
• Revitalize and streamline our review process to ensure the quality of add-ons

All this should add up to a common goal: extend Mozilla products to make the web better. Period.

So things are looking up! Please read the wiki and join us in IRC if you have ideas or want to participate in the project:

• Remora Wiki Page
• IRC: #amo#irc.mozilla.org

We are looking for help with l10n support. If you are a translator, please find us in IRC! Thanks.

August 22, 2006 10:06 AM

Seriously, the CSS WG is not always the best place on earth, but as I said a while ago, it's an island of pragmatism and cleverness in the middle of an ocean of delirium. I was an embittered general, I'm now also a "gatekeeper who would be in the camp that 'blew up the village to save it from...

August 22, 2006 03:41 AM

For those of you watching balsa, our memory leak tinderbox, just a quick heads up that we'll soon be migrating to the virtualized balsa[s] very soonishly.

The new virtual memory leak tinderboxen names are balsa-trunk which, coincidentally enough, does trunkish builds, and balsa-18branch which does—you guessed it—Firefox 1.8 branch builds.

bz and I looked at the numbers for both the physical and virtual tinderboxen and they looked comparable/cogent/good. Because these are leak memory tests, the virtaulized versions of these tinderboxen don't seem to be affected by virtualization, which we expected.

If you'd like to take a gander at these new tinderboxen, check out the 1.8 branch page and the trunk tinderbox page.

(They're also publishing to the Seamonkey-Ports page, but for some reason, both physical- and virtual-balsa are in various states of unhappiness... which, on the one hand, is good news in terms of validating that the VMs are coherent images of the physical machines, but bad in that... they're both broken.)

Because physical-balsa is literally sitting on the colo floor and the ever-gallant IT peeps are tripping over the machine, we'll probably shut it down within the next few days. If there's a reason why we shouldn't, please let us know.

August 22, 2006 02:09 AM

Desmond finished up his SOC project for Camino today. I'm really impressed with the way he came in and was...

August 22, 2006 01:47 AM

Mozilla Scheduled Downtime - 8/22/2006, 7pm - 10pm PDT (0200 - 0500 UTC)

We will have a scheduled downtime window this coming Tuesday from 7pm to 10pm PDT. The following changes will take place:

* 7pm PDT - NAS network settings changes. We will be updating network settings on our NAS. No expected downtime, but intermittent network filesystem access is possible through the window.
* 7pm PDT - Webtools migration. Bonsai, LXR and Tinderbox will be migrated to a new machine. 30-60 min of downtime is expected but could extend through the window.
* 8pm PDT - Updating firewall rules to internal networks. This will help improve network isolation and security. No expected downtime, but intermittent network connectivity is possible.
* 8pm PDT - SSH access to/from mecha will be disabled. If you use this host as a jumphost, you need an account on the new VPN server (announced multiple times).

Please let me know if you have any reason why we should not proceed with the planned maintenance. As always, we aim to keep downtime to as little as possible, but unexpected complications can arise causing longer downtime periods than expected. All systems should be operational by the end of the maintenance window. Feel free to email infra@mozilla.org if you see issues past the planned downtime.

August 22, 2006 12:41 AM

Here is a good article about Community Test Day - http://software.newsforge.com/software/06/08/17/2017247.shtml?tid=130&tid=138

And just a reminder, we do have a Bon Echo Community Test Day planned for this Friday. There will be lots to test since Beta2 is right around the corner. Please join us on Friday.

August 22, 2006 12:25 AM

August 21, 2006 10:21 PM

Last night, shortly after midnight PDT, the MOZILLA_1_8_BRANCH closed in order to spin up candidate builds for the upcoming Firefox 2 Beta 2 release. The release and QA teams are doing smoketests on the candidate builds, and assuming nothing triggers a respin, the tree will open up tomorrow evening for RC1 checkins. Check the Mozilla 1.8 Tinderbox page for the latest tree status and buglists. We’ll also make an announcement here and in mozilla.dev.planning.

August 21, 2006 06:59 PM

Microsoft's policy about how IE 7 will handle IDNs has changed slightly in beta 3, but unfortunately as it stands will still have a serious detrimental effect on IDN take-up. Here's why.

IE 7 displays all IDN domain names as punycode (e.g. http://www.xn--caf-hya.com), unless the copy of IE has the "language" of that domain name configured as one of its Accept Languages.[0] If it displays the ugly and indecipherable punycode, it also presents a yellow security bar, saying "We can't display this domain name; click for options", where presumably the user might have the option of adding to the whitelist whatever language IE thinks the domain name is in.

This will cripple IDNs in almost any international market, simply because domain owners are not going to want an unknown percentage of users visiting their domain to have that horrible user experience. You are a German company - will you choose an IDN domain name containing a ß as your primary domain name if you know you might one day want to expand into the European market and sell goods outside Germany? And that almost all your European customers will have to go through this?

IDNs might be perhaps used when the site owner can guarantee that all their visitors will have a particular language configured - but how common is that? Even aside from the situation above, this is the "World Wide" Web, and people use the browser of a friend, or an Internet café. The browser doesn't really know what languages its user speaks, and it's unlikely that the user will take time to tell it. When was the last time you configured the Acceptable Languages in a browser you were using? And if you did, when you stopped using that browser, did you remove them and reset the setting?

The sad thing is that this measure by itself doesn't improve security. A particular domain name is either dangerous or it isn't - that is, it's either a homograph of another domain registered to a different person, or it isn't. If the domain name is a homograph then all those people who, by default or by configuration, have that language configured are at risk. And if it's not a homograph, why not display it to everyone from the start?

The other measure IE 7 is taking, which is to forbid most script mixing, will improve security. But here they have gone the other way - this measure is too draconian. Script-mixing by itself is not dangerous, as long as your registry is on the ball.

Firefox has a system based on a whitelist of TLDs whose registries have sensible anti-homograph policies. Only they can tell if a domain name is dangerous or not; browsers just don't have enough information. Our policy allows many more safe domain names.

Unfortunately, as domain owners will only pick names which work everywhere, IE 7 is further restricting the set of names that can be used in practice. Having worked for a long time on making IDN safe and usable in browsers, it's very sad to see its uptake stunted in this way. :-( I hope they change their minds and remove that first check, but I fear it's too late.

[0] There will also be a host of problems caused by the fact that domain names use characters from particular scripts, or perhaps multiple scripts, and IE has a list of languages. Languages and scripts have a really complex relationship - in which language is the letter é? What Accept Language do I have to have configured to correctly view www.café.com? I haven't covered this further because it's secondary to the even bigger problem mentioned above.

August 21, 2006 04:46 PM

To make it more convenient for our qa contributors in Europe to participate in bug days, I'm moving the time to 8:00am to 12:00pm PDT (UTC/GMT -7). Same irc channel, #qa. See the Bug Day wiki for more information abut bug days.

-tracy

August 21, 2006 01:58 PM

Hello,

My name is Pascal Chevrel, among other things I am a Mozilla Europe board member and I have been blogging about Mozilla technologies for about 4 years in both French and Spanish. As you can see, I have decided to start blogging in English as well, so please excuse my French ;)

What kind of stuff can you expect to read here? Mostly web content localization news. My main task at Mozilla Europe is to coordinate the translation work so as to offer official Mozilla content in as many European languages as possible. We started with 4 languages more than 2 years ago and we now have a website offering content in 22 European languages. But not only do we host European languages, we also host via our mozilla-world alias the Firefox start pages for almost all Firefox languages (ex : http://www.mozilla-world.org/he/products/firefox/start/central.html).

So as to give you an idea, we have about 20 million visits per month and so far we are totalizing 1.6 billion hits for 2006. Quite a lot of traffic...

Actually, it also reflects the huge European success of Firefox and how language support matters for the success of the Mozilla project. People want Firefox and Thunderbird, but they want it in their language, computer geeks fluent in English may be happy with an English browser, but my mother won't even consider using a software that isn't in her language.

The Mozilla project was born at Netscape and then hosted by AOL. One of the reasons why AOL/Netscape, although a big corporation compared to Mozilla, failed getting back market-share with Netscape 7 is simple, it was usually available in 5 languages only (US-English, German, French, Japanese, Brasilian Portuguese) and you could wait months after the English realease before seeing the browser released in your language, sometimes, the localized build was available on the FTP but the official website only offered the English build or worse, a much older version. Furthermore, the quality of the translation wasn't always that good, at least for French... For Joe-user, Netscape was English-only, a showstopper for most of the global population.

Languages matter and it is one of the things the Mozilla project is good at. The quality of our software localisation is excellent and Firefox and Thunderbird are available in a great number of languages (currently 37) including several minor languages which are not even considered as a "market" by proprietary software vendors. If you look at Rafael Ebron's High Level Product Comparative Analysis between Internet Explorer 7 and Firefox 2, you see that IE7 will be released in 15 languages only which means that we definitely have a strong asset here since we already support 37 languages and we may even have more languages available in the future.

Mozilla Europe was created and is maintained by European volunteers because of that, because we believe that localisation is key to the success of Mozilla products, because we believe that the opensource model is a great solution for software localisation; for many people, it is even the only way to have software on their machine in their mother tongue...

Teaming up with Mozilla.com and Mozilla Japan, we will definitely use the expertise we gained managing a multilingual project over the last two years so as to provide more and better localized content for Firefox 2.

August 21, 2006 09:19 AM

We have candidate builds for the fast approaching release of SeaMonkey 1.1 alpha. SeaMonkey 1.1 will be based on Gecko 1.8.1 and SeaMonkey 1.1 alpha will be based on Gecko 1.8.1 beta2, which is currently scheduled for release on August 23. The candidates are at ftp://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/mozilla.org/seamonkey/nightly/candidates-1.1a/ and we'd appreciate it if you could take a build for a spin and check that it behaves the way you'd expect. If you've been using a 1.0.x build, we'd recommend that you use a different profile to test the alpha as the way we store things in the profile has changed slightly (you probably don't want to use 1.1a with your default profile and then revert to 1.0.x). Please report any bugs in bugzilla in the Mozilla Application Suite product and (if you think the bug is sufficiently severe) nominate it to block 1.1a or 1.1b. If you'd like to run the smoketests, stop by #seamonkey and I'll set up a smoketest run for you (look for ajschult). We'd like to get smoketests run for each platform.

August 20, 2006 03:27 PM

Crash:

• Fixed: 339518 - Switching IMAP folders while "mark-as-spam" is running causes a crash

Networking:

• Fixed: 222394 - IMAP: MYRIGHTS command used on names marked \Noselect
• Fixed: 249240 - Password dialog for POP/IMAP server does not reprompt when password is changed externally.
• Fixed: 325379 - STARTTLS negotiation skipped when account set to "TLS, if available"

Printing:

• Fixed: 342439 - printing certain urls (google groups and maps) from print preview shows the style/meta tags on paper

UI improvements:

• Fixed: 337815 - Messages don't show; summary-file increases every time Tb opens

Miscellaneous fixes:

• Fixed: 344694 - Conflict of linkage-specification for "MimeExternalObjectClass mimeExternalObjectClass"
• Fixed: 346302 - Yet another RFC 2231 violation (0x2a is not escaped)

Outstanding bugs:

• Since 08 Mar 06: 329755 - make javascript.enabled=false in thunderbird
• Since 16 Apr 06: 334263 - thunderbird crashes every time I delete a message

Official Windows, Official Windows installer (no discussion available @ mozillazine forums)

Official Linux (i686)

Official Mac (Universal binary)

August 20, 2006 12:43 PM

Functionality:

• Fixed: 345501 - enable auto-save by default

Networking:

• Fixed: 79767 - IMAP SEARCH commands include HEADER unnecessarily
• Fixed: 348762 - uploading message with mixed line endings in headers can corrupt headers

RSS:

• Fixed: 348662 - incoming filters for rss feeds broken

Spelling checker:

• Fixed: 348171 - Delete (backspace) is extremely slow in textareas in recent nightlies

UI improvements:

• Fixed: 345887 - Thunderbird Theme Update for Qute
• Fixed: 348387 - Group-By-Sort: First message not shown in group after selecting group header.
• Fixed: 348717 - header overflow twisty lost when needed in consecutively viewed messages
• Fixed: 348860 - Display name used for addresses not in address book
• Fixed: 348897 - replace "Extensions and Themes" with add-ons in update prefs

XPToolkit:

• Fixed: 342642 - Under specific conditions an exception is generated in the Error Console when "Clear Private Data" is used
• Fixed: 347954 - Running the NSIS installer as normal user (restricted group) or without enough free space available makes it silently fail
• Fixed: 348781 - Add 7-Zip SFX source to the tree

Miscellaneous fixes:

• Fixed: 333877 - TB 1.5.0.2 - 100% processor utilization processing IMAP IDLE

Mac-specific:

• Fixed: 335823 - Universal binaries not yet out for 1.8.x branch
• Fixed: 348804 - in-param for nsMsgKeyArray.h breaks obj-c build for embedded applications.

Outstanding bugs:

• Since 16 Dec 03: 228675 - Limit growth of junk token store
• Since 12 May 04: 243430 - Improving the chi-square spam detection method
• Since 17 Mar 05: 286655 - deleting or detaching attachment from IMAP message duplicates the message temporarily
• Since 29 Oct 05: 314297 - deleting one attachment from a locally stored message deletes multiple attachments
• Since 24 Jan 06: 324606 - Thunderbird hangs on Return Receipt Notification on some SPAM-Mails on IMAP-Accounts
• Since 14 Mar 06: 330507 - Crash when clearing a quick search during a LDAP search.
• Since 24 May 06: 339115 - save as file stopped working on IMAP
• Since 07 Jul 06: 343901 - cannot install dictionaries in thunderbird since bug 216382 landed
• Since 12 Jul 06: 344433 - Thunderbird needs to use a new set of APIs to claim defaults in windows Vista
• Since 17 Aug 06: 349073 - address book comes up empty

Official Windows, Official Windows installer (no discussion available @ mozillazine forums)

Official Linux (i686)

Official Mac (Universal binary)

August 20, 2006 12:04 PM

Matt and John put together an awesome behind the scenes video for the Firefox Crop Circle project.

Check it out here.

oh, and, digg digg digg!!!

August 19, 2006 09:12 PM

A few years ago, I was watching Cartoon Network's "Toonami", and they had a special music videos night. I was very impressed by what I saw. Two groups leapt out at me: Gorillaz ("Get The Cool Shoe Shine!"), and Daft Punk ("More than ever, hour after hour, work is never over"). I eventually bought the albums and found Daft Punk's work to be pretty good, Gorillaz's to be okay.

Fast forward to today. I'm browsing through the local used music/movies store, and I come across "Interstella 5555" in the house music videos section. The subtitle is "The animated house musical." As I am a casual fan of anime, I thought, "Okay, this is interesting." Then I looked at the bottom of the cover, and saw some very familiar anime faces, from Daft Punk's music videos.

I was pretty happy. Twenty bucks was a bit much to pay for twenty minutes of video, though, I thought. Then I saw the back cover - 65 minutes. In other words, the whole Discovery album as anime! The best part is I found another copy, used, for only thirteen bucks.

I never expected I'd get to see these anime music videos again. This is, for me, an instant collector's item. You might think this is a cult item, but hey, we are human after all. :-)

August 19, 2006 07:45 PM

August 19, 2006 12:58 AM

Brian started Monday at the Mozilla Corporation to help hack on Gecko. He's first task will be to assist Brendan, Igor, and Blake with the JavaScript engine. Brian has used SpiderMonkey before during his work at Sony Online where we worked on everything from Untold Legends for PSP to EverQuest.

Brian's got a history of working on large complex systems which will be invaluable as he digs into the guts of Gecko. Everyone has been really impressed with his technical depth and enthusiasm for the project.

You can find him on irc (crowder). Please swing by and say hello!

August 18, 2006 11:27 PM

First, loading a text into the editor should be done through a new method, converting all lines delimited by carriage returns or BR elements into paragraphs. The key thing here is to make all lines initially contained in a single classless span. Same thing, text insertion or drop should always...

August 18, 2006 10:38 PM

I decided last night that instead of trying to go through all the CSS files that comprise a Firefox theme by hand, or using utilities like diff that don’t handle cases where the contents of files are rearranged very well, I’d write a new tool designed specifically to compare the styles in two CSS themes.

I finished the utility a little while ago, and it’s working very well.  I pass it two CSS files and it spits out a list of all the styles that are unique to each file, as well as a list of the styles that are common to both but have different definitions.

This is going to make the Theme changes in Firefox 2 document much easier to write.  Still tedious, but not the massive task it would have been without this utility. I love handy-dandy utilities.

August 18, 2006 09:18 PM

Mea culpa. Mea maxima culpa. Depuis que le W3C focalise sur le Semantic Web, merdoie totalement sur XHTML2, voit en XForms la panacée universelle qui guérit des écrouelles et sauve les bébés des Mozilliens, se persuade que XML Schema est bien fichu et que les namespaces sont la bonne solution...

August 18, 2006 07:10 PM

Our next Community Test Day will be Friday, August 25th. We are now using Google Calendar to put our scheduled Community Test Days, Bug Days, and other activities. The Name of the Google Calendar is MozTesting (if you have a Google account). Otherwise, you can see it by going to:

http://www.google.com/calendar/embed?src=m42o9ivukgvpn17bvalf4iv0mk%40group.calendar.google.com

August 18, 2006 07:00 PM

People who run nightly builds may have noticed that no update has been issued yet for trunk (Minefield) or branch (Bon Echo). It turns out that this is due to a tinderbox putting something where it shouldn’t have (see bug 349183.) Should be fixed soon!

Update: branch seems to be working again and was actually a different problem; still no updates for trunk, though. [Aug 18, 9:30pm PDT]

August 18, 2006 05:40 PM

The Mozilla world has grown enormously in the last year and the Mozilla Corporation has followed. We’ve added many new employees, expanded our network infrastructure dramatically, increased our interaction with other companies and organizations, broadened our community marketing significantly, to name just a few. Firefox’s role in the Internet ecology has grown to such a...

August 18, 2006 04:57 PM