thoughts on mozilla

As announced in a few places, the Drumbeat Festival – which is a lot like the Mozilla Summit but for non-product-related Mozilla community members – has been scheduled for November 3-5 in Barcelona, Spain.

Mark Surman – Executive Director of the Mozilla Foundation (MoFo) – explains “[t]he theme is ‘learning, freedom and the web’ — connecting people on the radical, disruptive edge of learning with people from the open web world.” That’s a bit different than the one for the Mozilla Summit 2010, which is “Be More Like the Web.” How Drumbeat fits into learning and freedom has yet to be seen. Regardless, the Mozilla Foundation continues to grow the community using Drumbeat and spreading it beyond the mostly product focus of the past few years.

You might have noticed that we’ve been avoiding the Drumbeat Festival, which has been blogged about quite a bit, mostly because even those who work on Drumbeat haven’t yet explained exactly what it is beyond vague words like “platform” and “fundraising.” Mitchell Baker – Chairperson of MoFo and the Chairperson and “Chief Lizard Wranger” of the Mozilla Corporation – calls Drumbeat an “initiative for people who want to use the open infrastructure of the Internet to bring openness, participation and individual empowerment to other aspects of online life,” which is a nice way of saying “it’s lots of things for lots of people.”

Whatever it may end up being, if you’re you’re interested in the Drumbeat Festival, we recommend you check out the wiki page as well as the list of potential invites.

Frédéric Wenzel – a web developer with the Mozilla Corporation – published a post about the work behind the Firefox Input project, which recently shipped its 1.0 release and is now available publicly.

The Firefox Input project, as we’ve covered before, will give users an easier way to submit feedback (either good or bad) and give everyone else an easier way to see what people think. Submissions are only available to users of the yet-unshipped Firefox 4 beta. When it ships, users will be directed to the site to give feedback instead of to Hendrix.

Work is already underway on the next version of Firefox Input and the design and requirements are expected to be set by July 13.

With less than two weeks left until the Mozilla Summit 2010, a proposed schedule for the Mozilla Summit has been published.

While this schedule has yet to include names of sessions, it’s clear that there will be as many as nine (9!) tracks that attendees can follow. With hundreds of attendees, a large number of sessions should allow for better dialogue and less of a keynote-esque feel.

At the end of each quarter, each group within Mozilla (including the Foundation, Corporation, and Messaging) creates a set of goals for the next quarter. Some groups opt to publish these publicly, though most keep them internal-only.

The platform team (as well as the Firefox team) has consistently posted their goals publicly, allowing greater insight into where their effort is going for the next three months.

In the quarterly goals published for this coming quarter, there are a number of interesting line items that will be worked on this coming quarter. Quoting, out of order:

• Javascript performance near or even with Chrome 5 on their benchmarks (within 20% on SS, 30% on V8), with substantial wins on our benchmarks. (Windows, in-browser.)
• Security: zero reproducible high/[critical bugs older than] 30 days
• Fully support the WebGL 1.0 spec, with support turned on by default in a Firefox 4 beta on platforms that support OpenGL or OpenGL ES.
• Finish and land CSS Transitions
• Be prepared to ship [out of process plug-ins] for Mac OS X.

Several line items this quarter reference Chrome 5 and Mozilla playing catch-up to its speed. While this hasn’t been played up in the media, Chrome has been running rings around Firefox in some of the more popular JavaScript tests.

Kudos to the Platform team for continually publishing these. For reference, here are the goals for Q2, which is ending in a few days.

Microsoft has announced the next preview of its IE9 web browser, detailing new platform features available to users in the upcoming IE9.

IE9 includes a number of new HTML5 features like Canvas, the audio and video tags, and even WOFF support. As expected, support for the video tag includes the H.264 backend and not the WebM backend.

IE9 also improves JavaScript performance, bringing it inline with the leading browsers – Chrome and Safari – and well ahead of where Firefox 3.7 alpha 5 is.

By the time this post is live, Thunderbird 3.1 will likely have shipped.

Code named “Lanikai” after the popular beach in Hawaii, Thunderbird 3.1 includes a number of new features including:

• Faster Search Results
• Quick Filter Toolbar
• New Migration Assistant
• Saved Files Manager
• Mail Account Setup Wizard
• Built on Gecko 1.9.2
• And more…

Thunderbird continues to receive pressure from Postbox, which is hard at work on version 2 and just shipped Postbox Express.

As part of the press around Thunderbird 3.1, Mozilla is trying to get donations for Kupu, a Hawaiian conservation group. This is the second in a line of upcoming fundraising activities as part of the “Mozilla Parks” project.

As Mozilla buckles down on shipping its first beta of Firefox 4, the Firefox team has posted the first “Theme Roadmap,” a look at what Firefox has accomplished in a specific area and where it should go.

The Privacy & User Control roadmap gives a quick overview of Mozilla’s work on Firefox 1, 2, and 3.5 as well as where it intends to go for Firefox 4. To wit:

Local Disk Privacy

• extend privacy control to plugins
• locally encrypt passwords and form data by default
• token/client certificate support for authentication / sync

Online Privacy

• analyse use cases for third party cookies, choose better defaults
• auto-expiring cookies
• put behavioural tracking in user’s control (opt-in)
• reduce browser signature in UA header and other inspectible APIs
• continue to invest in web infrastructure that solves desired use cases while putting control in user’s hands

User Interface changes to enhance user control

• consolidate site permissions into single manager
• provide actionable controls per-site

Some of the future roadmaps that have yet to be published include Search, Social, Web Apps, and Performance.

As for specific product roadmaps, Mozilla has maintained a Firefox 4 beta page for some time. It includes quite a bit of information on what the first Firefox 4 beta will look like, including the inclusion of Test Pilot as an option when installing. Of course, the page discussing this is on Mozilla’s private intranet and no bug has been filed to track the work, so we’re left to guessing what this means.

(Psst. Speaking of Firefox 4, if you want a sneak peak of the pages that will go live on mozilla.com with the beta, they’re right here.)

A couple days ago, Google launched its response to Apple’s HTML5 Showcase, a website called “HTML5Rocks.” Naming aside, the website is an awesome mix of showcasing and experimentation.

Google’s site includes step-by-step tutorials as well as a “code playground” that allows full experimentation of the APIs available in HTML5.

Meanwhile, Mozilla continues to lag behind in resources and showcases for developers. Its Mozilla Developer Network, while up-to-date for most technologies, isn’t nearly as easy to use as Google’s new site.

Strangely, there was not a single mention of HTML5Rocks in the Mozilla blogosphere. After attacking Apple for its HTML Showcase, one wonders why Mozilla wouldn’t praise Google for its take on an HTML5 website.

Earlier this week, Adobe shipped Flash 10.1 for Android devices. As Mozilla continues work on its port of Firefox to Android devices, its still unclear what its stance on Flash will be.

Mozilla continues its work porting Fennec to the multi-process Electrolysis project, which will improve stability of any mobile Flash browser.

At the platform meeting this week, there was much discussion over the version of the next Gecko release, on which Firefox 4 will ship.

For the past two Gecko releases, Mozilla has opted to version them as “sub” versions of the 1.9 branch, despite their relatively sweeping changes. In doing this, Mozilla has also guaranteed that frozen interfaces would remain frozen. With the coming of 2.0, Mozilla is changing its stance on frozen interfaces. From the meeting notes:

Between minor or major releases, such as 2.0.x to 2.1.x or 1.9.x to 2.0.x, native-code interface compatibility is not guaranteed, even for interfaces that were previously considered FROZEN: providers of native code components, and embedders who use native-code interfaces, will at least need to recompile. We will endeavour to provide a smooth migration strategy for cases where source compatibility is not feasible, and we will also work to ensure that extension authors which rely on native components can support at least two adjacent incompatible Gecko versions in the same package.

Firefox 4 is currently targeted at Q3 of this year, though it will almost certainly slip to Q1 of 2011.