thoughts on mozilla

As is always true, much happened in the world of Mozilla last week. Here’s what you might have missed:

• Firefox 3.6.4 shipped, finally, only to be followed by a “chemspill” release two days later (called Firefox 3.6.6) to fix an issue with the new Crash Protection feature.
• Thunderbird 3.1 shipped.
• In the platform world, Gecko 2.0 will be the next version. Meanwhile, Q3 goals were published and Doug Turner posted about possible desktop notifications coming in Firefox.
• Flash 10.1 saw its release on Android, the first mobile version to go live.
• In HTML5-related news, Google launched HTML5Rocks. Mozilla has yet to acknowledge or respond. Microsoft launched IE9 Platform Preview 3, a huge step forward in their standards support.
• The Firefox team kept busy, publishing the first of what will be several “theme roadmaps,” pressing forward on Tab Candy, and publishing a video about Tabs on Top, coming in Firefox 4. The team also produced an Inspector 0.5 preview for users to try.
• The Firefox Input project shipped version 1.0. Aakash Desai, of the Mozilla Corporation QA team, has more.
• Bugzilla 4.0 is now on the map for later this year.
• In Jetpack land, the Jetpack 0.5 SDK was shipped and FlightDeck 1.0a2 got close to launch (hint: the page is no longer password protected).
• We reported on a couple upcoming events, including the Drumbeat Festival.
• Speaking of upcoming events, a proposed schedule for the Mozilla Summit 2010 was published.

In the “things we didn’t report on” department:

• Lightning 1.0 beta 2 shipped final.
• Mark Finkle – a Mozilla Corporation engineer – posted on what’s coming in Fennec 2.0.
• Mozilla won some award it really doesn’t deserve (what innovations shipped in the last year?).

This week will likely be slower than most as many Mozillians prep for the Mozilla Summit 2010 next week.

Over the weekend, Mozilla shipped Firefox 3.6.6 as a “chemspill” release to increase the amount of time Firefox waits before terminating an unresponsive plug-in. The release happened in spite of close to a million beta testers of Firefox 3.6.4, which theoretically would have caught such issues.

After Firefox 3.6.4 shipped, several users noted problems when playing Farmville. Specifically, Adobe Flash would “crash” because of a 10 second timeout. Ultimately, Mozilla fixed this issue by simply updating the timeout to 45 seconds, a simple change, but one that required shipping a release ASAP.

Meanwhile, Firefox 3.6.7 (formerly 3.6.6 before this chemspill release) code froze last Friday night. The release is intended to fix security issues prior to BlackHat and Defcon this year as well as fix issues in the new Crash Protection feature. One wonders how Mozilla was able to even notice many issues in Crash Protection a mere three days before code freeze, outside of this major Farmville problem.

Mozilla continues to plow forward with its plan to add many features from Firebug to Firefox. Yesterday, Rob Campell – an engineer with the Mozilla Corporation – announced the availability of “Inspector Milestone 0.5 Preview,” a series of experimental builds that incorporate his work on a Style panel and DOM panel, which will soon be built-in to Firefox 4.

Previously, David Dahl – an engineer with the Mozilla Corporation – announced his piece of the “Inspector” puzzle: a built-in web console.

As more of these features become part of Firefox, Firebug will become a tool used for hardcore web developers instead of a go-to for every web developer.

Download the preview builds here.

FlightDeck, Mozilla Labs’ project to allow for easier creation of jetpacks, is close to launching its second alpha. Did you miss the first alpha? So did we.

The wiki page for the project shows that all deliverables are “done” and messaging is being worked on now, including a release announcement. When it’s live, FlightDeck will be available at builder.mozillalabs.com, a website that is now protected.

Alex Faaborg – a user experience designer with the Mozilla Corporation – blogged last night about the move from “tabs on bottom” to “tabs on top” in Firefox 4. In the video Faaborg made, he outlines a number of reasons why this change makes sense and one drawback from it.

Specifically:

1. The conceptual model makes more sense with tabs on top.
2. “App” tabs, coming in Firefox 4, are more logical when a user doesn’t see the browser UI.
3. More and more of Firefox’s UI will be moving to tabs instead of windows. Examples include Preferences, the Add-ons manager, and Downloads.
4. Notifications can be tab-modal and not app-modal, something that’s challenging with tabs on bottom when such notifications will block other tabs.

The one drawback Faaborg mentions is that the distance a user has to move their mouse increases considerably. Mozilla intends to study this in their betas using TestPilot, which will soon be built-in.

To watch Faaborg’s entire video, head over to YouTube.

Myk Melez – a Labs engineer with the Mozilla Corporation – announced the availability of the Jetpack SDK 0.5. This latest versino adds quite a few new APIs to Jetpack, giving developers even more control over their jetpacks.

From the blog post:

• Tabs API – Provides easy access to tabs and tab-related events.
• Request API – Lets you easily make network requests.
• Load/unload reasons – Add-ons can now find out when they are being loaded for the first time after being installed or enabled and unloaded because they are being uninstalled or disabled.
• Localization API – Provides simple localization functionality. It makes it possible to retrieve localized versions of the strings in your code. And it doesn’t require you to solicit localizations from localizers or bundle localizations with your code, as the module retrieves them automatically from a web service based on the strings your code is using.
• Selection API – Provides a means to get and set current text/HTML selections as well as observe new selections.
• And in case you have not been following the latest Jetpack developments, we also launched Page Worker, Widget, Simple Storage and Private Browsing APIs in previous releases. A complete list of APIs can be found in the core library reference.

More information about Jetpack is available on its project page.

Proposed a while ago and first mentioned in the Firefox 4 slides, TabCandy is a new user interface experiment that attempts to organize your workflow. As its homepage states, “[t]hink Exposé meets Spaces done right.”

The progress on TabCandy is still in its infancy and the project will likely get renamed before shipping in a final version of Firefox, but the basics are there. The Firefox project page for TabCandy has quite a few mockups as well as a prototype extension available for download.

TabCandy is being designed and championed by Aza Raskin, a user interface designer for the Mozilla Corporation.

For quite a bit of information on TabCandy work, be sure to check out its Etherpad.

As has been customary for a few years now, Mozilla will take part in FISL 2010 in Porto Alegre, Brazil. Held July 21 through 24, FISL is an annual gathering of free software groups throughout the world, but especially in South America.

Mozilla’s attendance this year includes talks on Jetpack, Drumbeat, Web Sockets, and Universal Subtitles.

For more information on Mozilla’s participation in FISL, please see the wiki page.

In a blog post yesterday, Max Kanat-Alexander – a peer of the Bugzilla Project – discusses plans for Bugzilla 4.0 to be released by the end of the year.

Kanat-Alexander states the rationale for a “4.0″ version is based on the major UI improvements as well as improved WebServices support. From his post:

Bugzilla 4.0 will also have cross-domain WebServices support, via JSONP. As a part of that, the JSON-RPC WebServices interface can also now be accessed using HTTP GET and a simple query string in the URL, instead of having to POST a JSON object.

Also in the area of WebServices, we’re planning to have our most-requested WebService function implemented, Bug.update, so that you can update all the attributes of a Bug via the WebServices. There may be other good WebServices improvements which make 4.0, too.

A number of these features, as well as quite a few other changes, are available in Bugzilla 3.7.1, a preview (read: unstable) release of what will be in Bugzilla 4.0, as detailed in Kanat-Alexander’s blog post.

Additionally, updates are available for Bugzilla 3.2, 3.4, and 3.6.

Doug Turner – a platform and mobile engineer with the Mozilla Corporation – has a post up discussing a new feature that may one day come to Firefox: desktop notifications.

Turner’s proposal would allow websites to display notifications to users, with their permission, of course. On first use, the website would ask for permission to show notifications, much like websites can do now with geolocation (a project Turner worked on previously).

Prior to creating his own, basic implementation, Turner reviewed two other proposals: WebNotifications and the Google Gears Notifications API. Astute readers will note that both of these specifications have been written by Google. Because of this and because of their inclusion in the now-defunct Google Gears, it’s very likely that Chrome will ship with desktop notifications at some point in the future.

The comments on his post are quite heated and some discuss a couple scenarios when websites could easily take advantage of users after they allow notifications. Regardless, the feature is very likely to move forward, given previous work by Google on the concept.

For more information, follow the bug in Bugzilla.