thoughts on mozilla

In a blog post yesterday, Jay Sullivan – Mozilla Corporation’s VP of Products – discussed Firefox Sync and Firefox Home, two products Mozilla hopes will get a fairly decent amount of adoption.

Firefox Sync, formerly known as Weave, is essentially a server product that will allow syncing of all your Firefox information, including bookmarks, history, open tabs, add-ons, etc. Firefox 4 will include Firefox Sync by default, though Mozilla says the feature will be turned off.

Firefox Home is an iPhone client for Firefox Sync, which allows you to view much of your stored information.

Sullivan’s blog post reads more like a marketing than a discussion on product direction and offers no ETA for Firefox Home.

Meanwhile, Tony Chung – a QA manager at the Mozilla Corporation – has a blog post discussing the QA focus for Firefox Sync and general comments on Firefox Home. The post also looks at statistics for Firefox Sync, but not in great detail. Of course, stats are publicly available on addons.mozilla.org for anyone to peruse.

More information on the less-known Firefox Home is available in a FAQ on the Mozilla wiki.

Jennifer Boriss – user experience designer with the Mozilla Corporation – has been discussing the removal of the status bar on her blog in a three part series.

In the latest and final proposal, Firefox 4 loses its status bar in the majority of cases, allowing some add-ons the ability to place their bottom-anchored functionality on an automatically resizing status bar, much like the status bar in Google Chrome, which appears only sometimes. Not proposed by Boriss is the ability for the status bar to move below the window chrome when hovered. Without such an ability, content could become unreachable by some users. With such ability, the status bar becomes less usable and more finicky.

Overall, the removal of the status bar is a welcome change, which gives users and websites a larger usable content area.

Mozilla found time on Monday night to ship their Mozilla Developer Preview (1.9.3 Number 5) – previously called Firefox 3.7 alpha 5 –to users of previous developer previews.

For some reason, Mozilla has decided to brand this release with the “Mozilla” name, despite it being a “Firefox” download. It’s also quite a mouthful to say.

Those paying close attention will note that Mozilla intended to release a new developer preview every 2-3 weeks. This latest developer preview comes more than two months after the previous, just as Mozilla races towards the first beta release of Firefox 4.

While most groups have submitted their ideas for sessions, lightning talks, and the science fair to the various private Google spreadsheets, a few groups have been publishing their ideas and proposals on the Mozilla wiki.

The first, the Mobile group, has published a list of sessions they’re proposing for the summit, as well as proposed lightning talks. Attendees of the Summit will likely get a chance to attend sessions on Mozilla’s mobile roadmap, writing and designing add-ons for Fennec, user experience on mobile, and how mobile fits in with Mozilla’s out of process project, Electrolysis.

The mobile group will also have a “keynote” which will feature Stuart Parmenter – Mozilla Corporation’s (MoCo) Director of Mobile Engineering – giving a general overview of all things mobile, including Fennec, Android, Meego, and Firefox Home, the new iPhone application.

The second group to publish their ideas and plans is the Mozilla Foundation (MoFo), which have given a list of sessions and lightning talks they hope to present at the Summit. Among them are sessions on project communication, branch management in Bugzilla, the Mozilla web universe, growing the Mozilla community with Drumbeat, learning from non-Mozilla movements, and a general “participation” session.

The most interesting MoFo session looks to be one on exploring supporter and membership models for Mozilla, which MoFo is especially interested in as a way to raise funds. Membership at Mozilla could mirror that of the Apache Foundation, Gnome Foundation, or other open source non-profits.

The final group that has posted its plans on the Mozilla wiki is the Mozilla Labs Jetpack team. The Jetpack team has posted plans for one session that discusses Jetpack and the future of add-on development, mirroring a talk Myk Melez – Mozilla Labs engineer – is expected to give at the London MAOW the week prior. The group also has plans for three different lightning talks and a Science Fair booth to demo the Jetpack SDK and FlightDeck.

Additionally, the Jetpack team will be holding a Rocket Your Firefox add-on content and will announce winners at the closing dinner on July 9.

The Summit should be a fun and interesting event for those who attend. Hopefully more groups will publish their plans and ideas for the Summit to give outsiders a better look inside the event.

Mozilla is on track to ship Firefox 3.7 alpha 5 this week, likely on Friday. Of course, as with all releases, there’s a chance the release date will slip, but the release is currently on track.

Firefox 3.7 alpha 5 – which has yet to be rebranded Firefox 4 – will include several new features over the previous alpha, mostly on the backend.

• WebM support
• ChromeWorker with jsctypes
• 64-bit Mac and Linux builds
• Cocoa NPAPI support (improved performance with Flash 10.1)
• New Add-ons Manager (draft UI)

Candidate builds for the alpha will be started shortly and we’ll have a blog post once Mozilla announces the release.

Update: Candidate builds are now available.

As part of his ongoing work to redesign Firefox for Firefox 4, Stephen Horlander has uploaded new mockups of Firefox 4 for Linux.

The theme is very much in line with the Windows and Mac themes while keeping a very Linux look and feel.

The timeline for implementing the new theme, while very out of date, is available on the Mozilla wiki.

Chris Pearce, an engineer working out of Mozilla’s Auckland office, reports that WebM has been enabled for Firefox nightlies. Starting today, anyone running the general mozilla-central builds will get WebM for free.

After you download the nightly, you probably want to try it out. Pearce reports:

If you’re looking for some WebM videos to test with, you can view WebM videos on YouTube’s HTML5 Experiement [sic] with nightly builds from tonight onwards.

Download a nightly build now. (And ignore the broken dates on the nightly site.)

As many people know, every version of Firefox receives a code name after a national park, somewhere in the world. In the past, there have been Firefox code names for parks in the Canada, Italy, Japan, Madagascar, and Indonesia, among others.

Firefox 4 has been given the code name of Tumucumaque, after the Brazilian, Amazonian park. While not entirely finalized, the name will likely be announced at the Mozilla Summit 2010 early next month.

The tradition of using park names officially started with Firefox 2, though Firefox 1.5 had the code name of “Deer Park”, which wasn’t actually a park.

In recent months, the Mozilla Foundation (MoFo) has been capitalizing on the park names and using them for fundraising. The most recent efforts have been around “Lanikai,” the code name for Thunderbird 3.1 and a beach in Hawaii. Previously, MoFo raised funds for the lemurs, in support of “Namoroka,” the code name of Firefox 3.6.

For a list of Firefox code names and potential future code names, see the Mozilla wiki page.

While we all know Mozilla’s distaste for H.264, it’s been much less clear where Mozilla stands on other web standards that developers wish to use. Specifically, SVG Fonts have long been something Mozilla has not implemented as part of its Firefox web browser. This, of course, despite being part of the Acid 3 test, which Firefox has yet to pass.

In a blog post tonight, Mozilla Corporation Manager of Layout, Robert O’Callahan outlines his reasons why Firefox will not support either SVG Fonts or the popular WebSQLDatabase, which itself is not a standard, but has become fairly integral to mobile web applications.

Not supporting SVG Fonts is one of the first times Mozilla has flat out said “no” to a standard that other browsers support and one which has been at W3C Recommendation status since January 2003.

Of course, it’s especially interesting to see Mozilla not implement WebSQLDatabse, given how far behind it has fallen in the mobile browser race. I’d expect to see Mozilla catching up as quick as possible and implementing even better features (or improvements to features) at a faster rate than Webkit.

Yesterday, Ragavan Srinivasan – project manager of Weave – announced the graduation of Weave Sync from Mozilla Labs. As part of this graduation, Weave Sync becomes Firefox Sync and joins the Firefox team so it can become integrated for Firefox 4.

One of the questions that arose from this was brought up by Robert Kaiser of the SeaMonkey Project. With a purely marketing change of name that now specifically calls out Firefox, what should other projects call “Firefox Sync” when incorporating it into their applications? In his blog post, no Mozilla Corporation (MoCo) employee speaks up to answer. However, Gervase Markham – a Mozilla Foundation employee and longtime community member – notes that his desire was for “Weave Sync” to stick with a more general name, along the lines of “Mozilla Sync.” It’s evident that this option wasn’t chosen for marketing reasons by the MoCo team.