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.

Much happened last week and we’re here to tell you about all of it.

First, the things we reported on:

• Mozilla started the week with Chris Blizzard criticizing Apple for its Safari-only HTML5 website.
• We published a fair number of posts about the Mozilla Summit 2010. For ongoing coverage, follow the Summit 2010 category.
• Both Postbox and Songbird shipped releases and we also announced the first alpha of Postbox 2.0.
• The infrastructure security team proposed a new disclosure policy for infrastructure bugs.
• Mozilla fell short of delivering Firefox 3.7 alpha 5, but the release will likely ship early in the week with built-in WebM support.
• The Mozilla Labs team started their Secret project, meanwhile the Raindrop project started a reset. The Mozilla Labs team also started a new concept series titled “Crowdsource Crowdsourcing.”
• The Firefox Cup, a marketing project tied to the World Cup, launched.
• For those who donate $75, the Mozilla 2010 community-designed t-shirt started shipping. Strangely, it didn’t appear in the Mozilla Community Store.

There’s also a lot of news we didn’t report on. Here are some of the highlights:

• Daniel Buchner, a product manager for Jetpack, announced the results of the Jetpack survey.
• The first beta of Test Pilot, the Mozilla Labs project that studies user behavior, was released, as announced by Jinghua Zhang, a product manager for Test Pilot.
• The Firefox “Input” project, slowly moved forward. Its goal is to organize all of the feedback mechanisms, into one location.
• Firefox 3.6.4 hiccuped again and another build was made to fix bug 562198. Candidate builds are now available.
• Gervase Markham announced the Bugzilla 600,000 bug sweepstakes.
• Jay Sullivan, Mozilla Corporation’s VP of Product (formerly of Mobile), along with Dan Mills, an engineer with Mozilla Labs, spoke with Tech Radar about Mozilla’s stance on web privacy. A slew of fairly ignorant statements were made, but we took the high road and let it slide.

And that’s everything important that happened last week in the Mozilla universe.