thoughts on mozilla

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.

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.

Designed through the Mozilla Creative Collective, the 2010 Mozilla t-shirt is now available and shipping, as announced by Chelsea Novak, a fundraiser for the Mozilla Foundation.

Unlike previous shirts which could be purchased from the Mozilla store, the 2010 shirt requires a donation of $75 or more to the Mozilla Foundation’s “Open Web Fund.” Of course, the original Mozilla store has been offline for quite a while after serious privacy and security concerns were raised. But most users can still order t-shirts and other swag from the international store and also from the community store. Given that the t-shirt was designed by a community member, one would think it’d be available on the community store.

Mozilla continues to call this the “2010″ shirt, implying that they’ll release a new shirt next year and possibly implying that they only intend to release one new shirt this year. Meanwhile, the lovable Dino continues to get fatter.

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.