The Mozilla Blog

Editor’s note: Mozilla announced the release of Fennec alpha 2, an early developer release of the mobile version of Firefox, on Monday, December 22, 2008.  See Engineering Manager Stuart Parmenter’s comprehensive post for more details, excerpted here:

We’re happy to announce that our second alpha release of Fennec has come together.  While we focused much of the previous alpha on getting the user experience how we wanted, we’ve spent much of the time since focused on improving performance.  We’ve made major strides improving startup performance, panning and zooming performance, and responsiveness while pages are loading.

The release notes have information on a quick start, how to install, what’s new, known issues and how to provide feedback. So if you’re interested in getting involved with Mozilla Mobile, install Fennec and tell us what you think.

Congratulations to the entire mobile team!

Editor’s note: Mozilla released a security and stability update for Firefox 2.x users on Thursday, December 18th, 2008 at 6:04 pm PT. Check out the Mozilla Developer News announcement , reposted below, for more details.

Editor’s note: Mozilla released a security and stability update for Firefox 3.x users on Tuesday, December 16, 2008 at 4:30 pm PT. Check out the Mozilla Developer News announcement , reposted below, for more details.

Editor’s note: The Bugzilla Project released Bugzilla 3.2 on Saturday, November 29, 2008. Check out the full release notes for more details.

The Bugzilla Project released Bugzilla 3.2, the first major feature release since Bugzilla 3.0.  Bugzilla 3.2 brings a lot of great improvements and polish to the Bugzilla experience, including major UI improvements, a new default skin, custom status workflow, easier installation, experimental oracle support, improved UTF-8 support, group icons and more. It’s exciting to note that there are as many new features between Bugzilla 3.0 and 3.2 as there were between 2.22 and 3.0. For more details, see the complete list of new features.
If you’re upgrading to Bugzilla 3.2, make sure to read How to Upgrade From An Older Version. If you are upgrading from a release before 3.0, make sure to read the release notes for all the previous versions in between your version and this one, particularly the “Notes For Upgraders” section of each version’s release notes.

Check out Max Kanat-Alexander’s blog, one of the main developers in the Bugzilla Project, for more information on the release.

Today Mozilla released Fashion Your Firefox, a new Web application that enables Firefox users to customize their browser based on their interests and online activities. With Fashion Your Firefox, add-ons that fit people’s online lifestyles are organized in easy to discover ways and are available for installation in just a few easy clicks.

Fashion Your Firefox presents add-ons in activity-based categories that make them easy to find and install. Categories in Fashion Your Firefox include:
•    Shutterbug: View and share pictures and videos online
•    Rock Star: Listen to music while surfing, working, emailing or researching online
•    News Junkie: Get the most up-to-date news and weather
•    Shopaholic: Shop and take advantage of online deals
•    Digital Pack Rat: Keep track of favorite sites, bookmarks and blogs
•    Social Butterfly: Share, bookmark, and e-mail web pages via an array of social networking & bookmarking sites
•    Finder and Seeker: Find and make information on the Web more relevant
•    Decorator: Apply browser themes
•    Executive Assistant: Organize online activities

For more information see our press release, FAQ, and David Rolnitzky’s, Mozilla’s add-ons program manager, blog post.

Editor’s note: Mozilla released Firefox 3.1 beta 1 on Tuesday, October 14, 2008 at 2:42 pm PT. Check out the Mozilla Developer News announcement reposted below for more details.

Firefox 3.1 Beta 1 is now available for download. This milestone is focused on testing the core functionality provided by many new features and changes to the platform scheduled for Firefox 3.1. Ongoing planning for Firefox 3.1 can be followed at the Firefox 3.1 Planning Center, as well as in mozilla.dev.planning and on irc.mozilla.org in #shiretoko.

New features and changes in this milestone that require feedback include:

• Web standards improvements in the Gecko layout engine
• Added support for CSS 2.1 and CSS 3 properties
• A new tab-switching shortcut that shows previews of the tab you’re switching to
• Improved control over the Smart Location Bar using special characters to restrict your search
• Support for new web technologies such as the <video> and <audio> elements, the W3C Geolocation API, JavaScript query selectors, web worker threads, SVG transforms and offline applications.

More information about new web developer features are available in the Web Tech blog post.

Testers can download Firefox 3.1 Beta 1 builds for Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux in 36 different languages. Developers should also read the Firefox 3.1 for Developers article on the Mozilla Developer Center.

Note: Please do not link directly to the download site. Instead we strongly encourage you to link to this Firefox 3.1 Beta 1 milestone announcement so that everyone will know what this milestone is, what they should expect, and who should be downloading to participate in testing at this stage of development.

Editor’s note: Mozilla released a security and stability update for Firefox 3.x users on Friday, September 26, 2008 at 1 pm PT. Check out the Mozilla Developer News announcement reposted below for more details.

In order to repair a problem experienced by some users with the Password Manager feature in Firefox 3.0.2, and as part of Mozilla Corporation’s ongoing stability and security update process, Firefox 3.0.3 is now available for Windows, Mac, and Linux as free downloads at http://getfirefox.com/

We strongly recommend that all Firefox users upgrade to this latest release. If you already have Firefox 3 or Firefox 2, you will receive an automated update notification within 24 to 48 hours. This update can also be applied manually by selecting “Check for Updates…” from the Help menu.

For a list of changes and more information, please review the Firefox 3.0.3 Release Notes.

This morning we announced we’re partnering with StopBadware.org, the Harvard University based consumer protection initiative developed to combat badware in novel ways. Mozilla and StopBadware collaborated during the development of Firefox 3’s malware warning system.  Now these efforts will be extended to include research into how badware spreads online, an active community of users helping each other to keep their Web sites and computers protected, public alerts about new badware applications, and a clearinghouse of dangerous Web sites reported by StopBadware.org’s partners.

For more information please see the press release and Maxim Weinstein’s StopBadware blog.

Editor’s note: Mozilla announced that Firefox 2 will get a major update on Monday, August 25, 2008 at 6:10 pm PST. See Mike Beltzner’s comprehensive post on Mozilla Developer News, crossposted below.

Starting a little later tonight, users with the latest version of Firefox 2 will be getting an offer to update to Firefox 3. If you’re running Firefox 2.0.0.17 you will see the offer in the next couple of days, though if you’re eager you can always “Check for Updates” in the “Help” menu. This is what the offer will look like:

Clicking the “Learn More” link will open a new tab with more information about Firefox 3 to help you make your decision about upgrading. From there, you have a choice:

• select Later if you don’t want to decide now; Firefox will ask again in 24 hours
• select Never if you don’t want to accept this upgrade offer; we might send you another offer again in the future, but it won’t be for several weeks or months
• select Get the new version to continue on with the upgrade process!

Some of the updated features in Firefox 3 - like malware protection - required us to update our End User License Agreement (EULA), so we have to ask you to accept the new one:

Once you’ve accepted that, Firefox will download and install the update, then offer to restart the browser. When you restart, you’ll be rolling with Firefox 3!

Now, although over 90% of Firefox Add-Ons have been updated to be compatible with Firefox 3, in some cases the authors have created entirely new versions. If that happens with your favorite Add-On, you might see the following screen:

You can see exactly which Add-Ons are being flagged as potentially incompatible by clicking on Show List. As mentioned above, for most popular Add-Ons, there probably is an update available, but you’ll need to install Firefox 3 first in order to check. If you continue with the update process, when Firefox 3 starts up for the first time you’ll see the following screen:

By all means, Check Now to see if there’s a version of that Add-On which works with Firefox 3. If there is, you’ll see the following:

You’ll want to Install Now which will fetch the update and then continue loading Firefox 3.

If an update isn’t available, Firefox will check every day and let you know once the Add-On author has created one. If you’ve come this far and decide that you can’t live without your favorite Add-On, you can always go to www.getfirefox.com and click on “Other Languages and Systems”, and click on the link to download an older version of Firefox.

Note: Please do not link directly to the update site. Instead we strongly encourage you to link to this announcement so that everyone will know what this milestone is, what they should expect, and who should be downloading to participate in testing at this stage of development.