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 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.

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.

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.

Today from 11:00 a.m. - 12:00 p.m. PDT (UTC-07:00) Asa Dotzler hosts Air Mozilla Live. Join us at http://air.mozilla.com.

Asa’s guests this week will be Mitchell Baker and Mark Surman. Here’s how Mitchell introduced Mark on her blog:

I’m thrilled to report that we’ve identified the person we believe should lead the Mozilla Foundation into a new stage of activity. That person is Mark Surman, the role is Mozilla Foundation Executive Director. “We” in this case is the Executive Director Search Committee, the Mozilla Foundation Board of Directors, Mozilla Foundation staff, plus a set of other Mozilla contributors who have spoken with Mark.

Who: The Mozilla community, host Asa Dotzler, and guests Mitchell Baker and Mark Surman.
When: Wednesday, July 23, from 11:00 a.m. - 12:00 p.m. PDT (UTC-07:00)
Where: View the webcast and join the chat at air.mozilla.com and on IRC server irc.mozilla.org, channel #airmozilla.

No Monday blues around here today — it’s Mozilla’s 10 year anniversary! On March 31, 1998 Mozilla was officially launched and the Mozilla source code became publicly available for the first time. Mitchell Baker has a write up of what Mozilla and its community have accomplished in these past 10 years and what’s in store for the next 10. Here are a few highlights:

• Converted a closed, proprietary development process into a vibrant, transparent, open source project
• Grown into a massive global community, quite possibly the largest open source project in the world
• Developed a set of long-term, vibrant projects — Firefox, Thunderbird, SeaMonkey, Camino, Bugzilla, Calendar — most, and possibly all of which have millions of users
• Become the software provider of choice for over 170 million people
• Proved that open source development can produce great end user products
• Brought the Internet to millions of people in their language
• Moved the overall state of browser software forward dramatically
• Become a technology platform others use to create products built on Mozilla technologies, and in some cases competitive with Mozilla products

A huge thanks to our wonderful community that has helped make this all possible! Please stay tuned for more details on how we’ll honor the anniversary over the year.

Monday marks a very special day in Mozilla history — the 10 year anniversary of the Mozilla source code release. We’d like to give you the chance to hear from some folks who have been with us from the beginning. Mitchell Baker, Brendan Eich, Mike Shaver, and Chris Hofmann will join us for a special one hour retrospective. Asa Dotzler, will be hosting and asking our guests to reflect on the early days, major inflection points for the organization, and what’s in store for the next 10 years of Mozilla. Prior to the live broadcast you can catch “Mozilla Memories,” video messages from community members and Mozilla employees, starting at 10 a.m. PDT.

So please join us on Monday for this special Air Mozilla Live.

Who: The Mozilla community, host Asa Dotzler, and guests Mitchell Baker, Brendan Eich, Mike Shaver, and Chris Hofmann.
When: Monday, March 31, from 11:00:00 - 12:00:00 PDT (UTC-07:00)
Where: View the webcast and join the chat at air.mozilla.com.

Also: As part of the year-long celebration of Mozilla’s 10 years, we’re gathering up video memories from our community of contributors. If you’d like to share some of your experiences with Mozilla, please upload them to YouTube and tag them with “mozilla-anniversary” so that we can locate them. You’ll be able to see the first batch of video memories starting one hour before Monday’s show and we hope to add another batch at least once a month.

(If you do record a video memory, hold onto the clip so that if we decided to put it into the Air Mozilla program, we can use the higher quality footage rather than YouTube’s downsampled version.)

A special thanks goes out to Mogulus for supporting this production of Air Mozilla.

Please join us for another exciting episode of Air Mozilla Live!

This week’s Air Mozilla Live broadcast will feature a discussion with David Ascher, CEO of Mozilla’s new Mozilla Messaging organization. David will be talking about the launch of this new Mozilla Foundation subsidiary, upcoming Thunderbird releases, and the future of internet messaging. The program will also facilitate a community discussion about the new native look and feel for Firefox 3 on Mac, Windows, and Linux. Our guest for this segment of the show is Alex Faaborg, the User Experience Designer who has led much of this effort over the last year. Got thoughts, suggestions, rants about the new themes? Alex can’t wait.

So join us, this Thursday for our live community discussion and “call-in” show.

Who: The Mozilla community, host Asa Dotzler, and guests David Ascher, and Alex Faaborg.

When: Thursday, February 21, from 14:00:00 - 15:00:00 PST (UTC -8.)
Where: View the webcast at air.mozilla.com and participate on IRC, IM, or email.

• IRC: join the discussion on irc.mozilla.org #airmozilla
• IM: instant message your questions to the AIM/YIM/GTalk screenname airmozilla.
• email: send in your questions before and during the show to airmozilla@mozilla.com.

Air Mozilla is now streaming 24/7 with a new live show every month (or as close to that as makes sense.) If you’ve got ideas for shows, please email us and let us know. Even better, if you’re a part of the Mozilla community and you’d like to be interviewed or present on our live broadcast, let us know.