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about:mozilla - Mozilla Summit, Mozilla Labs, Add-ons workshop, Canvas in IE, Theora, Ogg, and more…

In this issue…

Mozilla Firefox Plus Summit 2008
Four hundred Mozilla contributors gathered in Whistler, Canada last week for the 2008 Mozilla Firefox Plus Summit. Three days of talks covered a huge range of topics, and spontaneous informal breakout sessions formed often (and often very late in the evening). The Summit was an incredible success, and there are a huge (and growing) number of pictures on Flickr, a long (and chronologically-reversed) Twitter stream, as well as numerous blog posts about the Summit on Planet Mozilla. And while there were bears, a rockslide that blocked the road out, a power outage, and even snow in July, it’s safe to say that a good time was had by all.

Mozilla Labs Concept Series
Mozilla Labs has introduced the extremely exciting new “Concept Series” initiative and issued a call for participation. “We’re calling on industry, higher education and people from around the world to get involved and share their ideas and expertise as we collectively explore and design future directions of the Web. You don’t have to be a software engineer to get involved, and you don’t have to program. Everyone is welcome to participate. We’re particularly interested in engaging with designers who have not typically been involved with open source projects. And we’re biasing towards broad participation, not finished implementations.” Much more information is available over at the Mozilla Labs weblog, including a handful of initial concept videos and links to the discussion forum.

Add-ons workshop in Paris
William — part of Mozilla’s Marketing team in Europe — writes, “I’m very happy to officially announce that a Mozilla Add-ons Workshop will take place in Paris on Saturday September 20th, 2008. The aim of the one-day workshop is to spur interest and encourage extension development targeted towards specific locales. The first workshop will be focused on extensions in French, gathering developers mainly from France, Belgium, Luxembourg and Switzerland but we hope it will be the first of many regular workshops organised across Europe.” For more information including a rough schedule for the day, see William’s blog post.

No browser left behind - Canvas in IE
Vladimir Vukićević has developed a native Canvas implementation for Microsoft Internet Explorer that is based on the same rendering core that’s in Firefox. Microsoft does not support Canvas in IE7, and has stated that it will not be supported in IE8, which continues to be one of the biggest roadblocks towards the widespread adoption of the Canvas technology. Vlad writes, “With an object tag, a bit of CSS, and a single line of script, canvas elements in HTML just work [in IE]. I’m excited that this experiment is working out, because lack of Canvas support in IE is one of the reasons people skip Canvas and instead turn to Flash and other plugin technologies.” Binary builds are not currently available, but you can track development in an hg repository. See Vlad’s post for more info, and the MDC Canvas tutorial to learn how to use Canvas.

Theora video backend for Firefox landed
It was announced at the Mozilla Summit that Firefox will include native Theora and Vorbis support for the HTML 5 media elements. Chris Double writes, “The backend has been committed to the main Mozilla source code and is enabled by default. You can download nightly builds and test it out. An example of a live site that uses video is the Wikimedia video archive. This original commit is a work in progress. There are unimplemented bits, bugs, etc that need to be sorted out. But it’s a start towards using a common codec across all platforms and will improve as we get towards the 3.1 release.”

Why Ogg matters
Robert O’Callahan has written a blog post outlining why shipping Ogg Vorbis and Theora in Firefox is important. “Our goal is to enable unencumbered, royalty-free, open-source friendly audio and video playback on the Web. Shipping Vorbis and Theora will achieve that for over 100M Firefox users — not everyone yet, but a good start! To reach the rest, we will keep turning people into Firefox users, and pressure Apple, Microsoft and other vendors to support Vorbis and Theora. Vendor pressure must come from content providers dedicated to making compelling content available in free formats (coupled with a superior playback experience in Firefox). Wikimedia has stepped up and hopefully others will follow.” More technical details and a mini-FAQ are available at Roc’s weblog.

Reducing testcases doc on MDC
Jesse Ruderman writes, “I created a page called Reducing testcases to replace the old Gecko BugAThon page.” This is a more modern document for everyone to use when working on reducing testcases for bug reports. The page is on the Mozilla Developer Center wiki, and Jesse invites everyone to help improve it.

Developer calendar
For an up-to-date list of the coming week’s Mozilla project meetings and events, please see the Mozilla Community Calendar wiki page.

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Original Article from Mozilla

Filed under Mozilla

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