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about:mozilla - Ubiquity, Fennec, Shredder, Firefox logo, Chrome, upcoming events, and more…

In this issue…

Introducing Ubiquity

Mozilla Labs introduced the Ubiquity project last week, an “experiment into connecting the Web with language in an attempt to find new user interfaces that could make it possible for everyone to do common Web tasks more quickly and easily.” Alongside the announcement, Labs also released an early experimental prototype that demonstrates some of the concepts behind Ubiquity. You can install the prototype, read the tutorial, and learn more about Ubiquity in depth. Further information is available at the Mozilla Labs announcement and Aza Raskin’s weblog.

John Lilly: Thoughts on Chrome and more

John Lilly, Mozilla’s CEO, writes, “Interesting developments in the browser world lately. Between the new beta of IE8 and Google releasing the beta of their new browser (called “Chrome”), not to mention interesting work by the Mozilla team here as well, there’s as much happening as I can ever remember. Let’s start from there: more smart people thinking about ways to make the Web good for normal human beings is good, absolutely. Competition often results in innovation of one sort of another — in the browser you can see that this is true in spades this year, with huge JavaScript performance increases, security process advances, and user interface breakthroughs. I’d expect that to continue now that Google has thrown their hat in the ring.”

Lilly goes on to discuss how the release of Google’s “Chrome” project affects Mozilla, what this means for Mozilla’s relationship with Google, and how Mozilla continues to be unique in the browser world. “Mozilla’s mission is to keep the Web open and participatory — so, uniquely in this market, we’re a public-benefit, non-profit group (Mozilla Corporation is wholly owned by the Mozilla Foundation) with no other agenda or profit motive at all. We’ll continue to be that way, we’ll continue to develop our products and technology in an open, community-based, collaborative way.” Read the full post at Lilly’s blog.

Mobile Firefox “Fennec” Milestone 7 released

The Mozilla Mobile team has announced their latest release. “Fennec (Mobile Firefox) has reached milestone 7 (M7) and can be installed on a Nokia N8×0 for testing. We got some good feedback (and bug reports) from M6, so there are more than a few bug fixes in M7. Other additions include better add-on support, initial kinetic scrolling, modeless password manager, and some zooming tweaks. Please take Fennec M7 for a spin and file some bugs.” The Mobile team has posted install instructions and the M7 Readme, and you can read the full release announcement at Mark Finkle’s weblog.

Thunderbird “Shredder” Alpha 2 released

Mozilla Messaging announced the release of Thunderbird “Shredder” Alpha 2 on August 12th. “Shredder Alpha 2 is a developer preview release for the next major version of Thunderbird that is built on top of the next generation of Mozilla’s layout engine, Gecko 1.9. Shredder Alpha 2 is being made available for testing purposes only and is intended for developers and our testing community. This release does not represent the final product. Some of the features are highly experimental and will likely change before final release. Please do not use Shredder Alpha 2 in a production environment.” For more information, including further release details, a list of features and enhancements, FAQs, and download links, please see the Shredder Alpha 2 Release Notes.

Mozilla and certification authorities

Frank Hecker writes, “Johnathan Nightingale recently addressed a very common question, namely why Firefox doesn’t automatically accept self-signed SSL certificates as being valid. I don’t have much to add to Johnathan’s discussion of the issues with self-signed certificates, but speaking on behalf of the Mozilla Foundation I do want to address some of the comments that I’ve seen people make with regard to SSL certificates, certification authorities (CAs), and Mozilla.” Frank’s blog post discusses some of the misconceptions related to Mozilla and CAs, debunking some of the more commonly repeated myths that exist around this topic.

Defining Firefox logo style

John Slater and Tara Shahain have been working on developing a new and improved style guide for the Firefox logo. The goal is to refine the existing guidelines and to get those communicated out to the widest possible audience. As part of this project, John and Tara gave a talk at the recent Firefox Plus Summit, and have started working with the Royal Order on creating the guide. They also very much want to keep the process as open as possible, so John will be blogging about various topics for discussion over the next few weeks. Additionally, they have assembled an informal advisory panel for the project, drawing upon the expertise and experience of several veteran members of the Mozilla contributor community. For more information, including a list of the people who are on the advisory panel, see John’s blog post.

Upcoming Events

Barcelona, Oct 25-26, MozCamp: A large, two-day Mozilla conference being held in Barcelona on the weekend of Oct 25-26, 2008. See the Mozilla Camp Europe wiki page for more information.

Paris, Sep 20, Add-ons workshop: A one-day event to bring together French-speaking XUL developers, hackers, and Web developers to discuss Mozilla technologies. See the Mozilla wiki MAOW page for more information.

Toronto, Sep 15-16, MozCamp: Two-day developer event full of talks, tutorials, and workshops. See the Toronto MozCamp wiki page for more information.

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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