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!

Mozilla is proud to announce “Fox For All” as the grand prize winner of Impact Mozilla.  “Fox For All” was authored by Phani Kumar Vadrevu and Uttam Byragoni of India.

In total, more than 5,000 people cast a vote for their favorite plan.  While “Fox For All” received the most votes, there were several finalists who finished as close runners-up: “How Do You Firefox?” finished in 2nd place (Chicago Booth student team), “Surf On Your Own Turf” finished in 3rd (Haas business school student team), and “My Firefox” by Bruno Fleurquin of France came in 4th.

We’re extremely grateful to all ten finalists.  The degree of hard work and the diversity of ideas contributed by the teams far exceeded all expectations.  Impact Mozilla also succeeded in reaching out to groups not traditionally part of the Mozilla community (e.g., MBA students).

So, where do we go from here?

With respect to our winner, we’ll soon start engaging with Phani and Uttam to discuss possibilities for the implementation of their plan.  For our other finalists, we’ll be sending out swag as a token of our appreciation.  Impact Mozilla has been a wild success, and it couldn’t have happened without the enthusiasm of the community and strong efforts by all participants.

We’ve launched a new video section on mozilla.com to help bring some of the many great features of Firefox alive.  The feature-specific videos are narrated by the people who helped bring them to Firefox.  The new video section even includes a walk through on how to install Firefox — perfect to help people make the switch.

The videos include (and the list is growing!):

• Firefox 3 overview
• How to switch to Firefox with Asa Dotzler
• Security features in Firefox 3 with Johnathan Nightingale
• Bookmarks and tags with Alex Faaborg
• Awesomebar with Seth Spitzer

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.

Mozilla Messaging just announced that the Thunderbird 3.0 beta 1 is now available for download!
For more details about Thunderbird and this release, check out the Mozilla Messaging website.

Our Impact Mozilla competition has reached its final phase – and now it’s your turn to determine the winner.  After a month of hard work, all ten finalists have returned with their developed strategies and complete marketing plans.  Here’s an overview of how things will play out:

• To judge all ten entries, simply go to impactmozilla.com/vote
• Please consider giving yourself at least an hour to read through multiple plans and to carefully consider all finalists
• The entry with the most votes wins Impact Mozilla
• Voting is open to everyone.  Only one vote per person is allowed.
• Voting closes on Wednesday, December 17th
• Mozilla then intends to execute the winning idea in early 2009

Congratulations to our ten finalists for their impressive efforts!

Editor’s note: Mozilla released Firefox 3.1 beta 1 on Monday, December 8, 2008 at 2:39 pm PT. Check out the Mozilla Developer News announcement reposted below for more details.

This morning we announced the launch of the Mozilla Community Store, a new open source approach to our t-shirt creation process that allows anyone to submit their original designs and make them publicly available for purchase.

The Store gallery is comprised entirely of community-generated art from around the world, all of which can be fully customized through Zazzle — a leading on-demand retail platform offering customization tools to help you create products fitted to your unique personal style. The process is pretty straightforward and there are lots of options to choose from, including:

- Over 400 apparel products including basic t-shirts, sweatshirts, and tanks.
- Styles covering women, men, kids, and baby.
- Detailed size charts that range from XS - 6XL.
- A wide variety of shirt colors.
- Scaling and repositioning of the design on the shirt.
- Adding custom text and other images.
- And more!

The Mozilla Community Store was inspired by the Firefox 3 t-shirt design contest, which resulted in a large pool of really impressive designs and a demand to make more of them available for print. We’ve seeded the Store with 60 of the best submissions from the contest, and are excited to see the collection grow.

You can contribute designs at any time through the upload tool on the site. Send us high resolution PNGs or JPGs of your best work, and make sure to enter your name so that we can give you full credit. We encourage you to be creative, but design concepts should generally be based on: Firefox, Thunderbird, SeaMonkey, Camino, Bugzilla, Sunbird or Lightning. Please read the Guidelines and FAQ for all the details.

In support of the launch, Zazzle is offering 20% off purchases through December 25th. Enter the special promo code MOZILLAMERCH at checkout for the discount…happy shopping!

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.