Mozilla

Fennec nightly builds for Windows Mobile and Maemo have been available for some time now. Recently, we decided to make nightly desktop builds of Fennec available as well. The desktop builds can be used to test add-ons and localizations with the most up-to-date code changes.

Mozilla Japan and Clear Code held a mobile developer camp (translated) over the weekend. Fennec has been lucky to have several Japanese coders helping out for a while now. The DevCamp added even more contributors!

Performance is very critical in Fennec, the mobile version of Firefox. Every feature, every aspect of appearance, every piece of code… is all judged by the impact on performance. We’re lucky to have automated performance tests for Maemo and we’re close to getting the same tests working for Windows Mobile.

The newest official XULRunner has been released. XULRunner 1.9.0.11 matches the Firefox 3.0.11 release. For XULRunner developers, most of the changes in 1.9.0.11 are related to security and stability fixes. SQLite was upgraded to version 3.6.7.

It was recently brought to our attention that a change to the context menu handling code has broken some extensions that built on the context menu. Davide Ficano found one of his extensions was broken when we replaced a property on the gContextMenu object, a helper object used to manage the context menu. The change was made in bug 449522 to accommodate new video element support.

We have added more information to the small, but growing collection of Fennec-specific add-on developer resources. If you’re interested in building add-ons for Fennec, here’s a list of resources you might find helpful:

Mozdev and Mozilla Europe have teamed up to create a Firefox Mobile (Fennec) Add-ons Challenge. The goal is to create or port add-ons to Fennec. You only need to propose a concept for now, but you’ll need to get the add-on ready for the upcoming Mozilla/Maemo developer weekend in Copenhagen on May 30-31.