Mozilla

I started working at Mozilla Corporation as a platform evangelist and was able to get up to speed fairly quickly, in a large part because of help from various community members. In my evangelism role, I really enjoyed getting to travel around and talk about Mozilla technology to anybody who wanted to listen. The Developer Day meet-ups were especially fun. I’m on the Mozilla Mobile team now, but still like to do evangelism work when I can.

Last weekend I decide to add some Mochitest unit testing to XUL Explorer, one of my XULRunner based applications. Luckily, this is something Dave Townsend already did with a different XULRunner application, McCoy. It was pretty easy to use Dave’s McCoy patch as a basis for getting things working in XUL Explorer. I used XULRunner 1.9.0.4 for building XUL Explorer and, amazingly, my unit tests ran on the first try! Here’s the changeset.

The newest official XULRunner has been released. XULRunner 1.9.0.4 matches the Firefox 3.0.4 release. For XULRunner developers, most of the changes in 1.9.0.4 are related to security fixes.

I decided to take a detour in my XULRunner session at MozCamp. I have done several XULRunner talks over the last few years. I usually focus on the functionality built into the platform and discuss the benefits of using Mozilla technologies to develop applications.

One of the opportunities I had at MozCamp was to get caught up on the stuff happening in Thunderbird & Calendar. They have a goldmine of great data, functionality and UX possibilities. During some of the sessions and a small ad-hoc discussion, the use of HTML in XUL to create compelling, interesting and useful user interfaces came up. Thunderbird 3 will be using HTML to enhance to appearance and functionality of message display. Calendar might be using HTML to do the same for displaying tasks, IIRC. The examples I saw looked great.

Last night, support for Fennec on AMO was pushed live. A big thank you to Mike Morgan and crew for making this happen. There are no recommended Fennec add-ons yet, so you need to search for them. Here are some results, based on the two add-ons I know support Fennec and are on AMO:

Okay, so it’s only two add-ons, but it’s a start. First, MR Tech’s Local Install from Mel Reyes was updated with support for Fennec. Then, URL Fixer from Chris Finke got support for Fennec.