Mozilla

I am headed to Barcelona to take part in Mozilla Europe’s MozCamp 2008 conference. I’ll be presenting sessions on XULRunner, Fennec Add-ons & Embedding Gecko. If you’re interested in any of these sessions and have topics you’d like to see covered, let me know. Commenting here or adding items to the wiki pages are goods ways to do that.

XUL Explorer is a small tool I started a while ago to allow me to quickly create and preview short snippets of XUL. At the same time, I used the process of building XUL Explorer as a use case to help me discover and learn various parts of the Mozilla platform. With the help of some great contributors, it’s been extended beyond simply previewing XUL.

The Mozilla Embedding project has been adding small chunks to the new API. The code is now hosted in an incubator repository, with plans of moving code to the main Mozilla tree when it’s ready. Some of the new additions and things we’re working on include:

One of the reasons we released Fennec A1 with desktop versions was to allow add-on developers to start hacking on Fennec add-ons. As long as the add-on contains no binary compiled code, it should run on any platform - including mobile devices. Developers can build and debug Fennec add-ons using the desktop builds, without needing an actual device.

Fennec (Mobile Firefox) has reached milestone 9, which is also our first alpha! We’re calling this release the User Experience alpha. The last eight milestones were building up to getting a stable browser with an easy to use interface. We really want to get Fennec in front of as many people as possible and get feedback.

The newest official XULRunner has been released. XULRunner 1.9.0.3 matches the Firefox 3.0.3 release. Firefox 3.0.2 was out for a very short time, so we skipped it for XULRunner.

Fennec (Mobile Firefox) has reached milestone 8 (M8). You can install it on a Nokia N8x0 and take it for a spin. One of the big improvements during this milestone was the addition of several Mozilla QA team members. Fennec is being tested pretty hard now, and by people who love to find bugs. We are finding and fixing lots of issues now. Probably the biggest visible change in M8 is the new theme. It’s not entirely landed yet and will likely get some tweaks as we iterate on the design.