Mozilla

As promised, XULRunner 1.9 has gone gold. The final release of the runtimes, SDKs and source tarball are now available. Release notes can be found here.

As you might have heard, Mozilla is working on a mobile browser (codenamed Fennec). If you are interested in Mozilla and mobile, I’d encourage you to start following the project. Besides the just plain awesome idea of a Firefox browser running on mobile devices, there are other reasons I like the project.

Keeping in step with Firefox, there is a new XULRunner RC3 build available. In addition to using the same source as Firefox 3 RC3, XULRunner RC3 also enables jemalloc support on Windows, just like Firefox.

Our Mike Beltzner created a sweet little screencast covering some of the cool new parts of Firefox 3. Mike’s been giving this “demo” for a while now and he does a great job showing how Firefox 3 can make your browsing experience better. Check it out.

Mozilla just opened the new source repository (mozilla-central) meaning the next release features will start landing. David Baron posted about landing new CSS selectors. Robert O’Callahan posted about some kick-ass SVG-based CSS effects used to style HTML. This totally rocks and will help push SVG into more of a leading role on the Web.

A while ago I posted about getting XULRunner builds to coincide with Firefox milestones. Work has been moving ahead on the goal. In fact, we have XULRunner 1.9 RC2 binary runtimes and SDKs available for testing. If you use XULRunner, or want to use XULRunner, you should grab these builds and give them a spin. Let us know (file bugs) if you see something wrong.

Shaver and I have been talking about getting a decent mechanism for remote debugging a JavaScript session. I have been looking at JSSH. It’s a bit dated, but a great little Firefox/Mozilla extension that adds a huge amount of external flexibility, control and extensibility. The Watir-based web testing system for Firefox (called FireWatir) uses JSSH to control the current Firefox browsing session. The big downside to JSSH is that it has binary components, so you need to build it across platforms and Gecko versions. Yuck!