Mozilla

Justin Scott and I are headed to UNC @ Chapel Hill for the Software Freedom Day festivities this Friday (9/14). We’ll be speaking about ways to get involved with the Mozilla project. The Carolina Open Source Initiative (COSI) is sponsoring the event. There will be software demonstrations, gear and swag, free food and door prizes too.

There is a potential developer day forming in Prague (yes that Prague) for some time later this year. If you’re interested, check out the wiki entry. Add your name so we can get a feel for the interest level. Also, add some potential agenda items too.

Today ActiveState announced the Open Komodo Project, an initiative to create an open source platform for building developer environments. The project overview has lots of information on the details. Here is a good summary:

Penelope, the Eudora on Thunderbird project, has released its first BETA. From the README, it looks like they are making very good progress adding the “Eudora-isms” into Penelope. It will be interesting to see the feedback from long time Eudora users. Check it out.

I finally pulled enough pieces together to get the next XUL Explorer release ready. Most of the new features in XUL Explorer 0.7 came from contributors which is cool. New in this version:

Cesar has release an alpha release of WebRunner deployed as a Firefox extension and launched using Firefox as the runtime. That’s right, delivered using Firefox’s extension mechanism and launched using Firefox’s runtime. No XULRunner needed for this deployment. It seems to work on Linux, but we need to make some changes for Windows and Mac. Also, check out some of the WebRunner Planning discussion to see what ideas are being kicked around.

Ryan Paul posted an article on ArsTechnica that describes how Firefox 3 will be able to run XUL-based applications. Since the news is starting to spread, I thought I’d try to put some information out before the guesses and rumors start to fly. Ryan’s article describes the feature rather well.