With the switch from CVS to Mercurial the ongoing work for the next major release of Firefox 3.1 is happening in mozilla-central now. That’s why using Bonsai to query for fixes within a given time span will not work. So what’s the replacement? How can you search for checkins which caused a regression?

It’s as simple as that. Since yesterday the web frontend (pushlog) supports querying by date. You can use the same date format like it was used for Bonsai or just enter “yesterday”, or “today” which will also work. Sweet! Thanks goes to Ted Mielczarek who implemented this enhancement in bug 437445. Now it only has to replace the changelog/shortlog pages and should be shown by default. Hopefully this will happen soon. Until then just bookmark the above URL.

The next week or better days will be really exiting. As a contributor to the Mozilla project I was invited to join the Firefox Summit 2008 in Whistler, BC, Canada. Thanks for getting the chance! It’s deeply grateful. I’ll enjoy the days in listening to talks, having discussions with other community members and employees of Mozilla and just be able to see each one in real life (Steven, this time it will really happen!).

Together with Abdulkadir Topal, who co-ordinates the German translation of Firefox and helped me a lot with the website translation, we will reach Vancouver this Thursday evening. So we have 3 days to explore Vancouver and the area around. There is still a plan of things to do but its not final. So if anyone is interested to join us, you are welcome. Just ping me in IRC or add a comment here. Otherwise see you on Monday!

Some hours ago Mozilla has advertised the release date for Firefox 3! So this wonderful piece of software will be official available on June 17th, 2008. Amazing work was done during the last three years which result in a huge list (approx. 15.000 of them) of new features and improvements. Deb Richardson has written a field guide for Firefox 3 which describes the most impressive ones in detail.

Anyone who is interested in Firefox 3 should also pledge to download Firefox 3 by June 18th. It will help Mozilla in trying to set a world record for the most software downloads within 24 hours. Read more about the Download Day 2008.

Don’t forget: Spread the word around and inform your family, friends, and colleagues!

In February last year I bought my first MacBook with OS X 10.4 alias Tiger installed and I was happy to say “Hello” to the Apple folks. Ever since it was a bit of work and I had to learn a lot until everything worked like expected. But there is still one thing which bugs me when running Firefox or Thunderbird on a fresh OS X installation. Both applications don’t use a reasonable temporary folder. Instead files which are opened by helper applications are stored under ~/Desktop or ~/Download and will not be removed sometimes after Firefox or Thunderbird are closed. This results in a really cluttered desktop or download folder. All the following steps have to be done because there is no way to specify the temporary folder from within Firefox and Thunderbird. Both lack an UI or a hidden preference to change this folder. I cannot say when this will be changed, but there is a reported bug about this issue. But lets go on… (more…)

What an amazing weekend! Reminisce about the last two years this one was definitely the greatest one at FOSDEM. The main reason why I joined again was Mozilla. And due to there aren’t so many choices to get the opportunity to meet Mozillians, I cannot cancel such an appointment. I met a lot of interesting and crazy people, listened to mostly all talks inside the Mozilla devroom (also known as sauna) and had pulsating and valuable conversations. Mostly I enjoyed to finally met Seth Bindernagel and David Tenser. Both guys working for the Mozilla Corporation and doing (like many others) a really great job. And that’s the reason why Mozilla gets so popular and can celebrate its 10th anniversary this year. Thanks to the organization team of Mozilla-Europe we had an incredible evening in the bowling centre. Sadly I didn’t made any pictures this year. But that’s not as bad because there are still hundreds of them available.

To be a bit more concrete about the topics I had at FOSDEM and work that I’ve taken with me, I will give a short overview:

1. Some weeks ago during a QA session on IRC, Marcia Knous asked me if I would be pleased when Mozilla would support my work. I was happy to hear that because I don’t have the perfect equipment to build my own debug builds under each operating system. This is bad when triaging crasher bugs which only happen under a special OS. Now everything goes really fast. Three days later I got a message from Seth Bindernagel who leads the community-giving program. After some conversations there was made the decision that I will get a new Mac Mini and the appropriate OS licenses. Finally we met each other at FOSDEM and discussed if I would fit into the Community Loan Program. But due to I don’t have a real plan of things I want to do - QA work is really widespread - we dismissed that option. Meanwhile I got the Mac Mini from my local Apple salesman and I will start to set it up within the next days. Hopefully I’ll get some help.
2. Over the last month I heard about SUMO several times. But I hadn’t the change to gain insight into this project. So I was totally uninformed on Friday evening when I was introduced to David Tenser, the smart and blond Swedish guy behind this project. To make matters worse his first question was about the German translation. I had to acknowledge my ignorance. But during his talk on Saturday I get more and more informed about the background. In co-operation with Abdulkadir Topal we will try to find some reliable localizers who are engaged to help translating the Firefox 3 help into German. We plan to do some posts to our German newsgroups and forums. Lets see if we are successful.
3. On Friday I also had the chance to talk with Chris Hofmann about the translation of the Firefox privacy policy into German. Due to the legal text no-one wanted to do that in the past. Now we will give it a try and do our best to create a good first translation. But the final review will be done by a lawyer so we don’t have to know everything in detail. That’s really helpful! Thanks Chris.
4. Stanisław Małolepszy and Seth Bindernagel did a great job in analyzing the latest community surveys. Hopefully we can get some data to be able to have a detail view onto the community in Germany, Austria and Switzerland. It looked like we are really a bit behind and not so enthusiastic like the Spanish folks…

Finally I have a lot of things to do right now and will give several status updates over the next weeks.

I’m really surprised! After years of experience with different Windows and Linux versions it’s getting normal for me to open contextual menus with Shift+F10 or the special context key if a mouse is not available. But yesterday while doing some work on bug 403602 I noticed that there is nothing for OS X? What about handicapped people who aren’t able to use a mouse or even use a screen reader? How do they access the context menu?

I asked several people who are still working on OS X for a longer period of time. But no one was able to give me a hint. So I started searching the web. I got this nice shortcut overview but no system wide shortcut is given. Now, while writing this post, I found this HIG document from Apple. It’s quiet interesting but once again a keyboard shortcut isn’t mentioned.

I’ll stop searching right now and hope that someone, who reads my post, could help me. I would be deeply grateful. Thanks!

What do you think about Mozilla? Are you satisfied with it’s communication efforts to the worldwide community? Or do you have suggestions how to improve the collaboration? Mozilla is interested in and wants to see your position.

To collect as much feedback as possible from users and the communities, Mozilla launched the Community Survey Program with the first survey today. It’s still available in 10 languages and further surveys will be put online from time to time.

Please take a few moments to answer few questions and help Mozilla to better understand its community. Thanks!

Sorry that I’m a bit behind with that information but my vacation conflicts with my current list of todo items. Probably Robert or Axel already told about it that the German localization community has it’s own newsgroup and mailing list for product localization now.

The idea to improve the German localization started a long time ago (as far as I remember it was at FOSDEM 2006) while having a talk with Abdulkadir who is responsible for the Firefox translation. We had seen that our community is totally scattered and that we don’t have a place for discussions. Also with that result at the back of our’s mind it should take over a year. While working on other parts this topic get lost until this year’s developer day in Paris. There I had to spot the work of other localization communities like Spain, France or Poland. They are perfectly organized and also have a handful of contributors to do various translations beside the product localization, e.g. the Mozilla Developer Center. That’s a part which we nearly haven’t started yet. The big question is why that not happened? One reason is definitely the lack of a central place where ongoing localization work can be managed and distributed to community members. That’s why Axel and me started to collect ideas what we can do to catch up with the other communities without having to much overhead for now. As result we decided to create a newsgroup and mailing list. You can read about the steps of creation on Bug 391048.

Two weeks ago both ways of communication were created and synced with each other. The newsgroup can be accessed over news.mozilla.org/mozilla.dev.l10n.de or Google Groups. If you are interested to join the mailing list add yourself here. We are looking forward to community members who are encouraged to help in the localization work. Join us and help to improve your favorite application.

Yay! It’s so amazing. I really cannot believe it that the first part of the system address book integration is done. Bug 203927 which handles reading from the system address book and exists since April 2003 has been fixed by David yesterday. So the new awesome feature is now available with todays nightly builds of Thunderbird and SeaMonkey. It’s not fully stable but you can step through all your addresses within the address book. Even the autocomplete feature is working within the compose window. Time is up. From now on I only have to handle one address book. The missing writing capability doesn’t disturb my experience. Many thanks to Peter Van der Beken who has done a great job and made it possible to fix this enhancement request. I also have to give David and all the other contributors props! (more…)

What you are thinking about which folks have knowledge about Mozilla, Firefox, and Co? Only Hackers, Designers, and persons who are addicted to the internet? You will be totally wrong…

Yesterday I had a nice experience. It happened in the morning. During breakfast which I had together with my parents at home my doorbell was ringing. Normally I’m at work at this time and I also didn’t expect to see anybody. So I ask through our entry phone and a man said that he has a parcel for me. Strange because I haven’t ordered anything within the last days. I was surprised and sprinted down all 3 floors. By opening the front door I saw an older not very well-tended man with an A4-like envelope. It was one of the postmen I’ve never seen in my area. He had a big smile on his face and told me that he has something for me from Mozilla (United States). I was surprised again and it seems that he saw it in my eyes. So he answered that he also has been a user of Firefox for some weeks now. He really likes our web-browser and if I don’t want to have this envelope then he will take it himself. I had to laugh. It’s not too often that you have fun with a postman who even is a proud Firefox user. It’s a pity that I hadn’t any Firefox sticker/fans downstairs and that he was in a hurry. If I’ll see him again one time - Mozilla please send me another parcel - then he will get a big sticker of Firefox! That’s guaranteed.