With a bit more then a year development Firefox 3.5 has been officially released 2 days ago. It contains tons of new stunning features like native video support, a private browsing mode, a jitted JavaScript engine, and many more. See the official release notes. For a quick overview you can also watch this video.

Comparing all the different ways we can get in contact with each other or searching for information on the web is definitely using a web browser to access web pages. Having several billions of web pages at the back of one’s mind it makes it really hard to get them displayed and operational as best as possible by any of those web browsers. Even with web standards set web designers can work their own way which could break some functionality of a browser. To find those issues is a hard job and sometimes it’s not possible at all because the website requests a login. In such a situation we need the help of the reporter to track the issue down or the company itself which hosts this web site. Isn’t it a tech evangelism bug we can then inform the developers to fix this bug in Firefox. But until we reach this point we need a way to get as much as possible feedback.

That’s why a small project which tracked the coverage of banking sites was already created during the Firefox 3 development cycle. But because of the usage of a Wiki page it wasn’t easy to get everything in sync for the public anonymous page and the internal page with contact information. Exactly the same feeling I had in February this year when I started to revise this project as extra work. We sent an email to all the users and asked for their help in testing the upcoming Firefox 3.5 beta3 release. As result users added their results to the public page and/or internal page and synchronizing both pages was up to me. Everybody how knows the wiki style can imagine that this work is hard. And even with a couple of reported results it was a half-day work for me. That’s not the way I wanna go for the release of Firefox 3.5 and hopefully more then 200% incoming messages daily. So we decided to move this project into a web application. This work was done by me and with the help of Murali Mnandigama in the last months. We used PHP and MySQL to setup a small web page which let us track the results very easily. After some iterations the project was released, on May 8th, on the Mozilla QA website and is open for everyone’s feedback now.

For the first time we mainly focus banking and financial sites. That means we have to create a list of major companies around the world so users can run tests against their website. Because we are not able to get all those information on our own we need the help of our great community around the globe which will supply us as much as possible different companies which we will add to the list. All of them will be displayed on the Website Testing results page.

If you find some time please join us and help this project by sharing your knowledge with us, so we can make Firefox 3.5 better as it already is right now. To get the first instructions head over to the project page itself where everything is described in detail.

And not to forget to mention one last important item: Please don’t forget our planned Website Testing testday this Friday on June 5th.

The Rules:

1. Link back to your original tagger and list the rules in your post.
2. Share seven facts about yourself.
3. Tag 7 1 people by leaving name and link to his blog.
4. Let them know they’ve been tagged

The seven things you may (or may not) know about me:

1. I was born in the German Democratic Republic. During its existence my family hadn’t a telephone nor a car. We were forced to write letters and to use the train or bike to visit our family members at any time.
2. It has taken a long time until I got in contact with the Internet. I was 19 years old and started my training in the Forschungszentrum Karlsruhe.
3. I’ve played several instruments more or less good, e.g. piccolo, accordion, guitar and bass guitar.
4. In 2002 I started dancing for the first time. Now it’s one of my favorite hobbies. I do this to keep in shape and to have fun. But I don’t want to do tournaments in Standard and Latin dance.
5. Photography is one of my other passions but it needs too much time, which I don’t have currently. You can see that in my photoblog. The latest entry was added a long time ago. I really have to continue in making pictures when I’ve been moving to Dresden in two month!
6. I have acrophobia but it hasn’t distracted me from having an awesome skydive over the Lake Taupo in New Zealand. It was a fantastic experience I would repeat at any time
7. And the best in the end: A month ago I was getting uncle for the first time in my life. I really love my sweet, and little niece!!!

There is someone who wants to write his own 7 things but hasn’t been tagged so far:

• Marco Zehe: One of our great accessibility guys from Germany

Update: The activity monitor sums up all the cpu usage for any thread within an existing process. Means, depending on the amount of cpu’s or cores and the amount of threads for that process, the cpu load can be higher than 100%. I hope that we don’t end-up in 8000% for a 80 core processor in the future…

It was an unbelievable Monday. And definitely the best one ever in my life. After 8 years of active contribution to the Mozilla project, I was getting hired by Mozilla. Means, from now on I work as a full-time QA engineer in the QA execution team. And like any other remotely connected office-less person I’m working from home. For now I’m based in Karlsruhe which is located at the west side of Germany. But after years away from my homeland I will move back and enjoy the living in the beautiful capital of Saxony, called Dresden.

If anyone is interested on which topics I’ll work, here some raw data for now:

1. MozMill test creation for functional ui testing
2. Litmus testcase creation
3. Release testing for Firefox 3.0.x/3.1 and Thunderbird 2.0.0.x
4. Content creation for QMO
5. Community work
6. The usual Bugzilla work
7. …

Thanks everybody for the warm welcome last week. I’m really anxious to see how everything is managed in the headquarters. And also to meet anyone of you over there next month.

But for now it should be enough. Lets dig into MozMill and create some helpful UI tests…

There are only two steps necessary to see the plugin appear in each Firefox installation. It’s not magic but a simple registry hack, which let the plugin be shared. I’ve no idea why Microsoft hasn’t already done that for this plugin. They are still aware in using this way, e.g. for “Windows Presentation Foundation plug-in“. I’ll get in contact with Microsoft and hopefully it can be solved in the near future.

But lets return to the instruction how to get it working. Just follow those steps:

1. The Window Media Player will be installed to “c:\Program Files\Windows Media Player”. So lets re-use this location. Create a sub-folder called “Plugin” and copy the library “np-mswmp.dll” over there.
2. Go to bug 421820 and download the registry hack.
3. If the installation folder of the Windows Media Player application differs from the one in step 1, you have to update the path inside the registry file before applying the file.
4. Double click the reg file to add the entries to your registry.

That’s all. Now each installed version of Firefox should be able to use the plugin to show embedded WMV content. At least you have to restart the browser, when it is already open. To make sure it has been recognized correctly open the Add-ons manager and click the plugins tab. The plugin has to be listed now.

The next step will be to get the list of patches, which have been checked-in between these builds. Until now I did that by taking the build id from each build and entering it in the date fields on the pushlog page on hg.mozilla.org. The problem here is, that you have to remember to add the time difference from PST to UTC or even your local time. I forgot this a couple of times and wondered why none of the listed check-ins were related in any way to the regression I’ve found.

But today I got a nice hint from Ted Mielczarek how to get the correct list of check-ins more easily. With his comment on Bugzilla he pointed out that recent builds offer the changeset information on the “about:buildconfig ” page:

The only thing you have to do now is to copy the changeset id for both versions and to create an URL like this one which will show you the list of check-ins.

For the moment it seems like that there is no UI for such a query but it would be great to have one in the future. But even in the current stage it will boost your work flow to finish any regression test.

Update: I’ve filed bug 471321 which covers the missing ui issue.

Because we wanna give a general overview of this meeting by our own upcoming post in the European blog, I want to focus on the actions and results of the community meeting. Because there is too much to say I’ll list everything from our notes:

Schedule
12.00 – 13.00 Brunch, informal talks
13.00 – 13.30 Talk about Mozilla Europe by William
13.30 – 14.00 Talk about Mozilla Website localization by Henrik
14.00 – 15.00 Talk about SUMO and MDC by Kadir
15.00 – 15.45 Coffee break
15.45 – 18.00 Talk about new Websites by Kadir and Henrik / general discussion

Presentations / demos
William

• Overview of Mozilla Europe and its work in Europe
• How Mozilla can help local communities

Henrik (Demos of)

• Localization needs for websites of Mozilla Europe, Google snippets, surveys and special events
• Overview of the processes
• Overview of tools

Kadir (Demos of)

• support.mozilla.org
• developer.mozilla.org
• forum and wiki on firefox-browser.de

Discussion about new community website

General Discussion

• People didn’t know that we are in need of help
• The coordination newsgroup was either unknown or people said that they don’t use newsgroups
• People don’t want to use Bugzilla (need for a simplified UI or another tool)
• There is no style guide people can follow when translating
• There is no glossary to look up common words to be consistent

Next steps:

• We need a status page, where people can see at first glance if we need help and if yes in which areas and whom to contact
• We have to rethink the way we coordinate work right now using newsgroups and Bugzilla. A forum could be the way to go here
• We need to work on a style guide, possibly reusing parts from the style guide of erweiterungen.de
• There is a glossary for extensions at babelzilla.org, managed by Jürgen Berg. We need to contact him to see if we can reuse that for all German localizers

Mozilla Europe

• The language selector on mozilla.com is at the bottom of the page, but most people don’t even scroll down, so they don’t get to see the website in their own language.
• The Google Snippets are outdated and are advertising Firefox 2

Next steps:

• We should move the selector to the top of the page or automatically serve users the website in their own language (bug 454890)
• Pascal already sent the snippets to Google and we have to wait for the new ones to be included (bug 444568)

SUMO

• People say that SUMO ist too slow to work with. That’s why they prefer other options.
• At the moment we have only the former internal Firefox help on SUMO.
• People think that SUMO has a corporate feel to itself and are afraid that they won’t be able to write as freely as they can do on the community wiki.
• One really big advantage of SUMO is it’s ability to show different versions for different browsers and OSs.
• People were not aware that they could write new articles without an existing English version
• There is some discussion about license problems when porting our wiki to SUMO
• SUMO still has some annoying bugs like not working language sniffing.
• One big problem is, that even a punctuation correction in the English version marks the German version outdated. This is a known bug, but still unfixed.
• In the community wiki everbody can start new articles and correct existing ones. On SUMO there is too much overhead with article versions that need to be made public.
• Most people have not yet looked into SUMO. After the discussion they are not opposed to moving to SUMO, but the points above need to be addressed.
• We have rescheduled a voting about moving to SUMO until everyone had the time take a closer look on SUMO.

Next steps:

• We need to talk with the SUMO team about possible speed increases for the website.
• We need to talk with the SUMO team about the language selector (bug 452825) and significant edit (bug 431501)
• We need a lot more peers on SUMO, so people don’t have to wait for their articles to be made public. Especially outside of the core help.
• We need to sort out any licensing problem with the wiki. That should be not so much of a problem as we know most of the contributors and can ask for a relicensing.
• We’ll need to have an online discussion about moving to SUMO in about a month, when everbody had a chance to look into SUMO

MDC

• Has just moved to a new wiki, localization is unclear
• Some communites have a huge amount of content translated into their language
• German is grossly underrepresented on MDC
• Nobody is in charge for the localization of MDC right now
• A German translation could help to make the technology behind Mozilla more popular in Germany

Next steps:

• Getting in touch with other locales, how they handled the amount of work needed
• We need to find someone to lead the localization of MDC

New Community Website

• The current website is 6 years old and was created as the official German Firefox website.
• Now the official website is Mozilla Europe. Our website has to reflect that change in status.
• A new name (www.camp-firefox.de) is proposed to show that this website is really only about the community.
• The new website needs to be more active. With extension of the week, aggregated blog posts about news in the Mozilla world etc. The forums need to be more prominent and the wiki or SUMO has to be more visible than it is now.
• To do that, we need to move to a new server and Drupal as a CMS.
• Gandalf is alreay working on a community pack which will include Drupal, phpbb and other software (e.g. SUMO). As we will move to that system anyway we can help Gandalf in testing it.
• The forums will be a big part of the new website. Currently we have only one active moderator left and the forums are getting only more popular, so we urgently need more moderators.
• The last few months and years have shown that some forums are more active than others, we need to change the structure of the forums to reflect that change in interest.

Next steps:

• We need to talk with people who agreed to blog about current developments in Mozilla world, to include their post into the new website
• Several people stood up for the moderation work in the forums. We need to decide with whom we want to work
• Moving to another server and to a CMS will take somewhere between 2-3 month. We’ll get in touch with Gandalf to see if his community pack will be ready by then.

Mozilla.de

• Mozilla projects in Germany are scattered over a lot of different websites, we need a place which can point people to the right websites.
• mozilla.de is finally owned by Mozilla and is the perfect address for this task.

Next steps:

• We need to decide whether the website should only point to other sites or offer own content

Extensions.de

• Ongoing discussion about the future of this website (German AMO available now).
• Unfortuntately we didn’t have enough time for discussions to come to a decision.

Next steps:

• Start a discussion online about how we can move forward with the German Addon Website, now that AMO is localizable.

Further Meetings

• We need to address a lot more people with the next meeting. Too many people were missing.
• The venue and organisation was okay, so we can use it again for the next meeting.
• For the next meeting we definitely need some shirts (and sizes), so people have something to take home.

Other related posts to this event can be found by William Quiviger and Abdulkadir Topal.

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.

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!

As a circumvention it was possible to use Safari and change its download folder to the specified location. From now on Firefox and Thunderbird are using this folder to store the temporary files. It’s not the best solution but I’m fine with that because I do not use Safari and I’m not interested in its download folder. But with the release of Safari 3 this isn’t possible anymore. The newer versions are using an other way to store its download folder settings and don’t touch ~/Library/Preferences/com.apple.internetconfig.plist anymore. So how it can be easily changed without using a plist or hex editor?

It’s just easy. Download one of the former versions of Safari and use it to change the download folder. There is a project called Multi-Safari which gives you the possibility to run different versions of Safari in parallel. So grab the latest Safari 2 release, open the preferences, and select another download folder location. It looks like that the best solution is to use ~/Library/Caches/TemporaryItems (NS_OS_TEMP_DIR) where all contained files will be deleted on restart. If you want to have the files deleted on exit of Firefox or Thunderbird you can also add the preference browser.helperApps.deleteTempFileOnExit and set its value to true. That’s all.

Please remember that this is just a workaround. It would be nice to see bug 311292 fixed in a timely manner.

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.