September 25, 2009 - 3:43 pm
Ricardo Palomares from Mozilla Hispano, had an interview with Robert Kaiser, long time SeaMonkey project coordinator on what’s going on with SeaMonkey, the motivations, and other activities including promotion and T-shirts. Oh, and real sea monkeys also.
RP: You are the coordinator (is that the right word?) of SeaMonkey Council, is that true? What does that involve? What else do you do in the project?
Yes, the formal designation of my position is “project coordinator” of SeaMonkey, meaning I’m trying to coordinate all work happening within the SeaMonkey project as well as how we work together with other projects, esp. Thunderbird, calendar and the larger Mozilla project, including Firefox, etc.
August 6, 2009 - 12:33 am
Lifehacker has a great interview with Mike Beltzner, Firefox product director on current Firefox’s speed and performance, its competitors, and upcoming releases.
Asked about Ubiquity and Taskfox, the project that aims to deliver its command line abilities into Firefox, he explains Mozilla’s vision on tasks acceleration:
Banking always requires me to find the bank site, log in, and get to the exact page for what I want to do. Why can’t Firefox know that my bank is Scotiabank, then remember the chain of events I go through to pay a certain bill or check a balance? Our intent is to find out what the intent behind those patterns are, and figure out better ways to get there.
A great read, at lifehacker.com.
October 14, 2008 - 4:59 pm
Mozilla has released Firefox 3.1 Beta 1, the first official development release of the next update to Firefox 3 just about four months after its release past June.
Firefox 3.1 is basically meant to be a completion release to get some features and enhancements that didn’t make it on time for the Firefox 3 final release. An example of this is the new tab switching behavior when pressing Ctrl + Tab (Cmd + Tab on Mac) which instead of moving to the next open tab, alternates between the current and previously viewed one. Keep Ctrl pressed while tabbing and a small dark window is overlaid with thumbnails of the most recently used tabs. You can also click on the thumbnail to select it or, press W while holding the Ctrl key to close it.
While, after a few months of using it, I’ve come to rely on the new tab alternating behavior, I still can’t get used to the tab preview dialog and I don’t feel it helps me reach the desired tab any faster. Setting browser.ctrlTab.mostRecentlyUsed (via about:config) to false, and restarting Firefox, disables both the alternation and the thumbnails. I would prefer to have separate hidden options for each of the features.
September 25, 2008 - 10:35 am
Firefox 3.1 may well be remembered as the “tab release”, as tabbed browsing will be the most noticeable updated area users will face when it comes out in final form.
The latest Firefox 3.1 nightly (code named Shiretoko) features a new tab button in the tab bar, making the addition of a tab fully discoverable for the first time as it is now part of the primary UI.
A previous change, added a few days ago, made the tab bar always visible by default which allows the new tab button to be present at all times. In the past, the tab bar was hidden when there was only one page opened. A preference in Options/Tabs allowed to make it visible at all times.
The old New Tab button which was present in the Customize Toolbar dialog and could be added to the toolbars is gone at this time.
Yet another change in behavior now makes the current window go away when its last tab is closed. There is already a number of users complaining about this behavior and I also at first thought it would be annoying, but I still haven’t been in the situation of closing all tabs, yet wanting to keep Firefox open.
May 23, 2008 - 11:44 pm
This is the transcript of the chat with Asa Dotzler, as part of Support Firefox Day, formatted for better reading.
All sessions happened on IRC with questions from the public moderated by David Tenser, Mozilla Support lead.
(David Tenser: Tell us a little about yourself and what you do at Mozilla!)
I’ve had many roles at Mozilla over the last decade or so. I started as a volunteer trying to figure out how to get involved as a non-coder (not even a very technical person). After banging my head against the wall for a while, I found a couple of people that were hosting developer builds on their FTP servers (back then, Mozilla didn’t make binaries), so I started testing and reporting bugs.
- 11:10 pm
This is the transcript of the chat with John Lilly, Mozilla Corporation CEO, as part of Support Firefox Day, formatted for better reading.
All sessions happened on IRC with questions from the public moderated by David Tenser, Mozilla Support lead.
I didn’t make it on time so I missed some of the first questions. The transcript starts with a partial answer by John Thanks to David, here’s the full transcript:
- 10:48 pm
This is the transcript of the chat with Mike Beltzner as part of Support Firefox Day, formatted for better reading.
All sessions happened on IRC with questions from the public moderated by David Tenser, Mozilla Support lead.
What frustrates you most about the Firefox 3 UI?
Heh, great question. There are a couple of things that are frustrating to me, both at the UI and underlying infrastructure level.
At the UI level, I’m frustrated that we’re not animating more, and not trying to offer more “emergent” interfaces that help users complete tasks based on what we can infer from the task the user is trying to complete.
- 9:53 pm
Not surprisingly, today’s Support Firefox Day chat sessions proved to be some very informative and fun ones.
If you missed any of them, here’s your chance to see what happened. I’ll post the transcripts (formatted for better reading) of the four chats with Mike Connor, Firefox 3 development lead; Mike Beltzner, Firefox 3 UI team leader; John Lilly, Mozilla Corporation CEO; and Asa Dotzler, Mozilla Community liaison.
April 25, 2008 - 8:32 pm
While Mozilla is gradually turning more attention to mobile platforms to expand its presence in the web, there’s another project, MicroB, that is already providing a Mozilla based solution for the Nokia tablet PC platform that has already become the default browser for Internet Table OS 2008, the latest version of Nokia’s maemo-based table PC OS.
Antonio Gomes, a MicroB developer kindly accepted an interview to learn more about the MicroB project and how it works.
March 28, 2008 - 11:42 am
Wired Compiler has an interview with Asa Dotzler, Mozilla’s Director of Community Development. Several interesting facts are mentioned on how Firefox was started, the process of deciding what features goes in and out, and Firefox 3.
