fligtar.com

Ever since I started working with AMO in 2006, in addition to primarily working on the development of the site and Developer Tools, I’ve been interested and involved in the direction and administration of AMO and Firefox Add-ons in general. As of today, I’ve switched roles to follow my interests, and will be working with Basil on Add-ons Product Management instead of being a part of Mozilla Web Development. I’ll be working on a number of new projects and continuing to help AMO from a different perspective. I’ll also be helping out with community management until the AMO Community Manager position is filled.

I’ll be finishing up development of the AMO 3.5 Developer Tools Revamp milestone before I make myself forget CakePHP, but I’ve already started working on a couple of exciting new projects that I hope to share with everyone soon.

I’m looking forward to working with everyone in the coming months in my new role.

Firefox 3 has been released! Check out all the new features (or see the field guide) and then go download it!

We’re aiming to set a world record with the most software downloads in 24 hours, so if you’re already using a Firefox 3 beta, make sure to download the full version from mozilla.com. Keep in mind that if you’re using Firefox 2, you will not automatically be prompted to upgrade to Firefox 3 yet, so you’ll have to download it yourself.

Last week, Facebook launched a new tool called Lexicon that measures the number of times a term is mentioned on user, event, and group walls. This is what the results look like for Firefox:

That huge spike at the beginning of April is when Firefox 3 Beta 5 was released. The gaps in the graph are when the term wasn’t mentioned enough to be recorded. Comparing the results of other browsers isn’t too helpful as Safari and Opera are common nouns, and most people would abbreviate Internet Explorer as IE.

Although no actual numbers are given, it’s still cool to be able to visualize a part of the biggest way Firefox is adopted around the world: telling your friends about it.

Update of 2006 State of the Projects.

Free-time project status:

• Password Exporter - Finished version 1.1 this week and is currently awaiting localization to the 20 languages it’s now in. Should be released sometime the first week of January. More details on that version will be in an upcoming post. Password Exporter has now been download over 203,000 times and has about 70,000 active users every day.
• FavLoc - Haven’t had time to work on it. Will try to find time to update compatibility for Firefox 3 sometime soon, but doubt I’ll add any new features. 28,000 downloads and 6,000 active users.
• LSU Campus Map - I haven’t updated anything since I first made it a few years ago, but it’s still very popular with people just searching for an LSU campus map. It had especially high traffic following the recent shooting on campus.
• All other projects including arraise, Startup Authenticator, Degree Analyzer, elurt, and all other ideas in my head that I detail but never start - I haven’t had time to work on and are pretty much dead.

Work project status:

• addons.mozilla.org - Remora was launched in March and the AMO team is currently working on version 3.2 to be launched in mid-January. I’ve been working on a statistics dashboard for add-on developers, and after 3.2 will be continuing to work mainly on AMO stuff, probably including a Developer Control Panel revamp with lots of new features.
• Operation Firefox - Contest was a big success and winners were announced earlier this month. Site will probably stay the way it is.
• Extend Firefox - Contest ends tonight. Future plans to be announced later.
• Rock Your Firefox - 0.6 released. Work on other milestones is not currently scheduled, and the app is pretty much in maintenance mode right now.
• Personas - Site hasn’t officially launched yet, but has been finished for a few weeks.
• Misc. other projects popping up and going away just as quickly.

The last few days I’ve been cleaning up a lot of site stuff, as I was quite shocked to find I had over 50 subdomains on this site, many of which are no longer used. I think I’ll be removing the ribbon from my pages soon, as I don’t think it’s helping anything.

I’m taking a class between the fall and spring semesters in order to fit in 3 more hours to graduate next December. There are only a few courses offered during wintersession, but fortunately two of them fulfill the generation education humanities course I needed. My choice was obvious and I’m now spending 3.5 hours a day Monday through Saturday studying zombies.

English 2025 is a fiction course that is taught on a variety of subjects, one of which is Zombies in Fiction. I went in not knowing much about them and after the first class I already felt that I knew way more than a normal person should know about the undead. I’ve never liked horror movies, but these haven’t been bad at all. Zombies didn’t originally attack people or seek flesh anyway.

In the first 6 classes, we’ve managed to read and view a whole lot of Zombie fiction: White Zombie, I Walked With a Zombie, “Dead Men Working in the Cane Fields”, “Salt Is Not For Slaves”, The Plague of the Zombies, “The House in the Magnolias”, “Song of the Slaves”, “While Zombies Walked”, Night of the Living Dead (1968 original and 1990 remake), Return of the Living Dead, I Am Legend (novel and movie), 28 Days Later, “The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar”, and Fido.

In the remaining 4 classes after Christmas break, there will be 4 more movies, 2 novels, and a couple more short stories. Wooo.

My new way of calling into Mozilla meetings:

It’s finally here! The first beta of Firefox 3 (Gran Paradiso) was released a few minutes ago. Although I’ve occasionally used Firefox 3 for testing and experimentation purposes, today was the first day I finally made the switch to using it full-time. And I’m glad I did - it’s awesome. I can’t speak for the other platforms, but the difference on Mac is amazing. The visual refresh hasn’t landed yet, but you can see what’s in the works here.

The browser just feels faster, and OMG cocoa widgets and unified toolbar! One of my favorite features that I’m slowly taking advantage of is being able to start typing any part of a url or page title and have the page I was looking for appear right in the URL bar.

So, if you want to try it out, head on over to the download page. And if you’re on Mac, I highly recommend installing the prototype theme of the visual refresh - it’s awesome. (Note: this is still a beta, so bad things could happen, so use at your own risk! But if you’re on Mac, it’s pretty much worth it.)

If you’re looking for information on what’s in Firefox 3, check out the release notes page. I’ve included a short summary from the announcement of the main things below in case you’re not interested in the details.

• Improved security features such as: better presentation of website identity and security, malware protection, stricter SSL error pages, anti-virus integration in the download manager, and version checking for insecure plugins.
• Improved ease of use through: better password management, easier add-on installation, new download manager with resumable downloading, full page zoom, animated tab strip, and better integration with Windows Vista and Mac OS X.
• Richer personalization through: one-click bookmarking, smart search bookmark folders, direct typing in location bar searches your history and bookmarks for URLs and page titles, ability to register web applications as protocol handlers, and better customization of download actions for file types.
• Improved platform features such as: new graphics and font rendering architecture, native web page form controls, color profile management, and offline application support.
• Performance improvements such as: better data reliability for user profiles, architectural improvements to speed up page rendering, over 300 memory leak fixes, and a new XPCOM cycle collector to reduce entire classes of leaks.

Huge thanks and congrats to everyone that’s been working for so long on Firefox 3 and Gecko 1.9 (27 months!).

I’d heard that some people had IMAP support start showing up in their Gmail accounts, so I’ve been checking mine frequently. A couple hours ago IMAP showed up for me, and I quickly changed my iPhone from POP to IMAP. It’s great. I’ve hated Gmail on iPhone ever since I got it and I’m glad that I’ll actually have a reliable counter of unread emails on my phone now.

I was killing time in a hallway until my next class started when I decided to visit the College of Business office to see an advisor about something. I ended up leaving checked out for graduation with 33 hours left. My graduation date is set for December 2008.

The courses I have left to take are:

• FIN 3715 - Business Finance
• MKT 3401 - Principles of Marketing
• MGT 3830 - Strategically Managing Organizations
• ISDS 3200 - Advanced Business Programming
• ISDS 4120 - Business Data Communications
• ISDS 4125 - Analysis and Design of Management Information Systems
• 3 hours Gen. Ed Humanities
• 6 hours ISDS electives
• 6 hours business electives

The latest version of Rock Your Firefox, Mozilla’s Facebook application, went live this morning. There are two exciting new features in it:

Automatic Add-on Detection

When adding the application, users will now have the option to detect the add-ons they already have installed in Firefox and add them as favorites. Existing users can do this from the sidebar of the homepage. Anytime new add-ons are installed, you can re-scan to detect the changes.

New Homepage with Newsfeed

Instead of going directly to the Browse area when using the application, there is now a homepage with a list of recent add-on activity such as new versions of your favorite add-ons, favorite additions by your friends, and recommendations based on your friends’ favorites. The sidebar has several sections, some of which will not always be visible.

Check out version 0.4 at rockyourfirefox.com! The next release is planned for the end of September.