The Mozilla team has recently announced the release of Jetpack 0.6. Jetpack is a Mozilla Labs project which makes it possible for anyone who knows standard web skills (HTML, Javascript, CSS) to make Firefox add-ons.
Jetpack 0.6 adds two major APIs to the arsenal: a secure preferences system and the ability to add and modify menus. With these new APIs — and the numerous bug fixes since the last release — the Mozilla team hopes to see even more innovative Jetpacks in addition to the hundreds already written.
If you already have Jetpack installed, update to 0.6 via the “Find Updates” button in the add-ons manager. If you’re new to Jetpack, you can get Jetpack automatically by installing any Jetpacks or by downloading it directly from addons.mozilla.org.
According to information provided by exo.performance.network, which tracks the usage and configuration of many PCs across the globe, there are 50.6% of users running different versions of Firefox ( that means there are more users who runs Firefox than those who don’t actually use it).
InternetExplorer continues to dominate the web browsers with about 84% of web browser users using it more often. The statistics shows percentage of overlap users who use different browsers and also reveals that about 34% of the users runs the top two browsers.
In the meantime, Google’s Chrome is still found establishing its foundation with 12 percent of the web browser users using it. It was found that 12 percent of the users use both Microsoft and Google browser. Among the users of top three browsers only 15 percent exclusively runs either Firefox or Chrome.
With Firefox reaching critical masses, the days now don’t seem to be far when Firefox will dominate the web browsers world.
The Mozilla Labs team today announced two new design challenges for the fall, via the Mozilla Labs blog.
The first is the University Design Challenge Fall ‘09. For this challenge, the team will work together with students from universities and schools specializing in User Experience and Human-Computer-Interaction studies around the world to find innovative concepts to the question: “Browsing and Search History — How can we make sense of this rich source of data and how do we best present this data to the user?”
Over the course of 10 weeks, students will work together in teams, with each university deploying a different solution approach — from a semester-long integration of the Design Challenge into the course to shorter Design Sprints and high-energy 24 hour Design Jams. For more information visit Mozilla Labs, here.
The second design challenge will focus on Weave Web UI, and will aim to answer the question: “Visualizing your browser data – How can we provide intuitive and useful visual representations of your browser data (such as your contacts, bookmarks, browsing and search history, tabs, stored credentials etc.) on a web page?”
The Labs team, together with IxDA, a network dedicated to the professional practice of Interaction Design and Johnny Holland, an open collective, talking, sharing and finding answers about all aspects of interaction design, will invite the wider community to join them in this challenge to develop concepts and submit them to their site. The full design brief and background information can be found here.
Today Mozilla announced the initial beta release of the Mozilla Creative Collective, the official new home and hub of activity for Mozilla’s visual design community. The goal of the Creative Collective is to use art as a means for spreading Firefox and sharing the Mozilla story in new ways.
Building communities is a big part of what Mozilla is all about, and key to our success as an organization. We have dedicated communities that contribute to nearly every aspect of Mozilla – from software development, to extensions, to localization, to marketing, and more – but an area that’s traditionally lacked an organized community is visual design. And because art is such a powerful form of communication, we’re harnessing that with the Creative Collective.
On the Creative Collective site, artists can create personal profiles, share their work in a public gallery, connect and collaborate with others from around the world, and much more.
Today, Mozilla Labs are announcing that their Test Pilot platform is opening with the release of the first Test Pilot add-on for Firefox 3.5. Mozilla labs team is looking for Firefox users of all levels of skill and all levels of technical knowledge to help improve Firefox and Labs experiments.
How test pilots help
Test Pilot is an opt-in program that everyone on the Web can join to improve the Web experience by participating in usability related tests.
As a Test Pilot, you will not only be able to try out the newest features and user interface ideas before anyone else, but also see and learn how those results may contribute back to the product design.
Briefly: Weave Sync is a prototype that encrypts and securely synchronizes the Firefox experience across multiple browsers, so that your desktop, laptop and mobile phone can all work together.
Key Features
Weave Sync lets you securely take your Firefox experience with you to all your Firefox browsers — including our mobile browser, codenamed Fennec. It currently supports continuous synchronization of your bookmarks, browsing history, saved passwords and tabs.
For example:
Get the same results on the Smart Location Bar on each of your Firefox browsers, so you can get to your favorite sites with just a few keystrokes
Continue what you were doing: have the ability to open any tab you have open on any of your Firefox browsers
Keep the same list of bookmarks on all of your Firefox browsers
Easily sign in to all your favorite sites using your saved passwords (this is especially handy on mobile phones, where it’s hard to type in complex passwords)
Do it all securely: Weave Sync encrypts user data before uploading it to Mozilla’s servers, so that only you can access your data
What’s new in Weave 0.5?
In this release a bunch of improvements in terms of reliability and performance have been made.
A few of the major changes are:
Major performance improvements during upload and download.
Sync waits until you’re not actively using the browser.
Improved support for bookmark tags and smart folders.
Support for changing passwords and passphrases.
Support for Fennec on Windows Mobile and Firefox on x86 OpenSolaris.
