I’m just back from the Mozilla Summit 2010 and I’m pretty excited about the demos I’ve seen there about the future of Firefox and the open web.
HTML5/CSS3 is most likely the next big thing on the web and Firefox 4 will be there to support it.
There is a really cool demo I would like to share: (note the dynamic real time content from twitter and flickr and also that this animation is not a video)
And once Firefox 4 with WebGL support will be out we will hit again the problematic situation on Linux about X.org, OpenGL and graphics drivers. (And for this moment I still need to embed the above video as Flash object to not ignore the people using non-WebM enabled browsers )
Two days ago the initial support for the new WebM Media Format landed in Mozilla’s official version control system. So I finally had a good reason to start preparing the first set of Firefox 3.7/4 alpha packages for openSUSE.
As expected they are available through OBS’ mozilla:alpha repository. For easier testing the package can be installed in parallel to your stable Firefox release and does not use the official branding yet. Please note that firefox4 is using the existing profile directory and it’s strongly recommended to use either -P to get the profile selection dialog or back up the profile in ~/.mozilla/firefox. It’s not fully ported with all openSUSE specific settings, KDE integration and lockdown functionality yet. All this will be done along the way of regular updating to newer snapshots. Firefox 4 is still under heavy development and far away from a final (or even beta?) release.
Mozilla is going to release the next Firefox 3.6 maintenance update (3.6.4) with a new feature to run browser plugins outside of the main process. The biggest advantage about that is that crashing plugins do not crash the whole browser anymore which can be a great improvement for people experiencing regular Flash crashes. Actually for Firefox 3.6.4 that feature only is enabled for Adobe’s Flash plugin and only makes a difference on 32bit installations (as 64bit still uses nspluginwrapper which does a similar thing anyway).
In addition to that there was some rework on the crashreporter which should work for x86-64 and is using DWARF symbols now which makes breakpad’s symbol creation compatible again with our default debuginfo packages.
To get some testing on these new features I have prepared packages for the upcoming release in the mozilla:beta OBS repository. Feel free to provide any feedback as comment to that post, Bugzilla, opensuse-factory-mozilla@opensuse.org or via IRC to me.
Starting with Firefox 3.6 I’ve enabled the Mozilla internal crashreporter for 32-bit builds. Some people have seen that already unfortunately But anyway that is still a good thing as it makes your and my life easier to analyze what’s going on. This is more kind of a testing phase currently but my plan is go that direction because Apport seems to be no efficient solution in openSUSE just yet and Mozilla was interested in helping distributors to use their infrastructure (they also have the advantage of having more crash data available on Linux systems).
There are still some technical issues which are being worked on. There is no full 64-bit support in Gecko 1.9.2 and the breakpad implementation lacks DWARF support so if we support stabs+ debug symbols as used there we loose RPM’s feature of generating correct debuginfo packages.
Both issues are almost fixed but it’s unclear if we can fully support it with Firefox 3.6 already.
(The number of my blog posts is getting inflationary somehow so I’ll keep it short)
Firefox 3.6 has been released and obviously it’s already available for download from the openSUSE Mozilla repository for all openSUSE versions back to 11.0.
(As it is really fresh, some Addons might not be updated yet and as always the latest previous version 3.5.x is still available in the mozilla:legacy repo.)
As mentioned in blogs here and herePrism 1.0b3 got somehow released.
I have updated the version I had in mozilla:beta and moved it to the openSUSE mozilla repository (even if it’s officially beta but then there is no previous version so it makes sense).
As the previous version it’s based on XulRunner and does not contain a full Gecko release which also means if you run Prism it will find a matching XulRunner automatically (not necessarily the latest one though what I consider bad behaviour and intend to fix).
Again my last post was quite some time ago and I think I need to summarize what happened since in openSUSE’s Mozilla land anyway (if I can remember all details).
Thunderbird 3.0 got released and is available as official update for openSUSE 11.2
I’ve prepared new Sunbird testing packages in mozilla:beta which also include Lightning addon packages to be used in Thunderbird and SeaMonkey as calendar extension. Those already landed in Factory as well.
For a long time I wondered how to manage my patchset and packages more comfortable and now started to try it with a Mercurial repository which holds the patchset and source RPM contents for XULRunner and Firefox (1.9.2/3.6 series for now). The repository is actually based on Mercurial Queues and can be found here. I made it available public to allow interested people to follow what’s going on there and also make it easier to contribute.
Firefox 3.6 is nearing a final release and can be found in the mozilla:beta repository in its RC1 incarnation. Factory contains the beta5 version of xulrunner (w/o Firefox) currently.
I plan to add (and already added) some new packages to the mozilla repository which are not directly related to the Mozilla desktop applications but providing lower level interfaces (e.g. mozldap and related things).
I spent some time to fix the GConf backend changes in XULRunner which are part of the lockdown infrastructure but disabled for openSUSE 11.2 because they broke a11y support in its original state. So Firefox 3.5.7 and 3.6.x have the feature integrated again.
Not sure if I haven’t forgotten anything but it probably still was worth a post.
As you most likely know openSUSE 11.2 is about to be released really soon now. I want to give a short overview what will be in there from the Mozilla side of things:
Firefox 3.5.4 featuring susefox and KDE integration
openSUSE’s Firefox contains some modifications which allows it to integrate a lot nicer into KDE thanks to LuboÅ¡ Luňák who did most of the work on that. Below is a video which shows the new features when using Firefox in KDE.
Thunderbird 3.0b4
The latest beta release of the new Thunderbird. It has a few known glitches still but we’ll update as soon as version 3 gets finally released.
SeaMonkey 2.0
The shiny new successor of the old Mozilla suite in its final 2.0 release.
Experimental support for shared certificate databases
This is not really new in 11.2 but was shipped in 11.1 for the first time. I’m going to write about the feature and how it can be used and set up in a next post soon.
An initial Namoroka openSUSE package is now available from OBS’ new mozilla:alpha repository. I’ve chosen to not reuse mozilla:beta just yet as I still ship TB3.0b and SM2.0b from there and the Namoroka package would try to automatically update systems away from Firefox 3.5.
There are some news and changes on the mozilla side of things within openSUSE which I want to share.
As others have already written Firefox 3.5 is now available in Factory and older distributions in OBS.
These packages feature a new openSUSE specific addon called SUSEFOX if you install the openSUSE branding (which is the default obviously). This addon uses a currently experimental/incomplete webservice to offer the available content plugins (e.g. Flash and Java). I hope to get this backend finished and ready to use soon but there are some open questions about how to do it exactly.
Also there are some new places for “mozilla in openSUSE” discussions:
a mailinglist mainly for development purposes opensuse-factory-mozilla@opensuse.org
a IRC channel #opensuse-mozilla
Both should help to bring people together who are interested in contributing to that area. So see you there with your feedback and ideas.
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