Firefox is bringing in a new test channel (to compliment nightly test builds, the beta version and the final release) called Aurora.  The Aurora channel of updates will deliver features to users at various levels of quality and polish.  This will be the new testing grounds as far as new features and innovations go too.

Overall, introducing this new update channel will both speed up development and give developers better access to get the things done they need to do.  Here is a quick blurb about it from Firefox Release Manager Christian Legnitto:

Lastly, the new repositories (which map to the channels) allow developers to do what they do best—develop. No longer should a developer need to know we are in blocker-only mode for a particular release. Instead, they will be allowed to land their fixes on mozilla-central at any time provided they stick to the mozilla-central tree rules. The mozilla-aurora repository will have different rules, and mozilla-beta will have different (and stricter) rules still. The rules for each of these repositories will not change over time or from release to release, which should help alleviate a lot of developer confusion and annoyance

For more information on the new development channels for Firefox 4 and beyond, be sure to check out this fantastic post by Christian in the Mozilla Developer Center.

Firefox 4 has suffered some setbacks as far as an official launch goes, but I think the public at large will be happy with the fact that they took a little ‘bit of extra time to work all the major bugs out.  Firefox 4 will also mark the last big release cycle Mozilla will do with the browser, so we may not have long drawn out countdowns any longer.  The reason for this is that the Mozilla team is opting for smaller and quicker releases, such as Google Chrome and other browsers like it have been doing.

When Firefox 3 came out, it had a record setting 8 million unique downloads the day it was released, back in 2008.  Will Firefox 4 be able to come close to that number? I guess we will see tomorrow!

* – image above from the Mozilla Firefox 4 t-shirt design contest.

It appears Firefox will be taking great leaps in development by the end of 2011.  The official Firefox roadmap was recently updated and shows that Firefox 7 is planned to ship in 2011.  I find that a little odd, seeing how Firefox 4 is still being in development as we speak and recently updated to beta version 10. 

Of course this is all just a simple drafted plan – so things are always subject to change.

Firefox 5

• Account Manager
• Simple Sharing UI
• UI Animation
• 64 Bit on Windows
• …anything that improves responsiveness and is ready
• …anything that improves stability and is ready
• …anything that polishes the user interface and is ready
• …anything else serving product priorities and is ready

Firefox 6

• Web Applications
• FasterCache
• OSX 10.7
• JS Optimizations
• …anything that improves responsiveness and is ready
• …anything that improves stability and is ready
• …anything that polishes the user interface and is ready
• …anything else serving product priorities and is ready

Firefox 7

• e10s? deXBLification?
• …anything that improves responsiveness and is ready
• …anything that improves stability and is ready
• …anything that polishes the user interface and is ready
• …anything else serving product priorities and is ready

You can go check out the full roadmap and plans on the Mozilla wiki.  I am excited to see that Mozilla still has big plans for the Firefox browser, however I think it will be really hard to ship Firefox 4, 5, 6, and 7 all within 2011. 

The Mozilla Labs Game On competition is over.  The web game development competition spawn a lot of creative and amazing games.  I can say one thing for sure, I sure am glad I didn’t have to decide who was the best of the best.  The best overall winner was Marble Run – but there were a lot of other awards handed out.

So who are the big winners? Here is a quick rundown:

• BEST OVERALL: MARBLE RUN
• BEST TECHNOLOGY: FAR 7
• BEST WEB-INESS: MARBLE RUN
• BEST AESTHETICS: SKETCHOUT
• MOST ORIGINAL: FAVIMON
• MOST POLISHED: WEBSNOOKER
• MOST FUN: ROBOTS ARE PEOPLE TOO
• COMMUNITY CHOICE: Z-TYPE

Go check out all the winners on the Mozilla Labs website, and let me know which one was your favorite.  For myself, I would have to say Favimon takes the cake for me.  It is simple, strange and very fun to play.

Along with all of your productive and useful websites out there, gaming websites or online games often get tossed to the wayside.  You know what though? Supporting games and independent developers is just as important as supporting the guys making the awesome website applications we all know and love.  With that said, I am happy to see Mozilla has launched the new Mozilla Labs Gaming.

From the sound of it, it looks like they are really reaching out to online game makers to provide them with the community, platform and tools they need to create new and innovative games for the browser.

From the Mozilla Labs Gaming blog, here is what Pascal Finette said about why Mozilla is traveling down this new fork in the road:

Modern Open Web technologies introduced a complete stack of technologies such as Open Video, audio, WebGL, touch events, device orientation, geo location, and fast JavaScript engines which make it possible to build complex (and not so complex) games on the Web.  With these technologies being delivered through modern browsers today, the time is ripe for pushing the platform.  And what better way than through games?  Traditionally games and game developers have been at the forefront of technology, often pushing the boundaries of what was thought possible.

To to kick things off, and start them off right, Mozilla Labs Gaming is going to launch an international gaming competition called Game On 2010.  Not much news has been released about it yet – but keep your eye on gaming.mozillalabs.com for more information.

One can only hope. According to several web sites that heard about it from a friend, who knew a friend, who was feeding the dog of a guy who might have worked at Sony, the PlayStation 3’s web browser might be getting a big upgrade, to Firefox.

Well turns out is was a possible rumor, then not so possible, but might be in the works?  Here is the first leak of information from psinsider:

We recently received a tip from a source very close to Sony who says that they have been in talks with Mozilla lately about possibly porting Firefox over to the PS3.

Later on, they issued a “correction”:

Looks like we goofed on the Mozilla rumor… I heard back from our source recently.”I don’t know how the guys from ps3center did this, but please tell me WHERE I wrote that Mozilla is going to port Firefox for PS3 ?? There was just a meeting between someone from PS division and someone from Mozilla.”The original message only mentioned that they had been talking, and I made the mistake of assuming it was related to porting Firefox onto PS3. I apologize for the lack of foresight. Sometimes when interpreting information from a rumor (which in some cases can be worded pretty vaguely), mistakes like this can be made. We apologize for the inconvenience.

So there were “talks”, I guess you could say, but nothing definite or newsworthy yet.  Personally, I’d love to see the PS3 browser get switched over to Firefox.  Even a stripped down basic version of Firefox would be better than the buggy thing they have there now.

Do you remember Jetpack?

It is the Mozilla Labs project that makes the add-on building process easier, mixing elements of HTML, CSS and JavaScript.  Mozilla has released an awesome Jetpack Gallery, which serves as a community for Jetpack developers and add-on users.

Much like the Firefox Add-ons site, you have featured add-ons for Jetpack, ratings, and user reviews.  It does a good job at giving you a summary of what each add-on is all about and looks like.

Here are some of my favorite Jetpack add-ons I have found:

• Thumbtabs – This jetpack displays your tabs and theirs thumbnails in Jetpack’s Slidebar.
• Jetstatus – Jetstatus is a Twitter client for Jetpack. It polls the service for new updates and displays popup notifications for every entry in the friends timeline.
• GTranslatifier – To translate a web page into your language, just click on the Google Translate icon in your status bar.
• Image Editor – Let’s you use the Pixlr image editor to edit any image you find on the web. Simply right-click an image, select “Edit Image”, and you’re editing away.

Here are a couple of other places to get Jetpacks:

• Jetpacks in the Wild – Mozilla Wiki
• Recent Jetpacks – UserScripts.org

I am happy to see that Jetpack development is alive and well.  It really brings new and interesting ways to change your own Firefox installation or interact with your favorite web sites. The Jetpack Gallery is well worth diving into.

Anthony is one of the driving forces behind that project, so I thought it would be fun to pick his brain to find out what his part in the project is, and what advice he might have for other hopeful Greasemonkey script writers or Firefox add-on developers.

What all have you done in development for the Firefox Greasemonkey extension?

I’ve definitely lost track of when and how exactly I first learned about Greasemonkey, and when I got involved.  Luckily, I can look up enough old records to get a pretty good idea of what the right answer here is.

I first interacted with Greasemonkey as a user.  Quickly though I graduated to User Script author.  My earliest blog post about a script I authored was in March of 2005.  I wrote a few scripts, some quite popular, for a while.  By June, Mark Pilgrim contacted me about being included in the “Greasemonkey Hacks” book, essentially a cookbook-like collection of existing User Scripts, with discussion about what they were and how they worked.  I was included as a contributor when that book was published.

I am first credited in a commit message from November, 2006.  That’s when I first began development of Greasemonkey itself, nearly three years ago.  At the time, the original creator, Aaron Boodman, was very much in charge and I was minimally involved.  Over time, I became more and more involved in the development process.

The first change I made to the source code directly, rather than submitting to the maintainers and being recognized for, was in February of 2007.  It was a very gradual process from there, but by some time in 2008 I was one of the more recognized authorities within the development community.  Finally, in August of 2009, the project’s original creator stepped down from the role of primary developer, handing the reins to myself and Johan Sundström, leaving me in the “co-lead” role with Johan.

Development progress over time has been relatively slow.  On one hand, Greasemonkey serves its purpose quite well, so doesn’t need to change very much.  On the other, there was a more complicated and difficult process for agreeing to and including changes.  Now that I’m more “in charge” than ever, I (along with Johan) am hoping to make it easier for Greasemonkey to progress, in the future.

As far as scripting and coding goes, how did you get started and what would you suggest somebody who wants to write their own Greasemoney script or Firefox add-on go to learn more on how to do so?

I’ve been programming since I was 10 or 11 years old.  Even earlier than that, I did “programming” by typing source code from a magazine into the Atari BASIC interpreter.  By my teens I was writing little programs, and by college I was beginning to learn PHP.  I got involved heavily in web development, and have been doing that professionally for six years now.

I was interested in Firefox extension development from the word go. Back in the 1.x days, however, tutorials and documentation was sparse, varied, and confusing.  Luckily today these problems have been solved. Mechanisms in Firefox 2 and 3 help make extension development easier, and both documentation and examples are much easier to find and understand.

I actually tried, and failed, to make my own extensions a few times. I finally got my first one running in June of 2005. Since then I’ve made a few of my own, and gotten involved with Greasemonkey.  For new extension authors, the developer.mozilla.org site is definitely the place to go, today.

User scripts are a different beast, and thankfully quite a bit simpler.  If you know javascript, you can probably get your first user script working in just a few minutes.  To learn how, visit the Greasespot Wiki, specifically the Manual.  The “common pitfalls” article by Mark Pilgrim is also very useful.

As an add-on developer, is there anything else you wish that the Mozilla team provided, or do you feel pretty happy with the information and support that they provide to developers?

It’s hard to say.  At this point, I’m a seasoned developer, so most of what I need is in my head.  There are two things that I would really like though:

Something like xulplanet.com’s XPCOM reference. The xulplanet.com site is now dead, giving just a link to the general developer wiki.  This is a good and helpful wiki, *but* has two weaknesses: it covers many disjoint topics (i.e. both web development, and extension development), and lacks the coverage that xulplanet.com
had.  There are many interfaces that, now, are harder to discover and understand.  Since xulplanet went away, I’ve found myself resorting to reading the source directly, which is more difficult to navigate to, and more difficult to read.

Better support for venkman. Venkman, the javascript debugger, was once quite wonderful.  Today, it’s often difficult to find the file you want to access (sometimes it’s there, sometimes it’s not) and almost impossible to find those that are/are referenced by javascript components.  Venkman seems to have bitrotted a bit.  Personally, even for web development, I strongly prefer it to Firebug for script debugging — it provides a multi-paneled interface that is significantly easier to use, than that of Firebugs, which is designed to fit in that tiny band at the bottom of the browser.

How big of a role has working on Firefox add-ons played in your professional life?

Almost none.  I interviewed for, but ultimately did not accept one position that would have been FF extension development.  My previous job did include creation of one extension, a port of the IE specific add-on that the company made, but was a secondary/side role.

What Firefox add-ons or Greasemonkey scripts are you a fan of?

For extensions, I like FireBug and Firecookie, JSONView, Open In Browser, and Web Developer extensions.

Most of the user scripts I use, I wrote myself.  Of those I find Linkify Plus and Submit in Select to be indispensible.  But I also use Check Range, and Google Reader Quick Links.

For more information on Anthony, what he does and his work – be sure to check out his personal site Arantius.com.  To check out all the Firefox add-ons he has been a part of, you can also check out his profile page on the Mozilla Add-ons web site.  From all the Firefox fans, I would also like to thank Anthony for the work he has done to (in the long run) make Firefox a better browser for all.

Not often do the people behind the absolutely awesome Firefox add-ons, tools and the browser itself get much time in the spotlight.  I recently had the chance to talk with the ColorfulTabs extension author, Shivanand Sharma, to get his views on his creation and a number of other development related questions.

What first inspired you to create the ColorfulTabs add-on for Firefox?

Before I begin I’d like to congratulate you and commend you for the great and popular blog and content you have created. A ‘hello’ to all your visitors and fans of Firefox.

Back in the old days when Firefox caught my attention, there was a page with a walk-through on how to use userchrome.css to style your toolbars and buttons. The article was created by Flexer and I was so fascinated that I spent hours coloring and styling every aspect of the browser. One day the idea just struck – what if every tab was a different color? At least the tab boundaries will be more distinguishable. It was a small idea that gave birth to ColorfulTabs. Initially ColorfulTabs just used 32 fixed colors to color each tab in a cycle (after the 32nd tab color cycle just restarted).

A friend of mine used to say – “an idea always starts small but eventually it matures and manifests into something big.” Users reported using 56 tabs and said that the colors were not unique. I had never imagined someone opening 56 tabs all at once. I then implemented random generation of colors. Later users requested more and we now have coloring at domain level and user selectable colors for up to 5 domains.

Will we ever see mono-chrome tabs? :)

I’ve been requested this feature for quite some time now. And I’ve been toying around with this idea. In my opinion such a feature is more of a theming work than that of a functionality enhancement. When Vista came out people wanted metallic tabs. So the idea is there and the day I’m convinced about it, it will be there :)

How difficult was it to convert Colorful Tabs over from Firefox 2 to Firefox 3?

Generally whenever the Firefox user-interface gets modified it breaks some extensions. We saw some UI changes for the Firefox 3 tabs and that’s what required some fixing. Generally if you are good at debugging, you know what is breaking things and what needs to be modified. It took me two days to fix the JavaScript part and another few hours to style the new tabs with CSS. As always it wasn’t merely a compatibility fix. I wanted to introduce more features, more functionality to live up to the expectations of the Firefox 3 users. When it’s the launch of Firefox 3 you sure want your extension to have some new features and impress the fans. And that takes some time and trying. I was not a seasoned extension developer when I started so I’ve learnt with time. I just was good at C and logic. That goes a long way. ColorfulTabs was one of the top 50 most downloaded addons on the day of Firefox release.

Outside of Colorful Tabs, what else do you work on professionally or for a hobby?

Technology amuses me. I find it hard to resist computers. So of all the things I do, most are technical. I’m a jack of many trades. I’m a professionally blogger and I have my main blog at http://binaryturf.com. It is about blogging and doing the best at that to go full-time. Once in a while I also post about the technology that catches my fascination. I sing and pursue immense interest in music and have another blog about it at http://music.binaryturf.com (which I only post to when I’m really in ‘the mood’). I also function as an Editor at Firefox Addons (AMO). I’ve designed a WordPress theme called Femme Flora and plan to design a premium theme soon. Photography is another favorite activity of mine. So it’s pretty much anything I can get my hands on.

While these activities keep my interest and I plan to pursue them full-time in the future. I work with an IT company as a Systems Engineer to make a living. However most of my earning comes from Google Adsense on my blog. May be in the future I’ll just work as a part of the open source community full-time and pursue my interests. I think that is what life is all about – doing what you want, contributing to a community and changing the world in whatever small way I can, having the money to afford this luxury and having a ball of a time :).

If somebody asked you, what is the best way to get started with creating add-ons for Firefox, what would you tell them?

I receive a lot of those requests on a regular basis. There are many tutorials online that will walk you through the process. They all stand good as long as you experiment and learn. However if I were to start learning extension development from scratch I’d head on to:

• http://kb.mozillazine.org/Extension_development – This is a formal introductory guide that serves as an induction into the process, the technology and the environment.
• http://kb.mozillazine.org/Getting_started_with_extension_development – a guide to equip you and get set for development.
• http://developer.mozilla.org/ – The central place where everything is documented and detailed. You will find code snippets and examples that come in as invaluable because there are times when you are stuck and there’s no one to help. Just copy the code and try it out. It can save you hours of frustration.

The community at Mozilla has been doing some fantastic work documenting everything to make development easy for individuals of any level and knowledge of development. I’d like to thank them for their continued efforts in making Firefox such a popular project.

Out of all the different, “download the video from that video sharing site” services out there – what does it feel like to be the most popular one, right now?

It’s good and that’s even better to be one of the most popular Firefox extensions overall :)

I started computing in the early 80s on a Sinclair ZX81 (2KB of RAM!) and since then, i wrote many lines of code within a lot of various projects but DownloadHelper is by far the application that got the best success. So when you write a piece of software that will be executed one million times everyday, you for sure feel useful but a bit anxious as you have the responsibility to make this code work flawlessly.

What makes Video DownloadHelper different than the other video download tools for Firefox?

There are 3 major things for an application like DownloadHelper to be successful:

First, it must be easy to use: most users must be able to use it right away after the installation without having to read a long manual.

Second, it must be reliable and work without problem is a large majority of situations. However, in this particular video downloading area, you must accept that the application won’t work in 100% of the cases users would expect it to work.

Third, it must be trustworthy and not try to spy the users, send them popups or anything of that kind, where it would be technically easy to do so and financially lucrative. And not only it must respect the users but it must be seen as such. This is were popularity is quite useful: users know that if millions other people use the application, this one must be safe.

For the case of video downloading tools, DownloadHelper is well perceived because it matches well the 3 points above, in particular it uses generic capture methods that work well in practice and do not depend on a video site implementation that could change the next day, that’s for reliability. Also, it does not resolve video media addresses through an external web site where users could suspect someone spies them upon on the videos they are watching.

Did video web sites complain about your tool being able to grab their content?

No, on the contrary, many of them ask for their site to be included in our lists.

It’s important to understand that DownloadHelper is not only a tool to grab videos to your local hard disk, but the overall project also includes a registry of more than 600 video sites which is managed mainly on the web site (http://www.downloadhelper.net/sites.php) and a bit in the extension (supported sites list). Thanks to the magic of statistics, from the data collected in the site over a large population of visitors, the lists are sorted accurately based on their quality. If a new good video web site opens, it will quickly show up in the top of the list.

This discovery feature generates everyday about 150,000 hits to those web sites. So to answer your question, a few sites requested to be removed and only 1 of them maintained this request once they understood the traffic was directed to their html pages and not directly to the media content.

Is there still room for improvement with Video DownloadHelper, or are you more focused now keeping it up and running with the most recent Firefox versions?

There is still a large functional margin with DownloadHelper and you can expect to see new great features in the near future. Amongst them, you should see:

• much smarter naming of the videos: most users would prefer downloading a file named funny_basketball_shots.flv rather than 3246874321854.flv
• video conversion parameters sharing: fine tuning the embedded converter can be tricky. As DownloadHelper users is a large population, sharing the
• configurations that work best becomes statistically meaningful
  direct access to YouTube high-quality videos
• several other features that are still secret :)

Do you have other secret Firefox-related projects?

Unfortunately, my brain is not powerful enough to handle other projects in parallel, and it’s certainly wiser to use the energy capitalizing on the popularity of DownloadHelper.

But still in the overall DownloadHelper context, the next big step is to take benefit of the exposure of the extension to help populations in Africa. It’s something to help people in developed countries getting videos, but if you can also provide a more significant support to people in need, then why not doing so ? I am currently discussing with associations to have that in place in late September or October.

How many people are contributing to the DownloadHelper project ?

About 2 millions daily users making suggestions and reporting issues (not all of them fortunately !), 800 beta-testers, 20 translators, ~10 advisers and 1 making the decisions and the coding.

What made you want to create the add-on for Firefox?

Basically the need for it.

In summer 2006, I wanted to download a video file out of YouTube. The only Firefox extension that was available at that time was really not good. As I developed several Mozilla extensions in a professional context, I had the technical expertise to do better, which I did in a week-end. The first day it was published on addons.mozilla.org it downloaded 2000 times which I found very high. I now have other figures in mind to talk about success :)

What other Firefox add-ons out there really impress you?

I like small extensions doing a simple job well, like Download Statusbar, Mouse Gesture Redox, Table2Clipboard.   And also as a web developer, I could not live without Javascript Debugger (Venkman), Firebug and Web Developer.