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The Day Of The Next Generation

Technology. The current frontier. These are the voyages of June 21st, it's ongoing mission to find strange new releases, new devices, and new software. To boldly go where no day has gone before...


This is surely an interesting day. Nokia has just presented the Linux-powered Nokia N9 with a completely new UI and it's surely a very slick device, interesting UI concept, and no matter if system-wise this midway point between Maemo5 and full-fledged MeeGo can be called "MeeGo" legally, having a mass-market phone out there that comes with a fully open "real Linux" is awesome.
The N900, which feels old, slow and clunky nowadays, has a damn good successor - even though the keyboard-attached N950 version has been blocked by carriers and is only available as a "loaned" dev kit to people creating N9 apps. I hope to see that N9 device out there soon, and perhaps it's done well enough that the absence of the keyboard can be taken, but I'd really need to test it for that. Also, I hope that enough of the UI stuff can be opened enough that MeeGo proper can ship it as well. Until all that clears up, I'll keep testing the MeeGo N900 Community Edition, which is shaping up nicely as well. Hopefully open-software phones have a future with all those moves (and I surely hope other vendors will chime in as well, as Nokia can't be fully trusted in that way any more).

But there's much more: I just saw Mozilla people on the US West Coast join IRC at 5am their time and start their work day - Firefox 5 is going public today as the first one off our new release process. While it doesn't ship a lot in terms of new features, the big thing here is that it kickstarts the new process that will get us new Firefox releases every 6-12 weeks that are easy to update to because they don't have a ton of new stuff but still a number of nice features. This time, CSS Animations are probably the only larger thing (next to performance improvements), and most users won't notice them yet, unless they look for some demos. But, the important point is that they're ready and so we can ship them to hundreds of millions of people, not needing to wait for a major version coming in a year or so. It's (going) out there, right now!
This is also the first release I have been there in "Crash Scene Investigation" for its whole cycle, and we learned a lot about a number of things in this cycle, including that we need to attract more people to the Aurora and Beta channels to get even better data, but also that there are some classes of crashes and hangs we need to take a closer look at, and we are doing that. All in all, our beta numbers of Firefox 5 have been quite good, we expect it to be at least as stable as Firefox 4.0.1, probably somewhat better.

In addition to this, Mozilla is shipping the probably last security update to Firefox 3.6, Thunderbird ships a security update for 3.1, and, very importantly, Firefox 5 also ships for Android and the before-mentioned N900 (maemo5) today, right at the same time with the desktop Firefox!

Not enough, though: The SeaMonkey team has just finished up building the first beta of SeaMonkey 2.2 and will ship that to its beta testers later today. This version has the same web-facing features as Firefox 5 (including CC Animations) and the security fixes shipped in other versions today, as well as a number of smaller fixes to SeaMonkey code, some of which have been found since 2.1 has been released.
I'm informed that the team will try to ship the final 2.2 release as soon as possible in the next weeks, hoping that this first beta will do well in testing.

And it's surely possible that this day has even more in store, it's not over yet! ;-)

Engage!

Beitrag geschrieben von KaiRo und gepostet am 21. Juni 2011 15:35 | Tags: Firefox, MeeGo, Mozilla, N9, N900, SeaMonkey | 8 Kommentare

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    AutorBeitrag

    Mardeg

    zitieren
    Firefox for Meego?
    Given the two topics covered in this one post, I'm wondering why there was no mention of a mobile Firefox build for the Meego OS? Are there any plans to do this? If so, will it happen before Maemo builds stop being produced?
    21.06.2011 18:52

    sonny

    aus France

    zitieren
    Real and open Linux on mobile device
    "having a mass-market phone out there that comes with a fully open "real Linux" is awesome"
    The N9 isn't the only. You should take a look at WebOS: http://developer.palm.com/blog/2011/05/10-reasons-for-geeks-to-love-hp-webos
    21.06.2011 19:21

    sonny

    aus France

    zitieren
    Quote of Mardeg:
    Given the two topics covered in this one post, I'm wondering why there was no mention of a mobile Firefox build for the Meego OS? Are there any plans to do this? If so, will it happen before Maemo builds stop being produced?
    Both Mozilla and Nokia are working on it.
    21.06.2011 19:22

    KaiRo

    Webmaster

    zitieren
    Quote of Mardeg:
    Given the two topics covered in this one post, I'm wondering why there was no mention of a mobile Firefox build for the Meego OS? Are there any plans to do this? If so, will it happen before Maemo builds stop being produced?

    I have not heard about Mozilla plans for MeeGo (and which one do you mean? N9's Harmattan? MeeGo N900 Community Edition (which comes with Firefox preloaded but rebranded as "Browser")? Any other MeeGo version?)
    Quote of sonny:
    "having a mass-market phone out there that comes with a fully open "real Linux" is awesome"
    The N9 isn't the only. You should take a look at WebOS: http://developer.palm.com/blog/2011/05/10-reasons-for-geeks-to-love-hp-webos

    I think WebOS uses a custom frontend, not a conventional Qt- or GTK-based one, so I would still say it falls slightly short on the "real Linux" front (and does it comes with a shell by default that I can easily use to get into root and mess around with the system without losing warranty?). Also, where are the available mass-market devices?

    Zuletzt bearbeitet von KaiRo am 21.06.2011 19:44

    21.06.2011 19:43

    Kelly Clowers

    aus Seattle

    zitieren
    WebOS and N9
    WebOS is a lot better than Android, but by default it does not use X11 (I think there is an installable version), which is definitely a downside.

    Even though I just got my (secondhand) N900 a few months ago, I would love to upgrade, but the lack of a keyboard is a dealbreaker for me. I have no way of getting an N950, either. The N950 also has no NFC or Bluetooth 4, and a smaller battery to boot. I know the N9 switched to a capacitive screen with no stylus, and I guess the N950 does as well.

    Poor tradeoffs all around...
    23.06.2011 17:16

    EP

    zitieren
    One more security update for Firefox 3.6
    Quote:
    Mozilla is shipping the probably last security update to Firefox 3.6

    AH Kairo but there is one more new security update being planned for Firefox 3.6 and that is 3.6.19.

    Read here for the details of FF 3.6.19 and on a possible FF 3.6 EOL:
    http://groups.google.com/group/mozilla.dev.planning/browse_thread/thread/2b42f29c21378451#

    so Mozilla hasn't yet completely abandoned Firefox 3.6.
    26.06.2011 03:56

    KaiRo

    Webmaster

    zitieren
    Quote of EP:
    so Mozilla hasn't yet completely abandoned Firefox 3.6.

    Haven't read that, but I wished we would have. I don't want to support multiple stable releases with crash analysis and rather would put more work time into finding stuff in prereleases so we ultimately can make Firefox more stable.
    27.06.2011 02:22

    Vladimir

    aus Ru

    zitieren
    Jökulsárlón Download Manager
    Address of this extension looks not so perfect in addons

    https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/seamonkey/addon/j%C3%B6kuls%C3%A1rl%C3%B3n-download-manager/
    27.06.2011 08:40

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