Hacks Mozilla.org

There have been a bunch of posts about the JägerMonkey (JM) post that we made the other day, some of which get things subtly wrong about the pieces of technology that are being used as part of Mozilla’s JM work. So here’s the super-quick overview of what we’re using, what the various parts do and where they came from:

We’ve posted a new release of our Mozilla developer preview series as a way to test new features that we’re putting into the Mozilla platform. These features may or may not make it into a future Firefox release, either for desktops or for mobile phones. But that’s why we do these releases – to get testing and feedback early so we know how to treat them.

In August 2008, Mozilla introduced TraceMonkey. The new engine, which we shipped in Firefox 3.5, heralded a new era of performance to build the next generation of web browsers and web applications. Just after the introduction of our new engine Google introduced V8 with Chrome. Apple also introduced their own engine to use in Safari, and even Opera has a new engine that they’ve introduced with their latest browser beta.

Ever since the release of Firefox 3 we’ve been doing a lot of work to add new capabilities for web developers. We thought it would be worth it to make a post that actually listed all of the features that we knew about and people might not know about. This contains everything that we’ve done over the last three releases or so, but calls out stuff that’s new in 3.6.

Enjoy!

Editor’s note: Today, Mozilla released a preview of the Gecko 1.9.3 platform for developers and testers. Check out the Mozilla Developer News announcement reposted below.

Last week we sent out the second issue of about:hacks, Mozilla’s newsletter for web developers.

Here are highlights from the topics covered in this new issue:

Firefox 3.6 was released on Jan 21st and has already been downloaded more than 35 million times! It features a faster JavaScript engine, faster DOM performance and a bunch of new HTML5 features. Read more

Many web applications use image uploaders: image hosting websites, blog publishing applications, social networks, among many others. Such uploaders have limitations: you can’t upload more than one file at a time and you can’t edit the image before sending it. A plugin is the usual workaround for uploading more than one image, and image modifications are usually done on the server side, which can make the editing process more cumbersome.

This article was writt by Anthony Ricaud, French OpenWeb enthusiast.

A dynamic web application usually needs visual feedback from its inner mechanism or needs to display different visual elements based on users’ actions.

Today we announced the release of Firefox 3.6 and users are starting to upgrade. One of the more important features we included for developers was support for a new font standard called WOFF.

WOFF has received wide support from the type community and we’re starting to see the results of that. There are a couple of specific instances that we’d like to point out on day zero of our release:

Firefox 3.6 has some cool consumer facing features like Personas and a better Plug-in Updater, but developers have a lot to be excited about too.  Developers will appreciate the increased st Read more

Firebug 1.5 was released yesterday on addons.mozilla.org, where you can now download it. It’s compatible with the upcoming Firefox 3.6.

If you’d like to take a more in-depth look at what’s new in Firebug 1.5, here’s a series of articles written by Firebug contributor Jan Odvarko (aka Honza):

Editor’s note: today the Firebug team released Firebug 1.5. Check out Rob Campbell’s announcement reposted below.

I am very happy to be able to announce the release of Firebug 1.5.0 on addons.mozilla.org. This release represents a significant effort by the Firebug Working Group which saw the addition of some new faces over the last few months.

Here’s a quick run-down of some of the new features: