Mozilla UK

Oh dear. It’s taken me longer than expected to get round to writing this blog post. I was obviously recovering from the awesomeness splendidness that was the Mozilla UK Community Meetup 2012.

As you may know, on a Thursday three weeks ago Mozillians from around the country travelled to the new Mozilla Space in London to get together and make plans for the next three months. I’ve done a write-up of what we discussed and decided over on the Mozilla Wiki, if you’re interested go read it now, we’ll still be here when you’re finished, honest!

BrowserQuest is a cool new game, which has been entertaining us and keeping us busy for the last few days, that can be played in your browser. In this blog post I'll tell you what it is, how you play it and how it's made. So sit back, relax and let me take you on a journey to a world filled with HTML5 and Javascript!

Last week, the DevTools team met up in London, one of the most beautiful cities in the UK. The sun was shining, the birds were singing, but this was only the beginning! Now, you might ask yourself: What is the DevTools team? What were they doing during the meet-up? What have they done before? And why is the sky blue? I'll answer these questions and more for you in this blog post, so read on!

Today I'd like to talk about something that's made us hold our breaths for a few weeks... until now! In this blog post I'll explain to you what Boot to Gecko (B2G) is and why you definitely want it.

What is B2G?

Boot to Gecko (or B2G for short) is the completely standalone core of an operating system for mobile phones, powered by Mozilla. It allows you to integrate web applications like games, widgets or news programs directly into your phone, making it ready for every day use. As soon as you turn it on, you "boot" directly into a web browser, which means that apps use open web technologies. B2G is made up of three different parts: "Gecko", the rendering engine which implements the new standard and proposed Web APIs, the kernel, which is called "Gonk" and provides the libraries that Gecko depends on and the user interface, called "Gaia".

Recently we've have quite a lot of emails from people needing help with their Firefox/Thunderbird installation. Although I've been happy to reply to those emails, there are quicker ways to get help. So, this morning I added a Support page to the site which directs you to the official Firefox and Thunderbird community support sites (and includes some commonly used articles).

We're still happy to answer emails for help and added a "Support" category to the contact form for this purpose (but be prepared to wait longer than you would on SuMo and SuMoMo.)

Happy Help Finding!

As Slade once so wonderfully put it:

IT'S CHHHHHHHRRRRRRRRRRRIIIIIIIIIIIIIISSSSSSSSSSSSSSTTTTTTTTTTTTTTMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAASSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSS!

And to celebrate, we thought we'd remind you that Firefox Live is still broadcasting a live feed of the firefox cubs at Knoxville Zoo.

Don't they ever get tired of being cute?!

Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year everybody!

Christmas is just days away (oh cripes, I haven’t got Christmas presents for anyone yet!) which means that the New Year is just a few days further, so now is a perfect time to look back on the awesomeness for Mozilla, Firefox and the web in 2011.

Firefox 4

The year started with the epic release of Firefox 4. Firefox 4 brought swathes of new features including a new, streamlined interface, Firefox Sync, annd better performance. However, let’s not allow that voice you hear inside your head when you read stuff to bore you about what was new, but let Johnathan Nightingale, Director of Engineering, do it instead: