New Mozilla Developer Site Goes Live

bdaehlie writes "After a lot of hard work, Mozilla's new developer site has gone live. It has been available at a test URL for a while but the transition is now complete. This should be a great resource for Mozilla contributors, web developers, and anyone interested in finding out more about Mozilla technologies."

Comments

Re:Dear Mozilla Developers

[bdaehlie]

I think you'll be pleasantly surprised by the next major version of Firefox, due around the end of the summer. Yeah, nobody likes to hear that "the next version" will fix their problems, but what else can I say... It's no secret that Firefox on the Mac was neglected, but concrete steps have been taken to rectify the situation (including Mozilla Foundation hiring me as their full-time Mac developer). As a result of Mozilla's renewed commitment to the Mac, the Mac Mozilla developer community has been revitalized and is doing some great work. If you want something now, go get a Firefox nightly build for Mac OS X. They are leaps and bounds better than Firefox 1.0.x releases for Mac OS X. Some very general hilights:

- major UI cleanup, more Mac-like than ever
- much better performance with plugins and other cpu-intensive tasks
- more OS-integration features like desktop image support, default browser, etc...
- more and more complete profile migrators from other browsers
- many miscellaneous Mac OS X-specific bug fixes

Unlike the situation 6 months ago, we now have actual work being done to solve bigger long-term issues as well. Some examples are native-looking widgets (like Camino has) and Intel-based Mac support. These are not empty words either - Firefox can actually build and run with native-looking widgets now, and it already runs on Intel Macs. We're also doing work to make the Mac infrastructure more maintainable in the future.

So we are getting better quickly - we hope you give us another chance!

-Josh Aas
Mozilla Foundation Mac Developer

Re:Firefox or Mozilla

[AuMatar]

Firefox is a web browser. Mozilla is a web suite (browser, mail, irc client, news, composer). Both use the Gecko HTML renderer. There's a lot of shared code and features between the tweo, but its not 100% shared. Both products are made by the Mozilla foundation, and are 100% open source.

Firefox is in version 1.0.6 currently. Mozilla is in version 1.7.8 currently. So yes, Mozilla 1.4 is a lot worse than Firefox 1.0, as 1.4 has a much older version of Gecko at its heart. A comparison of Mozilla 1.7.8 and Firefox 1.0.6 shows them to be much the same at rendering, with slightly divergent feature sets.

For myself, I prefer Mozilla suite, I use the email client anyway, may as well load both at once. And I think the UI for Mozilla is better than Firefox. But they are pretty similar over all.

Re:This is great

[stevey]

Isn't this what the book / online book Creating applications with Mozilla was supposed to help with?

Sure it's about applications rather than interfacing with the core of the browser, but it covers the concepts of XUL, packaging, etc.