Firefox 3.1 may well be remembered as the “tab release”, as tabbed browsing will be the most noticeable updated area users will face when it comes out in final form.

The latest Firefox 3.1 nightly (code named Shiretoko) features a new tab button in the tab bar, making the addition of a tab fully discoverable for the first time as it is now part of the primary UI.

A previous change, added a few days ago, made the tab bar always visible by default which allows the new tab button to be present at all times. In the past, the tab bar was hidden when there was only one page opened. A preference in Options/Tabs allowed to make it visible at all times.

The old New Tab button which was present in the Customize Toolbar dialog and could be added to the toolbars is gone at this time.

Yet another change in behavior now makes the current window go away when its last tab is closed. There is already a number of users complaining about this behavior and I also at first thought it would be annoying, but I still haven’t been in the situation of closing all tabs, yet wanting to keep Firefox open.

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This is the transcript of the chat with Asa Dotzler, as part of Support Firefox Day, formatted for better reading.

All sessions happened on IRC with questions from the public moderated by David Tenser, Mozilla Support lead.

(David Tenser: Tell us a little about yourself and what you do at Mozilla!)

I’ve had many roles at Mozilla over the last decade or so. I started as a volunteer trying to figure out how to get involved as a non-coder (not even a very technical person). After banging my head against the wall for a while, I found a couple of people that were hosting developer builds on their FTP servers (back then, Mozilla didn’t make binaries), so I started testing and reporting bugs.

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This is the transcript of the chat with John Lilly, Mozilla Corporation CEO, as part of Support Firefox Day, formatted for better reading.

All sessions happened on IRC with questions from the public moderated by David Tenser, Mozilla Support lead.

I didn’t make it on time so I missed some of the first questions. The transcript starts with a partial answer by John Thanks to David, here’s the full transcript: Read the rest of this entry »

This is the transcript of the chat with Mike Beltzner as part of Support Firefox Day, formatted for better reading.

All sessions happened on IRC with questions from the public moderated by David Tenser, Mozilla Support lead.

What frustrates you most about the Firefox 3 UI?

Heh, great question. There are a couple of things that are frustrating to me, both at the UI and underlying infrastructure level.

At the UI level, I’m frustrated that we’re not animating more, and not trying to offer more “emergent” interfaces that help users complete tasks based on what we can infer from the task the user is trying to complete.

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Not surprisingly, today’s Support Firefox Day chat sessions proved to be some very informative and fun ones.

If you missed any of them, here’s your chance to see what happened. I’ll post the transcripts (formatted for better reading) of the four chats with Mike Connor, Firefox 3 development lead; Mike Beltzner, Firefox 3 UI team leader; John Lilly, Mozilla Corporation CEO; and Asa Dotzler, Mozilla Community liaison.

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While Mozilla is gradually turning more attention to mobile platforms to expand its presence in the web, there’s another project, MicroB, that is already providing a Mozilla based solution for the Nokia tablet PC platform that has already become the default browser for Internet Table OS 2008, the latest version of Nokia’s maemo-based table PC OS.

Antonio Gomes, a MicroB developer kindly accepted an interview to learn more about the MicroB project and how it works.

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Wired Compiler has an interview with Asa Dotzler, Mozilla’s Director of Community Development. Several interesting facts are mentioned on how Firefox was started, the process of deciding what features goes in and out, and Firefox 3. Read the rest of this entry »

Since recently, Mozilla has started using the term organic as a way to describe Firefox. For example, the new mozilla.com prototypes feature trees, animals and balloons to suggest this, and the ongoing Firefox 3 T-shirt design contest has the organic theme as one of the specific concepts.

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The GigaOM Show had Mozilla Corporation’s CEO, John Lilly as its guest for Episode 28. John talks about the CEO transition, Firefox 3, Mozilla income, growth, the IPO theory and Thunderbird.

Watch the fourteen minutes interview on Revision 3 (and look for Mozilla Links brief cameo around 4:30).

Glaxstar is one of a few software companies focused on developing Mozilla-based solutions. The Paypal extension, del.icio.us integration and Spread Firefox are among its most relevant products. I talked with Ian Hayward, Glaxstar’s co-founder about Glaxstar and its most recent release: Glubble, a Firefox parental control extension reviewed here in Mozilla Links.

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