Firefox Seoul Party for celebrating the release of Firefox3

Mitchell Baker, chair of the Mozilla foundation and Gen Kanai, Asia marketing manager, visited Korea to attend the OECD ministerial meeting during June 17th ~ 18th and give talks in the Future of Global Web Technology conference on June 19th.

Coincidentally, Mozilla had officially released Firefox3 in this period of time, so the Mozilla Korea Community hosted a Firefox Seoul party to celebrate the release of Firefox3. They also attended the party, so it made the event more exciting for the community.

Before the party, I had the opportunity to have dinner with Mitchell Baker and Gen Kanai. I heard about the story of how Mitchell started her career in IT and was involved in the Mozilla project. It was an awesome story. I think she is part of the history of the Web.

I was also pleased to meet Gen, although we had not met each other,  because I had seen his talk in the Lift conference and read his blog. So I felt like I was meeting people I was already acquainted with. In addition, he has already written about the Mozilla Korea Community activities and the unique situation of using ActiveX controls in Korea in  his blog. So I'd like to thank him for his efforts.

There were some events during the party. Firstly, we enjoyed an interesting video of introducing the new features of Firefox3 and some photos of the Mozilla Korea Community activities.

Secondly, we had a Q&A time with Michell Baker. She kindly gave us answers about many questions regarding Mozilla/Firefox despite the late time and busy schedule. It left me wondering where she got her power & passion.

As the chair of the Mozilla foundation, she has striven to make the people all over the world access the Web equally without any restrictions. So I think that those efforts make her more powerful and active.

Thanks, Mozilla for keeping the Web for everyone; I will also help Mozilla spread Firefox.

Photo by Gen Kanai

Firefox3 beta1 & Cairo Graphics

As expected, Mozilla finally has started the beta test of Firefox3 after finished the alpha8 test. Actually, the official version of Firefox3 should have been released this time. However, the release date is behind the schedule as the alpha test was recently finished. Anyway, we expect that Firefox would be officially released in the first half of next year

The major feature of Firefox is to use Cairo as the graphic engine for rendering all of things. Cairo is designed to provide primitives for 2-dimensional drawing across a number of different backends
Firefox2 has only made use of Cairo in its Gecko layout engine for rendering SVG and Canvas.
However, all graphics rendering would be done through Cairo in Firefox3. The major reason of using Cairo is that SVG, Canvas, and font rendering need to use 2D vector drawing and it allows the drawing to be accelerated by GPU. In the future, Firefox is going to have the capabilities of drawing vector graphics as much as Flash so that it allows users to paint the Web in a standard way. We can already find out many examples of the future Web graphics when surfing the Web.
Click the following links for more details.

• Firefox3's new features for users
  
• Firefox3's enhanced technologies for developers
• Beta1 Release Notes