At Mozilla, our web development projects are open source, publicly available, and interested in community contributions.
This is one of those things that makes absolute sense when you hear it, but you may have never heard, or thought, of it before.
It’s not terribly well-publicized—that’s something Mike Morgan and I are going to start working on this week—but there are ways you can get involved:
- There’s info about most, if not all, our current projects on the Mozilla Wiki.
- An advanced search in Bugzilla can tell you a lot about what’s going on.
- You can find web dev people on IRC in #webdev, #sumodev, and a few others. (I’m jsocol on irc.mozilla.org.)
Why would you want to contribute to Mozilla web development projects?
- You care about the web, and making it better.
- Our websites are used by millions of people.
- Because of that, we work at scales most developers don’t usually get to see.
Hopefully I’ll have something to add by the end of the week, but in the meantime, come on over and say “hi” on IRC!
Buyer Beware here. You probably saw a warning when you tried to go to about:config. That’s because you can significantly alter the behavior of Firefox here, and you need to be either very careful about what you change, or very confident in your ability to fix it.
Right there? That’s enough to deter me from this whole process, so I can definitely understand if it scared you off. But this is an important update, a security update, so you need to do it.
Now, more towards the middle of the page, look for a link that says “
That will start downloading the normal installer we’ve come to know and love. Yeah, you’ll still have to restart Firefox, but you were going to need to do that, anyway.