As you most likely know openSUSE 11.2 is about to be released really soon now. I want to give a short overview what will be in there from the Mozilla side of things:

• Firefox 3.5.4 featuring susefox and KDE integration
  openSUSE’s Firefox contains some modifications which allows it to integrate a lot nicer into KDE thanks to LuboÅ¡ Luňák who did most of the work on that. Below is a video which shows the new features when using Firefox in KDE.
  
• Thunderbird 3.0b4
  The latest beta release of the new Thunderbird. It has a few known glitches still but we’ll update as soon as version 3 gets finally released.
• SeaMonkey 2.0
  The shiny new successor of the old Mozilla suite in its final 2.0 release.
• Experimental support for shared certificate databases
  This is not really new in 11.2 but was shipped in 11.1 for the first time. I’m going to write about the feature and how it can be used and set up in a next post soon.

An initial Namoroka openSUSE package is now available from OBS’ new mozilla:alpha repository. I’ve chosen to not reuse mozilla:beta just yet as I still ship TB3.0b and SM2.0b from there and the Namoroka package would try to automatically update systems away from Firefox 3.5.

There are some news and changes on the mozilla side of things within openSUSE which I want to share.
As others have already written Firefox 3.5 is now available in Factory and older distributions in OBS.
These packages feature a new openSUSE specific addon called SUSEFOX if you install the openSUSE branding (which is the default obviously). This addon uses a currently experimental/incomplete webservice to offer the available content plugins (e.g. Flash and Java). I hope to get this backend finished and ready to use soon but there are some open questions about how to do it exactly.
Also there are some new places for “mozilla in openSUSE” discussions:

• a mailinglist mainly for development purposes opensuse-factory-mozilla@opensuse.org
• a IRC channel #opensuse-mozilla

Both should help to bring people together who are interested in contributing to that area. So see you there with your feedback and ideas.

Tomorrow (2009-05-14) is Thunderbird and SeaMonkey TestDay again and this time the focus is on Linux. So if you are a Thunderbird or SeaMonkey user or want to become one this is where you should join in to get those really stable and usable.
To support that event and our openSUSE users there are new current snapshots of TB and SM in the mozilla:beta buildservice repository.
And let me cite the following from their testday page: “… and the fact that it’s openSUSE’s community week we would like to focus this week’s bugday to bugs that are happening on Linux.”

A few days ago Mozilla Labs announced the release of Prism 1.0 Beta.

I always was following from the side how it evolved but never tried it myself up to now. As it moves slowly out of the labs status I started to package it for openSUSE and so it is available now through the openSUSE Build Service’s “well-known” mozilla:beta repository as prism and prism-refractor which is the Firefox addon helping you to create webapps even easier.

So start to play around with it and … have a lot of fun!

Firefox 3.5b4 which is available in mozilla:beta since its upstream release finally hit openSUSE’s Factory today.

Give it a try and check out the new features!

I’ve released a Thunderbird 3.0b2 test package in mozilla:beta today. This is the initial package for openSUSE and may (actually does) have some issues but it still should be usable basically. Feel free to report packaging issues to Novell’s bugzilla. (Please ignore the outdated extension warning at startup.)

For deeper testing the application I recommend in general to join the upstream QA effort and especially today’s Test Day. The Thunderbird community is aware of these openSUSE packages so if you like you can do the testing using these while you always should mention their origin in upstream reports (since there might be also packaging issues).

Update:
There are some things I missed to mention earlier:

• MozillaThunderbird3 can be installed in parallel to MozillaThunderbird to make it easier testing the package.
• Thunderbird 3 saves its profile to .thunderbird3 instead of .thunderbird (which is different from upstream) to avoid breakage of the TB2 profile.

Someone asked me for a package for SeaMonkey 2 which is currently under development. So here it is in mozilla:beta with most likely some rough edges. It’s an early preview package and not meant for production use but if someone wants to give me some feedback feel free.
It’s currently not possible to install it side by side with SeaMonkey 1.1 but I’ll probably make that possible in the near future.

Yesterday I took the time to update to Firefox 3.1b2 (upstream release announcement) in mozilla:beta and fixed the outstanding build issues (gcc complaints) for 11.1 and Factory. What is still missing are the translations so it’s only available in en-US for now. Not every feature from openSUSE’s Firefox 3.0 package has been ported to 3.1 yet (namely gconf/lockdown integration) but it’s rather complete besides of the two things above.