Mozilla Firefox 4.0 Holds Launch Parties Across Indonesia

Mozilla Indonesia Community, supported by Mozilla Foundation, has held several launch parties across major cities in Indonesia. One of the events was held in Bandung just 2 days ago.

More than a hundred attendees turned up–from web developers to tech journalists to bloggers–meet up in Potluck CoffeeBar & Library, Bandung. Among them are Christian Legnitto, Mozilla Firefox release manager; Luke Wagner, JavaScript engineer; and Gen Kanai, director of Asia Business Development.

L to R: Gen-Kanai, Christian-Legnitto, Luke-Wagner

Gen Kanai explained new features coming with Firefox 4.0 other than major UI redesign, i.e. JägerMonkey, Panorama, improved HTML5 forms, a brand new add-ons manager and many more. One of the attendees, a graphic designer named Kuswanto, said that he loved Firefox 4.0 because of its new feature, ‘Pin Tabs.’

Christian Legnitto talked about Mozilla’s dedicated efforts to release a more stable and faster version of Firefox through a speedy development cycle. We can expect Firefox 5.0 release in June 21, 2011.

“We know that speed is really important for our users. We won’t change much of its UI, because we focus more on its speed,” he said

The event also introduced Kumi (left), the mascot of Mozilla Indonesia Community. Bandung-based design studio, Petshopbox, also shared how they created the fox animated design.

Luke Wagner also marveled attendees when he introduced JägerMonkey, the new JavaScript engine in Firefox 4.0 that would to improve the browser speed, namely the start up and web page loading. Yohan Totting, co-founder of FOWAB, then shared how Firefox 4.0 can be used to develop creative 3D graphically rendered web applications. Using WebGL, users will be able to:

• Play browser-based video games (without any plugin)
• Interact with multimedia without Flash
• Manipulate video through video API
• Draw without any add-on and to index the text inside images on search engines

“The limit is your idea,” Totting remarked.

During the Q&A session, an interesting question coming from the audience: “Is there going to be Firefox in Sundanese (the local language used in West Java)? Gen Kanai replied, “It is up to you. If you want it, you can have it.” Mozilla has proven to be supportive indeed to the Indonesian Mozilla community.