I’ve said it before, I’ll say it again – Seneca Rocks! For those of you that don’t know, Seneca College in Toronto (Seneca @ York specifically) has a program where students work with Mozilla technology during the semester. They learn to build big projects like Firefox and Thunderbird, learn about the underlying frameworks, customize the source code and make their own extensions. They also get to participate in the project itself – working on documentation, interacting with other project members and even helping other developers get into Mozilla. Its a great thing to see in action.

Anyway, the students have to pick a project and get that project to a “0.3 release” level. Its a big part of their grade. Yeah, the profs are hardcore. One of the projects is “Plugin Watcher” – keep an eye on plugins that might be hogging resources or blocking the browser. Its a cool concept, but honestly, I didn’t have high hopes. The plugin code in Mozilla is less than welcoming to newcomers. Then, finding some way to monitor the plugins is a whole other layer of pain.

But they did it! Go checkout the write up on the 0.3 release. Fima (gluon) and Brandon (r3ap3r), you guys rock! Great job. I had a great time answering your questions. I’m glad you didn’t give up.

Now you need to get your backend code into the Mozilla trunk. Go file a bug and submit a patch!

Check out the enitre set of 0.3 releases from the class on the Seneca blog planet. Amazing stuff. Congratulations to everyone.