about:mozilla » Firefox

Impact Mozilla – last call for submissions

deb — Mon, 20 Oct 2008 17:43:03 +0000

The Impact Mozilla community marketing challenge comes to a close on Friday October 24th, so this is your last opportunity to submit a one or two page idea summary. The purpose of this challenge is to help improve Firefox user retention. We know that tens of millions of people have downloaded Firefox but don’t continue to use it today. How do we get these past users back? How to we keep future users active once they’ve downloaded Firefox? If you have an idea about how we could solve this problem, we urge you to write it up and submit it through the Impact Mozilla website on or before this coming Friday.

First Mobile Firefox Alpha released

deb — Mon, 20 Oct 2008 17:21:00 +0000

Mobile Firefox (code-named Fennec) has reached its Milestone 9 release, which is also its first alpha. The team is calling this the “User Experience alpha”, and is targeted at the Nokia N800/N810 internet tablet. While great progress has been made on Windows Mobile, it is not ready for general use and is thus not included in this release. There are, however, new desktop versions of Fennec available, meaning you can now install the mobile browser on your Windows, OS X, or Linux desktop to see what all the fuss is about (and to help with testing and feedback, of course).

The Fennec Alpha 1 release notes include information about how to get started, how to install the browser, what’s new in this release, a list of known issues, and how to provide feedback. If you’ve ever been interested in getting involved with the Firefox Mobile project, now is a great time to install Fennec, watch the walkthrough video, and get started.

Firefox 3.1 beta 1 now available

deb — Mon, 20 Oct 2008 16:18:50 +0000

Firefox 3.1 beta 1 is now available for download. This milestone is focused on testing the core functionality provided by many new features and changes to the platform that are scheduled for Firefox 3.1. Ongoing planning for this release can be followed at the Planning Center, as well as in the mozilla.dev.planning discussion group, and on IRC in the #shiretoko channel.

New features and changes in this release include: web standards improvements, added support for CSS 2.1 and CSS 3, a new tab-switching shortcut that shows previews of the tab you’re switching to, improved control over the Smart Location Bar, support for the new video and audio elements, the addition of the W3C Geolocation API, JavaScript query selectors, web worker threads, SVG transforms, and improved support for offline applications.

More information about these features are available in several places including the Mozilla Developer Center’s Firefox 3.1 for Developers article, and in the Web Tech blog’s Overview of features for Web Developers post.

The vision for SUMO – Part 8: Live Chat

deb — Mon, 06 Oct 2008 13:45:21 +0000

David Tenser has published an extensive series of blog posts where he has been discussing a comprehensive vision for the scope and role of the Support.mozilla.org (SUMO) project. He has recently published the eighth and final post in the series, this one focused on the innovative and incredibly useful “Live Chat” feature. “If a problem isn’t yet covered in the Knowledge Base, or if the instructions in the article are too hard to understand, Live Chat is a powerful way for users to get in touch with Firefox experts and get hands-on assistance in solving their problems. Live Chat can also be a very fun way for contributors to provide support. Contributors helping out with Live Chat don’t just help users, they talk to each other in the backchannel as well, providing assitance to other helpers whenever needed. This means that although you’re usually the only one interacting with the user you’re helping, you’re never alone.”

David’s blog post goes on to discuss some potential future improvements for the service, including a fully integrated chat client, a simple scheduling solution, support for languages other than English, and automatically saving chat logs and associated user happiness ratings, among other things. If you’re interested in the Live Chat feature of the SUMO project and would like to see how the team is thinking about improving it in the future, read the full post over at the Firefox Support Blog.

Impact Mozilla: Community-sourced marketing challenge

deb — Mon, 06 Oct 2008 13:38:11 +0000

Last week Mozilla’s marketing team launched a new community-focused marketing challenge called Impact Mozilla. The idea is to further open Mozilla’s marketing process to the community, and see who can come up with the best ideas. This challenge is specifically focused on gathering and developing ideas that will help increase Firefox’s user retention rate — which is to say increasing the number of people who continue using Firefox after downloading and installing it.

“We’re looking for innovative ways to make sure people who download Firefox become regular users. Interested? Start by sending us a summary of your ideas and an oveview of how you and your team will carry them out. If your initial strategy makes the cut, we’ll ask for a complete plan detailing your solution. If your plan is selected as the winner, you’ll have the opportunity to manage a marketing campaign for one of the top brands in the technology world. We’ll give you the resources to enact your solution, plus $3,000 for the winning proposal.” For all the details, including how to get started and where to submit your plans, see the Impact Mozilla website.

Firefox support – envisioning the future

deb — Fri, 12 Sep 2008 14:33:09 +0000

David Tenser, Mozilla’s SUMO project lead, has been writing a multi-part weblog post outlining a working vision for the future of the Firefox support project. “Since the SUMO team was formally created, we have grown from a fairly buggy web site managed by a tight group of people, to a truly community-powered support channel with over 70 active contributors per week. This is an amazing achievement that really shows the strength of the Mozilla community.” Even so, SUMO’s mission is not complete. David continues, “From my perspective, we’ve just started. I’ve thought a lot about what we should do to take SUMO to the next level, something I playfully called ‘SUMO 2.0′ when discussing this with the team at the Summit.” David has written four posts outlining the vision for SUMO so far, that you can find at his weblog: Part 1: Listen as hard as we can, Part 2: Understanding the bigger picture, Part 3: Increasing community participation, Part 4: Having our finger on the pulse.

If you’re interested in volunteering to help with the SUMO project, you should keep an eye on David’s weblog and read the How to contribute page in the SUMO Knowledge Base. Helping out with user support is a great and easy way to get involved with the Mozilla project.

Mozilla, Firefox and Google Chrome

deb — Fri, 05 Sep 2008 13:21:45 +0000

As most browser-industry watchers know, Google has launched a beta version of a new web browser called “Google Chrome”. John Lilly posted about it at the time, and Mitchell Baker has written about it since, discussing how and why Mozilla and Firefox continue to be unique and vital in an increasingly healthy browser market where competition and innovation are again the norm.

Mitchell writes, “Mozilla exists to build portions of the Internet where individual human benefit, social benefit, and civic benefit are the most important things. [We] recognized long ago that an independent browser dedicated only to the public good is a necessary piece for building a healthy internet. Firefox is our first step in building that Internet. Clearly we need to continue to build great products, and to lead in a competitive market. Mozilla created this competitive environment through the success of Firefox, and I’m as confident as John is about Mozilla’s future.”

“We’ll continue to compete in the browser world, and we’ll continue to do well. We’ll continue to produce a product that people choose and trust and understand is theirs. We’ll continue to do this as part of our overall mission — building an Internet where individual, civic and social value are paramount.”

Firefox 2 gets a major update

deb — Tue, 26 Aug 2008 01:03:53 +0000

Starting on Monday evening, users with the latest version of Firefox 2 will receive an automated offer to update to Firefox 3. If you’re running Firefox 2.0.0.17 you will see the offer in the next couple of days, but if you’re eager you can always “Check for Updates” in the “Help” menu. The Firefox team has posted extensive details about this update over on the Mozilla Developer News weblog if you would like more information.

Defining Firefox logo style

deb — Thu, 21 Aug 2008 14:05:20 +0000

John Slater and Tara Shahain have been working on developing a new and improved style guide for the Firefox logo. The goal is to refine the existing guidelines and to get those communicated out to the widest possible audience. As part of this project, John and Tara gave a talk at the recent Firefox Plus Summit, and have started working with the Royal Order on creating the guide. They also very much want to keep the process as open as possible, so John will be blogging about various topics for discussion over the next few weeks. Additionally, they have assembled an informal advisory panel for the project, drawing upon the expertise and experience of several veteran members of the Mozilla contributor community. For more information, including a list of the people who are on the advisory panel, see John’s blog post.

Theora video backend for Firefox landed

deb — Mon, 04 Aug 2008 16:00:52 +0000

It was announced at the Mozilla Summit that Firefox will include native Theora and Vorbis support for the HTML 5 media elements. Chris Double writes, “The backend has been committed to the main Mozilla source code and is enabled by default. You can download nightly builds and test it out. An example of a live site that uses is the Wikimedia video archive. This original commit is a work in progress. There are unimplemented bits, bugs, etc that need to be sorted out. But it’s a start towards using a common codec across all platforms and will improve as we get towards the 3.1 release.”