The Mozilla Blog

It’s an amazing thought that the hundreds of millions of users of Mozilla software have (in almost all cases) found out about it by word-of-mouth, through their friends and acquaintances. The Mozilla community doesn’t merely develop, test and localize software and documentation, but it also markets this software to the world.

But marketing is perhaps the most diffuse and decentralized activity we undertake. As the Mozilla collective continues to grow, more and more volunteers are stepping forward as marketing contributors. That’s why we pulled together a guide to the resources available, to make it easier for people to join in marketing activities, and to start their own. The guide will evolve over time -indeed, we will be adding to it constantly, and look forward to plenty of feedback.

At the moment it has details of how people can get involved by:

• Organizing and Attending Events
• Public Speaking
• Blogging, Tagging and Social Networking
• Advertising Mozilla
• Making T-Shirts and Other Items
• Guerrilla Marketing Activities
• Collecting Testimonials
• Distributing Software
• Understanding Our Users
• Promoting the Mozilla Mission
• Collecting Press Clippings
• Speaking to the Press
• Requesting Sponsorship for a Project
• Reporting Disreputable Behavior

The guide is located on Mozilla’s community portal.

Today Mitchell Baker was announced as a winner of The Anita Borg Institute for Women and Technology (ABI) Women of Vision Awards in the Leadership category. Please see the post on Above the Fold for more details, crossposted below:

The Anita Borg Institute for Women and Technology (ABI) announced that Mitchell Baker is a winner of this year’s Women of Vision Awards in the Leadership category. Mitchell, along with Yuqing Gao, IBM Research, and Jan Cuny, National Science Foundation, will be honored for her accomplishments and contributions as a woman in technology at ABI’s fourth annual Women of Vision Awards Banquet at the Fairmont Hotel in San Jose on April 30th, 2009.

The news was announced in a press release issued by The Anita Borg Institute for Women and Technology, excerpted below:

The Women of Vision (WOV) Awards honor women making significant contributions to technology in three categories: Innovation, Leadership, and Social Impact. The three winners were selected from a field of highly qualified women all of whom are engaged in technology professions in industry, academia, NGO’s or government. Candidates for the awards are considered based on their records of (1) consistent, significant contributions to technology invention and application; (2) effecting positive changes in the ways in which technology impacts society; and (3) demonstrated leadership in the technology industry that extends beyond their place of work.

Please join us in congratulating Mitchell in this achievement!

Our friends at Social Actions are kicking off a unique contest today: Change the Web Challenge. They’re calling for new Web apps that can help people make a difference while browsing the Web – allowing them to find and share actions on websites, blogs and social networks. Participants not only have a shot at glory, but $10,000 in prizes.

To give you a better sense, here are some Web apps that Social Actions already powers:

• ‘Related Ways to Take Action’ WordPress Plugin: A plugin you can add to any WordPress.org blog that identifies the keywords of each blog posts and then displays related ways to take action.
• Twitter Action Pack: A directory of 30+ Twitter accounts that automatically post actions on the issues you care about.
• Firefox Ubiquity Command: A Firefox mashup that lets you highlight any phrase as your browse the web and find related ways to take action.

Pique your interest? Social Actions has pulled together some great resources to help with submitting and creating add-ons and Web apps for the contest:

• Change the Web Challenge Slideshow
• Social Actions’ Developers Google Group
• Developer Resources page
• An idea hub
• Joe Solomon’s presentation on Firefox Extensions for Social Change
• An online chat: How Can Mozilla Empower Movements and Nonprofits with Zak Greant and Suneel Gupta

Submissions are due April 3, 2009 and winners will be announced at NTEN’s Nonprofit Technology Conference on April 28th!  We’re looking forward to seeing what comes in!

Editor’s note: Mozilla’s Developer Tools Lab released Bespin on Thursday, February 12, 2009 at 6:30 pm PT. Check out Dion Almaer and Ben Galbraith’s blog post on the Mozilla Labs blog, excerpted below.

Bespin proposes an open extensible Web-based framework for code editing that aims to increase developer productivity, enable compelling user experiences, and promote the use of open standards.

Based upon discussions with hundreds of developers, and our own experience developing for the Open Web, we’ve come up with a proposed set of features along with some high-level goals:

• Ease of Use — the editor experience should not be intimidating and should facilitate quickly getting straight into the code
• Real-time Collaboration — sharing live coding sessions with colleagues should be easy and collaboratively coding with one or more partners should Just Work
• Integrated Command-Line — tools like vi and Emacs have demonstrated the power of integrating command-lines into editors; Bespin needs one, too
• Extensible and Self-Hosted — the interface and capabilities of Bespin should be highly extensible and easily accessible to users through Ubiquity-like commands or via the plug-in API
• Wicked Fast — the editor is just a toy unless it stays smooth and responsive editing files of very large sizes
• Accessible from Anywhere — the code editor should work from anywhere, and from any device, using any modern standards-compliant browser

For more information and to learn how to join the team and get involved visit the Bespin group, view the Bespin code documentation, or see the FAQ.

In response to questions that have been asked about Mozilla’s involvement with the recent European Commission (EC) conclusion regarding Microsoft’s tying of Internet Explorer to the Windows operating system, we’ve prepared this brief set of questions and answers.

What is Mozilla’s involvement in the EC’s complaint against Microsoft?
We are following it closely and are obviously interested in the outcome. Mozilla has received “interested third party” status in the EC’s investigation. As a result, we may see the Statement of Objections confidentially. We may participate in a hearing if the EC concurs. Mozilla’s role as an interested third party best enables us to contribute our knowledge of the browser industry to the EC. Mozilla is not a complainant; we have not “joined the suit”, despite some reports to the contrary.

Why is Mozilla getting involved?
The EC has taken a position that Microsoft’s actions harm competition among web browsers. The EC is currently developing a response based on this conclusion. A good remedy could be helpful; a bad remedy could create more damage. Mozilla has relevant and unique expertise in the web browser industry, both as to the nature of the damage and the complexities of possible remedies. We believe it’s worth offering that expertise to the EC. Ultimately, this case has huge potential impact on our mission of supporting an open and participatory web.

What does Mozilla want to have happen?
We want any remedy imposed to support an open and participatory web. By the same token, we seek to avoid any remedy that causes unintended damage.

There have been a number of opinions shared by individuals affiliated with Mozilla. What is Mozilla’s official stance on the EC complaint?
As with any dedicated and enthusiastic community, ours is one of diverse opinions. Our official stance: (1) we want to offer our knowledge to the EC as it considers its next steps; and (2) we intend to continue public discussions of this topic.

What remedies does Mozilla propose?
Mozilla has not proposed any remedies at this point. We have started a discussion to help figure out what the options are and how helpful they might be.

When will you have an opinion on remedies?
We’re synthesizing feedback from our community, our own previous experiences and from the EC. We don’t have a preset timetable.

What will the EC’s decision mean for Microsoft in other parts of the world?
Mozilla has no way of knowing this – we’ll learn what this means along with everyone else.

For additional information, please refer to the following blog posts by Mitchell Baker, Mozilla Foundation chair:

• The European Commission and Microsoft
• EC and Microsoft: Discussion Themes
• EC: Foray into Remedies
• EC Theme: Building Firefox is the only appropriate activity for Mozilla

Arun Ranganathan and Seth Bindernagel are just arriving in India to meet with our community and attend several events.  As you may or may not know – Arun is part of our Evangelism team and focuses on standards and open Web tools, while Seth focuses on localization.  Both have a ton of knowledge about the Mozilla project.  It’s going to be a  great visit thanks to our passionate and active community in India!

Where in India will Seth & Arun be you ask?

• Feb. 10th, New Delhi:  Seth and Arun will be joining MozCampDelhi organized by Mohak Prince, one of our great campus reps. There will also be a Mozilla Labs session on the news Concept Series.
• Feb. 12th – 13th, Kanpur:  The duo will be participating in the inaugural FOSSKriti at Techkriti.  Arun will be leading a workshop on Web development & Open Source technologies on the night of the 12th and then a HTML5 talk on Feb. 13th.
• Feb. 14th – 15th, Pune:  Arun and Seth find themselves at GNUnify where they will be leading a mini Mozilla Camp covering localization, Web tools and more.  On Sunday morning from 10 a.m. – 1 p.m. they will be joining PuneTech.com for an open meet up.

We’ll post more details as they continue to evolve.  Hope you can make it out to meet them — we’re always looking for new campus reps and India-based members of our community marketing team!

Editor’s note: Mozilla released a security and stability update for Firefox 3.x users on Tuesday, February 3, 2009 at 7:40 pm PT. Check out the Mozilla Developer News announcement , reposted below, for more details.

Firefox 3.0.6 security and stability release now available

Editor’s note: The Bugzilla Project released Bugzilla 3.2.1, 3.0.7, 2.22.7, and 3.3.2 on Monday, February 2, 2009. Check out the full release notes for more details.

The Bugzilla Project released Bugzilla 3.2.1, which fixes the longest-standing security bugs in Bugzilla, in addition to a few other security issues. These long-standing security issues were public for many years, but it required a lot of re-architecture of Bugzilla before we could fix them.

The Project also released 3.3.2, which has a lot of cool new features, including the ability to hide email addresses from logged-out users.

Additionally Bugzilla 3.0.6 and Bugzilla 2.22.7 were released as security fixes for people still using those older branches.

See Max Kanat-Alexander’s blog, one of the main developers in the Bugzilla Project, for more information on these releases.