The Mozilla Blog

Innovative yet easy-to-use browser addition by Mozilla Labs makes changing the look of Firefox a snap

Builds global community of independent designers, and gathers designs from Interscope Geffen A&M including the All American Rejects, Lady Gaga and No Doubt, BCBGMAXAZRIA, the Common Ground Foundation, Cynthia Rowley, Greenpeace, and LIVESTRONG

Mountain View, Calif. – March 31, 2009 – Mozilla, a public-benefit organization dedicated to promoting choice and innovation on the Internet, today announced the immediate availability of new designs for the Mozilla Firefox web browser by leading fashion, cause, sports and music brands. Personas are free, easy-to-install “skins” for Firefox that make changing the look of the browser as easy as changing a shirt.

Mozilla is expanding the Personas gallery with new cause, sports, fashion and music categories, seeded with new designs from leading brands and gifted designers.

“We wanted to give people an opportunity to reflect their interests, passions, and personality when dressing their browser,” said Chris Beard, chief innovation officer for Mozilla. “Personas also turn Firefox into a canvas for both independent and established designers to showcase their art for a worldwide audience.”

First introduced in late 2007, the Mozilla Labs Personas project has attracted hundreds of designs from a growing community of artists and designers. Anyone can create and submit a design online in a few simple steps, and designs can then be shared with friends and the broader community. The goal of the project from its inception has been to enable people to easily make their browsing experience more fun and personal.

Today, Mozilla is releasing personas from the following brands, organizations and artists at GetPersonas.com:

• Interscope Geffen A&M artists:
  • All American Rejects
  • Lady Gaga
  • No Doubt
• BCBGMAXAZRIA, a fashion powerhouse that has evolved into one of the hottest names in the fashion industry today.
• The Common Ground Foundation, a non-profit organization dedicated to the empowerment and development of urban youth, created by Grammy award winning hiphop artist, actor and children’s author Lonnie Rashid Lynn, known as “Common”.
• Cynthia Rowley, the namesake company of the award-winning designer, whose collection of clothing, accessories, books and more is sold in her own stores and others all over the world.
• Greenpeace, the leading independent campaigning organization that “bears witness” to environmental destruction in a peaceful manner.
• LIVESTRONG, an organization that is empowering cancer survivors and advocates in the global fight against cancer and raising awareness about the LIVESTRONG Global Cancer Campaign.

Aaron Foreman, head of digital solutions for Interscope Geffen A&M says, “It’s great for fans to be able to keep their favorite bands in their Firefox browser, no matter what web site they visit. No Doubt, Lady Gaga and All American Rejects fans are very dedicated and loyal. They’ll love it.”

“Giving people the ability to show their passion for Greenpeace through Firefox is an innovative approach to blending technology and people’s desire to protect the planet,” says Daniel Kessler, press officer at Greenpeace. “We’re proud to partner with Mozilla in this effort.”

All of these Personas and many more are immediately available for free download at: www.getpersonas.com

Press Contact:
press at mozilla dot com

You are an individual with unique styles and tastes. That’s why today Mozilla Labs is expanding its effort to help you give your Internet browser the look you want. Personas are free, easy-to-install “skins” for Firefox that make changing the look of the browser as easy as changing your shirt. With Personas, you can individualize your browser with hundreds of artist-created designs from brand new cause, sports, fashion and music categories, seeded with new styles from leading brands and gifted designers. You can also turn Firefox into a canvas and create your own design to share with a worldwide audience of millions.

Getting Started with Personas from Mozilla Labs on Vimeo

Background

The Personas project began in late 2007 as an experiment within Mozilla Labs to explore new ways to quickly and easily personalize the online experience. With the support and creativity of the Mozilla community, the project continues to evolve and is focused on three key concepts:

1. It Shouldn’t be Hard to Make Your Browser a Little More Fun and Personal

You can download the Personas add-on in under a minute with just a few clicks of your mouse. Select a design from the online gallery that reflects your mood or interests, and when you are ready for a change, rotate it out for another style. Your choice will appear instantly with no disruption to your web browsing.

2. You Should be able to Personalize Your Entire Web Experience with Lots of Great Designs

You can personalize your homepage, blog or instant messenger, but you leave your design behind when you visit another webpage or minimize your chat. The only way to personalize your entire online experience is through your browser. With Personas, your design stays with you at each and every point of your time online. And to give you lots of great content to choose from, we have opened the Personas gallery to independent designers from around the world, and also teamed up with popular brands, including Greenpeace, Cynthia Rowley, All American Rejects, and LIVESTRONG. Here are just some of the designs for you to choose from:

FASHION

BCBG

Anna Sui

Cynthia Rowley

SPORTS

White Sox

CAUSES

Common Ground Foundation

Leukemia & Lymphoma Society

LIVESTRONG

Greenpeace

MUSIC

All American Rejects

Lady Gaga

No Doubt

3. The Artist in You Should Be Able to Treat the Browser as Your Canvas

The Personas project aims to support and promote artists and their work. We do this by making it easy for you to style the browser with your own designs and share your work with millions of people around the world. Until now, designers had to write code to customize a browser. With Personas, you can use a simple interface to upload formatted images. If you don’t have experience with formatting images, we make it easy for you to learn how (and, we’re working on tools to make it even easier!) Once you’re done creating your design, you can upload it to the design gallery for people to discover and enjoy during their next online stroll through the gallery.

What’s Next?

Mozilla is dedicated to promoting choice and innovation on the Internet. Personas extends on that mission by giving Firefox fans, both new and established, the ability to make the browser reflect their personality, interests and passions. This is the first of many steps to expand the catalog of available designs by reaching out to both established designers and the imagination of our community. After you give Personas a shot, let us know what you think. As always, we’ll be listening carefully to your feedback on how to make your browser more personal.

Get Started

Install the Personas add-on for Firefox, watch a demo, or find out more by visiting getpersonas.com. Even if you’re not a current Firefox user, you can download Personas in less than a minute and begin asking yourself: “What will my browser wear today?”

Editor’s note: Mozilla released a security and stability update for Firefox 3.x users on Friday, March 27, 2009 at 3:45 pm PT. Check out the Mozilla Developer News announcement, reposted below, for more details.

As part of the Mozilla Corporation’s ongoing security process, Firefox 3.0.8 is now available for Windows, Mac, and Linux users as a free download from getfirefox.com.

We strongly recommend that all Firefox users upgrade to this latest release. If you already have Firefox 3, you will receive an automated update notification within 24 to 48 hours. This update can also be applied manually by selecting “Check for Updates…” from the Help menu.

For a list of changes and more information, please see the Firefox 3.0.8 release notes.

Please note: If you’re still using Firefox 2.0.0.x, this version is no longer supported and contains known security vulnerabilities. Please upgrade to Firefox 3 by downloading Firefox 3.0.8 from getfirefox.com.

Today Mozilla and the Khronos Group announced that Mozilla will be leading an initiative to bring accelerated 3D to the Web. Mozilla will work with the Khronos Group to extend the exploration process of what an initial take of 3D on the Web should look like to a wider audience.

Mozilla’s Graphics Team Lead, Vladimir Vukicevic, writes more about the initiative on his blog. “Finally, people are doing more and more on the Web, and are coming to expect more from the applications that they use.  Web applications already have access to features that have traditionally been reserved for desktop apps, including being able to work while offline, storing data locally, multiple choices for 2D graphics, and native audio and video support.  Adding 3D to this mix ensures that current Web apps can experiment with new user experiences, while also enabling new classes of web applications.”

“This is a pretty big deal for us and for the Web, and is really a reflection of the continued acceleration of open web technology well beyond just the classic HTML and JavaScript that we’ve seen in the past,” says Chris Blizzard, Mozilla’s director of evangelism, in his blog post. “It’s our intention to include this as base functionality in the release after Firefox 3.5, assuming all goes well on the standards front.”

Editor’s note: Mozilla released Fennec 1.0 beta 1 on Tuesday, March 17, 2009 at 5:37 pm PT. We’ve excerpted from Stuart Parmenter’s blog about the milestone below. You can read the full blog post here or find out more by reading the release notes.

Fennec 1.0 Beta 1 includes lots of great improvements, especially around performance. Starting with this beta, I’m able to use Fennec as the primary browser on my N810. We’ve done heavy optimizations to our frontend code and made a number of optimizations to the platform, resulting in greatly increasing zooming speed and making panning pretty smooth. We’ve also been able to improve startup performance by reducing a good bit of unnecessary work. We’ve enabled TraceMonkey bringing to mobile the huge JavaScript speed improvements the JIT has brought to Firefox 3.1 betas. A number of performance hotspots have been identified that we’ll continue to focus on until we ship final – in fact, we have fixed number of issues already for the next beta.

On the feature front, we’ve enabled plugins so you can now watch videos on your favorite sites, and we’ve got in our first pass at improved bookmark management and support for bookmark folders. A lot of time was spent on infrastructure that we could use to build the rest of our app with. You’re now able to scroll things like preferences and the new bookmarks list. One of our main focuses for the next milestone will be on polishing the user interface — areas like the extension manager will get a face lift and we’ll start working more on some of the usability issues people have reported.

For all of you heading to Austin this week, here’s a rundown of the events where you can catch Mozilla. Hear the inventor of JavaScript, the creator of jQuery, Mozilla’s Standards Evangelist, and members of the Mozilla Labs team share their thoughts on the future of the Web.  Stop by any of our exciting panel sessions or our Mozilla Labs event – we look forward to seeing you there!

Activities:

1. John Resig, Mozilla’s JavaScript Evangelist, is moderating a panel, “More Secrets of JavaScript Libraries”:
Saturday, March 14

11:30 am – 12:30 pm

Room Hilton B

2. Brendan Eich, Mozilla’s CTO and the founder of JavaScript, will be speaking on a panel with representatives from Opera and Microsoft, called “Browser Wars III: The Platform Wins” moderated by Mozilla’s Arun Ranganathan:

Monday, March 16

11:30 am – 12:30 pm

Room Hilton C

3. The Mozilla Labs 2009 Design Challenge: SxSW Edition event:

Monday, March 16

Time: 4:30 – 6:30 p.m.

Moonshine Patio Bar & Grill

303 Red River St., Austin, TX

Editor’s note: Mozilla released Firefox 3.1 beta 3 on Thursday, March 12, 2009 at 12:11 pm PT. Check out the Mozilla Developer News announcement reposted below for more details.

Please note: Firefox 3.1 Beta 3 is a public preview release intended for developer testing and community feedback. It includes many new features as well as improvements to performance, web compatibility, and speed. We recommend that you read the release notes and known issues before installing this beta.

Firefox 3.1 Beta 3 is now available for download. This milestone is focused on testing the core functionality provided by many new features and changes to the platform scheduled for Firefox 3.1. Ongoing planning for Firefox 3.1 can be followed at the Firefox 3.1 Planning Center, as well as in mozilla.dev.planning and on irc.mozilla.org in #shiretoko.

New features and changes in this milestone that require feedback include:

* Improved the new Private Browsing Mode, including the ability to “Forget This Site” from the History sidebar.

* Improved performance and stability with the new TraceMonkey JavaScript engine.

* Improvements to web worker thread support.

* New native JSON support.

* Improvements to the Gecko layout engine, including speculative parsing for faster content rendering.

* Support for new web technologies such as the <video> and <audio> elements, the W3C Geolocation API, JavaScript query selectors, CSS 2.1 and 3 properties, SVG transforms and offline applications.

Testers can download Firefox 3.1 Beta 3 builds for Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux in 64 different languages. Developers should also read the Firefox 3.1 for Developers article on the Mozilla Developer Center.

Note: Please do not link directly to the download site. Instead we strongly encourage you to link to this Firefox 3.1 Beta 3 milestone announcement so that everyone will know what this milestone is, what they should expect, and who should be downloading to participate in testing at this stage of development.

Mozilla Labs is calling on its community to share ideas to make it easier to upload files. They’re looking for ideas and mockups to address file uploading issues including the inability to drag-and-drop and upload multiple files, and the need for Flash or server-side hacking to provide any kind of progress indication.

Send in your ideas and join Mozilla at this year’s SxSW for a live discussion of those that catch our attention. See the Mozilla Labs post, excerpted below, for more details:

Here are two ways for you to make a difference:

1. Post an idea anywhere and Tweet its URL to mozconcept any time before the party (see below). The idea can be a mock-up, a prototype, some words, a napkin sketch, a video, anything.

2. Join the Mozilla Labs team at SxSW as we discuss ideas and mock-ups to replace or augment Firefox’s current built-in file uploader. Come take part in the conversation and enjoy some refreshments (read: beer & grub). Join the inventor of Javascript, the lead architect of Ubiquity, the creator of jQuery, and others to discuss how you can prototype your ideas. Expect the usual Firefox swag, some prizes, and merriment.

Details:

Moonshine Patio Bar & Grill

303 Red River St

Austin, TX 78701

Time: 4:30 – 6:30 p.m.

March 16, 2009

See you at SxSW!

Editor’s note: Lucas Adamski, director of security engineering for Mozilla, has posted a response to Secunia’s recently released 2008 security report (PDF link). We’ve reposted the full post from the Mozilla Security Blog here.

Beware the Security Metric

Security metrics are very difficult to do well, and easy to do poorly. For example, take a look at the recent Secunia “2008 Report” (http://secunia.com/gfx/Secunia2008Report.pdf). It tries to break down vulnerabilities reported by browser, and specifically states:

31 vulnerabilities were reported for Internet Explorer (IE 5.x, 6.x, and 7), including those
publicly disclosed prior to vendor patch as well as those included in Microsoft Security
Bulletins.

Safari and Opera each had 32 and 30 vulnerabilities, whereas 115 vulnerabilities were registered for Firefox in 2008.

From a quick read it appears as though Firefox had almost 4 times as many security issues as IE or Safari! Like, OMG! However, that conclusion would be painfully incorrect. Mozilla discloses and releases bulletins for all security issues fixed in Firefox, regardless of how they were discovered. Unlike other vendors that only disclose issues reported by external independent parties, but not by internal developers, QA or security contractors.

So presenting those numbers as comparable is worse than useless, it is in fact very misleading. It’s like comparing traffic accident rates for two cities of equal size, but one only reports accidents that make the news while the other reports all traffic accidents. Directly comparing such numbers is meaningless.

Some vendors make the point that the number of internally found issues is small and not meaningful. That would unfortunately imply their internal testing and security processes are incapable of finding security issues, and rely entirely on the generosity of random strangers (security researchers). I would find that pretty scary.

Fortunately, having worked in-house and consulted to a number of large software vendors, I can assure you that is not true. In fact they generally have very capable security teams and QA processes, which are so good at finding security issues that they usually find far more internally than they ever disclose to the public.

The Secunia report is deeply disappointing on a number of levels. Frankly, it’s disappointing that security researchers aren’t taking the “research” part of their jobs as seriously as they once did. It’s also disappointing that Secunia would publish something like this as one really expect better from them. This sort of reporting only encourages companies to hide as many security issues and fixes as possible, which moves the state of security backwards. And this is perhaps the most disappointing thing of all.

Lucas Adamski
Director of Security Engineering

Comment on this post at the Mozilla Security Blog

Editor’s note: Mozilla released a security and stability update for Firefox 3.x users on Wednesday, March 4, 2009 at 4:04 pm PT. Check out the Mozilla Developer News announcement, reposted below, for more details.

As part of the Mozilla Corporation’s ongoing security and stability process, Firefox 3.0.7 is now available for Windows, Mac, and Linux users as a free download from getfirefox.com.

We strongly recommend that all Firefox users upgrade to this latest release. If you already have Firefox 3, you will receive an automated update notification within 24 to 48 hours. This update can also be applied manually by selecting “Check for Updates…” from the Help menu.

For a list of changes and more information, please see the Firefox 3.0.7 release notes.

Please note: If you’re still using Firefox 2.0.0.x, this version is no longer supported and contains known security vulnerabilities. Please upgrade to Firefox 3 by downloading Firefox 3.0.7 from getfirefox.com.