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Archive for May, 2009

Dailymotion Supports Open Video

Posted by Melissa Shapiro

May 27th, 2009 · Around the Web, Firefox, Mozilla News

Exciting news! Today, Dailymotion, one of the world’s largest video entertainment websites, announced support for the new open video and web standards available in the current beta release of Firefox 3.5. Dailymotion issued a press release about the news. Mozilla’s own Director of Evangelism, Chris Blizzard, has a great post about the news as well, excerpted below.

Dailymotion has been an excellent test case for us because they haven’t just encoded with the formats that we support but also built a full-fledged player using HTML, CSS and JavaScript that looks, feels and acts like the flash-based players we see on the web today. They also make it possible to embed open video using an clever tag that loads the video content safely in an HTML page.

Standing on the twin pillars of the HTML5 video API and royalty-free codecs, the movement to bring open video to the web is well underway. Dailymotion, along with Wikipedia and the Internet Archive, have all committed to start serving up open video. The free encoders are getting better and better over time and we’re starting to see more interest in the technologies.

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Mozilla Labs Introduces Jetpack, Call for Participation

Posted by Nicole Loux

May 20th, 2009 · Mozilla Community, Mozilla News

Today Mozilla Labs announced Jetpack, a new project to explore new ways to extend & personalize the Web. The Jetpack development team’s Aza Raskin, Atul Varma and Nick Nguyen explain the project further in their post on the Mozilla Labs blog, excerpted below:

With Jetpack, we’re building upon our experience over the last four years empowering a community of more than 8,000 developers to produce more than 12,000 add-ons to imagine and build the next generation of the add-ons platform. We want to grow our community of developers by orders of magnitude through making add-on creation much more accessible, and yet more powerful by developing it as an extensible platform for innovation itself. Many useful Jetpack Feature’s can be written in under a dozen lines of code.

Specifically, Jetpack will be an exploration in using Web technologies to enhance the browser (e.g. HTML, CSS and Javascript), with the goal of allowing anyone who can build a Web site to participate in making the Web a better place to work, communicate and play.

Most importantly, from a user perspective, Jetpack will allow new features to be added to the browser without a restart or compatibility issues, resulting in little to no disruption to the online experience.

As with all Mozilla Labs initiatives, Jetpack is an open source project and everyone is welcome to participate in its design, development & experimentation.

Mozilla Labs Jetpack

The team also highlights how you can participate in the project:

This is a 0.1 release, so it unpolished, unfinished, and still highly prototyped. We are planning on entirely revamping things for the next iterations within the coming days and weeks. We need your feedback, both on the particulars as well as the direction. In particular, we are actively seeking feedback on the API design.

For more information or to learn how to get involved, visit the Mozilla Labs site.

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Mitchell Baker Honored as a Winner of The Anita Borg Institute’s 2009 Women of Vision Award

Posted by Nicole Loux

May 13th, 2009 · About Mozilla, Around the Web

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, was 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, which also links to a video detailing Mitchell’s accomplishments:

Mitchell Baker is recognized for her work as the leader of the Mozilla Foundation, a non-profit organization dedicated to openness and innovation on the Internet. Her work with the Mozilla Foundation and the Firefox Web Browser has evolved the technology around web browsing with more than 200 million users worldwide. Her leadership in the Open Source movement has impacted millions of people, through her way of integrating and unifying the work of company employees and an international community of volunteers.

The Silicon Valley/San Jose Business Journal also highlighted the recipients in an article on Monday. Please join us in congratulating Mitchell on this achievement!

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Mozilla Labs Launches Prism 1.0 beta

Posted by Melissa Shapiro

May 8th, 2009 · Mozilla Community, Mozilla News

Editor’s note: Mozilla Labs released Prism 1.0 beta today. Check out Matthew Gertner’s blog post on the Mozilla Labs blog, excerpted below.

Today we are pleased to announce the release of the beta version of Prism 1.0. It’s the culmination of more than a year of real-world use by companies like Yahoo! Zimbra, DesignLinks International and many others.

Tens of thousands of end users have installed Prism-enabled sites. Based on their feedback, as well as the experience of website creators, we’ve added new features to bring the user experience of web apps even closer to that of their desktop counterparts. We are particularly excited by these features because they’ve been informed by the many real-world applications currently using Prism:

* New API functionality for allowing Prism-enabled web sites more desktop like power.
* Ability to set fonts, proxy settings and other application-specific settings.
* The ability to clear private data on demand.
* Applications are automatically updated when new Prism versions are available.
* Tray icon support, as well as submenus for dock and system tray menus.
* Full OS X 10.4 support, and further OS X specific enhancement.
* Support for SSL exceptions.

You can find out more about Prism 1.0 beta and download the standalone version and Firefox extension from our new Prism website at prism.mozilla.com.

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