To celebrate the world’s largest football tournament, we launched the Firefox Cup — a friendly, global competition based on the number of users for each team Persona. We’ve seen thousands of fans from around the world showing their team spirit by wearing Personas on their Firefox. The winner for each round was chosen based on the team Persona with the most fans (average daily users) for the week.

Today, we announce the overall winner of the competition: Germany! Congratulations to Brazil and Spain, who were second and third place, respectively.

Here’s a recap of the four rounds:

• June 16th: Brazil won round 1 with Argentina in close competition.
• June 23rd: Brazil kept their lead.
• June 30th: Brazil hung on to its lead in round 3 with 17,380 supporters, just a few more hundred than Germany.
• July 7th: Germany jumped to first place!

Thanks to all the loyal fans and community members for supporting their teams in the Firefox Cup! We’re already looking forward to the next football tournament and challenge Paul the Octopus to follow the Firefox Cup!

Editor’s note:  Cross-posted from Chelsea Novak’s Blog.

After a great Mozilla Creative Collective design challenge and vote, we have the Mozilla 2010 T-shirt! Designed by Mozilla community member foxyboy, this shirt cannot be bought in stores and is only available to Mozilla donors.

So how do you get it? Contribute $75 or more to the Open Web Fund. Every dollar you donate will support a Mozilla Drumbeat project.

You can help us support these amazing Drumbeat projects and wear your love for the open web on your sleeve. Or on your chest. It is a T-shirt, after all.

PS. This program has been live for a little while now, but because of some upstream technology issues we haven’t been able to process donations very well. If you’ve tried to donate before and were having a less than awesome experience, please try again.

Editor’s note: Cross-posted from Julie Deroche’s Blog.

Over the years, Mozilla went from hiring only a handful of interns to now having over 30 students during the summer. They come from different academic backgrounds and different countries, with the shared objective of improving the web. At Mozilla, our goal is to expose the students to our open source environment, and therefore demonstrate the importance of a community-driven project.

What Mozilla offers is more than a summer internship: it’s an open invitation to becoming a meaningful contributor to the project. And when we say that your work matters, we actually mean it. Let’s take the recent release of Firefox 3.6 for example. All of our 2009 engineering interns actually committed code that became part of Firefox 3.6! Where else can you say that your work positively impacted more than 350 million users?

But don’t take my words for it, go to our interns website and check out our interns presentations.

We also have both full-time and internship positions available on our careers page. Don’t be shy, check it out and send us your resume! .

Starting next week, we’ll be attending a few career fairs and also hosting some info sessions, and we hope to meet you then! For more information regarding our program, you can always drop by #interns on IRC (irc.mozilla.org).

Are you a Personas fan or want to change the look of your Firefox?  Firefox 3.6 makes it possible for you to change the appearance of your browser by selecting new themes called Personas in a single click and without a restart!   There are over 30,000 designs to choose from thanks to our wonderful community of designers.  Help celebrate the launch of Firefox 3.6 and the hard work of our Personas designers by telling the world about your favorite Persona — in pictures.

Gorjan Jovanovski flaunts his style

Just showcase a Persona that reflects your individuality by taking a photo with it. Here’s how:

• Select your favorite Persona on Firefox and create a screen capture of your browser window.  Cut it out and take a photo with it.  Here’s a great template to help you.
• Take a photo upclose with you next to your computer and your Persona-clad browser.
• If you’re super creative, have fun with digital imaging software and put your picture in your browser like this one.
• Or you can copy and enlarge design elements from your favorite Persona into an image editor to create a placard, a mask and more!

Feel free to get creative. You can also gather friends for a group photo. Whatever you do, share it with the world. Here are a few ways:

• Upload to Flickr or your favorite photo sharing site and tag with “personas”.  If you use Flickr, make sure to add it to our group.
• Post on Twitter, Identi.ca or Mozillaca using Twitpic or bit.ly to shorten your Flickr URL along with a link to our new Personas video (http://bit.ly/4EMJ7)
• Make it your new profile picture on Facebook, Ning or Orkut.
• Add it to our fan photos on Firefox’s Facebook page.

Have fun and stay-tuned for a showcase of all the great Personas pictures like we did for Five Years of Firefox.

Thanks to everyone for taking and creating such amazing images to celebrate Firefox’s 5th birthday.  In particular, we’d like to announce the winner of the Mozilla Creative Collective Five Years of Firefox challenge — Rogelio Calamaya, Jr., also known as Lucero.  As you can imagine it was a tough decision with so many great choices (see John Slater’s slide show).  Rogelio’s illustration, Happy B-day Firefox, really captured everyone’s hearts and imagination.  As inspiration for his design, Rogelio imagined a busy Firefox who’s always running around, stepping away from his 5th birthday party for a second to rest and enjoy some cake.  Congrats Rogelio!

In addition to the Creative Collective challenge, we also put out a call for community members to “Light the world with Firefox.”  The response was overwhelming – check out the results.  We wanted to call out some of our favorites and thank everyone for their creativity and time!

1.) Congrats to Carlo Frinolli and the nois3lab team for lighting the city of Rome with Firefox.  Carlo has also just put out a video chronicling their trip around Rome.

2.) Vineel Reddy and Paramveer Singh used light graffiti to create some great pictures!

3.) Irvin Chen projected Firefox onto the skyline over Love River in Kaohsiung, Taiwan for a great effect.

4.) Mitsuhiro Takano got a great shot of hundreds of Firefox flashlights eliminating the ceiling at the Tokyo Developer Day this past fall.

5.) Marcia Knous experimented with light painting using candlelight and a flashlight as light sources.

6.)  Tristan Nitot (and others) caught the incredible light installation at the Paris party in action.

7.) Bob Moss, our resident photographer, took some amazing photos of the San Francisco party, including our effort to light up San Francisco!

I also wanted to mention some other great photos that didn’t incorporate light but really captured the spirit of our community and the 5 year celebration.

• A Firefox drawing.
• A handmade Firefox cake + banner in India.
• Billboards that dotted Macedonia during November.
• Another awesome Firefox cake to add to our collection.
• SathishKumar Kandasamy and friends overtook (peacefully!) an Internet Cafe in India.
• Hands holding out Firefox buttons.

Thanks again for all the wonderful creative work and adding to our repository of wonderful Firefox imagery.  Here’s to another five awesome years and beyond!

At Mozilla we foster a healthy ecosystem of communities that promote the ability to freely access, modify and distribute software and creative works. These ecosystems create a digital commons; a shared space, shared resources or network of ideas, applications and products that are free to use.

Much like a park is a vital ecosystem for collaboration, recreation, conservation and commerce, the values of park ring very true within the open source software moment. Take a look back at Firefox release history and you’ll see that previous versions of have been named after parks like Gran Paradiso (Italy), Bon Echo (Canada) and Shiretoko (Japan). Mozilla community members in Japan were so honoured to have Firefox 3.5 code-named after their UNSECO world heritage site park, Shiretoko, that they created Discover Shiretoko to celebrate the park as an important part of their national heritage and to celebrate Firefox and its role in creating a better Internet.

There is a story here to be told about the history of Mozilla and of Firefox and at the same time, we have an opportunity to use the shared values we have with these parks to do some good.

The newest pre-release code name for Firefox is Namoroka, named for a park in the northwest section of Madagascar. Famous for its Karst topography (or Tsingy as it is described in Malagasy), Namoroka is full of caves, canyons and natural swimming pools. Namoroka is also home to eight species of adorable lemur.

Since we’re very fond of things tailed and furry at Mozilla, we’ve decided to celebrate the release of Firefox 3.6 by raising money to protect lemurs in Namoroka park and throughout Madagascar.  As a nation Madagascar is struggling to improve the quality of life for its rapidly growing human population and at the same time is struggling to find a way to preserve the forests and wildlife that remains.

To help, Mozilla is teaming up with the Madagascar Fauna Group (MFG) to help Madagascar through this challenging time. The MFG has been working on conservation in Madagascar for more than 20 years, addressing the environmental and social issues that are leading to deforestation and the trapping of lemurs.

The money we raise for this project will be used to help the MFG improve its website and online fundraising activities, connecting them with like-minded contributors and donors around the world. This donation will also support conservation and education programs on the island. By enhancing their presence within the web ecosystem, we can help them protect the natural ecosystem of Madagascar.

How can you help?

• Donate! We’re hoping to raise $10,000 to give to the Madagascar Fauna Group to help them improve their website and online fundraising, as well as support programs for protecting lemur habitats and stopping illegal lemur trapping.

• Spread the word! Get your own Support Namoroka button and put it on your blog or website, tweet it and sing it from the rooftops and street corners while you’re at it.

We’ll be raising funds until the end of January 2010. More updates to come!  Many thanks to Ned Schwartz, Chelsea Novak, Brain Warren, Jamey Boje and David Boswell for making this happen.

Editor’s note: Mozilla released Personas 1.4 today.  New features allow  you to discover new art, rotate through your favorites and undo.  Check out the Personas Blog post below for more information.

Personas 1.4 Released

Personas gets a set of new features that lets you discover new art, rotate through your favorites, and undo.
With feedback from the Personas community, Labs recently released Personas 1.4. Here is a video describing some of the features:

Introducing Personas 1.4 from Mozilla Labs on Vimeo.

What you can Expect from 1.4

1. More From the Designer: Say you’re browsing through the Personas gallery and pick a design you like. The next day, you want to know whether the designer has created any other cool designs. Before, you would need to go to getpersonas.com and either search for the designer name or find the design you liked and click on the designer by-line. Now, you can simply click on your extension (the little fox on the bottom left corner of your screen), mouse to the top of the menu, and then mouse right to the submenu.

2. Favorites: In the last version of Personas, we enabled you to easily favorite any Persona design in the gallery and have it instantly accessible in the “my favorites” section of your menu (see more about the 1.3 release).

3. More From the Category: Say you’re in the mood for a Holiday persona design. Within the extension menu, you mouse through the Holiday category but can’t find anything you like. Before, you needed to navigate to the Holiday gallery by navigating to getpersonas.com and finding the Holiday gallery. Now you can get there in one step by clicking “More From Holiday” in the extension.

4. Undo: Personas gives you the ability to preview a design before you select it. But still, maybe you chose a design and instantly regret the decision. Before, to undo you would need to go to “recently selected” designs in your extension menu and click on the last design you were wearing. Now, an undo notification bar drops down every time you select a design that you haven’t used recently, or haven’t marked as a favorite.

Get Personas 1.4

If you are already using Personas 1.3, Firefox will automatically update it to Personas 1.4 the next time it checks for add-ons updates. If you aren’t using Personas yet, or you want to get the new version immediately, install it at getpersonas.com.

Thanks!

Many thanks to Erik van Eykelen, Jose Bolanos, Ryan Doherty, Carsten Book (a.k.a. Tomcat), Toby Elliott, Zandr Milewski, and all the Personas localizers on Babelzilla (AtteL, dogi, drry, Ersen Yoldac, fernph, Funkin2x, funTomas, Joergen, jojaba, jooliaan, kkemenczy, kustodian, Lisman, lois, loveleeyoungae, moZes, pia, SiiiE, spjutster, steekid, stoyan, Wareczek, and wtspout), who did great work to make this feature possible, along with all the folks in the discussion forum who suggested the feature, tested early versions of it, and reported problems!

What’s Next?

We’re looking to make this feature even better and easier to use. To continue to evolve Personas quickly, and in the right direction, we need your feedback and participation. Join the conversation in the discussion forum and add helpful hints to the support wiki. And stay tuned to this blog for updates!

- Suneel Gupta and Myk Melez on behalf of the Personas development team

We’re coming up on a pretty incredible milestone — Five Years of Firefox — on November 9, 2009!  In order to celebrate we’re kicking off a special campaign called “Light the World with Firefox.”  We’re putting a call out for the most creative use of the Firefox logo and light.

Here are a few ideas, but don’t feel limited!

• Spotlight: Borrow a projector and shine the Firefox logo on the wall during a Firefox party, or make a logo stencil and place it in front of a flashlight for a cool effect (think shadow puppets). Or, go crazy and get a searchlight to create your very own Firefox “bat signal“.
• Mash-Up: Think of the most interesting way you can combine Firefox and light. For example, create the logo out of candles on a birthday cake, program your very own lite-brite or light show, or create a fun wallpaper! If you’re really have a lot of time on your hands (and skills) you could even create a light show.  The more creative, the better.
• Mobile: Get the Firefox logo on your phone and take a picture holding it in front of a local landmark. Or, organize a bunch of friends for a big group photo with the logo on everyone’s phones.

Please upload all videos and pictures on Flickr with the tag “Firefox5″.  We’ll feature submissions on a special site launching on November 9th and the most creative actions will be rewarded with some cool Firefox swag.  Remember to have fun, but be safe and use common sense.  And, get permission before projecting our logo on public buildings!

If you’re looking for other ways to help celebrate the coming anniversary, here’s how:

• Host a party
• Join our Facebook group
• Sport a twibbon

We’re all looking forward to celebrating five years of hard work on the 9th!

Thank you to each and everyone of you who participated in and helped promote Mozilla Service Week!    The Mozilla community didn’t disappoint – thousands of you got out, and made a difference in our communities and the Web. Kudos to all!

Now it’s time to see how we did.  Please take a moment to report your hours and share your stories by Sept. 25th (we’ll start displaying completed hours on our site tomorrow). We’re throwing in a little memento for those that do this!

Wondering what’s next?  Today is OneWebDay, a global celebration of the Web — which is a wonderful way to wrap up Mozilla Service Week!  Here’s how to celebrate:

• Print and share an ‘I love the web poster’. Or change your twitter of Facebook pic! Create a global wave that shows the Web is a precious public resource.
• Conduct an Internet Health Check. Find computers with Internet Explorer 6, and upgrade them to a more secure browser.
• Find a OneWebDay party or celebration near you!
• Donate to OneWebDay. Every time you donate, Mozilla will too.

Thanks for making a difference this week!  We’re hoping the spirit lives on all year long.