News, notes and ramblings from the Mozilla project
Today, Mozilla published this year’s annual State of Mozilla report. You can find full details on the annual report website. Included below is an excerpt from Mitchell Baker’s blog:
I am pleased to share with you this year’s annual State of Mozilla report. It details our opportunities, our community and our expanding set of initiatives…I invite you to learn more about the Mozilla Project and join us in our ongoing efforts to build a better Internet.
Editor’s note: Today, Mozilla published a Do Not Track Field Guide and shared DNT adoption numbers to date. The full post is available on the Mozilla Privacy Blog. Excepted below.
Today we’re publishing our first edition of the The Do Not Track Field Guide. Based on interactions with developers from leading companies that support DNT today, The Do Not Track Field Guide contains case studies, tutorials and sample code. We’ve also included a background section on our view of what the debate over DNT is all about. We hope that the Guide inspires developers around the world to embrace the technology and also leads to subsequent editions with new tutorials and sample code.
Editor’s note: Yesterday, Mozilla announced a new version of Thunderbird. You can read full details here. Below is an excerpt from the blog post.
The latest version of Thunderbird includes more than 390 improvements and performance enhancements that make Thunderbird more responsive, faster to start up and easier to use. Thunderbird delivers several improvements to some favorite features such as RSS feeds, Attachment management, and Tabs which can now be reordered and dragged into a new window.
Editor’s Note: Today, Mozilla released our annual report and 2009 financial statements. You can find full details on the annual report website. Included below is an excerpt from Mitchell Baker’s blog:
Mozilla has just filed its audited financial statements for 2009. This is the perfect time to look at the state of the Mozilla mission, our successes, our opportunities and our challenges. This year we’re trying a different format to better reflect the scope of Mozilla and to make better use of video and visual information. We’re hosting this year’s State of Mozilla at our main website rather than at this blog. Please take a look!
Editor’s Note: Today, the GNOME Foundation announced an additional $10,000 grant from Mozilla to support their important accessibility work. See the GNOME Foundation press release for full details. Included below is an excerpt from the release:
Mozilla is helping to fund improvements in the Orca screen reader. The Mozilla Project has helped to identify performance problems when Orca interacts with Gecko-based applications and other desktop applications. The funds will be used to perform a review of Orca performance bottlenecks and help fix problems that are identified. Orca is an extremely important tool for users of GNOME with reduced vision.
“The web is an integral part of everyday life and it’s important for it to be accessible to everyone.” says David Bolter of Mozilla. “I am thrilled we are again contributing funds to the GNOME Foundation for critical efforts, including Orca, and events like the accessibility hackfest at CSUN.”
Editor’s Note: Today, Mozilla announced the availability of Plugin Check for all browsers. For more details, check out Johnathan Nightingale’s blog post, reposted below.
It’s been a few months since I wrote about the work our plugin check team has been doing, but there are a couple of pretty excellent pieces of news I’d like to share, most notably: the Mozilla plugin check now works for users of other browsers as well.
Plugin Check: A Refresher
Last fall, we started a program to help our users keep their plugins up to date. Outdated plugins are a major source of security and stability risk for web users, and some studies have put the proportion of users with older versions as high as 80%.
In the months since we’ve deployed the page, we’ve seen some great success. These days, over 60% of the users we see on the plugin check page with Adobe’s Macromedia Flash plugin installed are running the most recent version, and the number grows to more than 75% if we include the second most recent. That’s much higher than the web as a whole, and there is still a lot of work to do to get that number up, but we’re confident that the integrated checks for outdated plugins in Firefox 3.6 will improve things even further.
What’s New
We believe that plugin safety is an issue for the web as a whole, so while our initial efforts focused on building a page that would work for Firefox users, the team has since expanded plugin check coverage to work with Safari 4, Chrome 4, and Opera 10.5. We have added support for Internet Explorer 7 and 8 for the most popular plugins, as well, but since IE requires specific code to be written for each plugin it will take us a little longer to get to full coverage. You can see the updated page for yourself here.
This has been a phenomenal amount of work to develop and test, and the matrix of browser, plugin and OS grows very quickly. Our web team is remarkable, but they couldn’t have done it without the continuing support of Mozilla community members like Lloyd Hilaiel who helped write some of the plugin-specific logic.
Plugin Check Badges
Finally, now that we have delivered a more universal plugin check page, I wanted to call your attention to the plugin check site badges our team developed a little while ago. Adding these banners to your site will help your readers stay current regardless of which browser they use, and make the internet a safer place for everyone.
One More Request
Our Plugin Directory will eventually become the main way we keep our data about plugins up-to-date. If you’re a plugin vendor, we need your help! The directory is currently in alpha stages, and we need vendors to let us know as new versions come out, and old versions become dangerous. Please email plugindir @ mozilla . com for information about how you can get involved.
Johnathan Nightingale
Director of Firefox Development
Editor’s note: On Mar 11, Mozilla announced over 100,000,000 downloads of Firefox 3.6 to date. Firefox users on prior versions will be offered an upgrade to Firefox 3.6. For more details, check out Mike Beltzner’s Dev News announcement, reposted below.
In the past 50 days, Firefox 3.6 has been downloaded over 100,000,000 times by people looking to improve their web experience, and install the world’s best web browser. Mozilla believes that the user’s choice of web browser matters, and is extremely proud of how many people have chosen to use Firefox.
Starting today, users running older versions of Firefox will be offered the choice of upgrading to Firefox 3.6. We’re presenting this upgrade offer for our users who may not realize that a new version is available:
As always, users will be able to choose between:
- deferring the decision for 24 hours (“Ask Later”),
- declining the offer (“No Thanks”), or
- accepting the free upgrade (“Get the New Version”).
The offer screen will only appear after 60 seconds of keyboard inactivity to ensure we don’t get in the way of anyone’s activities. If a user declines the offer and later regrets that choice, they’ll be able to get it again simply by selecting “Check for Updates” from the “Help” menu.
Firefox 3.6 has already been chosen over 100,000,000 times by users, and we’re proud to offer it to the remaining Firefox user base. It’s fast, stable, compatible with over 90% of the thousands of Firefox Add-ons, and contains new features such as lightweight themes and plugin version checking.
Editor’s note: Today, the GNOME Foundation announced a $10,000 grant from Mozilla to advance accessibility. See the full press release for full details. Included below is an excerpt from the release:
The GNOME Foundation and Mozilla are committed to open source, open standards, and open formats. Both organizations and their contributors contribute to numerous projects to ensure an open Web and open desktop platform for all users. Part of that effort is working hard to ensure users with physical disabilities are able to make use of a free desktop and Web browser.
“The GNOME Foundation’s commitment to accessibility improves the desktop and Internet experience for millions of people, and Mozilla is proud to support this work,” said Mitchell Baker, Chair of the Mozilla Foundation.
Mozilla, a public-benefit organization dedicated to promoting choice and innovation on the Web, today released Firefox® 3.6, an update to its popular, free and open source Web browser. The latest version of Firefox introduces cutting-edge features, support for a wide variety of Web standards, and access to more than 6,000 free add-ons that allow users to customize their browser to their liking.
Firefox 3.6 is more than 20 percent faster than Firefox 3.5 and includes extensive under the hood work to improve performance for everyday Web tasks such as email, uploading photos, social networking, and more. It also delivers new features like customizable browser themes called Personas, a ground-breaking Plugin updater, improved JavaScript performance, and enhancements to familiar favorites like the Awesome Bar for a better, more personal Web experience.
Firefox 3.6 was built by Mozilla’s global community of passionate contributors, including thousands of experienced developers, security experts, localization and support communities, and hundreds of thousands of active testers. More than 350 million users worldwide enjoy Firefox’s fast, secure browsing experience and unparalleled customization.
What’s new in Firefox 3.6:
Below are some of the coolest features of Firefox 3.6:
What’s New Under the Hood for Developers
Firefox 3.6 is available for Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux in more than 70 languages – more platforms and languages than any other browser! You can download Firefox 3.6 at www.firefox.com.
EDITOR’S NOTE:
For screenshots and logos, visit http://www.mozilla.com/press/images.html.
For a video tour of Firefox 3.6, visit http://www.mozilla.com/en-US/firefox/video/?video=whatnew-3.6.
Further details on Firefox 3.6 features can be found in the Reviewer’s Guide.
For more information about Mozilla Firefox 3.6 and how it provides a better and faster online experience, visit www.firefox.com.
Web developers are encouraged to check out the Firefox 3.6 for developers page and the full release notes.
We’re excited to share that Firefox 3.6 is scheduled to arrive tomorrow morning Pacific time!
You can click below to watch the What’s New in Firefox 3.6 video starring Director of Firefox, Mike Beltzner:
No video playback capabilities detected. See the video on YouTube.
You can also help us build excitement by Tweeting/Facebooking/Sharing this message:
Firefox 3.6, the world’s best web browser, will be available Thursday, Jan 21st. See what’s new at http://bit.ly/8a0Kux #firefox
Stay tuned to the Mozilla Blog for tomorrow’s announcement!
