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.

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.

 

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.

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!

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.”

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

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.

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:

• Personas: Personalize the look of your Firefox by selecting new themes called Personas in a single click and without a restart
• Plugin Updater: To keep you safe from potential security vulnerabilities, Firefox will now detect out of date plugins
• Stability improvements: Firefox 3.6 significantly decreased crashes caused by third party software – all without sacrificing our extensibility in any way
• Form Complete: When filling out an online form, Firefox suggests information for fields based on your common answers in similar field
• Performance: Improved JavaScript performance, overall browser responsiveness, and startup time
• Open Video and Audio: With the world’s best implementation of HTML 5 audio and video support, now video can be displayed full screen and supports poster frames

What’s New Under the Hood for Developers

• Support for the latest HTML5 specification, including the File API for local file handling
• Font Support: In addition to OpenType and TrueType fonts, 3.6 now supports the new Web Open Font Format (WOFF)
• CSS gradients: Supports linear and radial CSS gradients which allow for a smoother transition between colors
• Device orientation: Firefox 3.6 exposes the orientation of the laptop or device to Web pages

How to get Mozilla Firefox 3.6:

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.

You can click below to watch the What’s New in Firefox 3.6 video starring Director of Firefox, Mike Beltzner:

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!

]]> http://blog.mozilla.com/blog/2010/01/20/firefox-3-6-coming-soon/feed/ 21