The Mozilla Blog

Yesterday, Mozilla Japan shared the Discover Shiretoko campaign with the world!

Discover Shiretoko was born as a collaborative project between Japan’s Shiretoko Foundation and Mozilla Japan. Shiretoko is a national park in Northern Japan - it is also the codename for the latest version of Firefox. The campaign is designed to help more people learn about Shiretoko national park and the newest version of Firefox.

You can read a full post about Discover Shiretoko on Foxkeh’s blog.

Earlier this month we launched a new project called Fastest Firefox to help spread the word about Firefox 3.5’s dramatically upgraded performance. As with most things at Mozilla, public participation is a key goal, and we’re hoping to get a bunch of community-created videos of Firefox fans showing off their speediest skills.

To contribute, just record a short video of you or your friends doing something really fast - anything from folding clothes to playing ping pong - then visit www.fastestfirefox.com to upload. We’ll edit our favorites into a single clip, and if we use yours you’ll get a supercool Firefox 3.5 t-shirt (plus the satisfaction of helping the open web and spreading Firefox, of course). The only catch is that the submission deadline is June 28, so time is running out.

We’ve also been collaborating with some truly incredible Guinness World Record holders. Earlier we shared videos from the world’s fastest clapper and the world’s fastest sport stacker, and our latest in that series comes from Todd Taylor, the world’s fastest banjo player. Watch Todd in action and prepare to be blown away.

If you still need more inspiration, check out this one-handed Rubik’s cube video from community member Daniel DJ Cruz Chan, then send us a video of your own!

Firefox 3.5 is the fastest Firefox ever – check out this video of Director of Firefox, Mike Beltzner running through the new features. Please note, you can view the video without plug-ins using Firefox 3.5 and get a first-hand look at native audio/video support in the browser. You can download the Firefox 3.5 Release Candidate here.

In other Mozilla video news, later today we’ll be releasing the latest in our series of Fastest Firefox videos. Check out the already-posted World’s Fastest clapper and World’s Fastest sport stacker videos.

Our Fastest Firefox project is in full swing, and we’ve already received some very speedy videos from members of the global Mozilla community (not to mention the world’s fastest clapper and the world’s fastest sport stacker).

But, in our quest to show how fast the new Firefox 3.5 will be, we want even more videos. So, if you or your friends have a talent for doing something quickly - anything from riding a bike to eating a pizza to writing code - send us a short clip. We have a snazzy new Firefox 3.5 t-shirt waiting for you if your video makes it into the final Fastest Firefox compilation.

The only catch is that the videos are due June 28, so don’t delay! And if you need some inspiration, check out this Fastest Firefox submission from community member Daniel CJ Cruz Chan…his talent for one-handed Rubik’s Cube mastery is most impressive.

Our ongoing efforts to encourage participation in all facets of the Mozilla project led us to the vibrant community of artists at Infectious.  We wanted to bring artists and art lovers together through a Community Art Project to inspire creative contributors to join us in making the Internet better for everyone.

Today we unveil some amazing designs by 5 Infectious artists that we asked to help kick off the project.  We challenged them to create art inspired by Firefox and the values that drive the Mozilla project. The result? Zeptonn, David Lanham, Reuben Rude, Etsu Meusy and Paulo Arraiano responded by contributing original art pieces that reflect the innovation, openness, opportunity and idealism that Mozilla represents.  The diversity of these artists is what makes this initial collection so unique and each piece showcases the artist’s distinct style

We’re excited to share their designs with our community and have made them available in a variety of ways:

1. Laptop skins, iPhone skins, car decals, desktop wallpaper, and iPhone wallpaper through Infectious.com

2. T-shirts at our Mozilla Community Store

3. Personas for your Firefox browser

As we get closer to the launch of Firefox 3.5 (currently in Beta), this art provides a fresh interpretation of what Mozilla is all about.  It also serves as an example of what’s possible when you bring creative minds together to share their talents and passion for art and technology.  Another nice bonus: Infectious and the contributing artists are collectively donating 20% of Firefox product sales at Infectious.com to the Mozilla Foundation.  It’s great to see that kind of generosity from our partners and the artists we work with.

And this just the beginning.  Our collaboration with Infectious continues in July with an open design contest that will give everyone a chance to show off their skills and contribute to the Community Art Project for a chance to be featured on Infectious.com and win some cool prizes.

All of this fits nicely into our plans to launch the Mozilla Creative Collective later this summer, and we hope everyone that participates in this round with Infectious will join us is building a strong community of creative contributors for the Mozilla project.  More information to come soon, so stay tuned!

As I wrote last week, the upcoming Firefox 3.5 release will be significantly faster than any previous version of Firefox. To spread the word about this achievement, we’re asking members of worldwide Mozilla community to share videos of their own speedy feats.

If you’d like to join the fun, here’s all you have to do:

1. Record a short video of you at your fastest. You can be playing piano, running laps or writing a blog post…just make it fast!

2. Visit www.fastestfirefox.com and follow the easy instructions on how to upload your video to us.

3. We’ll be editing the best submissions into a single compilation, so check back about a week after the 3.5 release. If we use your clip, you’ll get a Firefox 3.5 t-shirt (not to mention great karma and a story you can tell your grandchildren).

Need inspiration? Don’t miss the video from the incredible Steven Purugganan, who at the age of 11 already holds multiple world records for sport stacking. If you’re not familiar with sport stacking just watch the clip and all will be revealed (but you may need to watch it a few times because it truly goes by in a blur).

Can you keep up with Steven? Be sure to visit www.fastestfirefox.com and show us your speed!

The Mozilla Labs team has announced that in only ten short weeks since the Personas launch, the Personas community has welcomed more than 5 million downloads! The downloads have been worldwide, with approximately 60% of them coming from outside of the United States. The community has welcomed more than 13,000 designs from nearly 9,000 artists.

Check out the post on the Mozilla Labs blog for more details, and to find out what’s next for Personas! And, as always, we appreciate your ideas and feedback. If you have thoughts on how to make Personas better, please discuss and debate them with the community in our discussion group or add a solution to our newly created support wiki.

Firefox 3.5 will be here soon, and it’s shaping up to be by far the fastest Firefox yet: more than twice as fast as Firefox 3 and 10 times as fast as Firefox 2.

That’s a fact worth celebrating, and to spread the word we’ve reached out to some of our fellow Guinness World Record holders, each of whom knows a few things about speed. Our first record holder is Kent “Toast” French, whose ability to clap his hands 721 times in a minute (averaging 12x/second!) officially earns him the title of the world’s fastest clapper. Along with his son Joshua, Kent put on a truly astounding display of in honor of Firefox 3.5:

We know that Kent isn’t the only person in the global Mozilla community with a talent for speed, so if you want to help tell the world about Firefox 3.5 here’s what to do:

1. Make a short (30 seconds, max) video of you doing your speediest skill. It doesn’t matter if it’s making a sandwich, changing a tire or mowing your lawn…it just has to be fast.

2. Visit www.fastestfirefox.com and follow the easy instructions on how to upload your video to us.

3. We’ll be editing the best submissions into a compilation video that really shows off what our community is capable of, so check back about a week after the 3.5 release. If we use your clip, you’ll get a Firefox 3.5 t-shirt plus, of course, worldwide fame and the satisfaction of helping the open web.

We’re prepared to be dazzled, so send in those videos!

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(More details on this project at www.intothefuzz.com)

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.

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.

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.