The Mozilla Blog

[Mozilla announced Firefox 3 Beta 2 today, Dec 18 at approximately 7:40pm PST. See Mike Beltzner's comprehensive post from DevNews, crossposted below. Reminder that the Firefox 3 Beta 2 milestone release is intended for testing purposes only and is not for casual users.]

Firefox 3 Beta 2 now available for download

Please note: We do not recommend that anyone other than developers and testers download the Firefox 3 Beta 2 milestone release. It is intended for testing purposes only.

Firefox 3 Beta 2 is now available for download. This is the tenth developer milestone focused on testing the core functionality provided by many new features and changes to the platform scheduled for Firefox 3. Ongoing planning for Firefox 3 can be followed at the Firefox 3 Planning Center, as well as in mozilla.dev.planning and on irc.mozilla.org in #granparadiso.

New features and changes in this milestone that require feedback include:

• Improved security features such as: protection from cross-site JSON data leaks, tighter restrictions on site-specific content using effective TLD service, better presentation of website identity and security, malware protection, stricter SSL error pages, anti-virus integration in the download manager, version checking for insecure plugins.
• Improved ease of use through: better password management, easier add-on installation, new download manager with resumable downloading, full page zoom, animated tab strip, and better integration with Windows Vista, Mac OS X and Linux.
• Richer personalization through: one-click bookmarking, smart bookmark folders, location bar that matches against your history and bookmarks for URLs and page titles, ability to register web applications as protocol handlers, and better customization of download actions for file types.
• Improved platform features such as: new graphics and font rendering architecture, JavaScript 1.8, major changes to the HTML rendering engine to provide better CSS, float-, and table layout support, native web page form controls, colour profile management, and offline application support.
• Performance improvements such as: better data reliability for user profiles, architectural improvements to speed up page rendering, over 330 memory leak fixes, a new XPCOM cycle collector to reduce entire classes of leaks, and reductions in the memory footprint.

(You can find out more about all of these features in the “What’s New” section of the release notes.)

Testers can download Firefox 3 Beta 2 builds for Windows, Mac OS X and Linux in over 25 different languages. Please be sure to read the full release notes before using this preview release. Developers should look at the Firefox 3 for Developers article on the Mozilla Developer Center.

Note: Please do not link directly to the download site. Instead we strongly encourage you to link to this Firefox 3 Beta 2 milestone announcement so that everyone will know what this milestone is, what they should expect, and who should be downloading to participate in testing at this stage of development.

After an overwhelming response and some tough decision-making, the winner of Operation Firefox has been announced! Winner Agent R.W. from Georgia Tech University and team plastered the giant Firefox logo on their school’s football stadium for thousands to bask in.

The Firefox logo soared to new heights on runner up Agent Teren’s plane.

The Firefox sticker also graced the set of the New York City Opera, as well as a concert bus at an Iowa State tailgate. You can check out all the amazing pictures here or check out the Operation Firefox blog for the full scoop. We want to thank all our special agents for their creativity and participation! Over and out!

It sometimes seems that when someone at Mozilla sneezes, there’s someone somewhere writing about it. From Twitter to the New York Times and everything in between, Mozilla attracts an amazing volume of coverage.

This volume is both good and bad. We don’t have the marketing and pr budgets of the software mega-companies so the press buzz we get organically is wonderful. The downside is that because of the sheer volume of coverage, it’s difficult to follow it all and make sure that Mozilla is being represented fairly.

What Mozilla lacks in marketing and pr budget, however, it more than makes up in the enthusiastic and capable community of participants who have already brought Firefox to 130 million users and made Mozilla a household name.

For the Record (FTR) is a community-driven public relations and press response program that will harness the energy and knowledge of the Mozilla community to 1) catalog all of the online coverage of the Mozilla Project, 2) develop a sustainable team of spokespeople who feel empowered to respond to online coverage, and 3) build a collection of talking points and responses to frequently asked questions.

To start participating today, simply add fortherecord@mozilla.org to your email address-book and forward blog posts or articles about Mozilla projects or products that are a) factually inaccurate or misleading, b) relevant to Mozilla, its products, or the Open Web, but fail to mention Mozilla, or c) thoughtful stories that are factually accurate and favorable, or at least fair about Firefox. Please include a short note explaining why you’ve forwarded the story.

The For the Record team, Mozilla’s marketing team, PR representatives, or various spokespeople will take it from there.

Want to join the For the Record team, and help us further develop the program and write a set of FAQs and other materials that will make it easier for the Mozilla community to better tell the Mozilla story and respond effectively when needed? Well, that’s easy too. Simply subscribe to the mailing list. Please note, unless you’re really interested in analyzing the flow of Mozilla news and helping to distill relevant content into documentation, this probably isn’t the list for you. If, on the other hand, that sounds like great fun, we’d love to have you involved.

[Mozilla announced Firefox 3 Beta 1 today. Mike Beltzner has a comprehensive post on DevNews, crossposted below. Reminder that the Firefox 3 Beta 1 milestone release is intended for testing purposes only and is not for casual users. – Melissa Shapiro]
Firefox 3 Beta 1 now available for download
Please note: We do not recommend that anyone other than developers and testers download the Firefox 3 Beta 1 milestone release. It is intended for testing purposes only.

Firefox 3 Beta 1 is now available for download. This is the ninth developer milestone focused on testing the core functionality provided by many new features and changes to the platform scheduled for Firefox 3. Ongoing planning for Firefox 3 can be followed at the Firefox 3 Planning Center, as well as in mozilla.dev.planning and on irc.mozilla.org in #granparadiso.

New features and changes in this milestone that require feedback include:

• Improved security features such as: better presentation of website identity and security, malware protection, stricter SSL error pages, anti-virus integration in the download manager, and version checking for insecure plugins.
• Improved ease of use through: better password management, easier add-on installation, new download manager with resumable downloading, full page zoom, animated tab strip, and better integration with Windows Vista and Mac OS X.
• Richer personalization through: one-click bookmarking, smart search bookmark folders, direct typing in location bar searches your history and bookmarks for URLs and page titles, ability to register web applications as protocol handlers, and better customization of download actions for file types.
• Improved platform features such as: new graphics and font rendering architecture, native web page form controls, colour profile management, and offline application support.
• Performance improvements such as: better data reliability for user profiles, architectural improvements to speed up page rendering, over 300 memory leak fixes, and a new XPCOM cycle collector to reduce entire classes of leaks.

(You can find out more about all of these features in the “What’s New” section of the release notes.)

Testers can download Firefox 3 Beta 1 builds for Windows, Mac OSX and Linux in over 20 different languages. Please be sure to read the full release notes before using this preview release. Developers should look at the Firefox 3 for Developers article on the Mozilla Developer Center.

Note: Please do not link directly to the download site. Instead we strongly encourage you to link to this Firefox 3 Beta 1 milestone announcement so that everyone will know what this milestone is, what they should expect, and who should be downloading to participate in testing at this stage of development.

Will you be the brain behind the next great web innovation? Get ready to show the world what you’re made of… Extend Firefox 2 is here!

Extend Firefox 2 is a developer contest with prizes awarded for creating new Firefox Add-ons. All entries will be judged by a panel of experts, with three Grand Prizes and 12 Runner-up Prizes awarded for entries that demonstrate excellence in user experience, innovativeness, and use of open standards. Need inspiration or want to share ideas? Check out our Idea Wiki!

Our panel of judges includes:

* Garrett Camp - Founder & Chief Product Officer of StumbleUpon
* Brendan Eich – CTO of Mozilla and creator of JavaScript
* Tariq Krim - Founder and CEO of Netvibes
* Jesse James Garrett – President of Adaptive Path
* Joshua Schachter - Founder of del.icio.us, Director of Engineering, Yahoo!

So what are you waiting for? Start creating! This contest runs through December 31, 2007. Get more info and stay on top of contest news at the Extend Firefox 2 site.

[This is a repost of Asa’s original blog post at SpreadFirefox.com - Mary Colvig]

Tomorrow’s Air Mozilla Live will be focused on the recent announcements around Mozilla’s increasing investment in email and messaging. We’ll have both Mitchell Baker, Chairman of the Board, and David Ascher, the leader of Mozilla’s new messaging company taking your questions, live just after 2PM Pacific. So join us this Wednesday at air.mozilla.com and on IRC or IM to be a part of the fun.

Who: The Mozilla community, host Asa Dotzler, and special guests Mitchell Baker and David Ascher.
When: Wednesday, September 19, from 14:00:00 - 15:00:00 PDT (UTC -7.)
Where: View the webcast at air.mozilla.com and participate on IRC, IM, or email.
* IRC: join the discussion on irc.mozilla.org #airmozilla
* IM: instant message your questions to the AIM/YIM/GTalk screenname airmozilla.
* email: send in your questions before and during the show to airmozilla -at- mozilla -dot- com.

[Mozilla announced a new initiative focused on Internet mail and communications yesterday. Read the press release here, and see Mitchell Baker's post below, crossposted from her blog. - Paul Kim]

Mozilla has been investing in email since the Foundation was created. We have a good, solid client in Thunderbird, and we have aspirations to do more. We’ve spent the last few months working on how to meet those aspirations. Many thanks to everyone who participated in the discussions.

The result is that Mozilla is launching a new effort to improve email and internet communications. We will increase our investment and focus on our current email client — Thunderbird — and on innovations in the email and communications areas. We are doing so by creating a new organization with this as its sole focus and committing resources to this organization. The new organization doesn’t have a name yet, so I’ll call it MailCo here. MailCo will be part of the Mozilla Foundation and will serve the public benefit mission of the Mozilla Foundation. (Technically, it will be a wholly owned subsidiary of the Mozilla Foundation, just like the Mozilla Corporation.)

David Ascher is joining Mozilla to lead MailCo. David has been an active participant in the Mozilla project for many years, both in his role as CTO of ActiveState and personally through participation in our governance discussions. In fact it was one if David’s comments on an early draft of the Mozilla Manifesto that helped crystallize its structure. David also has deep experience in the open source world and is a member of the board of directors of the Python Foundation. David also brings familiarity with Mozilla technology and the Mozilla community through years of using Mozilla technology to build ActiveState products, including the new Open Komodo project. We are very fortunate to have David join us to lead this effort.

Mozilla will provide an initial $3 million dollars in seed funding to launch MailCo. This is expected to be spent mostly on building a small team of people who are passionate about email and Internet communications. As MailCo develops it and the Mozilla Foundation will evaluate what’s the best model for long-term sustainability. Mozilla may well invest additional funds; we also hope that there are other paths for sustainability.

We’ll be setting up MailCo in the coming weeks. Part of this is forming the team of people, part is developing a transition plan to move Thunderbird into MailCo gracefully while supporting the Thunderbird users. That will take some time. We ‘re on the path now though and that’s a great thing.

The goals for the new company are:

• Take care of Thunderbird users
• Move Thunderbird forward to provide better, deeper email solutions
• Create a better user experience for a range of Internet communications — how does / should email work with IM, RSS, VoIP, SMS, site-specific email, etc?
• Spark the types of community involvement and innovation that we’ve seen around web “browsing” and Firefox.

One of the things I find most exciting about the Firefox work is the way people use Firefox to dream up what the web could be, and then go out and so something to make it happen. We can spark the same kind of excitement and energy level and innovation in the email/ communications space. And when we do, Internet life will get much, much better and much more interesting.

Help us make it happen.

- Mitchell Baker, Chair, Mozilla Foundation

[Reposted from the SFX Team's blog at Spread Firefox - Paul Kim]

On November 9th, 2004, you all started a movement. Spread Firefox, supported by tens of thousands of contributors, took just 99 days to deliver 25 million downloads of Firefox to a world of people desperate for a better Web — a Web that didn’t overwhelm them with pop-ups, a Web that didn’t infect their systems with viruses and spyware, a Web that was fun again, simply put, a Web that worked.

In less than six months, you all doubled that number to 50 million downloads, turned open source into a household word and reasserted the supremacy of choice and simplicity.

It took the Spread Firefox global community of activists only one year to reach the 100 million downloads mark and to let the world know that innovation was alive again on the Web.

And just one year ago you all helped to double that number again, to 200 million downloads. More than 50,000 of you, with Spread Firefox buttons and banners, no only helped Firefox achieve an amazing download milestone, but you all helped to make Firefox one of the world’s most recognized and respected brands.

Today, you all have done it once again. With your amazing efforts, Firefox has reached 400 million downloads and demonstrated that not even the world’s most powerful companies can keep people from a better, safer, and faster Web experience. You all, the grass roots and the heart of the Firefox movement, have helped hundreds of millions of people find that better, safer, and faster Web.

Thank you for building this movement. Thank you for helping Firefox to deliver on the great promises of the Web. On behalf of the hundreds of millions of Firefox users, thank you for all that you have done in just three short years.

Digg it!

Hey everyone,

My name is Sarah, and I am a marketing intern at Mozilla and also a returning senior at Stanford University. One of the projects I worked on at Mozilla this summer was the Firefox Campus Edition, which is a special edition of Firefox designed specifically for students like me. The Campus Edition bundles the latest version of Firefox with three great add-ons: FoxyTunes, Zotero, and StumbleUpon. What student has time to look through all the awesome add-ons that Firefox offers? No worries; Mozilla has made it easy for us. Here’s a little bit of info about each add-on:

FoxyTunes lets you control almost any media player and find lyrics, covers, videos, bios and much more right from your favorite browser.

StumbleUpon lets you channel surf the Internet to find great websites, videos, photos and more based on your interests.

Zotero helps you collect, manage, and cite your research sources. It lives right where you do your work – in Firefox itself.

These tools will allow you to maximize your time doing research and have fun while surfing the Web. Just download and enjoy: http://www.firefox.com/backtoschool.

Hi all. I’m excited to announce that the revamped Mozilla Store is now live!

Here are a few quick high points of what’s new:
- new site design, featuring Mozilla employees as models.
- 12 new items (plus many old favorites) including t-shirts, stickers and more.
- interactive features including a Store Blog, Community Spotlight and the ability for people to comment on each item.
(view more details about the new Store)

We’re also offering a 10% grand re-opening discount…just use coupon code MOZILLASTYLE at checkout (expires 11/30/07 - view more offer details). Plus, all orders of $10 or more will get a free sheet of Firefox, Thunderbird and Mozilla stickers as a bonus.

Today’s update is only for the North American Store, but we’ll be updating the International Store in the near future. Plus, we’ll be adding more products in future updates, so visit the Store Blog and let us know if you have any suggestions for more Mozilla merchandise.

Happy shopping!