The world’s largest football tournament will kick off this week with plenty of opportunity to celebrate. Ever worn a team jersey, painted team colors on your face in support or waved a flag from your car after a victory? There is another way to express your team spirit, and it doesn’t involve paint or fabric – just your Firefox Web browser!
Firefox is the most customizable browser in the world. With Firefox Cup Personas (easy-to-use backgrounds that let you personalize the look of Firefox) you can customize your browser and show your team spirit.
Being in front of your computer doesn’t mean you have to miss out on all the action, you can participate with the Firefox Cup . By wearing one of these 32 Personas to support your team, you’ll take part in the global Firefox Cup competition. On the Firefox Cup website, you can easily see how many “fans” each team has (i.e., how many people are wearing each team Persona on their Firefox). The team with the most fans will win the Firefox Cup!
We’ll announce round winners on the following dates:
June 16th: Round 1
June 23rd: Round 2
June 30th: Round 3
July 7th: Round 4
July 14th: Overall country winner announced!
You can also stay on top of scores and news within your Firefox browser with the FootieFox add-on. No matter where you are in the world or your time zone, you can catch all the action and support your team with the Firefox Cup!
The winning country will be showcased on Mozilla’s sites and more, so be sure to cast your vote by wearing your favorite country’s Persona today.
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)
Editor’s note: The Labs team at Mozilla released Personas 2.0 early this morning. Check out the Mozilla Labs announcement reposted below.
Personas 2.0 offers a cleaner look, clearer navigation, and easier ways to discover and engage new art. Check out the new site here.
The Mozilla Labs team launched Personas 1.0 in March with the idea that it shouldn’t be hard to make your internet browser more fun and personal. Over the past eight months, with your feedback and support, we iterated on the Personas experience fifteen times (10 times on the website, 5 times on the extension) and are now pleased to introduce Personas 2.0.
Here is a screencast by Ryan Doherty, who led development work on the redesign:
1. Enhanced look: Thanks to the creative vision and guidance of Chris Howse, the site now has a cleaner look and feel, and also customizes an experience based on whether you are currently using the Personas add-on. The site also suggests more you might enjoy based on what you choose to wear.
2. New features: With your feedback and support, we integrated features like search, and favorites. We also added features to the Personas add-on itself to make it easier for you to discover and manage your persona designs directly from the little fox in the lower left corner of your browser chrome. (see 1.4 announcement and video).
3. More designs: Personas 1.0 launched with less than 150 designs. Thanks to a growing community of contributors and artists, the Personas gallery will likely welcome its 40,000th design by the end of this year. The gallery also includes affinity art from Harry Potter, Vans, Bob Marley, Lilly Pulitzer, and Greenpeace.
4. Easier discovery: To let you discover new artists and designs, we sorted the Personas gallery by “up and coming” designs. This allows you to quickly view personas designs that are gaining popularity in the Personas community. You can also easily switch your view to sort by “popular” or “just added”.
5. Localization underway: the localization and web development teams have worked to make the site localizeable. If you want to join the effort, you can do so here. Thanks to our community of volunteers, many localization efforts are underway, with some nearly complete.
Thanks!
Like all Mozilla projects, Personas is a collaboration between people who develop the product and people who use it. The following people (and many more) have been commited to this product’s success:
NinaBella, Digital Blasphemy, MaDonna, and thousands of other artists around the globe that give millions of Firefox browsers a personalized look and feel. They are the heroes of this project.
Shae Rivard, who has supported the resolution of over 250 issues on the Personas discussion forum, as well as over 500 other members, whose feedback, testing, and contributions continuously make the product better.
Chris Howse for developing a creative vision for the Personas 2.0 site, and Ryan Doherty for implementing and for developing the screencast above.
Myk Melez, Toby Elliot, and Zandr Milewski, with the support of Erik van Eykelen, and Jose Bolanos, for collaborating with community feedback to constantly improve on the product. Collaboratively, the development team has fixed over 300 issues since launch.
Carsten Book (a.k.a. Tomcat), Stephen Donner, Tony Chung, Krupa Raj, and Vishal Kamdar, for assuring quality releases, and for doing so within incredibly tight deadlines.
Amy Zehren, Sean Martell, Catherine Brady, and Julie Martin, with the support of Monique Johnson, who have reached out to countless brands around the globe to share the Mozilla story, and offer them the opportunity to participate in a growing movement.
Tara Shahian, Mary Colvig, Melissa Shapiro, John Slater, Sarah Doherty, Jay Patel, and all the other members of the marketing community that helped build awareness around Personas.
Seth Bindernagel, Staś Małolepszy, Pascal Chevrel, and all the Persona 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 worked diligently to ensure that Personas is accessible in as many languages as possible.
What’s Next?
As Personas crosses 10.5 million downloads and prepares to welcome its 40,000th community design, we will continue make the product 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!
- Ryan Doherty and Suneel Gupta on behalf of the Personas development team
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:
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
