Last week we announced that the Weave Sync add-on for Firefox is now generally available to seamlessly bridge your desktop and mobile Firefox experiences.

Using this free browser add-on from Mozilla Labs, you can use secure mechanisms to access all of your personal data (including your bookmarks, saved passwords, browsing history, and open browser tabs) across all of your supported devices, making your Web experience instantly more personal and useful.  And all of your data is encrypted end-to-end to help ensure your privacy.

This week we’re launching the first set of developer resources including Weave Sync & User APIs, documentation, and Python & Javascript client libraries — to increase the number of places where you can securely access, and have your personal data readily available to you, independent of whether or not Firefox is available.

This first set of APIs focuses on enabling Weave clients to provide user’s access to their stored data from other devices and environments.

Future APIs will provide third-party web sites and applications the ability to request permission and obtain explicit access only to specific user data to augment a users’ Web experience, e.g. providing personalized recommendations based upon a user’s bookmarks or search history.

We’re also releasing a number of early prototypes and sample code that have been developed alongside the Weave APIs, including:

• Web-based Weave client: A complete Weave data viewer implemented in Javascript.
  
• iPhone Weave client: A complete Weave data viewer on the iPhone, including support for a Firefox-like URL bar as a standalone application.

• commandline Weave client: Command-line application and library written in Python.
• WebOS Weave client: A complete Weave data viewer for Palm’s WebOS.

How to Get Involved

• Dive into the Weave Services Developer Resource site
• Post your design and early prototypes to Weave developers discussion group
• Join us in #labs on irc.mozilla.org

We’ve also tried to anticipate your questions, and have posted an FAQ .

– Ragavan Srinivasan and Mike Hanson, on behalf of the Weave team

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.

Bringing Firefox to mobile devices is the next step toward fulfilling Mozilla’s mission of providing one Web that everyone can access, regardless of device or location. Secure, powerful, and customizable, Firefox is the most modern mobile Web browser available and is optimized for a mobile experience. Key design principles are at the heart of the mobile browsing experience including minimal typing, seamless synchronization with desktop Firefox and the ability to take your Firefox with you, to name a few.

Firefox for mobile is packed with your favorite features, including:

• Awesome Bar – Go to your favorite sites in just a couple of keystrokes with intelligent and personalized searching
• Weave Sync – Sync your Firefox tabs, history, bookmarks and passwords between your desktop and mobile device for a seamless browsing experience
• Add-ons – Customize your Firefox by adding small pieces of functionality, like games and news readers, that help make the mobile Web browser your own
• Location-Aware Browsing – Get maps and information relevant to your location
• Tabbed browsing – View open tabs as thumbnails to easily identify and select the Web page you’d like to go to next
• Safe Browsing – Get an Instant Web Site ID and easily access and edit security settings
• Available in more than 30 languages and counting

Firefox is the first mobile Web browser to support add-ons. With add-ons, you can customize your Firefox by adding features that help make your browser your own. Add-ons like AdBlock Plus, URL Fixer, TwitterBar, language translators, and geo guides become especially handy when you’re out and about on your mobile device. You can both discover and install add-ons directly from your Nokia N900. There are currently more than 40 Firefox add-ons available for mobile and the number is growing every day.

We strongly recommend that you install the YouTube Enabler add-on from within the Add-ons Manager.  Tap on the install button, restart Firefox, and you’re all set to watch YouTube videos.

Just as Firefox does for the desktop, Firefox for mobile provides a platform for developers to create rich applications. Developers can use the latest Web technologies like HTML5, CSS and JavaScript to improve, modify and customize the browser. Visit the Develop for mobile page to learn more.

Firefox is currently supported on Nokia’s Maemo5 platform and is available for download on the Nokia N900. Users can download and learn more by visiting Firefox.com/mobile. Visit the FAQ for more information.

This is an exciting entrance into the mobile ecosystem and Firefox for Maemo5 is just the beginning – look out for lots more to come from Firefox for mobile this year.

Get Up and Go! – With Weave Sync, open web sites on your desktop are instantly available on your mobile device.

• Learn more about the Mozilla Labs Weave project
• Read the Release Notes for the 1.0 release for important information.
  
• Get technical support and help
• Report bugs
• Get the source code
• Discuss, debate and add to the design in the Weave discussion group
• Join us in #labs on irc.mozilla.org

Over the years, Mozilla went from hiring only a handful of interns to now having over 30 students during the summer. They come from different academic backgrounds and different countries, with the shared objective of improving the web. At Mozilla, our goal is to expose the students to our open source environment, and therefore demonstrate the importance of a community-driven project.

What Mozilla offers is more than a summer internship: it’s an open invitation to becoming a meaningful contributor to the project. And when we say that your work matters, we actually mean it. Let’s take the recent release of Firefox 3.6 for example. All of our 2009 engineering interns actually committed code that became part of Firefox 3.6! Where else can you say that your work positively impacted more than 350 million users?

But don’t take my words for it, go to our interns website and check out our interns presentations.

We also have both full-time and internship positions available on our careers page. Don’t be shy, check it out and send us your resume! .

Starting next week, we’ll be attending a few career fairs and also hosting some info sessions, and we hope to meet you then! For more information regarding our program, you can always drop by #interns on IRC (irc.mozilla.org).

We’re excited to bring you the third release candidate of Firefox for Maemo.  Since RC2, we fixed several usability bugs that were found, as well as addressed a number of performance issues.  Based on feedback we’ve received so far, we were able to find and fix several crash bugs.  To improve page load times and responsiveness, we tuned a number of preferences and improved several algorithms.  We’ve sped up zooming and made our panning even better.

If you’ve already got RC2 installed on your N900 or N810, you will be receiving a software update shortly.  Otherwise, if you’re viewing this on your device, you can install it from here.

We’ve decided to disable plugin (not to be confused with add-ons, which are supported) support for this release.  The Adobe Flash plugin used on many sites degraded the performance of the browser to the point where it didn’t meet our standards.  If you wish to enable our experimental plugin support, you will be able to manually via about:config, but do so at your own risk.  We are working on an add-on that will allow the user to have control of which sites to enable plugins for, as some sites, like YouTube, do work quite well.

As always, we’re looking for feedback and suggestions.

If you have a minute, please take this short survey about the Mozilla Store. Your feedback will be a huge help!

Mitchell with Lisa Burda, granddaughter of Aenne, at award ceremony. DLD conference, Munich 2010.

Mitchell Baker, chairperson of the Mozilla Foundation, was awarded the Aenne Burda Award at the international Digital Life Design Conference in Munich, Germany. Mitchell is the fifth recipient of the award that honors successful, creative female entrepreneurs that are visionaries of the digital world. She received the award for alternative and transparent developments in software.

To quote from the press release issued by DLD-Conference: “Mitchell is a pioneer in the internet industry. The Mozilla Foundation calls for transparency and self-determination in the digital world and develops open-source software that allows everyone to contribute. With the popular browser Firefox Mozilla was able to take a significant amount of market share from the market leader.”

Mitchell Baker comments on receiving the award: “I am honored for the recognition, both personally and on behalf of the many thousands of Mozilla community members who contribute to Mozilla every day to bring innovation and self-determination to Internet life.  I am proud to receive this award and proud that hundreds of millions of people today trust Mozilla to make their digital world better.”

The award commemorates visionary entrepreneur Aenne Burda. The German business woman was a role-model for many of the post-war generation. Starting with a small publishing house, Aenne Burda created the world’s largest fashion publishing house.

Previous recipients of the award are Marissa Mayer of Google, Caterina Fake, Flickr-founder, Martha Stewart, TV-host and entrepreneur, as well as investor and internet pioneer Esther Dyson who presented the award to Mitchell together with Lisa Burda, granddaughter of Aenne.

Please join us in congratulating Mitchell for this award!

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)
• Make it your new profile picture on Facebook, Ning or Orkut.
• Add it to our fan photos on Firefox’s Facebook page.

Have fun and stay-tuned for a showcase of all the great Personas pictures like we did for Five Years of Firefox.