Earlier this week the Mozilla Add-ons team released Add-on Collections, which enables anyone to create their own collection of add-ons that can be shared with their friends, posted on blogs, and featured on the Firefox Add-ons website. The news has gotten a lot of positive attention and feedback. Many people are excited to be able to more easily discover and share the wealth of Add-ons, enabled by Collections and a redesign of the Add-ons site.

Lifehacker’s Kevin Purdy discusses some of the benefits of Collections:

By creating a new collection, which you can make private or public, you basically create an up-to-date backup of your must-have Firefox extensions. For frequent re-installers, a good collection is going to be a must. For those looking to help out Firefox newcomer friends or keep a group of workers updated, it seems like a pretty nifty tool.

PC Pro and Beta News have even made their own Collections. Check them out!

Coverage highlights include:

The New York Times, Geek.com, PC Pro, PC Pro, Pocket lint, Lifehacker, Mashable, BetaNews, GHacks, Heise and Tech Radar

Mozilla Labs recently announced a call for participation in its latest project, Jetpack. Jetpack explores new ways to extend & personalize the Web.

Jetpack was received positively by the press, with many people noting that the already impressive size and dedication of the Mozilla add-ons community should help make the project a success. There seemed to be some initial confusion over the differences between Jetpack and Greasemonkey, but we continued to push the message that Jetpack was in part informed by the success of Greasemonkey, and that you’ll likely see support for Greasemonkey scripts to Jetpack to allow them work even better together.

The Register’s Cade Metz spoke with Aza Raskin about the goals of the project. He writes, “‘We want to enable more people to participate in the creation of browser functionality, following the Mozilla mission of making the browser yours, making the web yours,’ Mozilla’s head of user experience Aza Raskin told The Reg. ‘What if any eighth grader with a little skill could change the browser? What would that mean for the web?’”

CNet’s Josh Lowensohn notes some exciting benefits the release brings to users, “Besides no restarts and no breaking with updates, the most exciting aspect of Jetpack is how it can give users more control over what they see on a site, and how they can interact with its content. Like Ubiquity (another Mozilla Labs project), it also appears to be putting these add-ons right in the hands of users as soon as they visit a site with Jetpack controls, which means there’s less of a need to promote it in an add-ons directory to have users find it.”

US Coverage highlights:

PC Advisor, Lockergnome Blog, Trusted Reviews, Pocket-Lint, Internet News, Slashdot, TechSpot, InfoWorld, Ars Tehnica, CNet, PC World, eWeek, TechNewsWorld, ChannelWeb, InformationWeek, The Register, N4G, Vnunet.com

EU coverage highlights:

PC Pro, ComputerWorld UK, Heise Online, ZDNet, Yahoo UK & Ireland, eWeek, Computeractive, Digital Arts,

Late last week the Fennec team announced its first significant milestone for the Windows Mobile platform, with the release of Alpha 1. Brad Lassey introduced the milestone and highlighted exciting features of the release in a blog post, which was then quoted in quite a few pieces of press coverage.

To date there have been more than 20 original pieces of coverage, with the majority of tone being positive toward the release. There has also been widespread understanding in the community that this is an early developer release, really intended for testing purposes.

CNET’s Jessica Dolcourt comments on the technical features of the release, “For the techies, Mozilla built its interface for Fennec Alpha 1 for Windows Mobile using CSS. This will help the app adjust to various screen sizes and resolutions, says Mozilla. The Mountain View, Calif., company also divulged that this Fennec build shares Firefox’s memory management library, JeMalloc. This resource-sharing is another indication that Mozilla is striving to create a mobile product as identical to its desktop offering on its back end as is technologically possible.”

Sean Michael Kerner from Internet News sums it up nicely, “Yes, there is a long way for Fennec to go before its final. But it is moving in the right direction with new platforms coming on early in the process. As mobile device vendors continue to open up their own platforms for application stores, I can see a huge opportunity for Fennec.”

Coverage highlights:

IT Pro, Heise Online, Phones Review, Silicon.com, Mobile Choice UK , Personal Computer World , PC Pro, ZDNet, Pocket-Lint, LifeHacker, Mobile News Direct, Trusted Reviews, Linux Insider, Geek.com, InformationWeek, ZDNet, The H, Mobile Marketing News, Phones Review, TechWhack, engadget, IntoMobile, Unwired View

Firefox 3. Beta 4 was released on Monday. It’s gotten much attention in the press given this release likely represents the final beta for Firefox 3.5. Coverage has been positive, focusing on improvements around speed and performance, private browsing, and geolocation.

Mike Beltzner spoke with TG Daily’s Wolfgang Gruener and commented about the significance of a beta release. Wolfgang writes, “While Mozilla releases nightly builds of the browser on a continuous basis, each new beta may not be as interesting to users as those rare betas for Safari and IE. ‘It is a fundamental difference in the way how our culture works,’ Beltzner said. Mozilla believes that its beta software is a crucial tool for developers, while other browser makers are using their beta browsers for marketing purposes. ‘Internet Explorer has such a long upgrade cycle. And when a beta is released people end up installing that software since they believe it is the latest and greatest.’”

U. S. coverage highlights include:

CNET,  ComputerWorld, ReadWriteWeb, TGDaily, InternetNews.com, Lifehacker, Mashable, PC Magazine, BetaNews and InfoWorld

On March 31 Mozilla announced new designs for the Mozilla Firefox web browser by leading fashion, cause, sports and music brands. Personas has been building on the momentum it has built from its inception in 2007 in Mozilla Labs, with hundreds of designs from a growing community of artists and designers. Personas continues to grow to enable people to easily make their browsing experience more fun and personal.

Mozilla issued a press release announcing its work with a number of brands. Public feedback toward Personas as a simple and fun consumer tool to customize your Firefox has been largely positive. Some have been of the opinion that Mozilla should focus on improving the technical capabilities of Firefox instead of these “fun” tools, though, our main goal here was to introduce Personas to mainstream consumers.

As Kevin Purdy from Lifehacker notes, “Skinning Firefox for a new look doesn’t exactly add much productivity to your browsing day, but if you’re going to seek out that complete desktop theme feel, GetPersonas makes it seriously simple.”

Coverage highlights include:

US

Lifehacker, PC Pro, TechCrunch and CNet

Germany

Chip, Chip’s “20 favorite Personas”, ComputerBild, PcWelt, Heise

Spain

20minutos

Italy

downloadblogi.it

Earlier this week The Khronos Group announced an initiative with Mozilla to bring accelerated 3D graphics to the Web in hopes of improving online games and other Web applications.

The initiative has garnered excitement among the press, with discussions around the benefits of having games available directly from a Web browser, the eventual integration of 3D features into Firefox, and what this might mean for the competition.

WIRED’s Michael Calore notes, “Nobody can ignore the obvious fact that any 3D graphics technology with the weight of Mozilla, Google and Khronos behind it has one hell of a chance of succeeding. And even if it takes years to truly mature, Adobe should be worried.”

Coverage highlights include Ars Technica, CNET, ZDNet, BBC, Internet News, Information Week, and The Escapist.

On Tuesday, our mobile team released Fennec 1.0 Beta 1!

Scott Gilbertson at Wired writes, “The latest Fennec beta brings in two new features from its desktop cousin — The “awesome bar” search engine, which makes it easier to get to frequently visited sites with less typing; and also new is  TraceMonkey, the same, much-improved JavaScript engine set to arrive in Firefox 3.5. Other improvements in the latest release include faster panning, better zoom tools, and other performance related tweaks.”

You can read more about this important mobile milestone in TechCrunch, Lifehacker, CNET, Ars Technica, Network World, Gizmodo, and PC World.

Late last week Mozilla released Firefox 3.1 beta 3. There’s been much excitement in the media around the new beta and enhancements to features and performance. Coverage has highlighted improvements to web worker thread support, Private Browsing Mode, performance stability and the Gecko layout engine.

Gregg Keizer notes the enhancements to private browsing mode. He says, “Now, however, users can selectively tell the browser to “forget” specific already-visited Web sites from the History sidebar by right-clicking and choosing ‘Forget About This Site.’”

Ars Technica’s Ryan Paul says, “The 3.1 release will bring a lot of very impressive changes, including performance enhancements and new features for users and developers.“

Coverage highlights include Internet News, eWeek, Ars Technica, Lifehacker, ZDNet, PC Advisor, WIRED and CNet.

Earlier this month, Mozilla’s Developer Tools Lab released its first project, Bespin. Bespin proposes an open extensible Web-based framework for code editing that aims to increase developer productivity, enable compelling user experiences, and promote the use of open standards.

There has been much excitement around the project, particularly in the developer community and technology press. As Ryan Paul from Ars Technica states, “The creative way that Bespin uses the canvas element demonstrates the power of open Web standards and the creative things that other developers are doing with Bespin validates the usefulness of the project.”

The project is already acting as a catalyst for innovation in the open source community. Alex Handy from the SD Times reports, “One open-source developer has already tied Bespin to a headless Eclipse server. This IDE mashup provided Bespin as the editor, while the Eclipse engine crunched and examined the code dynamically on the back end.”

Highlights of coverage include:

US:

Ars Technica, CNET, Internet News, Lifehacker, eWeek, SD Times

UK:

TechWorld, ZDNetUK, ComputerWorld UK, The Register

Germany:

Chip, PC-Welt, silicon.de, ORF, t3n, magnus.de, Heise

The Anita Borg Institute for Women and Technology (ABI) announced that Mitchell Baker is a winner of this year’s Women of Vision Awards in the Leadership category. Mitchell, along with Yuqing Gao, IBM Research, and Jan Cuny, National Science Foundation, will be honored for her accomplishments and contributions as a woman in technology at ABI’s fourth annual Women of Vision Awards Banquet at the Fairmont Hotel in San Jose on April 30th, 2009.

The news was announced in a press release issued by The Anita Borg Institute for Women and Technology, excerpted below:

The Women of Vision (WOV) Awards honor women making significant contributions to technology in three categories: Innovation, Leadership, and Social Impact. The three winners were selected from a field of highly qualified women all of whom are engaged in technology professions in industry, academia, NGO’s or government. Candidates for the awards are considered based on their records of (1) consistent, significant contributions to technology invention and application; (2) effecting positive changes in the ways in which technology impacts society; and (3) demonstrated leadership in the technology industry that extends beyond their place of work.

Please join us in congratulating Mitchell in this achievement!