Today, Mike Beltzner and the Firefox 2 team were announced as finalists in the 2008 ISDA International Design Excellence Awards in the Interactive Product Experiences category. The ISDA is the voice of the industrial design profession, advancing the quality and positive impact of design.

This is a great honor in the design industry. Congrats to the team on their recognition!

Yesterday we announced the release of Firefox 3.1 Beta 1.  To date there has been more than 25 pieces of coverage, despite the buzz around the Apple Notebook announcement.  Coverage is neutral with a strong focus on enhancements under the hood, and portrays the release as a testing ground for developers and Web designers. Those who have turned on Tracemonkey have been largely impressed by the performance enhancements. Generally, we’re seeing excitement in the industry around how the revitalization of the “browser wars” is fostering competition to produce the best possible browser.

Highlights include coverage in Ars Technica, CNet, InternetNews.com, BetaNews, CIO, Technologizer, ComputerWorld, LifeHacker and CRN.

Yesterday we announced Geode, an experimental add-on designed to explore geolocation in Firefox 3 right now, ahead of the planned implementation of geolocation in Firefox 3.1. Future versions of Firefox (and Fennec) will support the new W3C Geolocation Specification, which adds the native ability for Web sites to request, and you to optionally grant access to, your location.

As of this morning there were more than 50 total articles posted on Geode, with the majority of the coverage in the technology, consumer technology press and blogsphere. Coverage has been primarily neutral with many reporters comparing Geode to Yahoo!s Fire Eagle and Google Gears.

We accompanied this announcement with a few use cases to illustrate the benefits of the technology, which helped provide a more thorough understanding of Geode as everyone was able to see the immediate benefit, making the exploration of the technology very “real”.  However, we saw some confusion about whether geolocation would make it into Firefox 3.1 or Fennec, and difficulty understanding that when the beta comes out next week, users and developers could experiment with geolocation in that result.

Some highlights from the coverage include CNet, PC Magazine, Mashable, and New England Cable News.