Last week Ken Kovash, Mozilla’s manager of metrics, wrote a blog post on Mozilla’s metrics blog analyzing the results of Mozilla’s campaign to warn users if their version of Adobe Flash is out of date. Ken noted that in just one week 10,000,000 people have clicked on the “flash update” link below.

Sean Michael Kerner from Internet News helps put that number into perspective. He says, “That potentially means that 10 million people were running older out-of-date and insecure versions of Flash. It means that despite Adobe’s own efforts to get people to update with their own update mechanisms and public outreach that 10 million people were still left out of the loop.”

Mitchell Baker and Johnathan Nightingale also commented on the success of the effort in blog posts last week.

ComputerWorld’s Gregg Keizer includes comments from Adobe in his article, “Adobe on Thursday confirmed a spike in traffic to its Flash Player update page, and applauded Mozilla’s move. ‘For us, anything that others do to help users stay up-to-date is a good thing,’ said Brad Arkin, Adobe’s director for product security and privacy. ‘We’re glad to see Mozilla doing this.’”

Additional coverage includes GHacks, Download Squad, Geek.com, SC Magazine and InformationWeek and Heise.

Last Friday, the official Spread Firefox download counter reached one billion. To date, there have been more than 80 original pieces of coverage with most of the coverage being extremely positive and excited about the billion download achievement.

David Colker from the L.A. Times commented on the milestone:

Quite a feat for a browser that unlike Microsoft’s Internet Explorer or Apple’s Safari is run by a nonprofit organization with fewer than 250 employees.  Despite it’s lack of big corporate backing –or maybe partially because of that lack—Firefox has become hugely popular worldwide”

John Paczkowski from All Things D quoted Mozilla CEO, John Lilly:

As Mozilla CEO John Lilly told me this morning, ‘It’s a billion votes–a billion intentional decisions–for people to take control of how they interact with the Web. We–the whole Mozilla community, really–are really proud to have been part of building a product that’s been downloaded so many times, but more importantly, we’re all proud to have helped people take more control over their online lives by making intentional decisions.’”

And Ryan Paul from Ars Technica said:

Firefox has transformed the Internet by bringing innovation and a strong standards-based browsing experience to the masses. Its swift rate of advancement has been accompanied by rapid adoption, leading to the emergence of an enormous following of loyal users. The Firefox phenomenon has contributed greatly to leveling the playing field on the Web and reigniting competition in the browser market.”

Coverage highlights include: BBC News, CIO Today, CNET, Examiner, Fast Company, Geek.com, Information Week, Info World, Lifehacker, The Mirror, PC Magazine, PC World, The San Francisco Business Times, Silicon Valley/San Jose Business Journal, The TechHerald, TecZone, The Guardian, ZDNet, ReadWriteWeb, TechCrunch, VentureBeat,

We’ve had a phenomenally busy few months at Mozilla.  I’m pleased to share a number of highlights from Mozilla’s media coverage around the 3.5 launch and more!

First up, Firefox 3.5 launched to much fanfare and widespread coverage in major media outlets including USA Today, Fast Company, Seattle Times,  ABC News, MTV, BusinessWeek, CNET, NPR, TechCrunch, Ars Technica, and more.  Firefox 3.5 also enjoyed top trending topic status on Twitter on launch day.  If you look closely, you can see that we’re beat Michael Jackson

Last week, John Lilly was a guest on the NBC Bay Area show Press:Here, a Sunday morning news roundtable discussion show about Silicon Valley featuring top tech leaders and world class technology reporters.  You can view the segment here.   Creative Commons VP, Mike Linksvayer is interviewed immediately after John so be sure to check out the full episode!

And finally, this past weekend Mozilla was featured in The New York Times Sunday Business section.  The article includes photos of Mitchell Baker, John Lilly, and a number of Mozilla engineers in Mountain View and Toronto (via video satellite).

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.

On January 26, Mozilla announced a $100,000 grant to the Wikimedia Foundation to advance open video.  The announcement was communicated via blog posts from Mike Shaver, VP of Engineering, Mozilla, Chris Blizzard, Director of Evangelism, Mozilla, Erik Möller, Deputy Director, Wikimedia Foundation, and blog.mozilla.com.

The announcement was covered in The New York Times, Ars Technica, PC World, TechCrunch, FOSSwire, WIRED and many others.  You can view all the trackbacks at the bottom of the original blog.mozilla.com post.

Last week Mozilla’s VP of Engineering Mike Shaver spoke at the Churchill Club on a panel entitled, “Browsers are Hot Again!”, moderated by Businessweek columnist Steve Wildstrom. Joining him on the panel were representatives from Microsoft (Dean Hachamovitch), Opera (Christen Krogh) and Google (Sundar Pichal).

Below is coverage from the event, including articles in CNET, InfoWorld, and TechCrunch. The overall theme through the coverage was the feeling of increased competition.  Paul Krill writes, “While it appeared Microsoft’s Internet Explorer had won the browser battle five years ago, things have changed with the advent of mobile browsers, Firefox and Safari, Wildstrom said”.

Mike Arrington highlighted the importance of the Mozilla community, “Mozilla’s Shaver said Firefox was about ‘putting the web first’ and creating a standards-compliant browser in as many languages as possible to ensure that no one was left out of the Internet”.

Earlier this week Mozilla Labs announced updates to two of its recent projects – Snowl and Ubiquity. Both projects have demonstrated impressive momentum and are being well received in both the Mozilla community and the press.

Snowl 0.2, a messaging-in-the-browser experiment, builds on the first release with an updated river view, a new stream view for keeping track of messages in a sidebar while you do other things, the ability to send tweets, and support for multiple Twitter accounts. Sean Michael Kerner from Internet News notes, “For Mozilla, a close embrace of Web 2.0 with Snowl may have an impact beyond simply making it easier for users to access Twitter and similar services: It may actually represent the future of the popular browser.”

Highlights of Snowl in the news include Internet News, ReadWriteWeb, WIRED, ComputerWorldUK.

On Wednesday, Mozilla Labs released Ubiquity 0.1.5. With it, Ubiquity gains a sleeker look, a smarter core and the ability to be skinned – anyone who knows how to write standards-complaint CSS can now create and share a custom Ubiquity skin. Scott Gilbertson from WIRED writes, “Think of Ubiquity as an on-the-fly mashup creator, taking information and reorganizing it to make it more useful.”

Ubiquity was featured in InformationWeek, WIRED, Internet News, and Lifehacker.

As 2008 comes to a close, the industry reflects back on the past year and highlights the best and brightest technologies and news stories that came our way. This month Mozilla and Firefox received the following honors:

*eWeek Top 10 News Stories of the Year

*Mozilla and Racepoint Group UK won Best Technology and Consumer Electronics PR Campaign for Mozilla Firefox 3 launch at the European Excellence Awards 2008

*Firefox wins ReadWriteWeb Top 10 Consumer Web Apps of 2008

*Mozilla Weave wins ReadWriteWeb Top 10 Web Platforms of 2008

*Firefox included in BusinessWeek’s Best Tech Products of 2008

*CrunchGear fans name Firefox 3 Best Browser, Peoples Choice Award

Last week, Mozilla and Zazzle announced a strategic partnership and launched the Mozilla Community Store!  At the Mozilla Community Store, you can browse the gallery to shop from an array of community generated designs. Designs consist entirely of artwork supplied by Mozilla’s worldwide community, with all designs available for customization on over 400 apparel products including t-shirts, sweatshirts and tank tops. To get things started, we’ve seeded the store with over 50 designs from the Firefox 3 t-shirt design contest, but you can also start from scratch and add your own!

US coverage highlights include: TechCrunch, Lifehacker, Startupmeme, and Zazzle’s blog.

This morning an exciting article was published in the BBC News that profiles Mitchell Baker and her role as one of the most influential women leaders in Silicon Valley. Valley Girls: Mitchell Baker looks at the history of the Mozilla Project and Mitchell’s role in founding and shaping its success.

She reflects on the start of her role at Mozilla. “At that point I knew that the building of the browser was a necessary step to have an internet that was worth living in,” she said. “I also knew [Mozilla] was not the obvious path to build a career but it was the obvious path to do something interesting.”