Since I knew I was coming to FOSDEM this weekend with many Mozilla localizers I wanted to know not just which language of Firefox people use but where in the world people use Firefox. John Lilly blogged earlier about how we use AUS data to get an aggregate view of Firefox usage. We looked at AUS data for December (comparing it against a Geo IP database) – the results were surprising:

Some details of note:

• As near as we can tell there are active Firefox users in every country on the planet. This includes Norfolk Island(Population Tokelau
• People from the United States account for less that 30% of Firefox users worldwide
• China is the fastest growing locale in relative share. Between November and December it overtook Australia in active users

The combination of locale growth and worldwide usage growth are an amazing reminder of how Firefox and Mozilla are truly worldwide projects.

During the last week of January Mozilla developers from Japan, China, Israel, Norway, Netherlands, Belgium, Germany, England, Ireland, Canada, Italy, Denmark and New Zealand all converged on Mountain View, CA to finish up Beta 3. It was really an amazing experience as 55 different people from around the world committed changes in one day to Firefox 3.

Give Beta3 a spin and tell us what you think. It is available in 34 languages each one of them the result of the amazing dedication of a volunteer localization team.

Since others have covered it well I just wanted to add a personal note. I’ve had the great fortune of knowing John for well over a decade and couldn’t imagine a better person for the job. He’s smart, great at what he does, says what he means, cares deeply about Mozilla’s mission, and cares even more for the people involved. He also deserves much of the credit for enabling Mozilla to scale and prosper over the last few years. w00t!

Congrats John!

You might remember an article in mid November reporting that 80% of the 700 Firefox 3 blocker bugs would not be fixed. Since that article was written we’ve fixed over 800 bugs in total. Beta2 contains fixes for 448 blockers and we’ve got another 200 bugs fixed and ready for Beta3. In short, despite some sensational and inaccurate headlines you might have read – Firefox 3 is going to rock.

The Mozilla community has been working overtime to make Firefox 3 easier to use, faster, and use less memory than previous versions. Firefox 3 includes tons of improvements specifically requested by web developers. More on this to come – but I wanted to make sure that it is clear: we are committed to releasing a version of Firefox that is the best yet. Try the awesomebar in Beta2 for a few days and see if you can go back to Firefox 2. I know I can’t.

P.S. Thanks to Alex Faaborg from whom I adapted the use of Exhibit for the icon set to use here visualize bugs fixed in Beta2.

The IE Blog today linked to a report that “showed that IE7 had both fewer fixed and unfixed vulnerabilities in the first year than the other browsers we compared.” Paul has already pointed out that this report was generated by a Microsoft employee, but not explicitly disclosed as such.

Wanting to verify the data I wandered over to the public IE bug database that Microsoft launched to great fanfare and I encountered this:

A vivid reminder that there is no way for anyone outside of Microsoft to confirm how many vulnerabilities ever existed in Internet Explorer. In an earlier post the author of the study touts the benefits of the Software Developement Lifecycle (SDL) at Microsoft as a reason Vista is more secure. Surely one of the goals of this process is to identity and fix security bugs right? How many bugs were identified and fixed using the SDL during development? Your guess is as good as mine.

Bug counts are meaningless, what matters is whether you are at risk or not. Symantec looked at this problem before as has Brian Krebs of the Washington Post. I recently found this up-to-date analysis of data on Secunia which paints the same picture. Firefox is safer than IE:

On a related note – remember the URI vulnerability from July? When we first encountered it we, along with others, were pretty sure it was a flaw in Windows or IE. Many folks attacked us for this stance. Embarrassingly, we were vulnerable to the same issue, and we fixed it one week later.

Microsoft maintained that it was not their issue, even after I sent them this spreadsheet developed by our QA team over a weekend in July which clearly showed a change in behavior for all applications after IE7 was installed.

Three months later, when Microsoft’s own Outlook and Outlook Express joined the ranks of affected applications Microsoft finally admitted it was their problem. It took another month before they fixed it. It took them three months to admit the problem and another month to fix it.

Does this look to you like the behavior of vendor trying to be open, transparent, and honest about security issues?

I expect more out of software vendors, and so should you.

“The web browser in the Nokia N810 is incredibly fast, loading complete web pages in seconds.”

“With the new Mozilla based browser, dubbed “MicroB” and which you can find and install over here, GMail performance is improved, using Google Maps is finally possible, and you can switch between using the Opera and the Mozilla Gecko -the same one used by Firefox and SeaMonkey- engines using the appropriately named “Set Engine” option. GMail performance is improved as is loading Word documents with Google Docs.”

Congrats again to the Nokia team, Dougt, Chris H, and everyone involved in getting this going. Glad to see all the perf improvements in Gecko 1.9 (coming soon in Firefox 3) showing well on a device with just a 3-400 MHz processor. I can’t wait to see where we get as the new mobile team really starts cranking…

Why Places?

The drive behind places came from a number of different directions at once:

• People losing their kmarks has been one of the top support issues in Firefox for years.

  We’ve already been using and contributing to sqlite for some time, so we decided to move bookmark and history storage to a well-used, open-source, database that implements full ACID compliant transaction model rather than a hodgepodge of custom ways to manage on-disk storage (I’m looking at you mork and RDF!). This means that it should be near impossible for you to lose bookmarks in FF3 from power outages, crashes or the like. But even if everything goes wrong there is a very handy automatic backup and restore feature built into the bookmarks organizer.

  Lost bookmarks no more!

• Organizing your little piece of the web. Turns out there are a lot more sites on the web than in 1994 (news flash!) so organizing them with the standard files/folders bookmark metaphor just doesn’t cut it. Places makes it easier to deal with huge numbers of bookmarks by adding one-click bookmarking, tagging, annotations, and intelligent searching through your history right in the url bar:

  

• Customization: Extension authors have done heroic things with the arcane bookmark API’s in FF2 and below. Places brings a whole new set of capabilities from annotations to easily building sync services.
• Performance: Instead of just reading the entire contents of your history into memory on startup we have a full database engine with indexes, paging, and all sorts of knobs to turn. This means performance on many operations related to history (startup, viewing the history sidebar, coloring links you’ve visiting, etc) will be significantly better in Firefox 3 even after storing a much larger (and thus more useful) history range.

Check out the developer docs or ui plan for more info.

The team has spent nearly a year hammering out the infrastructure (this means it is solid) so like many things in Firefox 3 what you see in the UI will be just the tip of the iceberg in terms of what we can do.

A few weeks ago in a gecko meeting I mentioned that I felt like we were in the “trough of despair”. That’s the part of every software project where you’ve had to scale back your open-ended dreams to match the reality of shipping in your lifetime – but the bug list looks so long you have no idea how to get through it.

Well – thanks to some very hard work we’ve gotten ourselves down to 13 total beta 1 blocker bugs – that’s 6 platform and 7 Firefox bugs. That means we really are closing in on beta1. Go team!

I’ll have more thoughts about what should you expect out of Beta1, Firefox3 and why are we doing what we are doing in the coming weeks.

Why increase Mozilla’s presence in mobile?

* A large portion of the world accesses the Internet from mobile devices, and this will become increasingly true over time (mobile devices outsell computers 20-1). Each Firefox install is an individual choice by a person to download something that didn’t ship by default on their computer. Why not offer that option for mobile devices?

* Firefox the most popular open-source browser on the planet with > 100 million active users. Bringing Firefox add-ons, the Mozilla platform (including XUL), open source, and a large and passionate community to the closed and fragmented mobile platform will do the world some serious good.

* Firefox and Mozilla give device manufacturers the best of both worlds: shared investment in the core open-source project plus the flexibility they need to customize the browser for their devices.

* You can already get a Mozilla-based browser for the Nokia N800 and Firefox is a key part of Ubuntu Mobile and the new Intel Internet Project, and most recently ARM has put serious effort towards Firefox on mobile devices.

* Through Joey, we’ve seen how the desktop and mobile browsing experiences can be bridged to build a better experience for both. Wouldn’t it be great if your bookmarks, history, extensions, etc. from Firefox on your computer just worked on your phone?

Just what are we announcing?

* Mozilla will add mobile devices to the first class/tier-1 platform set for Mozilla2. This means we will make core platform decisions with mobile devices as first-class citizens.

* We will ship a version of “Mobile Firefox” which can, among other things, run Firefox extensions on mobile devices and allow others to build rich applications via XUL.

* Mozilla will expand its small team of full-time mobile contributors to focus on the technology and application needs of mobile devices. In particular two new folks just joined:

** Christian Sejersen, recently the head of browsers at Openwave which has shipped over 1 billion mobile browsers, joined Mozilla Monday. He’ll be heading up the platform engineering effort and setting up a R&D center in Copenhagen, Denmark.

** Brad Lassey just joined Mozilla from France Telecom R&D. He’s already been an active contributor to our mobile efforts and can now focus on Mozilla mobile full time.

These folks will accelerate the tremendous work already done by Doug Turner, Chris Hofmann and the entire Mozilla community. The efforts in mobile will be magnified by all aspects of our kick-ass community in everything from testing, to UI design, to core engineering. Together we will accelerate the development and use of mobile-ready Mozilla technology.

Why now?

* Getting a no-compromise web experience on devices requires significant memory (>=64MB) as well as significant CPU horsepower. High end devices today are just approaching these requirements and will be commonplace soon For example, the iPhone has 128MB of DRAM and somewhere between a 400 to 600 MHz processor. It is somewhere between 10x-100x slower on scripting benchmarks than a new MacBook Pro and somewhere between 3-5x slower than an old T40 laptop on the same wifi network. But rapid improvements in mobile processors will close this gap within a few years. There are chips out there today that are faster than the one in the iPhone and integrate graphics, cpu, and i/o (wifi/3g/wimax) on one die. Intel has recently re-entered this market which will keep things interesting. Most exciting of all ARM has announced that by 2010 devices will be shipping with a processor 8x faster than what’s in the iPhone!

* The user demand for a full browsing experience on mobile devices is clear. If you weren’t sure about this before you should be after the launch of the iPhone.

* We’ve seen through Mozilla on the Nokia N800 and Minimo that it is possible to build a great experience on devices by using the Mozilla code.

* We are wrapping up work on Gecko 1.9 and there is room post 1.9 to make significant changes to the architecture for improved performance and memory use on devices. Things like reducing the use of XPCOM, unifying memory management under MMgc, and other improvements from Mozilla 2 will make Mozilla a great platform for all devices from mobile phones to your desktop. The use of a single source base gives us the leverage that makes OSS work so well.

Is this the right time?

Absolutely! Up until very recently device limitations required writing new mobile browsers from the ground up. Being able to leverage all the investments in the Mozilla platform across both desktops and devices is the right approach. There is far from a dominant player in this marketplace and even the best mobile browsers today have compromises in user experience, performance, and compatibility. There is still *plenty* of room for innovation.

When?

As mentioned above, Mozilla browsers are already available to N800 users and you can use Joey today to extend your Firefox desktop browsing experience to your phone. We’ll continue to invest in Joey and will work closely with partners who want to ship Mozilla browsers today. Mobile Firefox will arrive later (certainly not before 2008).

What about Minimo?

Minimo was an experiment in mapping the desktop browser experience to a specific mobile context. While we don’t currently plan to develop that project further, it has already provided us with valuable information about how Gecko operates in mobile environments, has helped us reduce footprint, and has given us a platform for initial experimentation in user experience.

Does this mean that Firefox 3 will run on my phone?

No. This project is focused on Mozilla technology that will ship after Firefox 3. We’re at least as excited as you about getting Mozilla’s great web capabilities into your hands, literally, but it’s a big undertaking, and won’t be something that we can wrap up in time for Firefox 3.

What mobile devices will Firefox run on?

We haven’t yet determined what our target platforms will be. If you’re a mobile device or software-stack developer, your insight and support will be very helpful in determining which configurations we can and should support in our initial efforts.

How can I get involved?

Join us on IRC at #mobile, in the newsgroups, or ping me. We need your help!