Posts Tagged with “Firefox”

First set of mock-ups

Second post re mock-ups

We’re still working on this. There’s been a bunch of helpful feedback. We appreciate this. We think we’ve integrated the feedback into something that’s a good solution; different from out last version in both its essence and its presentation and content.

We’ve come to understand that anything EULA-like is disturbing, even if the content is FLOSS based. So we’re eliminating that. We still feel that something about the web services integrated into the browser is needed; these services can be turned off and not interrupt the flow of using the browser. We also want to tell
people about the FLOSS license — as a notice, not as as EULA or use restriction. Again, this won’t block the flow or provide the unwelcoming feeling that one comment to my previous post described so eloquently.

We expect to have the materials that show this plan posted tomorrow morning.

Along with the feedback, there have also been some responses that go beyond anger to nasty, personal attacks.  This is unfortunate. I think we’ve gotten past the vitriol to absorb the underlying issues. It’s possible that we’ve missed something. Sometimes the vitriol masks what would otherwise be a point we might understand and agree with. If that’s the case, we’ll keep working on things. The end result will be better for all of us.

Mozilla exists to build portions of the Internet where individual human benefit, social benefit, and civic benefit are the most important things. We build Firefox explicitly to advance this goal. Mozilla is uniquely suited to doing this. As a non-profit organization we are organized — legally and logistically — to do this, and only this. We build Firefox as a first, critical step in this goal. But Firefox isn’t the end goal. The end goal is to create an Internet where all of us can participate, where all of us have the ability to build, where all of us can earn authority, responsibility and decision-making ability.

Each one of us will live in a world where our online identity and experience is massive and growing. Each one of us should be able to participate in creating and defining that experience. And to participate in the ways we think are important, not just in the ways someone else offers us. Mozilla recognized long ago that an independent browser dedicated only to the public good is a necessary piece for building a healthy Internet. Many people thought this was silly — the browser was generally treated as simply a part of the Windows desktop and not important in its own right. These days we know that’s not true.

Almost 200 million people have spoken by adopting Firefox; demonstrating how much the browser does matter. Yesterday Google announced that it will release its own browser, validating once again the central idea that this tool we call the browser is fundamentally important. Our first great battle — that of relevance and acceptance — has been won.

We build Firefox with an open development process. At Mozilla people earn respect, authority and decision-making ability by demonstrating their abilities. This allows individual people to become full, equal participants, with both authority and responsibility for building a better Internet. The development process for Firefox demonstrates the type of Internet we want to build. (Not perfectly, of course.)

Firefox is our first step in building this Internet. It’s the demonstration of how to make these goals tangible in a product hundreds of millions of people can enjoy. Firefox is a terrific product and it needs to be. Clearly we need to continue to build great products, and to lead in a competitive environment. Mozilla created this competitive environment through the success of Firefox, and I’m as confident as John is about Mozilla’s future. We’ve already got great things ready for our upcoming 3.1 release, and there’s much more to come. Performance, stability, security, ease of use, features — it’s a great time in Firefox and browser development in general.

We’ll continue to compete in the browser world, and we’ll continue to do well. We’ll continue to produce a product that people choose, and trust and understand is theirs. We’ll continue to do this as part of our overall mission — building an Internet where individual, civic and social value are paramount.

Competition is seldom comfortable, but it forces us to do our best. Firefox 3 is a terrific product and there’s much more to come. We’re just beginning to touch the surface of what Mozilla can accomplish. The best is yet to come.

(Note: I’m flying back to California today after a few days of vacation and so unfortunately will be out of touch for parts of the day.)

Late last week a colleague expressed dismay that we didn’t have either a recorded version or a text version of the brief comments I made from Seoul via Air Mozilla on the release day of Firefox 3. So I took my notes and put them together into something that is close — certainly in spirit — though not exact.

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Every once in a while — for those people who are really lucky — we get to experience a moment where everything comes together. A period where dreams and hard work merge together with remarkable results.

This is such a time for Mozilla.

It’s based on hard work and execution of course. The number of people who have done something unexpected in the last few months, something that changes the outcome, is very high. But that’s only part of it. And there are plenty of times in life — most of life for most people, in fact — where people work hard and pour themselves into their effort but don’t experience the lift and buoyancy of sense of validation.

The periods that are so memorable often involve a team of people, and something that makes that group of people cohesive and satisfying. Sometimes these periods involve working on something that seems giant, hard to achieve and meaningful. Often then involve many things coming together in a way almost didn’t seem possible. And they involve a response from the world at large that demonstrates all the work and energy was worth it.

It’s incredibly fortunate to experience this at all. And it’s intensely gratifying to see these things come together for Mozilla.  It’s not just Firefox, it’s the entire Mozilla community. Firefox reflects the Mozilla community, giving us a chance to see how broad and deep the Mozilla world is, and how much can be accomplished. Eight million people — not only aware of a piece of software but acting on that awareness — in a day is astonishing.

The excitement isn’t all about a piece of software. The real activity is about the Internet. It’s about people not just using but also creating the Internet; creating an experience that is fun, safe, and productive. The Internet is a big deal. The ability to participate in creating it is a big deal. It’s rare that such a fundamental resource can be created by voluntary individual participation.

We can see that people sense the opportunity, want to participate, want to build and are more willing to share than might have been expected. We see this in the open source world, we see it in activities like Wikipedia, we see it in the growing range of activities using an “open source” model.

Mozilla has a role to play here. What a great place to be.

Today Mozilla releases Firefox 3 — fast, smart, safe, fun. Full of new things. Firefox 3 once again demonstrates how a great product makes Internet life better.

Firefox 3 is also the tip of a much bigger iceberg. For one thing, Firefox is the tip of the web itself. Firefox is exciting because the Web is exciting, and because Firefox does such a nice job of making the richness of the Web available to people in elegant, useful ways.

Firefox is the visible tip of an enormous amount of powerful, open-source technology. That technology makes Firefox possible, and it
also makes a range of other products possible. Some of these other products are released by Mozilla, some by other organizations.

Firefox is the tip of an enormous, wildly active community of people who are building a better Internet.

Firefox is the tip of an innovative development process that uses open source techniques in a range of activities extending far beyond code.

Firefox is all of these things. And it’s one unbelievably good browser.

Congratulations and thank-you to everyone who is participating in building Firefox and the Mozilla community.

Tomorrow I’ll be mixing OECD events with the Firefox 3 launch day and Mozilla community events. I’ll get up very early to participate in an Air Mozilla event coinciding (almost) with the official Firefox release. Then I’ll go to a local TV station to talk about Mozilla. The only downside is I’ll have to miss some of the interesting roundtables at the OECD Ministerial. That’s disappointing, but reflects how much is going on that is relevant to Mozilla. I’ll go back to the OECD for the lunch and afternoon events. Then in the evening I’ll have the chance to meet up with a significant group of Mozilla contributors. I’m really looking forward to this. The community in Korea has long been wildly creative, active and part of what makes Mozilla Mozilla.  It will be great fun to see Firefox release day from this vantage point.

Thursday I’ll participate in a forum on web standards and the importance of interoperability for a healthy Internet environment. “The Global Web Technology Workshop will be held for the adoption of global web technologies and web standards within the Korean web industry . . . ” This is organized by long-time Mozilla contributor Channy Yun. It should be a great opportunity to meet the broader web community within which Mozilla lives.

It’s a rare treat to combine three great events in one all-too-brief trip. The OECD, the Mozilla community on a Firefox release day, and a community interested in the open web. No doubt I’ll come home buzzing with excitement and stumbling with exhaustion!

Firefox 3: June 17. Our target release date is less than one week away.

The web experience gets dramatically better for millions and millions and millions and millions of people with Firefox 3. If you know anyone who’s not using Firefox already, now is the time. Help them head over to Download Day, set a world record, and enjoy what the web can be.

We’re getting very, very close to the release of Firefox 3. It’s an odd time around the Firefox part of the Mozilla project. Most of the Firefox and platform engineers are mostly done. The long, long push to get hundreds of issues triaged and resolved is over. Our first Release Candidate is out. Maybe we’ll do another release candidate, that depends on what we learn over the next short period. And if we do there will be a burst of activity. But the vast bulk of the engineering work is done. These engineers are already defining and working on the next projects, from Firefox to mobile. But there’s also a sense of waiting. Firefox 3 isn’t done until we’ve completed a massive test cycle, and there’s a constant and growing throbbing in the air as we work through the final stages.

Meanwhile, other groups of people are in high gear. The QA team is one. It’s a quiet storm of QA activity right now as we throw every test we’ve got at Firefox 3, looking for any cracks or stress points. It’s a quiet storm only because QA is a well-organized, experienced and highly effective team. Otherwise it would be a wild frenzy. Quite a contrast with the Firefox 1.0 release, where we hand-tested the localized versions up through the day of the launch itself, using an easel size pad of paper covered with a hand-written list of localizations and status updates.

Other engineering teams are hard at work as well. The web development team, for example, making sure sites like addons.mozilla.org are ready to go. The website content teams and localization teams are making sure that the many pages of content are available in the massive number of languages that are part of the Firefox 3 release. This includes both the websites themselves and the “product” pages which are part of Firefox. Build and release is the final stage of the release, so they are also in the thick of things right now.

The marketing team is extraordinarily busy, from community activities to press briefings to creating and distributing all the materials needed to explain Firefox: both new features and the overall pleasure of using Firefox to people who haven’t yet experienced what’s possible with Firefox. It’s a massive undertaking to launch a product with a userbase the size of Firefox. We couldn’t do it without the deep integration of the marketing team with the massive Mozilla community and we’re seeing that at work.

So we’re experiencing extreme levels of activity and performance in giant parts of the Firefox community. That’s combined with an intense sense of pressure building. It’s a little like seeing the first rays of sunshine appear on the horizon, and knowing that blazing ball of summer will appear soon.

For the last couple of years the Mozilla Corporation has organized and hosted an event known as the “Firefox Summit.” We’ve done this twice so far; once after the release of Firefox 1.5 and once after the release of Firefox 2. The Summits have been a gathering of the people most deeply involved in creating the just-released product, and likely to be deeply involved in the design and creation of the next version. The summits are part celebration, partly closure, and mostly planning and consensus building for the future efforts.

The Summits bring together a range of contributors, both volunteers and those employed by Mozilla and other organizations. The fundamental goals are to build closer bonds between contributors who rarely meet face to face, and to do serious planning and focusing for the future Firefox work (including the underlying platform). We also try to have some fun, of course. 🙂 Mozilla funds participation — travel, lodging, food, etc — for our volunteers. Mozilla Corporation employees are expected to attend, others attend by invitation.

We’ll be having another Summit this July. This time we plan to expand the focus a bit to move beyond Firefox and the platform technologies that make work. The main focus will still be Firefox and the technology that underlies it — that’s still the key that so much of our vitality. This includes discussions about how our products and technologies can and should move the Mozilla vision forward. And we’ll undoubtedly have discussions about building strong communities, this is an element that runs through every Mozilla activity.

Eventually it would be great to have a broader Mozilla Summit, discussing not only our technology and products but also the range of other activities that the Mozilla project is, or should think about, undertaking. We’re not ready to plan and take that one quite yet, but it’s time to see if we can broaden the focus somewhat.

We’ll clearly broaden this to include Thunderbird, email, and Internet communications. That’s an official Mozilla product that shares our technology and the Mozilla mission. We’ll undoubtedly broaden this in other ways; mobile, Weave, data, and Prism are obvious candidates.

So while we’ll probably refer to this as the “Summit” or the “Firefox Summit,” its official, somewhat-awkward name is the Firefox Plus Summit. If we knew exactly the scope we could figure out a more precise name. I came up with this name to be clear about what we do know: most discussions in the context of Firefox, not completely Firefox, not aiming to cover the entire possible scope of the Mozilla project.

We’re just starting to plan for the Summit. This includes invitees, content, how to get the most input into the discussions and how to get the results dispersed to greater audiences. We hope to make progress in the next couple of weeks, and the bulk of the content development will happen as more and more people finish up their work on Firefox 3.

A few weeks ago John Lilly got me to thinking — how would I describe my aspirations for Mozilla for 2008? I don’t mean how I would describe goals, or tasks, or specific things that need to be done. I mean aspirations — high level, overarching concepts that describe why we do things and what is ultimately important to accomplish.

Here’s the result — let me know what you think.

In 2008 we demonstrate to the world all the things that makes Firefox, Mozilla and the Open Web important. We tell the big picture Mozilla story effectively — what Mozilla is, what our products are, what our product and technology roadmaps are, what “open” is, how these traits result in a better Web, how people can participate, and why it matters.

We find new ways to give people greater control over their online lives — access to data, control of data, greater ability to participate beyond increased consumption. We demonstrate these characteristics through our products. We inspire others to create these characteristics. We show consumers what they should expect.

We make a compelling public case that this approach is practical, effective and innovative. We do this with Firefox 3, a great product that people love. We do it with other initiatives (not necessarily product releases) that show that Fx3 is a building block for even better things.