Posts Tagged with “Firefox”

Security issues are in the news recently with the Windows Metafile vulnerability. The point of this post is not to second-guess Microsoft’s handling of this vulnerability. For this discussion I’m happy to assume that Microsoft is taking exactly the correct actions on exactly the correct schedule. And beyond that, security is much more of a process than a one-time result. It’s not possible to be perfect. All of us, including Mozilla Firefox, must deal with security issues. Instead, I want to note that this vulnerability points out a key issue with the Internet that has little to do with Microsoft’s handling of this — or any other — specific vulnerability.

The current monoculture of operating systems is dangerous. The degree to which people rely on Windows and have few viable options in times of need is dangerous for the Internet and dangerous for life on the Web. This dominance is also dangerous for the business models of Microsoft’s competitors of course, and unfortunately much of the analysis often stops at this business level. But far more important is the danger to a vital piece of our infrastructure — the health of the Internet itself.

Take the current setting as an example. The WMF vulnerability exists in the Windows operating system, the experts report it’s being exploited by a range of websites, visiting one of these websites is about all that’s required to be affected, there’s no official fix and news reports differ on the likely effectiveness of antivirus software.

So what is a person to do? Buy and install more antivirus and security software? Stop using the web until a patch is released? Try to determine which are “safe” sites to visit? The current answer seems to be angst, resignation and a sense of fear about the dangers of the Internet. This is bad for all of us.

A better answer is to have greater flexibility in operating systems and applications. One way to get flexibility is through diversity and competition, which gives people an effective choice about what option best meets their needs. Today one can use an Apple computer with a non-Windows operating system (as I do) and avoid many of these problems. But Apple isn’t the perfect answer, being a closed-source, single-vendor, more expensive alternative. And just about everyone seems to agree that the Linux desktop is not yet ready for most people. So the alternatives are slim, and most people appear to be stuck.

Another source of flexibility can be found in the competition of ideas that go into a shared resource, a process at the heart of great open source software projects. But one way or another, a healthy system needs the flexibility to adapt. And the people in the system need some way to demonstrate what matters to them.

These goals of flexibility, adaptation and choice drive the Mozilla project. This is one reason Mozilla Firefox has always been a “cross-platform” application. By “cross-platform” we mean that the same codebase can be used on many operating systems. We make sure Firefox runs well on a variety of Windows, Mac, and Linux operating systems. Other contributors make Firefox work on yet more operating systems.

We do this because it allows people a choice of operating systems. It allows that choice now, and it provides a key element in promoting effective choice in operating systems. It is much harder to change operating systems, or to move between operating systems, if the applications people use are different as well. Firefox removes this burden. Use Firefox on Windows today. Use a Linux machine tomorrow for some specific task — Firefox will be the same. Switch back to Windows for your main work, use a relative’s Macintosh when you visit them — Firefox will be the same.

Building a great cross platform application is not easy. It is extra work. t requires massive expertise and testing, and it requires grappling with the differences between operating systems so that the user doesn’t have it. In some cases it may mean not taking full advantage of some opportunities to integrate with the operating system offers. (Of course sometimes integrating with the operating system can create problems of its own, as the security issues with ActiveX have demonstrated.)

We do not do this because it is easy, but because it is important. The Web is still young — too young to be tied to a single path of development. Through our open-source, cross-platform applications the Mozilla project seeks to promote flexibility and consumer choice and to help build a healthier Web. It’s exciting and extremely challenging, and there’s no doubt it’s worth the effort.

Mozilla Firefox has changed the web. Firefox 1.5 continues that path. Firefox is changing the web by providing an innovative product that is worthy of people’s trust and by bringing consumers the respect we deserve.

People should be able to enjoy the power of the web without becoming experts in Internet and software technology. Firefox makes this possible. Firefox is easy to install, intuitive to use, and remarkable in its ability to bring people the complexity of the web through a comfortable interface.

People should be able to enjoy the power of the web without feeling abused or that our computers are out of control, and while enjoying serious protection against unwanted intrusions. Once again, Firefox delivers. Firefox provides a world where pop-up windows are almost non-existent. A world where one’s computer doesn’t seem to running wild. A product with multiple layers of defense against unwanted intrusions.

Already millions upon millions upon millions of people have moved to a better world by choosing Firefox as their web browser. Firefox 1.5 provides even more reasons to do so. Firefox 1.5 builds upon the great features in Firefox 1.0, offering even better pop-up protection, security and privacy enhancements and usability improvements. Firefox 1.5 also introduces a new mechanism through which Firefox can both alert people when a security or other update is available and also make it much easier for people to install important updates.

Firefox is exciting because the Web is exciting, and Firefox 1.5 shows the Web at its best. With Firefox 1.0 we inaugurated a set of search plugins to make search functionality even easier for people to use. We’ve heard over and over that people love this feature. With Firefox 1.5 we’re beginning a new search relationship with Yahoo in Japan, China, Taiwan and Korea as part of our strategic goal of helping people access a range of quality services through Firefox. Versions in these languages will have a Firefox start page powered by Yahoo and Yahoo as the first search option. Our search partnership with Google continues in the Americans and Europe. We’ve also added answers.com as a search option in the English language, U.S. version. We’ll continue to focus on making critical activities such as search easier for users in the future.

The Mozilla project creates Firefox because an innovative, trustworthy browser is critical to protecting the usefulness and health of the web. Firefox is the result of thousands of people who contribute their time and energy to demanding the best possible browser of ourselves and then making it happen. Some are employed to do this, some are volunteers. Some contribute through code, others by testing, others by encouraging people to try Firefox. Many, including the readers of this post, contribute by following the Mozilla project. Enormous numbers of people take it upon themselves to understand Firefox, to help others understand how easy and worthwhile it is to try Firefox, and to assist the project in innumerable ways. Together we create the product consumers both need and deserve: A product that respects the human beings that use it, harnesses the power of the web and gives people extraordinary choice in their online lives.

Firefox 1.5 is better than ever. With Firefox, the World Wide Web is better than ever. If you haven’t tried Firefox, now is the time: www.getfirefox.com. If you know people who haven’t tried Firefox, now is the time to help them to a better web experience: www.getfirefox.com.

Enjoy the web. Feel protected. Get Firefox.

Time Magazine hosted a dinner for the Time 100 last week, inviting this year’s list, last year’s list and a set of other interesting people. As you might imagine, many people don’t attend. I went, thinking it would be an opportunity to meet interesting people. The dinner was a black tie event held at Time Warner Center in Manhattan. That’s “Time Warner,” as in used to be “AOL/Time Warner,” which I found somewhat ironic. It was a classic New York event, black tie, with the red carpet and photographers and “headliners” to generate interest and so on. I was reminded once again of how pervasive the role of the media is in New York life, and how unabashedly people seek the spotlight.

We (my husband and I) did meet some interesting people. For example, we turned around to talk with a gentleman standing behind us to learn he was James Watson who, with his colleague Francis Crick, is credited with figuring out the structure of DNA.

As we got to the dinner table I found myself standing between two people from the Time 100 group of 2004. One woman, from the investment world, looked a bit unsure as I described Mozilla and Firefox. But she had brought her son as her guest and he immediately piped up “Firefox! Everyone I know uses Firefox!” And went on to describe why. I then turned to person on my other side, who is active in politics. He too looked a little lost of the idea of software. But his companion, a doctoratal student in the biosciences looked up and said “Firefox! I absolutely use Firefox. All my colleagues use Firefox.” And he went on to explain why as well. Then someone from the other side of the table joined in about Firefox. One person has a Spread Firefox account. I could feel the initial confusion morph into something along the lines of “hmm, I may not know of it, but it feels like something is going on.”

I found the experience to be a perfect example of the Firefox phenomenon. A whole set of people have no idea about the Mozilla Foundation. Many find software confusing in general and have little interest in sorting through the complexities of the browser or other software. And yet all around them are people they respect who are aware, who do care, and who are actually connected to the Mozilla project in some fashion.

There’s been a fair amount of discussion recently about Seamonkey and Firefox development. First, never trust the headlines! I’m frequently amazed by what I find.

It is true that the Mozilla Foundation does not plan to ship official releases of the integrated Mozilla Application Suite (also known by its codename of “Seamonkey”) after the 1.7.x line. It is true that there are a group of developers who remain interested in developing and releasing new versions of the Seamonkey project. This group has proposed a plan for continuing the Seamonkey project as a community effort. In essence, the proposal is that interested developers would do the work and the releases, and the Mozilla Foundation will supply infrastructure support (cvs, bugzilla, etc.) We support this plan and will work with the developers to figure out how to implement it effectively.

These developments represent the strength of the open source development model in action. One of the benefits of open source software is that consumers are not locked into the vendor; they have the flexibility to create, maintain and use the products they want. Here we see these freedoms in action.

The Mozilla Foundation will cease development of new features for the Seamonkey product. (We’ll continue with 1.7.x maintenance and security releases to support 1.7.x users.) This decision has been discussed at length, and I won’t go into the rationale — we believe it is the correct decision for the overall health of the Mozilla project. There is a user and developer base that remains interested in Seamonkey. In a traditional proprietary world those users and developers would be out of luck, stuck forever using the last version received from the vendor or forced into an unwanted upgrade. In the open source world this need not be the case, and Seamonkey is an example of this.

The community of people interested in Seamonkey are organizing themselves and beginning to plan the tasks for the next release. The Mozilla Foundation will provide infrastructure support as described in the Seamonkey transition outline.

Like many open source projects, the Mozilla project is characterized by contributors who are fervently devoted to the technology, the projects and the releases they believe important. It’s no surprise that a portion of our community remains attached to the Seamonkey suite — these are some of the folks that made Seamonkey so good in the first place. It’s no surprise that a group wants to continue developing new features for Seamonkey — this is the commitment that gives the Mozilla project the power to be effective. An active Seamonkey community project reflects the success of the Mozilla project as a whole.

Ben Goodger has just noted that his employer has switched from the Mozilla Foundation to Google. We expect Ben’s role within the Mozilla project to be just about the same as the role he’s played for the last 18 months — pushing Firefox and the Mozilla platform ahead, and focusing on improving people’s experience with the Web. Ben has been the lead engineer for Mozilla Firefox because of his talents and drive, not because of his employment status with the Mozilla Foundation. We expect this to remain true.

This is not unusual in the world of the Mozilla project. A number of people have moved from one employer to another within the Mozilla project. IBM, Novell, Sun, Red Hat, Oracle and now Google have employees contributing to the Mozilla project — some dedicated, some part time, and some as individual contributors. Having multiple companies offer jobs to key Mozilla figures has long been a part of our view of a successful project and we’ve traditionally worked closely with companies whose employees contribute to the Mozilla project. We’re looking forward to more great progress with Firefox and the Mozilla platform, and we don’t foresee changes in Ben’s role.

Some people have asked if this means that Google has a corporate voice in Mozilla Firefox. The answer is “no.” Ben is the Module Owner for Firefox, and as Module Owner he has responsibilities to the Mozilla community. These responsibilities are documented in our policy on Module Owners and Ownership. The key responsibility is that the Module Owner’s job is to act in the best interests of the community and the project at large, not in the interests of his or her employer. Ben has lived with these responsibilities as a volunteer, a Netscape employee, a Mozilla Foundation employee and now as a Google employee. We’re confident that Ben will continue to help us drive great innovations in the browsing world.

Launch day here was quite a day, and I thought I would describe my view of it.

We knew it would be a long day, since the launch was schedule for 1 a.m. Monday night/Tuesday morning. On Monday most of us started rolling into the office about 10 a.m. or so. A number of us had been online from home before, especially those of us in contact with the localization teams in Europe and Asia. Meanwhile, these teams were trying to stay awake long enough to get last minute messages through to the release coordinators in California so that the localized builds could be certified for inclusion in the 1.0 release.

The day in the office started with a flurry of activity around localized builds. The Firefox 1.0 release was the first time we’ve included localized builds in our main CVS tree and included them in our release process. Adding 50 or 60 builds (20 languages, 3 platforms each) to a release is a big deal and Chase spun many sets of localized builds. The last planned spin of all localized builds was at 10 a.m. Monday morning. As the builds arrived, the localization teams around the world began to check in to verify them again, and our Quality Assurance groups went into high gear.

In the meantime, the engineers were always looking for last minute issues. We were confident of the release, but it’s in our nature to keep looking for things to improve until the last minute. Brendan isolated himself in the back of the office and went through crash data, trying to eke out one last problem until finally he gave up. Darin and bryner and dveditz continued their quest through bugs and mail to look for other improvements.

Chris Beard and I huddled on a set of questions, ranging from press inquiries to official and unofficial builds to localization questions to distribution programs. I spent a lot of time working with organizations interested in the Fireflox launch and finishing the blog post about the Firefox end user license agreement. Chris Hoffman monitored all activity, constantly encouraging people. Dbaron tracked the set of things that needed to be done to make the launch happen. These included:

• Determining the list of localized builds that were ready to be shipped with the English version
• Getting all builds pushed to the ftp site at the right time
• Verifying that the download infrastructure was ready (more on this later)
• Verifying that the 1.0. launch page for the website was ready to go
• Verifying that the infrastructure for the website was ready to go
• Verifying that the infrastructure for the start page was ready to go
• DNS redirect.

Various people spent some time looking at the infrastructire for “update.mozilla.org.” This infrastructure was new and we knew that it would have trouble scaling, so we wanted to most out of the existing infrastructure. Others spent time keeping in touch with the Spreadfirefox.com community.

We knew that Mozilla Europe and Mozilla Japan were ready to go. Each had done or coordinated massive amounts of work to have appropriate materials translated into localized websites in multiple languages as part of the launch. Bart Decrem had spent time in Europe with the Mozilla Europe folks and Chris Hofmann had gone to Japan to work with Mozilla Japan in coordinating the international launch. We made sure that Mozilla Europe and Mozilla Japan could be reached from the main page of www.mozilla.org, and tried to ensure that appropriate localized versions would be offered to people visiting those sites.

During the day people would find interesting tidbits and tell them to the group. Ben and Asa found a few folks who had created countdown clocks. We read aloud various blog posts about waiting for Firefox to encourage people finishing up the last bits of work.

All this formed the background activity. The main focus for much of the day was the QA and build team creating and checking out the localized builds. For each build, a whole set of things need to be worked out. This included:

• Does the build open?
• Does the installer work?
• Are the UI items localized?
• Are the right fonts used?
• Are appropriate links localized, allowing users to get to content in their own language?
• Are the search plugins localized, allowing users to get relevant search contents?
• Is the start page translated?
• Is the start page localized (including links, search capability, etc.)?

Our amazing QA team here in the office — Marcia, Sarah, Tracy, Jay and Asa went to work and worked tirelessly. So did Chase, our build and release maven, who created the build infrastructure for the localizations before we’d even given him time to acclimatize to life at the Mozilla Foundation. We made a giant list of all the localizations that might be ready, a list of the localizations for which localized search engines are available, a list of the localization teams who had certified their builds, and a list of any problems the QA team had found.

Periodically one of the QA folks would ask about some potential problem — was it a blocker or not? We have one big open space, so a bunch of us would look up and figure it out. This is particularly helpful in a few cases. For example, about 9 p.m. Asa groaned and announced that the Japanese version seemed to have a serious font problem and he didn’t think we could ship it. Immediate conversation ensued, since the Japanese team had just certified the build as ready. Chase started wondering about the fonts on Asa’s machine, jumped up and went to explore. Sure enough, Chase was right about fonts, the Japanese localization team was right about their build, and the Japanese version was cleared to ship out with the 1.0 release. One spike of tension receded.

As the list of localizations was finalized, other bits began reaching the final stage as well. Ben became more focused about the website push. Dbaron became more focused about the various pieces fitting together. Ben and I finished our blog posts. We also started tracking the start page infrastructure to make sure it was online. Chase began the process of getting the final builds pushed to the ftp site. Pav decided that we need to have BitTorrent available for the launch, so he settled down in a corner and went to work to make this happen. He took some kidding from those who felt that this wouldn’t be needed. Pav wasn’t having any of this, put his head down and dug in. Anyone who knows Pav knows that there’s no point in trying to stop Pav when he gets into this mode, so we left Pav to get BitTorrent going. We noted that the load at www.mozilla.org was going up. We assumed this was caused by people polling to see if the release was available yet, since we had read blog posts about people doing exactly this. It gave us another clue that yes, people were excited about seeing Firefox 1.0 appear.

About 11:00 pm Pacific Time Steve Garrity woke up to help with the final push. Steve is our lead contact with SilverOrange, the web design firm that has done the visual identity work for Firefox, Thunderbird and our website. Steve lives on the far East Coast of Canada, so our 1 a.m. launch time is 4am for Steve. Steve reports that he managed to wake up, but never got out of bed, and did the final push for the 1.0 launch website lying in bed with his computer in his lap. We were a bit nervous about waking Steve up but this turned out to be unnecessary — Steve came through on his own, as he always has. Even so, it was a mighty relief when messages from Steve began appearing! There were 4 or 5 things that needed to happen with the website for the 1.0 launch (changing the content at www.mozilla.org to our 1.0 release notice, pointing to localizations and some other info, and so on), and they went off without a hitch.

About 11:40 p.m. Asa looked up and said in a concerned voice: “I timeout when trying to reach www.mozilla.org. Can anyone else get to it?” The answer was no. The mozilla.org website was down. The office grew suddenly tense. Asa hadn’t spoken loudly, but everyone knew anyway. This is often the case — in a network-centric environment with lots of people in one room, you can almost tell when the network is down. Often when I find I don’t have a network connection I simply look up. If I see other people looking around then I know — network issue. I usually ask to be sure, but it’s almost redundant. At that moment Vlad reappeared. He came in the door grinning, noticed the odd silence and said “I though you guys would be celebrating.” “Can’t get to www.mozilla.org.” Vlad’s grin disappeared, he sat down, pulled out his computer and buried his head in it.

Dbaron and bryner went to work, as they always do when a problem like this arises. There’s nothing like this in their job descriptions, but that hasn’t mattered. In a minute or two there was a group clustered around dbaron debugging, and a steady stream of information was coming from dbaron. After a bit he says something about “two heaps” and “immense traffic.” Then he says “It looks like it’s coming from Myk!” Soon we’ve established contact with Myk. Yes, all the activity is coming from him. He’s bringing a second server on line to support the projected load at www.mozilla.org.

Myk has been our toolsmith for many years. We got to know him as a result of his application Forumzilla, and we jumped at the chance to hire him years ago. Since the Mozilla Foundation was launched Myk has taken on the Herculean task of coordinating our systems administration and infrastructure. We’ve had great help from a group of tremendous volunteers, but Myk has been the central point. For someone who didn’t ask for the job, he’s done amazing things.

“Right now?” we ask. “Doesn’t it seem a bit earlier would have been better?” Well yes, of course. But the machine took longer to arrive than expected, and now is when it was ready. Vlad looked up and said “Well, he’s got 8 minutes to get it done. That should be plenty.” And so it was. Being Myk, the job was done in 5 minutes, the work was perfect, there was no hitches, and within a few minutes www.mozilla.org was back and ready to go.

Someone asked “are we ready?” Chase answered that the release bits were on the site, both in English and the many localizations. We went through the list of all things people were thinking about, orchestrated by dbaron for the network aspects and Ben for the Firefox specific elements. Chofmann’s nearly jumping up and down by now, “Yes, we’re ready, we’re ready, we’ve been ready. Push the bits!”

We decide we’re ready. The last thing to do is to get the revised home page for www.mozilla.org actually “pushed” to the website, publish the blog and related posts, see the mozillazine news article posted and watch. Pushing new content to www.mozilla.org takes a few minutes. That’s because content is stored in our CVS repository and so at least part of the website source tree needs to be rebuilt to implement the new content. Normally this happens automatically every 30 or 40 minutes. We don’t want to wait that long, as we start a manual rebuild to get the content pushed sooner. We’re all used to this wait for new content to appear but this time it’s a very focused wait. No one is doing much of anything, we’re all sort of standing around.

And then, voila. “It’s done.” We all race to our laptops and go check out www.mozilla.org. We’ve all seen the content before, we’ve been looking at it for days, checking for problems, tweaking it. But this is the first time we’ve seen the content live on our public website, and we all have to look to make sure it’s really there — Firefox 1.0 is available, the Mozilla community has delivered something exciting, and we’re proud of it.

What did people do next? Did we all jump up and down, run around and have a giant party? No. We watched the network. Yup, that’s what we did. Chofmann managed to get a group to stop long enough to come back and at least acknowledge the glasses of champagne, and even to take one and wander around with it. But always back to watch the network. Is www.mozilla.org looking OK? Is the http download traffic looking OK? Is the ftp download traffic looking OK? Here we are:

The next day we arrived at work a bit later. We were beginning to get an idea that Firefox 1.0 was getting the reception we had hoped for. (I don’t think we yet had any idea of the reception that Firefox 1.0 has actually achieved, which has been phenomenal.) In a sense it was a bit anticlimactic because I couldn’t touch or feel the response. Our download traffic is handled by a set of mirror sites coordinated by the marvelous folks at Oregon State University’s Open Source Lab (http://osuosl.org/). Other significant university and research participants in our mirror program are Georgia Institute of Technology, Indiana University, the University of Utah, the Friedrich-Alexander University Erlangen-Nuremberg in Germany, and the Spanish National Research Network) and the Internet Systems Consortium. There are also a few commercial entities that assist, and we are grateful to all of them. We get logs and such from the mirrors through OSU, but of course that’s a step removed from managing this ourselves and having immediate access to the data.

After a while the anticlimactic feeling faded as we began to get information about the number of downloads and the general reception of Firefox. As best we can figure it, around 1,000,000 people came to download Firefox on the first day alone. That’s an astonishing number, far beyond what we had seen before. As Chris Hofmann put it, the building at the Mozilla Foundation might seem quiet, but the wires were burning up at Oregon State! And indeed the traffic did burn out some machines. By midday it was clear that our some of our mirrors were buckling under the load. For example, we had routed a good chunk of traffic to three jumbo sized load-balancers each fronting multiple machines in a big datacenter, and two of them burned out. (Note to alleviate speculation here: I am not talking about Google.)

Myk and chofmann had given a good deal of thought to this possibility and had two backup plans. The first potential backup was a load-balancing tool that distributed load across a larger set of servers (more about this below), and the second plan was a commercial vendor specializing in high-availability hosting.

Myk suggested we use a load balancing tool written by Mike Morgan of Oregon State. The idea was that in addition to distributing load to the small group of primary mirrors — the powerful ones that get our releases first, host everything we serve, and send us back logs so we can generate download numbers — we also distribute some load to the much larger group of secondary mirrors. The secondary mirrors may be less powerful, take more time to get our releases, not send us logs, and not host everything we serve (many of them host only the latest releases), but they still represent a significant amount of download capacity that could come in handy during periods of high demand.

Myk had evaluated the tool and believed it would improve our delivery capability dramatically. So early afternoon on Tuesday the 9th we implemented it. Sure enough, Myk was right, the tool performed as hoped and our ability to deliver Firefox to interested people improved significantly. Another bout of tension was reduced. Many, many thanks to Mike Morgan for writing the tool, and to Scott Kveton and the mighty team at OSU who helped get much needed equipment up and running in short order.

We didn’t reach perfection of course, the demand was too great. And as we had suspected, the infrastructure for update.mozilla.org was our weak point, and we had to curtail its operations during the peak activity.

Meanwhile, Bart and Pav were preparing for the AIR MOZILLA web event, a 5 hour live webcast and text chat. The show had interviews and discussions with Mozilla staff, with questions and music. I was so engrossed in the day’s activities I didn’t quite understand why there were suddenly speakers next to my desk, but then the event began and it became clear. We wanted some way to connect with people involved with Firefox and we can’t do by all getting together, so Bart came up with the webcast idea and Pav played host. Bart has spent some time looking at technologies that help with community development, such as the drupal / civicspace technology he connected with the Spread Firefox project, and AIR MOZILLA was another example. Bart orchestrated, Pav interviewed a lot of long time mozilla.org participants for a webcast. We simultaneously hosted a 2-channel IRC session where people could pose questions. Hundreds of people joined the IRC sessions where Asa and Marcia played IRC hosts, gathering questions and passing them on to Bart and Pav and then to various participants. The event was a nice, low-key marker of the tremendous international interest and participation in the project.

By the time the AIR MOZILLA event came to an end serious fatigue had set in, and many of us went home to get a good, long rest. Or at least the start of one. I suspect that many of us didn’t get enough of a good long rest until the holidays at the end of the year.

Firefox represents something new for us — a release that is squarely aimed at the end-user. A great browser where power features don’t get in the way of the general user. It’s sleek, innovative, accessible to mere mortals and also packs enough punch for the most sophisticated power user. If you’ve been waiting to try Firefox or to recommend it to others until it has the official stamp of approval, now’s the time.

This release also marks a new era in our international focus. I’m not sure one can imagine how much work is involved in the localization effort until one has tried it. In addition, our localization teams are all volunteers. That’s right, volunteers. People volunteer in order to have Firefox available in the language they care about. This involves not only the actual localization, but reviewing and verifying all aspects of the localizations, waiting for our build cycles to complete, working at odd times to hook up with everyone else and helping the Mozilla Foundation figure out how best to manage such a massive task. And of course, all this needs to be done on a very tight timeframe. I am regularly astonished by the outpouring of support for the Mozilla project, and the localization effort is a perfect example.

In addition to improved localization, Firefox 1.0 also has integrated search capabilities, both in the Search Box and in the startpage. We know that search is a critically important feature of the web, and we’ve worked to make Firefox’s search functionality as useful as possible. Firefox ships with a set of search plug-ins, allowing the user to select the search engine which works best for his or her needs. In addition, one can choose to add a broad range of additional search engines quite simply.

In keeping with our emphasis on the end-user, we have redesigned the Firefox startpage. We wanted a startpage that reflected the Mozilla project and provided a good access point to the web. Given the importance of search, we decided to add search functionality to the start page itself. Google has long been recognized as a leader in search experience and so we chose Google.

We provide access to search services from a range of sources including Google, Yahoo, Amazon, eBay and others you can see in Firefox. We expect to see some funds come to the Foundation as a result of our integrated search. We’ll use any funds that result to help support the Mozilla Foundation’s non-profit operations. When finances are involved questions often arise about their influence on an organization and we’ll spend some time talking about this as we go forward.

For now, I want to express my admiration for the vitality and commitment of the Mozilla community. The Firefox 1.0 release builds on the work of hundreds of programmers and QA contributors and thousands of participants. It also highlights the efforts of new groups of participants, including:

• the Visual Identity team — a new group of volunteers that has brought great polish to Firefox, our new mail client Thunderbird, and our website;
• Spread Firefox — the admins who spearhead community marketing campaigns, and the thousands using their creative energy to let others know about Firefox;
• Mozilla Europe and Mozilla Japan — our international affiliates who assist with all manner of activities for users outside of the United States;
• an increasing number of people employed to work on Mozilla technology, some within the Mozilla Foundation and many funded by other entities; and
• the millions of people who have downloaded the Firefox preview releases.

The breadth and depth and innovation of the Mozilla community continues to bring unprecedented results. Mozilla Firefox is a great browser, and a testament to the thousands of people who have contributed their energies to bring innovation, creativity and choice to the web.

Rediscover the Web — Get Firefox

It’s already been a year since the Mozilla Foundation was created, and it’s been quite a year. The Mozilla Foundation has prospered, our products are receiving rave reviews, consumer and enterprise interest in Mozilla products is at an all time high, the awareness of the importance of choice in browser software is growing and our community remains vigorous and energetic.

The Mozilla project has long been an open source technology leader. With our new Firefox and Thunderbird products, we are now focusing on bringing a better Internet experience to millions of new users.

There have been many highlights for the Mozilla Foundation this year:

• We’ve built a potent development team to lead continued innovation. Our small team is built entirely of veterans with many years of experience in the Mozilla project.
• We turned our attention to the end user for the first time, after years of being solely a technology project. The result: Firefox (for browsing) and Thunderbird (for email). 1.0 launches for both products are now just a few months away. To help end users we’ve started offering CDs (we ship more than 5000 CDs for every new release!), telephone support and Mozilla wares (our new tshirts are proving to be a big hit). With help from David Shea and others, we’ve also given our web site a make-over.
• Our friends in Europe have created Mozilla Europe, a non-profit organization that’s working to promote Mozilla throughout the continent. Similar efforts are now underway in other parts of the world.
• We continue to innovate. Just a few weeks ago, the Mozilla Foundation spearheaded an announcement with Macromedia, Apple, Opera, Sun Microsystems and Adobe to deliver a richer plugin experience. Mozilla engineers are active participants in the WHAT Working Group, a collaborative effort with Opera and Apple engineers to bring innovation to web forms and other parts of the web.
• US CERT, a division of the US Department of Homeland Security, recently recommended that Internet Explorer users switch to a different browser to avoid recent dangerous security exploits affecting IE. Secunia, a leading third party security firm, also recommends using another browser.

The results?

• 5.5 million downloads of Mozilla products in the last 30 days, including over 3 million downloads of Mozilla Firefox. That’s close to 200,000 downloads a day for the last 30 days.
• More than 300 million page views on our web site for the year. This month alone, an estimated 10 million visitors have come to mozilla.org – and we’re just halfway into the month.
• Amazing buzz for Firefox, with more than 20,000 web sites linking to the Firefox product page!

Most importantly, the tide is finally beginning to turn: after years of increasing monopolization of the web browser market, Mozilla-based browsers (browsers based on the Gecko rendering engine, that is) are now gaining modest but noticeable market share. Both Web Side Story and OneStat.com, leading web analytics firms, confirm this trend.

All of this terrific news wouldn’t have been possible without help from lots of individuals and organizations. The Mozilla Foundation is a small organization (just a dozen people), but we have lots of friends and contributors:

• Financial assistance from AOL, IBM, Sun Microsystems and Mitch Kapor allowed us to launch the Foundation.
• IBM, Sun Microsystems, Red Hat and others employ dozens of engineers who dedicate their full time energy to the Mozilla Foundation.
• MozillaZine has become a lively hub for Mozilla news, community feedback and end user support.
• MozDev is home to hundreds of extensions and other projects that keep Mozilla on the leading edge.
• Close to 4000 individuals have donated almost $10,000 per month to the Mozilla Foundation.
• The Visual Identity Team has done an amazing job on the Firefox and Thunderbird logos and default themes – and they’re not done yet!
• A consortium of universities, lead by Oregon State University, is providing server infrastructure helping meet bandwith requirements for our significant (and growing) downloads.
• MozSource, the company that operates the Mozilla Store, ships thousands of CDs and Mozilla merchandise every month, processes a good chunk of the donations coming to the Mozilla Foundation, and is now sponsoring SilverOrange to improve the Mozilla web site. SilverOrange is also doing a lot of this work on a volunteer basis.
• Most importantly: the thousands of hackers and testers who participate in producing great software.

What’s next? Firefox and Thunderbird 1.0 — just around the corner. But don’t wait. Download the preview releases today and help spread the word. And if you prefer to go with a proven, mature Internet suite that’s been around for years, make sure to download Mozilla 1.7.

Help us take back the web!

– The Mozilla Team