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Four cool Firefox items, you choose
What do you want to see available next at the Mozilla Store? A $10 Firefox-themed laptop skin? A $15 Mozilla themed Rubik’s cube featuring the Firefox, Thunderbird, SeaMonkey, Camino and other logos? What about a $17 Firefox logo frisbee? Or an ultra-cool $35 flash drive featuring the Firefox 3 robot?
I’m all for the Rubik’s cube but hope the robot gets one of the faces. $35 for a 1GB flash drive seems steep even for a Firefox 3 robot flash drive. Unless there is a 4GB Corsair Survivor under the hood.
Head over now to the latest Mozilla Store poll and get what you want. It only runs until tomorrow June 24 11:59pm PST.
In case you haven’t noticed, the Firefox 3 T-shirt is already available for chicos y chicas.
Firefox aims for download record
Mozilla "Recommends" Surf Canyon
Mozilla Links
Join Support Firefox Day… now!
Whether you want to help other Firefox users, learn about the tools available to help others and the innards of some Firefox 3 features, or talk to some of the main drivers of Firefox 3 and Mozilla, Support Firefox Day is for you.
Mozilla Support has prepared a day full of support sessions, chats and workshops for today, Friday 23, 2008. Here’s the schedule: (all times US Pacific Standard Time, GMT -7)
- 8:00 - 10:00: Support session #1
- 10:00 – 10:45: Workshop: Supporting Firefox 3 users with Live Chat
- 11:00 - 11:30: Chat with Mike Connor, Developer Lead of Firefox 3
- 11:30 - 12:30: Support Session #2
- 12:30 - 1:15: Workshop: Learn all about the new bookmark system in Firefox 3
- 1:30 – 2:00: Chat with Mike Beltzner, Usability Design Expert
- 2:00 - 3:00: Support Session #3
- 3:00 - 3:45: Workshop: Learn how to troubleshoot Firefox 3 like a pro
- 4:00 - 4:30: Chat with John Lilly, CEO of Mozilla Corporation
- 4:30 - 5:00: Chat with Asa Dotzler, Spokesmodel and Storyteller
All sessions, workshops and chats will take place on IRC (instructions to access audio and video will be provided during the sessions). To participate, just drop by Support Firefox Day page for the complete details and a web based chat client (powered by mibbit) you can use to join the party.
If you prefer to use your favorite IRC client (like ChatZilla), connect to irc://irc.mozilla.org/#sumo.
Do new Web tools spell doom for the browser? | InfoWorld | Analysis | 2008-05-12 | By Neil McAllister
Shredder: in-development Thunderbird
If you are using a Firefox nightly to browse the web, you (better) know you are walking on a minefield where a just landed patch can explode at any time taking some or all of your bookmarks, cookies or saved passwords with it. So, builds from the Firefox trunk (development code repository) are properly called Minefield. Its logo, a lit dynamite stick stuck into the globe, makes things even clearer.
With Thunderbird, if you go the nightlies way, you should know you are checking your email with a shredder: a bad move and it’s buh-bye to your beloved years-old mail archive. So it has been aptly named Shredder and now Mozilla Messaging is looking for a logo that reflects its risky nature.
If you have an idea for a logo, you are invited to submit it to the tracking bug in Bugzilla.
Thunderbird 3 is expected to include some interesting features including integration with Lightning, the calendar extension; a visual refresh; STEELE, an API for more powerful extensions, and extensive code cleanup. The first alpha should be out in the next few weeks with a second one to follow on July.
Welcomed updates in Mozilla Add-ons 3.4.1
The revamped Mozilla Add-ons site launched last month has been updated to address a few common complaints regarding some limited functionality.
Among the most relevant: Themes, Dictionaries and Language Packs can be searched independently again, the range of application versions an add-on is compatible with is now displayed, review titles are displayed, 20 search results instead of 10 by default, Internet Explorer 7 compatibility so add-ons for Sunbird or Thunderbird can be properly downloaded, etc.
Still, I would like to see options to filter out incompatible and experimental add-ons from search results, and a separate category for search plugins.
Anyway, this is indeed a significant update, to be followed by yet another in the next couple of weeks.
We’ve got a logo, by graphicsguru
Thanks to Jamey Boje, the graphicsguru, who kindly offered to design a new Mozilla Links logo to match the new look, Mozilla Links now features a real well done one I am very pleased to introduce to you all.
Black and red is Mozilla, and links are links, hence, Mozilla Links. Simple, clear, and greatly executed by Jamey.
He is a frequent contributor to Mozilla related projects where graphic design talent is needed. Among other works, he is responsible for much of Spread Firefox and Foxiewire art and design, tons of banners and buttons, and the Firefox and Thunderbird CD art. He has also collaborated with other projects including Drupal, Radscripts, Glaxstar, phpCow, ionCube, and R3N3.
I want to thank Jamey for his selfless contribution and hope all you readers enjoy it in ML’s pages and your tab bars!
Two Mozillians among most influential people in IT
Earlier this month, Ziff Davis business oriented publications, eWeek, CIO Insight and Baseline, published its list of the Top 100 Most Influential People in IT which “looked for people who not only had a tangible track record of IT success, but also have far-reaching influence, the ability to effect change and a deep level of engagement in developing emerging technologies.”
The list includes a couple of notable Mozillians: Brendan Eich and Wyndow Snyder, Mozilla Corporation Chief Technology Officer and Chief Security Officer respectively.
“Eich helps ensure that the browser is up to the task of acting as the operating system— running an increasing number of mission-critical enterprise applications in the cloud.”, says the article about Brendan who is ranked in the 30th position.
About Wyndow, in the 43rd position, it reads: “A former Microsoft security strategist, Snyder borrowed a page from Redmond’s playbook and introduced a comprehensive threat-modeling and penetration-testing routine to Mozilla.”
The list is headed by Larry Elison, Steve Jobs and Steve Ballmer and includes a long list of notable including Tim Berners-Lee, Nicholas Negroponte, Mark Zuckerberg, Marc Andreesen, and Ray Ozzie. Michal Zalewski, a famous white hat hacker who disclosed a few Firefox vulnerabilities last year, today and information security engineer for Google, is also in the list in the 51st position.
A new face for Mozilla Links
It’s been almost a year since the last major update to Mozilla Links look and, to be honest, it gets boring to look at the same page so many times a day every single day. Besides, it was broken. At some point in time I messed so much with the Vertigo WordPress theme to the point it was too much pain to fix.
So for the last month or so I’ve been working on a new design, largely based on the iNewspaper theme. I’ve tried to make it very clean and easy on the eye.
These are a few changes you will hopefully notice for good:
- Print. There is now a stylesheet for printing so no loading for you, no plugin required for me, just print the page or click on the Print link in the post toolbox and you will get a clean version.
- Share. Do you like to share Mozilla Links content? If you do, the ShareThis link in the post toolbox is for you. It provides for ways to share a post over digg, reddit, StumbleUpon and a lot of others social bookmarking sites as well as email. You let me know if you think there are too many options or you miss one.
- Threaded comments. You can now reply to a specific comment so no need to quote or messy scrolling to find what someone is answering to.
- Breadcrumbs. The path to the actual content is shown just below the header.
- A new logo. For the sake of it, really. The only thing I was sicker about than the site design, was the logo itself. So it is gone for good. Not that I am particularly in love with the new one, but it is different and somehow: 1) keeps the color reference to Mozilla colors (black and red), and 2) suggests connection (as in “Links”).
- A few Firefox 3 icons here and there.
- Less ads. Really I hate to add ads. But I am greedy. Lucky you I am less greedy these days so there you go.
- The theme is called iNewspaper, but it could as well be called iNewYorkTimes. I love the NYT design. Consequently, Mozilla Links shamelessly borrows a lot of ideas.
- Mozilla Links runs on WordPress 2.5, as it has since its release about a month ago. It is a terrific upgrade with a lot of improvement for admins and a few for readers.
I hope you enjoy this new design. Thank you for stopping here.
Please look around, kick the tires, and let me know what you like, what you don’t and what you miss.
New Mozilla Add-ons an inch short of the perfect central
Mozilla has unveiled the new version of Mozilla Add-ons, the official repository for Firefox, Thunderbird, SeaMonkey and Sunbird extensions, plugins, search plugins and themes.
As seen in the February preview, it provides a cleaner interface, puts search front and central, and the interface is available in 24 languages, a very important achievement.
A welcomed improvement is that it detects the browser version and either displays an Install button (Download for Thunderbird add-ons) for compatible add-ons and notifies the incompatibilities for those that aren’t. I would like a checkbox where I could quickly filter incompatible add-ons in or out.
New add-ons that are awaiting review and approval are included in search results and lists marked as experimental and with a link to logon to be able to install them. While it is good to be able to see them, I miss an option to filter them in or out.
Add-on profiles include a download counter for every add-on so you can judge its popularity, several screenshots thumbnails that open in the same page, and a compact area to rate and review it.
Unfortunately it doesn’t address the biggest concern with February’s preview: the inability to search themes, dictionaries and search engines independently. For example if I am looking for the Wikipedia search plugin, I’d enter wikipedia in the search box and select the Search Tools category, but the results include several other search and Wikipedia related extensions all mixed up and it will be pretty hard for a new user to identify what he needs to add it to his search bar.
The tiny Search Plugin, Theme and Dictionary links below the add-on categories list in the front page doesn’t help much either. If you click on the Theme link, the new page is dominated with two recommended extensions not themes. An option to browse them (not search) is in a lower panel.
Search plugins, themes and dictionaries are very specific and different. A user may want to add a Yellow Pages thingy to his search bar and will be overwhelmed with too many unrelated stuff: experimental and incompatible extensions and themes that has nothing to do with what he’s looking for.
It seems the functionality is there to make finding a specific add-on (50% of visitors according to Mozilla Add-ons’ Basil Hashem) a dead-simple task. I suggest adding pure themes, pure search plugins and pure dictionaries categories to the search menu, and a couple of checkboxes to include incompatible and experimental (sandboxed) add-ons, unchecked by default. Or at least make the theme, search plugins and dictionaries browsing panels central in their respective pages.
A lot of search plugins have been added making it a more serious alternative to Mycroft, but still there are several heavyweights missing like YouTube or Mininova, or, for Spanish speakers, the Real Academia de la Lengua plugin.
I also noticed there are some bugs that made Firefox add-ons incompatible with my Firefox 3 nightly appear as downloadable (not installable). Unfortunately, I haven’t found a way to consistently reproduce it but will report as soon as I do.
Mozilla Add-ons’ Basil Hashem provides more details in his blog.
Mozilla Messaging starts up
David Ascher, announced today the launch of Mozilla Messaging, Inc., a fully-owned Mozilla Foundation subsidiary (hence, sister of Mozilla Corporation) dedicated to advancing Internet messaging.
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Related Articles at Mozilla Links:
- Firefox 3 theme for Vista is here. Join the discussion.
- Mozilla Digital Memory Bank podcast
- Mobile phone email addresses
- Instantbird: Mozilla-based instant messaging
- Spicebird brings Mozilla-based collaboration
- Thunderbird 3 plans include calendaring and more
New Mozilla Add-ons preview
In preparation for Firefox 3, Mozilla Add-ons recently underwent a number of important updates to support the new Add-ons Manager which tightly integrates with it to provide recommendations, search and install from a new Get Add-ons page.
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Related Articles at Mozilla Links:
- Another Firefox 2 theme teaser
- Firefox logo getting an update?
- FullerScreen 2: Firefox as your presentation software
- Have you tried Miro?
- Preview that tab with Tab Scope
- Firefox 3 icons preview
Firefox mugs and plushies are back
The US Mozilla Store is offering again cute Firefox plushies (9″, $16) and introducing Firefox coffee mugs (12oz, $8).
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Related Articles at Mozilla Links:
- Firefox plushes extinction
- On vacation!
- Foxkeh upgraded to 3D
- Unified Back/Forward button for Firefox
- Post your experiences to the Mozilla Mosaic
- Firefox chronicle by Ben Goodger
Ten years of Mozilla
Ten years ago, Netscape announced it would release to the public the code of its flag ship product, Netscape Communicator 5, making it an open source product. The action came at a time when Netscape was still the dominant web browser: 65 million users and 90% market share in the educational segment according to Netscape’s own accounts. But Microsoft’s Internet Explorer was grabbing share at a furious pace thanks to it being free (at a time Netscape was about$30) and specially the fact that it came bundled with Windows 95 and upcoming Windows 98 (released on June 1998).
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Related Articles at Mozilla Links:
- $4 billion Mozilla IPO… then you wake up
- AOL announces end of support for Netscape
- Firefox user profile, the real one
- Mozilla to open corporate office in China
- Mozilla Links turns four calendars
- UPDATED: Air Mozilla returns this Wednesday, August 1