cbeard's blog

Personas for Firefox has been updated and officially moved into Mozilla Labs as part of our exploration of dynamic personalization.

Be sure to grab the latest version it's a major rewrite of the code and includes dozens of new designs (including a bunch in time for the holidays!). It also now works with the beta releases of Firefox 3.

Special thanks to Rhian for coordinating the development of new designs, and to Myk for driving this round of development.

A new Web site and developer APIs will be released within the next couple of weeks.

Mitchell Baker, Chairman of the Mozilla Foundation, today blogged about why we're not a "for profit" organization. I'm posting as I think that it's highly relevant and important to everyone here, as key contributors to the Mozilla Project.

Recently a Mozilla observer and contributor asked why Firefox isn't treated as a typical for-profit, commercial effort, and why we are giving up the chance to get rich. This is a great topic for discussion, I'm glad it was raised. I've got a very strong opinion on this, and am quite interested in what others think.

There are many reasons why Firefox is a public asset, built for public benefit rather than private wealth.

To start with, we want to create a part of online life that is explicitly NOT about someone getting rich. We want to promote all the other things in life that matter -- personal, social, educational and civic enrichment for massive numbers of people. Individual ability to participate and to control our own lives whether or not someone else gets rich through what we do. We all need a voice for this part of the Internet experience. The people involved with Mozilla are choosing to be this voice rather than to try to get rich.

I know that this may sound naive. But neither I nor the Mozilla project is that naive, and we are not stupid. We recognize that many of us are setting aside chances to make as much money as possible. We are choosing to do this because we want the Internet to be robust and useful even for activities that aren't making us rich.

It's possible that some participants are deferring the chance for personal wealth rather than giving up on it. Contributing to Mozilla, passing up opportunities for stock and wealth now, and planning to step back into that world after a while. This is a topic I'd love to discuss further and may write more about before too long.

But for now I want to concentrate on why I have always believed -- and still do -- that Firefox can not become a tool for some people to get rich. And why I believe the organizational home for Firefox (the Mozilla Corporation) must remain dedicated to the public benefit.

Firefox is not the creation of a "company" or a set of employees. The Mozilla Corporation and its employees are important, but not enough. Not remotely enough. And even if we had 2 or 3 or 4 times as much money or employees it would still not be enough.

Firefox is a great product because thousands and thousands of people care about it, and contribute to making it better. And the Firefox phenomena is even further removed from anything that could be accomplished if Firefox was a private company. Imagine 50 million people, or 100 million people or more. Now imagine getting all those people to download, install, and migrate to Firefox even though they have a similar piece of software already on their machines.

That used to be known as impossible. Today it's known as Firefox. It is happening because tens of thousands -- I believe hundreds of thousands of people -- have taken it upon themselves to create Firefox, to spread Firefox, to localize it, to extend it, to tell others, to install it for others, to help others use it.

Firefox generates an emotional response that is hard to imagine until you experience it. People trust Firefox. They love it. Many feel -- and rightly so -- that Firefox is part "theirs." That they are involved in creating Firefox and the Firefox phenomena, and in creating a better Internet. People who don't know that Firefox is open source love the results of open source -- the multiple languages, the extensions, the many ways people use the openness to enhance Firefox. People who don't know that Firefox is a public asset feel the results through the excitement of those who do know.

Firefox is created by a public process as a public asset. Participants are correct to feel that Firefox belongs to them. They are correct legally, since the Mozilla Foundation's assets are legally dedicated to the public benefit. They are correct practically because Firefox could not exist without the community; the two are completely intertwined.

Periodically someone suggests that it's possible to build a community like this around a core of people who own a company, and use that company for the express purpose of generating wealth for a few. I don't buy it. I don't buy it on practical terms. The participants I meet radiate the conviction that Firefox exists to benefit all of us. I don't buy it on a philosophical level either. A people-centered Internet needs some way for people to interact with the Internet that isn't all about making money for some company and its shareholders.

We need a public benefit aspect to the Internet. That's why we started building browsers in the first place. That's why we build Firefox. That's why we build Thunderbird, and why we'll build future products.

Source: http://weblogs.mozillazine.org/mitchell/archives/2007/08/firefox_is_a_public_asset.html

Gran Paradiso is the codename for the next major release of Firefox. We’re now within six weeks of releasing the first of two planned Beta releases. (You can view the current schedule at: http://wiki.mozilla.org/Firefox3/Schedule.)

The way major Firefox product releases work, following the Beta the product team will evaluate the feedback and remaining work, and a schedule for final release will begin to firm up. There is no date yet for final release -- we’re much more quality than date driven as an engineering organization.

At this point in the release cycle, we’re starting to define the marketing activities and to gear up for the launch!

One of the first things we’re doing is taking a look at the features list and pulling out key themes and characteristics.

Over the following days and weeks we’ll be posting the first draft of this work and the early plans for the launch campaign. We’re particularly interested in your thoughts, opinions and gut reactions.

The first early draft of the key bullets for the general consumer audience has been posted at: http://www.spreadfirefox.com/node/27771

So if you’re at all interested at helping out, please do not hesitate to jump right in! More info will be available soon on the schedule and community meetings.

- cbeard, on behalf of the firefox product team

As anyone close to the Mozilla project knows, we're a really different kind of animal and one that is particularly hard to describe.  I've tried in the past by saying that "We are a global community and a public benefit organization dedicated to improving the Internet experience for people everywhere." But that misses the mark and doesn't capture the fact that Mozilla is many things to many people, and we're made up of a multitude of voices, interests and passions. (And it also sounds like corporate-speak.)

To make it that much harder, Mozilla has a long and storied history and only recently gained its independence, both organizationally and financially.  To compound the matter, it turns out that the unique legal structure required to fit Mozilla's context and support that independence is complex and easily misunderstood. [1]

For example, I often wish we had chosen a name for what is now the "Corporation" (the wholly-owned taxable subsidiary of the non-profit Mozilla Foundation) that wasn't so highly charged and full of implicit negative meaning to so many people. It hasn't been an easy starting point when trying to help someone understand Mozilla.

At the end of the day, we're unique and imperfect (as anyone close to us can attest), but so far have collectively accomplished things that many believed impossible. 

I don't know if we will ever be able to make Mozilla understandable to the whole world, but I do believe that we need to now make ourselves increasingly knowable to a wider audience so that we can grow as a community (and as a movement) to meet the challenges that lie ahead.

Recent press articles and blog posts suggest that our public weekly project meetings, DevNews blog, Developer Days, Spread Firefox and so on, are only the beginning of what's needed.

- cbeard

[1]  Much more detail on how Mozilla is organized and its legal structure can be found in the detailed FAQ on the reorganizaton and in Mozilla's legal and tax documents.

A few weeks ago, I got an itch. It was the sort of itch that I hadn't had in a very long time. You see, many moons ago I was a bit technical. These days I'm more of a pointy-haired kinda guy over here at Mozilla.

Thanks to the tremendous support of many folks, over the last few weekends and several late nights, I've hacked together my first Firefox add-on.

I call it "Personas for Firefox" and it adds a feature that allows you to instantly put on a new mask or "persona" to personalize your Firefox.

It's still very early in its design and development, but ready for wider testing and feedback.

Please do check it out and let me know what you think. You can find it here:
http://www.puffinlabs.com/personas/

Special thanks to beltzner, myk, mconnor, gavin, ss, ian hayward, mfinkle, and brendan for their advice and for answering my seemingly random technical questions. And especially to asa, jslater, rolo, graphicsguru, pkim and sean for whipping up the first round of themes that can be applied.

And, of course, Mozilla Japan for the awesome design work on Foxkeh that inspired this whole idea.

- cbeard

PS: if you're at all artistic, please do consider creating your own Persona and submitting it to the list. They are really easy to make!

In the coming weeks you will see some pretty dramatic changes here. We're rolling forward quickly with a plan to evolve Spread Firefox to support the entirety of the global Firefox marketing program. Stay tuned! But do hold on and please excuse any unexpected outtages as the site goes through a rebirth.

We've started a project to define and build a community dashboard to track Firefox adoption. You can learn more by clicking on the Dashboard tab in the header, or by going to the Spread Firefox Dashboard project.

The plan is to publish a full set of metrics and raw data so that everyone has as much information in their hands as possible, to assist with planning and decision making around driving adoption worldwide. We're going to release everything under a CC license, and given the nature of some of the data it should be pretty valuable for other open projects as it gives a unique view into Internet adoption and activity patterns on a global basis.

Here's an example of some of the data we've published so far, that shows global downloads of Firefox by originating browser:

How can you help?

• If you've got statistics in your blood, love econometrics, or otherwise like to understand and tinker with modeling, please do join us. This is real world data that we're trying hard to better understand and to affect through community marketing programs on a global basis.
• If you're driving a Spread Firefox project or have ideas for new projects, jump into the conversation and let's talk about what sort of data and metrics you think would be useful for us all to collectively gather and track.

Special welcome to students and faculty from Stanford University who have joined the project through the d.school's class on Creating Infections Action, Kindling Gregarious Behaviour and the Global Entrepreneuship Marketing (GEM) programme.

If you're a student or teacher in business, stats, economics, marketing, or in any way interested in joining the project and having your class work on real world marketing programs with real data, in the open, with a global community, please do get in touch! Contact Asa Dotzler or myself and we'll get the ball rolling.

cbeard, on behalf of the mozilla marketing team