pkim's blog

After an overwhelming response and some tough decision-making, the winner of Operation Firefox has been announced! Winner Agent R.W. from Georgia Tech University and team plastered the giant Firefox logo on their school's football stadium for thousands to bask in.

The Firefox logo soared to new heights on runner up Agent Teren's plane.

The Firefox sticker also graced the set of the New York City Opera, as well as a concert bus at an Iowa State tailgate. You can check out all the amazing pictures here or check out the Operation Firefox blog for the full scoop. We want to thank all our special agents for their creativity and participation! Over and out!

A couple of folks here at Mozilla in Mountain View mentioned hearing some enthusiastic recommendations for Firefox this morning on KQED radio's Forum show. Here's the show archive; the segment is a talk about the Web 2.0 Summit and the clip about Firefox starts at about 45:30. The guests are journalists Sarah Lacy and Brad Stone. Sarah mentions the Firefox crop circle and the efforts by thousands of individual people to help Firefox gain momentum.

[Mozilla announced a new initiative focused on Internet mail and communications yesterday. Read the press release here, and see Mitchell Baker's post below, crossposted from her blog. - Paul Kim]

Mozilla has been investing in email since the Foundation was created. We have a good, solid client in Thunderbird, and we have aspirations to do more. We've spent the last few months working on how to meet those aspirations. Many thanks to everyone who participated in the discussions.

The result is that Mozilla is launching a new effort to improve email and internet communications. We will increase our investment and focus on our current email client -- Thunderbird -- and on innovations in the email and communications areas. We are doing so by creating a new organization with this as its sole focus and committing resources to this organization. The new organization doesn't have a name yet, so I'll call it MailCo here. MailCo will be part of the Mozilla Foundation and will serve the public benefit mission of the Mozilla Foundation. (Technically, it will be a wholly owned subsidiary of the Mozilla Foundation, just like the Mozilla Corporation.)

David Ascher is joining Mozilla to lead MailCo. David has been an active participant in the Mozilla project for many years, both in his role as CTO of ActiveState and personally through participation in our governance discussions. In fact it was one if David's comments on an early draft of the Mozilla Manifesto that helped crystallize its structure. David also has deep experience in the open source world and is a member of the board of directors of the Python Foundation. David also brings familiarity with Mozilla technology and the Mozilla community through years of using Mozilla technology to build ActiveState products, including the new Open Komodo project. We are very fortunate to have David join us to lead this effort.

Mozilla will provide an initial $3 million dollars in seed funding to launch MailCo. This is expected to be spent mostly on building a small team of people who are passionate about email and Internet communications. As MailCo develops it and the Mozilla Foundation will evaluate what's the best model for long-term sustainability. Mozilla may well invest additional funds; we also hope that there are other paths for sustainability.

We'll be setting up MailCo in the coming weeks. Part of this is forming the team of people, part is developing a transition plan to move Thunderbird into MailCo gracefully while supporting the Thunderbird users. That will take some time. We 're on the path now though and that's a great thing.

The goals for the new company are:

• Take care of Thunderbird users
• Move Thunderbird forward to provide better, deeper email solutions
• Create a better user experience for a range of Internet communications -- how does / should email work with IM, RSS, VoIP, SMS, site-specific email, etc?
• Spark the types of community involvement and innovation that we've seen around web "browsing" and Firefox.

One of the things I find most exciting about the Firefox work is the way people use Firefox to dream up what the web could be, and then go out and so something to make it happen. We can spark the same kind of excitement and energy level and innovation in the email/ communications space. And when we do, Internet life will get much, much better and much more interesting.

Help us make it happen.

- Mitchell Baker, Chair, Mozilla Foundation 

Learned about this from Asa. The folks at Mozilla Japan created this Firefox customized car for a competition in Nagoya and debuted it this weekend as part of Mozilla 24. 

Photo courtesy of Flickr user nobihaya. 

Hey SFXers:

Mozilla is looking for experienced web developers and highly technical users to give us feedback on the latest milestone for the next major version of Firefox, Gran Paradiso Alpha 7.  Built on top of Gecko 1.9, Gran Paradiso Alpha 7 is now available for testing purposes. In particular, we're testing for website compatibility and stability.

You can find the full release notes and download Alpha 7 here: http://www.mozilla.org/projects/firefox/3.0a7/releasenotes/

Also, testers can back up their profiles using the following instructions: http://kb.mozillazine.org/Profile_backup

Gran Paradiso 1.9 Alpha 7 contains the following notable changes:

    * Support for Mac OS X 10.3 (Panther) has been removed. Gecko 1.9 will no longer build or run on Mac OS X 10.3.
    * Default visited pages history size 9 to 180 days (see bug 332748)
    * Full page zoom of images, layout and text (see bug 4821)
    * Many fixes for context menus, clipboard, and drag services on Mac OS X.
    * Reworking of XUL menus and popups (see bug 279703)
    * document.all now returns a NodeList of elements (see bug 259332)
    * Several new clipboard events (see bug 280959).
    * A class of wrappers to mediate access between web pages from different origins (see bug 367911)
    * Cross site XMLHttpRequest specification implemented (see bug 389508)
    * A method for opening modal dialogs from content (see bug 194404)
    * Color profile support (see bug 16769)
    * Text in <canvas> (see bug bug 339553)
    * SVG lighting (bug 383184) and tile filters (bug 373572)
    * Support for CSS text-rendering property for HTML (see bug 387969)
    * Many fixes to CSS font property bugs (see bug 377947, bug 216456, bug 383979), bug 388458), and bug 383979)
    * -moz-border-*-start and -moz-border-*-end CSS properties are implemented (see bug 74880)
    * -moz-initial implemented for all remaining CSS properties except quotes and -moz-border-*-colors (see bug 80887)
    * window.getComputedStyle supports all supported CSS properties (see bug 316981)
    * Dropped SOAP support (see bug 332174)
    * Browser-side support for windowless plugins on Unix/X11 (see bug 137189)
    * A full Gecko 1.9 bug fix list

[Reposted from blog.mozilla.com - Sarah Arora, one of Mozilla's summer marketing interns, introduces Firefox Campus Edition. - pkim]

Hey everyone,

My name is Sarah, and I am a marketing intern at Mozilla and also a returning senior at Stanford University. One of the projects I worked on at Mozilla this summer was the Firefox Campus Edition, which is a special edition of Firefox designed specifically for students like me. The Campus Edition bundles the latest version of Firefox with three great add-ons: FoxyTunes, Zotero, and StumbleUpon. What student has time to look through all the awesome add-ons that Firefox offers? No worries; Mozilla has made it easy for us. Here’s a little bit of info about each add-on:

FoxyTunes lets you control almost any media player and find lyrics, covers, videos, bios and much more right from your favorite browser.

StumbleUpon lets you channel surf the Internet to find great websites, videos, photos and more based on your interests.

Zotero helps you collect, manage, and cite your research sources. It lives right where you do your work – in Firefox itself.

These tools will allow you to maximize your time doing research and have fun while surfing the Web. Just download and enjoy: http://www.firefox.com/backtoschool.

Firefox user kurtmac blew me away today with his Mozilla Firefox NASCAR set. Check it out for insane virtual racing action, featuring the 'Fox. Courtesy of the Firefox feed on Flickr.