pkim's blog

Operation Firefox: The results are in!

Tue, 18 Dec 2007 15:44:38 -0800

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!

Meet the Firefox Marketing Team

Thu, 08 Nov 2007 00:56:25 -0800

Over the past couple of years that I've been at Mozilla, we've been fortunate to have terrific people join the marketing team, deliver strong programs and roll out blogs on Planet Mozilla and Spread Firefox who've never been formally introduced to the Mozilla community.

Like a lot of Mozilla, we have a much smaller team relative to our reach and impact on the Web. When we launched Firefox 1.5, appropriately enough there were about 1.5 dedicated marketing staff in the US dedicated to the launch. We about doubled this number for Firefox 2.

As we've been gearing up for the launch of Firefox 3, the team's grown. We have marketing team members working on our web sites, events, advertising, PR, analytics, grassroots outreach and more.

You've already seen posts by several folks that I'm about to introduce here on planet and on SFx. All of us are fully invested in the work our fellow ninjabots in dev, QA, build and IT pour into making Firefox 3 a six-gallon bucket of awesome.

So without further ado, meet the Firefox marketing family (add -at- mozilla -dot- com after the email names):

Mary Colvig
Mary joined Mozilla in 2006 after representing us as part of our PR team and immediately jumped in on the Firefox 2 and Thunderbird 2 launches. She currently manages our events program.
email: mary
blog: http://blog.mozilla.com/blog/author/mary@mozilla.com/

Alix Franquet
Alix is leading our work to support international marketing, with an emphasis on empowering community marketing. She's also mind-melding with the Firefox development team to build reviewers' guides for Firefox 3.
email: alix

David Rolnitzky
David leads our new user outreach activities, from search engine marketing to partner initiatives with eBay and Kodak.
email: david
blog: http://www.giantspatula.com

Melissa Shapiro
Melissa is our PR manager. She makes sure Mozilla and Firefox stories are represented well in the media that cover our work.
email: melissa
blog: http://icouldntfindanypaper.blogspot.com/

John Slater
John is Mozilla marketing's creative director. He's our branding and messaging guru, responsible for the voice we use to represent Firefox in our marketing.
email: jslater
blog: http://www.intothefuzz.com

David Tenser
David is a longtime contributor to Mozilla and authored the reference standard for Firefox support. He's joined Mozilla to lead the rollout of new end user support resources, working with a team drawn from the community.
email: djst
blog: http://www.djst.org/blog/

We work with colleagues all over the world. In Mountain View: Rhian Baker, Ken Kovash, Alex Polvi, Asa Dotzler, Jay Patel and Seth Bindernagel. In Europe: Tristan Nitot, Jane Hatton Finette, Anne-Julie Ligneau and Pascal Chevrel. In Japan: Gen Kanai, Kaori Negoro and Kohei Yoshino. In China: Li Gong and Jack Guo.

It goes without saying that we are working together with thousands of marketing community contributors through Spread Firefox and beyond to get the word out about Firefox.

We'll be sharing a bunch more over the coming weeks as we build up to the worldwide launch of Firefox 3 about our planning, content and approach. In the meantime, say hey to the Mozilla go team.

Heard on the radio: "Switch to Firefox!"

Thu, 18 Oct 2007 14:47:56 -0700

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's New Focus on Thunderbird and Internet Communications

Tue, 18 Sep 2007 07:38:15 -0700

[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

Firefox Custom Car

Sat, 15 Sep 2007 15:42:56 -0700

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.

Help Mozilla Test Gran Paradiso Alpha 7

Wed, 05 Sep 2007 12:21:33 -0700

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

Introducing the best thing to hit campus since ramen noodles

Tue, 28 Aug 2007 20:26:23 -0700

[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.

Daytona 'Fox

Wed, 15 Aug 2007 21:43:50 -0700

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.

Watching Firefox

Wed, 01 Aug 2007 21:28:41 -0700

Longtime Firefox community marketer Raiph triggered a discussion a few weeks back about creating a project to share a common set of tags to track Firefox news, via del.icio.us. I owe Raiph some feedback, which I'm doing now.

Here's Raiph's draft:

Do you read planet.mozilla.org? Would you like to be able see a stream of posts like that, but filtered by tag? (For example, viewing just posts tagged 'marketing', or 'mac', or 'marketing+mac'.)
Do you write blogs included in planet.mozilla.org? Does your blog software support tags?

The intent behind this:

If Mozillans knew that tagging an URL was the canonical way to expose
one of the URLs out there to those interested in it, e.g. that tagging
an URL with "firefox" and "support" and "faq" was probably or
definitely going to get that URL exposed to those interested in FAQs
about Firefox support, I believe more and more Mozillans would do that,
and that the Mozilla Firefox support community would reap the
significant benefits outlined in the abstract case I made above.

Subscribing to RSS feeds that cover Firefox is an amazingly easy way to stay current on Firefox news, and to share this news with friends who haven't yet made the switch.

For example, I subscribe to two Flickr RSS feeds that send me photos tagged "firefox" or "mozilla". Here are the feed URLs; if you click on these in Firefox 2, you'll be prompted to subscribe to these feeds and you'll get fresh photos people all over the world are tagging.

All photos tagged Firefox

All photos tagged Mozilla

Let the discussion continue... :-)

Lifehacker: Top 10 Firefox features that don't require extensions

Wed, 01 Aug 2007 20:53:46 -0700

Another great post from Team Lifehacker, this time on the top 10 Firefox features that don't require an add-on.

Here's an excerpt; the full article is definitely worth a read.

Today, rather than pointing you toward a handful of extensions designed to boost your productivity, we're highlighting the top 10 productivity-boosting Firefox features that don't require an extension.

Marco visits MoCo

Mon, 16 Jul 2007 17:50:23 -0700

Asa and I had a great time hosting Marco Castelijn on a brief visit to Mozilla Corp. headquarters. Marco's a long-time Spread Firefox community leader, who was out for a wedding and vacation from Oulu, Finland. Oulu, Marco informed us, is 300 miles south of the North Pole, and as such receives all the mail addressed to Santa Claus. Thanks for visiting Marco, looking forward to returning the favor very soon!

Mmm, Donuts...

Thu, 05 Jul 2007 15:03:23 -0700

Percy at MozillaLinks tipped us to the release of an official "The Simpsons" movie theme for Firefox. Looks like this was created by 20th Century Fox in Germany (where Firefox has upwards of 25% marketshare), but it's perfectly usable, and entertaining, in other languages.

Get the theme at the Mozilla Add-ons site, and make sure to check out Percy's review. And if you like it, digg the story!

"Daddy, What's Internet Explorer?"

Sat, 30 Jun 2007 15:57:56 -0700

I just read a very entertaining blog post by Danny Sullivan, the editor of Search Engine Watch, about how his kids use the Internet. Here's an excerpt:

I had a real revelation on how you can shape your kids in tech potentially for life the other day, when my oldest son couldn't get Firefox to work. I told him to try Internet Explorer, only to get asked, "What's that?"

Read the rest of the post at Daggle, Danny's personal blog. And keep on Spreading Firefox: do it for the kids! :-)

Show off your Firefox!

Fri, 22 Jun 2007 14:32:42 -0700

Update: Part 1 is live now on Lifehacker.

Our friends at Lifehacker are asking for screenshot entries that show how you've customized your Firefox.

They'll post the coolest submissions on their site in a week. We think one of the main ways Firefox is different from other browsers is the degree to which you can personalize it to suit your tastes. This is a great opportunity to showcase this aspect of Firefox to new users.

Check out the rules on their site and get your entry in!

We Get Letters...

Mon, 23 Apr 2007 17:59:10 -0700

We've been putting up the postcards you guys have been sending us for the Mozilla Mosaic project at our offices in Mountain View. Keep 'em coming! We love hearing from you.

Don't forget - you get great Firefox gear in return:

Send a postcard telling us about yourself and your
Mozilla experience - even better with a picture of your hometown. In
return we'd love to get you a Mozilla goodie! If you are in the US,
please send us a self addressed stamped envelope
and we'll send out some stickers, tattoos, etc. For international
folks, just indicate your return address on the postcard and we'll send
the treats right out.