Going to conference is fun. You meet with interesting people from all over the world, discuss about interesting matters, but it does imply a lot of traveling, mostly flying. Actually, mostly waiting for planes, or security check, or taxi or train. I don't mind flying and I love going to conference, but the waste of time to get there drives me nuts. You may know that I'm an avid motorbike rider, and like some helmet stickers say, "I'd rather be riding" (than wasting my time traveling).
I've been Mozilla has been doing tons of things recently in Europe, which in many cases implies that I must be there:
Mozilla Add-Ons Workshop in Paris
Community meeting in Germany (in this case, William attended for me, thanks William!)
Press meetings in Italy last week
Mindtrek event in Finland...
I was told that Linus Torvalds has a blog. I'm a big fan of Linus. He's pragmatic and direct (and very smart too, but we all knew it).
Linus mentions that he's written a piece of software which monitors the time his kids spend on-line.
(...) you can get it (...) if you want to play around with it. It's not fancy, it has no docs, no installation instructions etc, but if people are actually interested, I'll be happy to help. Why? Because I've always noticed that my own projects get so much better if others are involved, even if it's just as a user...
This is indeed true about the Linux Kernel, but pretty much every piece of software.
Oh, and Linus runs Firefox, too! (as mentioned in his post about SSD). That's another high-profile Firefox user, along with Vint Cerf (and the next...
Meme(me) via Standblog September 22nd, 2008 at 08:10
Via John Lilly
Take a picture of yourself right now.
Don’t change your clothes, don’t fix your hair... just take a picture.
Post that picture with NO editing.
Post these instructions with your......
A microphone. Take it and speak up!
Mozilla is doing really well at enabling participation within the community on a worldwide scale. In this regard, Bugzilla is just amazing to discuss technical details, submit and review patches. But there are some topics that just don't fit into a bug report. For them, a we've found surveys to be a great tool. We currently have two examples:
If you are an add-on developer: Add-on developer survey
If you're a Firefox user and/or contributor: Firefox in your country survey.
Now there are much broader topics that Mozilla needs to discuss as a community. The proposed 2010 goals is one of them. Now this makes discussion a lot more harder, because it's less technical. It's also more challenging for non-native English speakers like me to discuss...
Fountain on place de la Concorde
Alexandre III bridge, seen from the Invalides...
TechRadar writes that the Ubiquity extension for Firefox knocked (their) socks off. Their words, not mine!
I installed Ubiquity when it was publicly announced. Working in an international environment, I immediately fell in love with the translate command. I select a piece of text with the mouse, invoke Ubiquity with a keystroke (Alt-Space in my case) and type translate this to French. Then the text I selected is changed into something which is quite close to French (most of the times, thanks to the limits of automated translation).
It's really nice, and I'm very excited by Ubiquity's potential. But what really "knocked my socks off" is the tab command. Let me explain an issue I experience since Firefox 3: I tend to have several Firefox windows open at the same time, with dozens of...
Google
Mitchell's blog post about Mozilla's future has a very interesting tidbit that may go unnoticed. I'll post it here so it gets a little more attention:
We've just renewed our agreement with Google for an additional three years. This agreement now ends in November of 2011 rather than November of 2008, so we have stability in income.
The past deals with Google spanned periods of 2 years, so not only we have secured income with our biggest partner, but we have secured it for a longer period of time.
This, on top of ground-breaking recent announcements such as TraceMonkey, the concept series and Ubiquity — along with increased localization efficiency — demonstrate our ability to innovate and execute on a global scale. Combine this with a secured revenue stream, and...
10 years after its launch, Mozilla keeps impressing me day after day, in many different ways. Let me give you two very different examples:
Localizing something in 44 languages in less than four days
We have decided recently to trigger the major update from Firefox 2 to Firefox 3 for people who have not yet manually installed Firefox 3. One "detail" remained to be fixed: the 15 words message displayed to Firefox 2 users was not localized... Well, translating 15 words sounds like a pretty easy task. Do this into 44 different languages is a bigger challenge! Our community, wonderfully led by the ever amazing Pascal Chevrel has managed to achieve this in less than 4 days. Fernando, a Spanish localizer, managed to do the work and post the result in just 34 minutes after Pascal asked...
With Firefox 3 recently released, with its market share higher than 30% in Europe, it's easy to forget that seven years ago, things were really different:
The Mozilla future was quite gloomy. I remember discussions inside Netscape were many people thought that killing Mozilla was the best option, and the Big Rewrite was still underway, and the codebase was in really poor shape (Netscape 6, anyone?)
The future of the Web was uncertain: most Web sites were limited to Internet Explorer, which was not actively developed after version 6 was released in August 2001.
At Netscape, a gang of people (the TE/DS team) was concerned that the Web needed Open Standards to thrive. In order to promote Web Standards, several initiatives took place, including:
Devedge, a Web site dedicated to Web...
Note for my readers who've been living under a rock for the past week: Mike Schrep Schroepfer, our VP of engineering is leaving us for Facebook. We had a series of toasts yesterday evening with Schrep, but I did not have the courage to step on stage to raise my glass in public. Now that I'm hiding behind my keyboard, I know that you won't see if I show a little bit too much my emotions. So here was the toast I would have delivered if I had more courage yesterday:
Schrep, my dear Schrep, what are you doing? Why are you leaving something you still love? We could hear in your voice that it's really hard. I think it's a lesson for all of us here in this room: if you decide to leave Mozilla, we'll force you to come on stage in front of 400 mozillians to explain while crying why you do...
I arrived yesterday night (1 AM!) in Whistler, British Columbia, Canada. The place is supposed to be wonderful, but I did not get to see much of it so far: either its was dark or pouring (but who cares, I'm here for the people, the ideas and the energy, not the landscape!). We arrived to late to enjoy the party, but it looks like it was great. William has pictures and more details.
Mitchell's keynote
This morning, after an intro by John, Mitchell has delivered a really good speech describing Mozilla.
Mitchell doing her keynote
Here are the notes I took. Mitchell used a tree metaphor to describe what Mozilla is.
Trunk: Human interaction with the Internet. Our mission: "How do we make Internet life better for human beings?"
Our roots (not visible, but essential to what we...
Pascal and a friend of mine have seen an ad on TV saying "In Micro-Hebdo this week, we'll discuss the best browser of the world", with the cover below.
MicroHebdo cover: Firefox 3, the best browser in the world!
Pascal bought the issue, are there are no less than 8 pages on Firefox!...
Quoting Mitchell Baker, thinking about data:
Our online lives are generating increasing data about us as individuals and about how groups of people are using the Internet. At the dawn of the World Wide Web 15 years ago people “surfed” to websites and viewed information. Today Internet life is more participatory and people create more information. In addition, a range of tools have been developed for tracking and generating data about people and our activities. The existence and treatment of this data is important to our online security and privacy. The treatment of this data also affects the public ability to understand how people use the Internet.
So there is a lot of value in knowing people's behaviour on the Internet. So far, a lot, if not all, of this value is captured by...
The recent Firefox tablet post over at TechCrunch has caused quite some stir in the blogosphere. Truth is I have with me several "Firefox computers". I'll skip the obvious: my laptop (a MacBook Pro) is a Firefox computer! Firefox is the most important app for me and many of my friends. But there are many other computers that qualify as "Firefox computers", but with a different form factor than the usual laptop. Here is a short list:
N810, Linutop 2, eeePC, MacBook
Nokia Internet Tablet
The closest to what TechCrunch describes is the Nokia N810, here running Fennec. This is a very early stage version of what will be Firefox Mobile, but the Nokia 810 stock version already ships with a Mozilla-based browser called MicroB.
Fennec in French running on a Nokia N810
eeePC...
I recently compared the Mozilla project's state 5 years ago with today, and cried Victory. I reckon I declared victory in a provocative way, as I must say. Of course, a lot has been achieved during the past 10 years, but Mozilla is now facing another set of challenges. Here is an attempt to list them:
More competition on the desktop
Microsoft finally seems to get its acts together and is reinvesting in Internet Explorer. IE7 was just a start, but IE8 sounds promising, at least in terms of Web standards support, which is good. It's a bit too early to discuss user experience improvements, but Microsoft may do better this time...
Likewise, Apple is not resting on its laurels. Webkit is quite impressive in terms of performance. Safari has an edge over Firefox as it is shipping with...
According to these documents, Mozilla Foundation was incorporated on July 14th, 2003. It's been five years. Five years that come on top of the five years under Netscape's structure. Five years during which the community has experienced pretty much all the range of possible emotions, from hopelessness (when Netscape gave up) to victory[1]. What seemed desperate in 2003 is now a daily reality. We're approaching 200 million active users.
I remember in 2003, I was going through some outplacement training, following the big Netscape lay-off. Picture this: unemployed people in a conference room, explaining to each other their "professional project plans". Most of us were quite depressed, I have to say. It was my turn to explain to the group what I was going to do. I started:
I want to...
There have been recently a couple of posts here and there that tickle my mind, but I'm going on vacations tomorrow and my brain is too tired to bring something interesting to the conversation.
So I'm going the easy way by posting links to these articles hoping that I'll be able to revisit these topics later...
Am I Bored With “Web 2.0”? ;
A Manifesto for the Next Industrial Revolution ;
Thoughts on open source and politics 2.0 ;
The Next Million Mozillians ;
The Open Web is a social movement ;
What’s Mozilla’s scope? What should it be? ;
Now I'm heading to the Firefox 3 launch party in Paris and then will take a few days off. Don't expect updates to the Standblog before a...
My dear nerdy friends, just picture this:
a big bar where you can have drinks with friends, with good and inexpensive beer
a computer museum in which half of the items displayed are things that you have owned or used 20 years ago and the other half were pictured in your wildest dreams. Oh, and you can play with the computers on display, too!
a Cybercafé all made with Free Software running on recycled computers, with a really fast Internet connection, whose motto is "all our code are belong to you"
a big place where you meet FLOSS enthusiasts, artists, students
a country where the mountains (where you can ski) are close to the sea (where you can swim), where the architecture is wonderful and where Firefox has 35% market share.
All of this does exist, all in one place. It's called...
A couple of months ago, the team over at Kiberpipa has contacted us in order to organize a Firefox event in Ljubljana, the capital of Slovenia. The schedule of the event was just announced. It's going to be a busy day, with a press conference, followed by talks about Mozilla (Zbigniew will help, too) and of course, a party.
Slovenia is a very interesting country in many regards. It's certainly not big (2 million citizens, 150 times smaller than the US!), but Internet penetration is quite high at 62% and the economy is quite strong.
Firefox market share in Slovenia has been measured at 35% in Feb. 2008 by local firm Iprom, which is pretty close to Poland (39.4%, according to Gemius) and Hungary (38.7% accoring to Gemius), who are leading the world's adoption of Firefox.
I'm...
With more than 8 million downloads, the Download Day is an amazing success. Firefox 3 market share, measured in real time by Net Applications is North of 6%, just 36 hours after the launch. But besides download numbers, the idea of setting a Guinness book record was immensely effective to get the word out. It was super effective in mobilizing our 180 million users and the members of the press. Press coverage has been amazing in all countries, including US&UK, France, Italy, Germany and Spain (there is no Google News in Poland). Not only the coverage is beyond amazing, it has also enabled Mozilla to reach a new level in terms of Open-Source visibility for itself, for the Mozilla Manifesto (our all of our values) and for the whole Open-Source / Free Software world. For all these...
The demand for the new Firefox 3 browser has been simply overwhelming. As I write this, the number of downloads is at 6.5 million (with around 6000 new downloads taking place every minute) so we are well on the way to breaking the Guinness World Record (Firefox 2 was downloaded 1.6 million times on the first day in October 2006).
This is great recognition for our community of developers, testers and localisers who have worked so hard to make Mozilla what it is today.
We did experience a small outage on the Mozilla download site last night when Firefox 3 officially launched; as noted on some news sites including The Register and [The
Guardian|http://blogs.guardian.co.uk/technology/2008/06/17/get_firefox_sorry_you_cant.html]. But I think this just demonstrates the huge success and...
I recently saw that Poland passed the 50000 mark on the European part of the map, which made it the first European country to do so. Go Poles!
Download day map of Europe as of Sunday June 8th, 2008.png
Now, it's hard to compare countries, because of the diversity of sizes. Of course the US is leading the way, but they have a population of 300 million people and many of them are connected...
How can we compare countries on a fairer ground? This question has been on my mind for a couple of days, until Ken 'Numerator' Kovash blogged about the community-driven Download Day 2008 Statistics, which has tons of great info.
I wish we could rank countries for the download day by number of connected people. It's not (yet?) possible, but Ehsan Akhgari provides the world with Pledge Rankings by...
Giuliano talking about Firefox 3 on Adnkronos
Giuliano and Schrep demoing Firefox in Milan.
It's amazing how talking in Italian makes a great product even sexier
(Schrep is the ever traveling VP of Engineering and Giuliano is one of our volunteers in Italy, leading the very dynamic Mozilla Italia community, who manages localization and local...
I stumbled this morning on a great quote from Edwin Khodabakchian, who develops Feeddo/Feedly, posted on Scoble's blog :
We did some benchmarking between firefox 2.0 and firefox 3.0 on one of our applications which uses heavily Javascript, DHTML and timers and the results are very impressive: a much more fluid experience thanks to the timer/scheduling experience and an overall execution performance which is 3.5x faster. I am not exactly sure how they did it but the results are impressive.
Disclaimer: Edwin is an old friend of mine, when we were both Netscape employees @ the Paris office. But I promise I've found his quote...
Ken Kovash, over at the Metrics blog posts some significant information:
we’ve surpassed 60 million active daily users.
But Ken also links to a post by John Lilly dated January 2008, which mentioned that we had passed the 50 million active daily users[1].
If I read this right, we have gained 10 million active daily users in just 6 months, moving from 50 million to 60 million. Firefox has gained 20% active daily users in just 6 months, which is nothing short of amazing
Now the Web is growing, but Firefox is growing faster that the Web itself, meaning that we're gaining market share in percentage. And wait 'til we ship Firefox 3: I'm betting that Firefox adoption will accelerate!
Notes
[1] For more details on market share, active daily users and active monthly users, please...
It's really nice to see Abdulkadir Topal being interviewed in Der Standard. Abdulkadir is one of the many people helping our users to get a better Web experience in their own language. Abdulkadir is a student in Germany. His work on Firefox localization is used by 15 to 20 millions people in Germany! I don't know any students outside of Mozilla which work impacts so many people... Do...
We've seen through various blog posts that Firefox 3 uses significantly less memory than Firefox 2 (and the dominant browser) and is so far the fastest browser according to Apple's SunSpider benchmark. But does this mean in the real world? What does it actually change for our users? Does it really make a difference? Actually, it does.
Take Gmail, a very popular and complex Ajax application. It's used by millions of people worldwide[1]. You can make your own lo-tech browser benchmark without even using a stopwatch and see by yourself how Firefox 3 makes a difference:
Launch IE7 (yeah, I know, it hurts, but well, it's for the good cause)
launch Gmail in IE7
click on a message header
when the message is loaded, click on the Older > link (on the top right corner of the window) to...
When I was doing my keynote at the bDigital Global Congress, I discussed the fact that localization teams where very important for Mozilla. In this regard, Spain is a great example of this, since there are several co-official languages on top of Spanish (also called Castellano), including Basque, Catalan and Galego (spoken in Galicia). We're lucky to have versions of Firefox available in Basque, Catalan and Spanish, but for now there is no version of Firefox in Galego. In my talk, I mentioned this, and I encouraged the Galician community to join us and build a version of Firefox in Galego. What I did not know is that the situation is currently changing. While there is not yet a Galician Firefox, the Galician local government (Xunta de Galicia) has created language pack for Gallego. It...
In case you were looking for links to phishing and malware Websites (like me when doing demos), here you are:
This is a phishing Website
This is a malware......
Nokia N800, a Linux-based device, running a Mozilla Gecko-based browser
As Jay Sullivan puts it,
This is a great step for Mozilla. Our engineering team has worked very hard over the last couple of years to prepare for mobile. Our platform is now faster and leaner in the more constrained hardware and network environment of mobile phones. We’ve worked well with Nokia on shipping a Mozilla-based browser on the N810, which is a Linux-based device. We’re working on Firefox for Windows Mobile. Adding LiMo to our set of target platforms will further broaden our impact in the mobile environment.
Here is the LiMo Foundation press release.
Partial coverage:
Verizon, Mozilla to join LiMo Foundation ;
On Wednesday LiMo announced a raft of new members, the most significant...