November 2004 Archives

Deanna and I spent a long weekend in Napa Valley, then followed the Russian River over to the coast at Jenner, and headed Southward and back home. The weather was beautiful and the vinyards were all ablaze in fall colors. Here's a taste:

Click on the thumbnails to get a larger view if you find the photos interesting. (Refrain if you're not really interested, my bandwidth is tight.) I've also got the full resolution images and I'm happy to share those if anyone is interested but my bandwidth limits prevent me from linking those all in as well. These are about 5% of the photos I took during the weekend.

I've received several emails asking me to talk about the new Netscape Browser. I don't have much to say except that from the reviews, screenshots, and blog posts I've seen, (and having been tangentially involved with several Netscape releases in the past,) I think this is probably Netscape's best technology preview to date.

If you're looking for a more serious critique, mozillaZine's Alex Bishop has put together a fairly lenghthy review of the Netscape Browser with lots of screenshots. I encourage you all to check that out.

Garnering nearly 8 million downloads in the first three weeks, Firefox 1.0 -- with its small size and clean, easy to use interface -- has certainly taken the Web by storm. There's no doubt that Netscape picked a solid foundation for their new product, using Firefox's Gecko and Toolkit. Where they're going with that, well, that's still not clear to me. I guess time will tell.

This morning, the Firefox 1.0 download counter hit 7,500,000. We've done in 3 weeks with 1.0 what it took us 50 days to accomplish with the Preview Release. Amazing! Keep spreading the word.

We're getting very, very close to Thunderbird 1.0. Last night we took the last of the planned changes and if all tests out well today, we'll have a 1.0 Release Candidate tomorrow.

If you're available to help us test these candidate builds before they go out to hundreds of thousands of users (hopefully tomorrow) please join us today on IRC, server irc.mozilla.org, channel #mozillazine, for BugDay focused on Thunderbird testing and bug triage.

Now that Firefox 1.0 has shipped and a significant number of extensions have been updated for 1.0, it seemed like a good time to ask you all again which extensions you use, if any, and why.

I only use a few these days. First, I'm a happy Bug Me Not user. I actually registered at most of the sites I use Bug Me Not, but at some point I forgot my passwords or even which email account I used to register. Bug Me Not saves me the trouble of trying to keep that stuff straight for all those sites where a login seems pointless anyway.

The second extension I find myself using is Link Visitor which allows me to mark links on a page as visited or not visited. I mostly use this to keep my blog in order (details of that are probably unimportant).

I occasionally use the Translator and Linky extensions but those are becoming pretty rare for me.

So tell me about your extensions :-)

We're back from a great weekend all over Napa Valley. The weather was wonderful and the colors were amazing.

The wine tasting was, as always, great fun and the comfort of the lodging and the spa treatment (thank you, Deanna!) were rejuvenating.

If I'm not too busy with the upcoming Thunderbird 1.0 release, I'll try to put up a small gallery of photos.

Slashdot has a story up describing a Windows XP upgrade that wiped out 60,000 machines at the UK's Department for Work and Pensions.

My upgrades to XP were mostly fine and my upgrades to SP2 went pretty well too.

I'm going to be gone for a few days so feel free to use this post for whatever commenting you're interested in.

For those of you in the U.S., I hope you're having a pleasant Thanksgiving. For everyone else, best wishes for an enjoyable weekend.

I guess this is the sixth year I've cooked the same turkey recipe. I may post pictures of the bird later tonight. Deanna brined it for the last day and a half and I've been tending to it in the smoker for the last eight hours. We're about an hour from dinner and tomorrow morning we're off to the wine country for a long weekend.

The sfx download counter probably won't be updated until I get back on Monday and I probably won't be posting at the blog till then, either.

If you're on Windows and your system isn't fully up to date, you're hosed. You're not sort of hosed. You're not kind of hosed. You're fully hosed.

Spyware and adware is not just something that clueless downloaders get. It's something that vulnerable IE systems get via exploits. Get your patches and get on Firefox.

We're getting very close to the Thunderbird 1.0 release and making our final stability push. If you'd like to help us with this, please download the latest branch nightly Thunderbird build and when you install it be sure to select the "custom" install so you can be sure that the Talkback crash reporting component is enabled.

We've fixed a number of serious stability problems and in order to verify that the crashes are indeed fixed -- and that we haven't introduced any new ones, we need a lot of users testing the latest nightly builds with Talkback enabled.

These builds are quite solid and I use them without fear of losing any of my data (including tens of thousands of local messages in my POP3 account). It's always good practice to have backups of sensitive data (even when running production software) but Thunderbird has been so strong for so long that I don't fret dataloss at all.

So join us as we drive the final miles to Thunderbird 1.0. There's no doubt in my mind that this is an Outlook-killer and we just need to get those magic numbers, "1 dot 0" attached to it so that the rest of the world will feel safe in trying it out. You can help us achieve that 1.0 status by downloading and using these latest nightly builds.

I've just posted an update on the 1.7 branch plans to the n.p.m.seamonkey newsgroup.

The Mozilla 1.7.1, 1.7.2, and 1.7.3 releases were all security releases from near the 1.7 release tag. Since then, we've taken quite a few changes into the 1.7 and Aviary branches but haven't delivered those changes in a Seamonkey release yet.

We're planning a mid-December Mozilla 1.7.5 release that will include all of those changes and be a Gecko-equivalent to Firefox 1.0. Web and web application developers should be able to test and certify against either of Mozilla 1.7.5 or Firefox 1.0 and have confidence that their code will work in the other.

For 1.7.5 we are only considering changes that provide the maximum compatibility with the Gecko shipped in Firefox 1.0, and of course any security issues that might be raised in the next week or so.

I've updated the "1.7.x" Bugzilla flags to "1.7.5" since that's the next major release we're shipping. We don't intend to take any changes into 1.7.5 that would break Gecko compatibility with Firefox 1.0 and we'd like to make this release happen quickly so we're also not likely to take even non-Gecko changes into 1.7.5 unless they're security related.

I can't wait until we have a Firefox and Seamonkey shipping identical Geckos to tens of millions of users. We get the question, all of the time, "which version do I code to?" and it's going to be nice to have a simple answer of "Code for and test with Firefox 1.0 _or_ Mozilla 1.7.5".

Wow!  Amazing!
 2 Weeks & 6 million downloads!
Keep spreading the fire!

A big thanks to Alfons, who pointed out the new Titan photo-mosaic. This beautiful mosaic was created from a series of photographs taken during Cassini's flyby of Titan nearly a month ago.

I've scaled the image down some but I encourage you to check out the high-resolution Titan image (537.1 kB) available over at NASA's Planetary Photojournal. It's just amazing.

Mission scientists are still puzzled by the sharply defined bright and dark regions. It's clear from the lack of cratering that the surface is geologically young but what caused those divisions or what features they even are is still up in the air. With several weeks to analyze the images, scientists are still calling them "extraordinary" and "alien".

I'm sure we'll all learn a lot more about Titan when the ESA's Huygens probe descends through the thick atmosphere in January 2005. I can't wait.

In case anyone was wondering, yes, I'm still following those two amazing Mars rovers. Just a quick update for those of you who care.

Spirit's driving slowly up the Columbia Hills at Gusev Crater, trying to be very frugal with batteries which don't get a lot of solar charging during the Martian winter and spring. Terrain is rough in the area so things are pretty slow.

Opportunity is charging back up and (soon) out of Endurance Crater where she weathered the Martian winter. This side of the crater puts her solar panels at a choice angle to the sun so batteries are doing well and Opportunity is taking a lot of great photographs and doing other data collection.

Maybe during the slowdown this winter, with the Firefox pressure cooker behind us, I'll have a little more energy for updates on the rovers, Cassini, and several other very interesting missions underway or in planning.

From this Register article it seems like the MSN search team is handing out screenshots of their new search page using Firefox :-) See this example, for example ;-)

I just realized that the freeiPod offers change each day. If you don't know what I'm talking about, see yesterday's post where I set out to earn a free iPod from freeiPods.com.

How this works is that people subscribe to various services like blockbuster video online, credit cards, music services, newspapers, etc. through the link I provide here at the blog and if 5 people sign up for something then I get a free iPod.

If you don't need any of these kinds of services, then feel free to ignore these posts. If, however, you are looking for a music service, a newspaper subscription, a credit card, etc. then please get it through my link so I can get credit.

The offers seem to change each day, so if you're not interested in the services listed today, check back in a day or two and see if there's something that better fits your bill.

Thanks.

You know you can't wait to see what's new in 1.8 Alpha 5. Get your fix here.

We're working to make our Bugzilla products and components better reflect the current state of Mozilla development. Towards that aim, we've created a new "Seamonkey" product to house all of the bugs for the Mozilla application suite. We've created a new "Core" product for bugs in Gecko, Editor, Networking and other core Gecko components shared across all of the Mozilla applications. And we've also created a new "Toolkit" product to hold bugs in the new platform toolkit underlying Mozilla's "Aviary"-style applications (and possibly Seamonkey if someone ports it to the new toolkit).

We've still got a little bit more shuffling of products and components but the big moves are happening today. Nothing's final and I'm open to improving things further so please let me know if you've got questions or suggestions.

Thanks.

Mozilla's browsers have a total global usage share of 7.35 percent. The new Mozilla's Firefox has a total usage share of 4.58. The total usage share of Mozilla was 2.1 percent at the end of May.

It seems that people are switching from Microsoft's Internet Explorer to Mozilla's new Firefox browser. The total usage share of Microsoft declined 5 percent and the total usage share of Mozilla increased 5 percent," said Niels Brinkman, co-founder of OneStat.com.

See the full article.

If all goes well, we'll be seeing a 1.8a5 this afternoon or evening. For the Mozilla developers, this also means that the 1.8a6 trunk will be opening for business.

After talking to my friend Robert Accetura who just got his free iPod in the mail, I've decided it's worth a try. Robert described his experience and it seems like it's a legitimate opprotunity and he's got iPod in hand to prove it :-)

Here's the deal. I really, really want an iPod :) If you want to help me get one, I just need 5 people to sign up for a credit card, a music subscription, blockbuster online, etc. You can sign up for one of these offers here.

I'm also interested in hearing about your experience with FreeiPods.com -- if you've been through this and got your iPod or not.

Jason, over at Just Well Mixed, has a great post titled Get the Most Out of Firefox: Cut Through Pages With Find As You Type. If you're not already using FAYT then you really should give this a read.

It seems my previous post was confusing. The point I was trying to illustrate was that we have varying percentages of downloads coming from IE users that seem heavily skewed depending on whether the download is of, for example, the el-GR localization -- where 86% of the people downloading the Greek localization did so using IE - or the en-GB where only 45% of the downloads were performed using IE.

Another way to put this would be to say that, based on my rough analysis, people seeking the en-GB localization are mostly downloading with non-IE browsers. I don't have a breakdown of that but it's probably mostly older Gecko-based browsers. People seeking the Greek localization are mostly downloading from an IE client and so I'm guessing that before 1.0 Gecko-based clients didn't have a lot of penetration into the Greek market.

Is this more clear? The reason I even bring this up is because I hear a lot of people saying things like "yeah, you may have millions of 1.0 downloads, but those are all probably just people upgrading from the Preview Release." So this was a response of sorts trying to point out that people using IE to download Firefox 1.0 probably aren't PR users (who would presumably be using the PR to download 1.0 rather than IE.)

My first pass through the data suggested that more than 53% of the Windows Firefox 1.0 dowloads were being performed by IE users. Out of curiosity, I looked a bit closer and saw that there was a fairly wide spread, with IE users dominating a few of the localized builds, and non-IE downloaders having a strong majority in other localizations.

Hope this clears things up a bit more. Let me know if it doesn't.

The Firefox 1.0 release has just hit the 5 million download mark. We're seeing a much swifter uptake for 1.0 than for the Preview Release which took more than a month to reach 5 million downloads.

Additionally, the majority of our Windows downloads, so far, have come from IE users. (A few interesting data points on that: en-US is about 53% IE downloaders, el-GR is an amazing 86% IE downloaders, and en-GB only about 45% IE downloaders.) update: en-GB, el-GR, etc. is not necessarily where the download is coming from, it's the specific localization that was downloaded.

We're clearly reaching a new world of users and we're doing it at a faster pace than any time in Mozilla's history. Thanks to everyone that's helping spread the word.

If you've been looking for ways to get more involved with spreading Firefox, head over to SpreadFirefox.com and get hooked in with our open source marketing and PR community.

Looking for a forum avatar or an IM buddy icon? Then head over to Rakaz' Avatar Gallery.

I'm posting this from Firefox 1.0 on OS/2 Warp. Nice work Mr. Kaply.

gemal.dk - gemal's psyched site

Scot Finnie, over at DesktopPipeline.com, has a good review of Firefox 1.0.

Firefox 1.0 is the first Web browser since October, 1997, that deserves serious consideration by the entire world of desktop computer users. On October 1, 1997, Microsoft released Internet Explorer 4.0, which was a far better Windows browser than any other on the market. And, despite ongoing efforts from Opera, Netscape, Mozilla, and others, it has retained that mantle ever since.

Firefox 1.0 offers everything most people need to browse the Web, in a way you're apt to like better than Internet Explorer.

Colin D. Devroe, over at TheUberGeeks.net, has a nice article that explains Firefox to non-techy people but does it without that 'talking to a child' condescension that you find in a lot of articles trying to explain tech stuff to non-tech people.

Dear Internet Explorer:

It's over. Our relationship just hasn't been working for a while, and now, this is it. I'm leaving you for another browser.

If you're looking for help with a Firefox deployment, Automated deployment of Firefox with extensions, themes, and pre-configuration by Bob Templeton might be just what you need. Rob's guide "will show you how to build and deploy custom Firefox configurations for your business, school, or home networks. This has been tested on XP, 2000, and 2003."

If you know of other articles, guides, or tools for Firefox deployment, please let me know in the comments. Thanks.

By my rough estimates, we achieved just above 3.5 million downloads in the first week of the Firefox 1.0 release. Averaging half a million downloads a day for the first 7 days is simply amazing!

With 1.0 we had just over a million downloads on the first day. To have something to compare to, the best single day of downloads that we had with the Preview Release was around 300,000 and it took us more than three weeks to top 3.5 million downloads.

Another interesting comparison point is that while we broke a million downloads in a single day, Apple's long-awaited iTunes for Windows took more than three days to achieve its first million downloads. We're on fire!

This is so exciting! Keep spreading the word!

And we're back!

Yes, we know. SpreadFirefox.com is down. We're workin' on it.

While you're waiting on SFX to return, go read these articles :-)

The New York Times' "In the Battle of the Browsers '04, Firefox Aims at Microsoft"
SFGate.com's "Firefox 1.0 beats Microsoft browser in several areas"
Salon's "Firefox -- the flag bearer of free software"
CIO Today's "Will Firefox Ignite Enterprises?"
and Eweek's "Browsers: Choice Is Your"

Jason Lefkowitz, over at Just Well Mixed has a great blog post on turning Firefox into a Web searching powerhouse. Go give it a read and spread the word.

"Internet Explorer, you're fired."

Rob Pegoraro, in the Washington Post, says "Tuesday, the answer to IE arrived: a safe, free, fast, simple and compatible browser called Mozilla Firefox." He goes on to praise the clean interface and sane default preference settings and gives a nice rundown of Firefox's feature advantages. Rob concludes saying, "I think anybody using Internet Explorer should switch to Firefox today. Seriously. Even if you've loaded every IE security update, Firefox will give you a faster, more useful view of the Web. If you haven't -- or if you use a pre-XP version of Windows ineligible for Service Pack 2's security fixes -- it would be lunacy to stick with IE.".

This kind of mainstream press is really exciting. If you've got a minute, e-mail Rob Pegoraro at rob@twp.com, and let him know you appreciate this informative article.

In a news post over at Bloglines, the new Bloglines | Firefox Center was announced: "your one-stop shop for getting started with Firefox, RSS, and Bloglines." Check it out.

It seems like someone in the Opera usability or user experience group started listening to users. I've just downloaded the Opera 7.6 Preview and I'm very impressed with the direction they're headed with the default interface.

This is a preliminary review and I've only been playing around with the app for a couple of hours so Opera users please don't go crazy on me if I've missed something or mis-represented something. Thanks ;-)

First, the install and first launch was pretty good. I didn't care for the first panel of the installer. I'm of the opinion that the installer isn't the place to introduce your users to the app's featureset. That's just an opinion, though. I was also a bit confused by the advertising selection dialog. It was odd that picking different ad types, google or normal, gave a different toolbar set. I also think that users shouldn't be making this decision. The text ads are clearly a better user experience. Opera should just drop the banners and streamline this experience.

The default browser window setup is so much better than 7.5 that I almost can't believe it's the same app. The menubar is clean and simple and browser-focused, like it should be -- without all of the mail and chat and other crap. The navigation and address/search bar is basically the same as what's offered in Firefox (excellent ;-) The last vestige of MDI, the max/restore/min icon, is finally gone and it feels like a real tabbed browser. Rather than spend a lot of time praising the new layout, I'll just note that almost all of my complaints about stock layout have been remedied.

That's not to say that everything was great. I'm sure that some of my early problems were simply bugs that will be fixed in the final release so I'm withholding final judgement until we get a final release :-)

First, I had a very difficult time with this odd "start" bar that pops up from the addressbar when you try to type in an address. I'm really not sure what value that toolbar ads and it's suffers from several bugs -- the worst of which are that it doesn't seem to go away and that it doesn't play well with the history auto-complete pop-up.

Second, I think the choice to use tooltips as the primary link location indicator is a bad choice. Tooltips are on a delay that's appropriate for tooltips, not for a quick check to see where the link is going to take you.

The "View" eye icon is really distracting and kinda creepy :)

It looks to me like many favicons/site icons are getting cropped or mis-scaled. Not sure if that's a bug or intentional.

Next, the pop-up blocked slideup notification widget seemed jerky and distracting with no obvious way to turn off. Also, the trash can in the there is a bit confusing. I liked that I could retrieve closed tabs but it was unclear why that was combined with pop-ups or how it relates to the bookmark trashcan. Maybe the icons need more differentiation or something.

Also, in my brief use, I experienced a couple of crashes which is a bit concerning. I've very seldom crashed Opera so I hope that they can get back to the stability I'm used to by the time they ship this update.

Finally, not getting the proper i-beam selection cursor when hovering over text was really annoying. I sure hope this is a bug and not as designed.

With a switch to the native Windows style and little customizing (which was much easier in this version than the last one I tested) and a $39 registration, I got a browser that was quite usable.

Opera still has a ways to go but little touches like putting the Preferences menu item on the correct menu and setting a start page that doesn't trigger 3 pop-ups, signals that the Opera browser team is moving in the right direction. In a couple more versions, they might be caught up to where Firefox has been for the last year ;-)

Chris Beard, over at his sfx blog, has posted a great new project.

Sitting here at the Mozilla Foundation it's hard to fully appreciate how far and wide Mozilla software is used, and the effect that it has on people's lives. There's also no way for us to see all the great articles about Mozilla, Firefox or Thunderbird in your local newspapers, or from magazines from outside the USA.

Can you help?

Here's the idea: send us a postcard or press clipping, letting us know where you are in the world and how you use Mozilla software and we'll put it up at the Mozilla Foundation for all to see! Please be sure to include your e-mail address as we'll pick someone each week and send out a t-shirt or other prize.

(I'll post a picture of our rather bare walls shortly.)

You can reach us at:

Mozilla Foundation
1350 Villa Street, Suite C
Mountain View, California
94041-1126
USA

It looks like we did just short of a million downloads on our second day putting us over 2 million for the first two days. Amazing.

My preliminary data from today shows a bit more slowdown with the hourly download rate falling by about 25% from it's high on Tuesday. That seems pretty close to what we saw for the first few days of the curve for 1.o PR. Wow.

Let's see if we can keep spreading the word and keep the trendline what it was for the Preview Release. Tell your friends and family. Tell your local newspaper. Tell your co-workers and classmates. Spread the Fox!

With partial data in, I'm excited to announce that we're estimating that we broke 1 million Firefox 1.0 downloads on day 1 of the release. What an amazing day! Keep spreading the word.

Bad timing:

In its latest monthly update, Microsoft was not been able to fix a serious vulnerability in Internet Explorer because the flaw was discovered only a few days before the company�s regular update was due. To make matters worse a worm exploiting the flaw was released on Monday, leaving the software giant without any option but to ignore the problem � for now.
....
The IFRAME vulnerability and the Bofra worm appeared in the week leading up to the final release of Mozilla�s Firefox browser, which is unaffected by the worm and seen as the biggest threat to Microsoft�s dominance of the browser market for many years.

Today, C|Net reviewd IE 6 for SP2 and Firefox 1.0.

Mozilla Firefox 1.0 is the dream Internet browser you've been looking for. Featuring a host of small technical improvements, including tabbed browsing, built-in and customizable search bars, and a built-in RSS reader, Mozilla's Firefox browser is the one that should finally put a dent in Microsoft Internet Explorer's unrivaled market dominance.

But small improvements and countless security patches for IE haven't changed the software's overall functionality much in years, which has given newer browsers such as Firefox an advantage when it comes to cutting-edge features and security. In our opinion, it's time for a new Internet browser. For cutting-edge technology and better Internet security, we like Firefox over Internet Explorer

If you're already running Windows XP, the SP2 upgrade is free. But if you're running an earlier version of Windows, it costs $99. Ouch. By comparison, Mozilla Firefox is free and runs on all versions of Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux.

Firefox 1.0 remained fast and stable and displayed an impressive range of cutting-edge browsing options. We were able to view every Web site just fine, thank you. If you're fed up with the latest Internet Explorer security patch issued from Microsoft or with the latest virus to capitalize on some flaw in IE, you should switch to Firefox--now.

Missing from the latest Internet Explorer interface is a built-in search engine toolbar, although you can download free versions from a number of third-party sites such as Google and Yahoo. Nor is there a built-in alert icon whenever there's a security update for your browser; instead, you'll need to check the Windows Update site. In comparison, Firefox includes both a built-in search bar and an upgrade indicator.

you must open several instances of the Microsoft browser, each requiring system resources. So viewing multiple Internet pages in IE can tax your computer, while tabbing through multiple pages within Firefox will not.

Perhaps the most noticeable interface difference from IE is the addition of a customizable search bar built into the Firefox menu bar. Although Google, Yahoo, and others offer plug-in search bars for Internet Explorer, the Firefox search bar is much more flexible, allowing you to add not only other search engines but Amazon.com, eBay.com, Dictionary.com, and even IMDB.com.

But there are many things you still can't do with Internet Explorer 6. For example, you can't view RSS feeds. (RSS is an easy way to filter and view news and blog headlines.) While there are third-party RSS readers available as IE plug-ins--Puck, for example--we like the fact that Firefox includes its own built-in RSS reader. Another thing you can't do in IE is open multiple Web pages within the same window, a feature that's available in Firefox

Firefox's tabbed browsing, RSS support, security features, and overall cool factor make it more attractive than Internet Explorer.

Unless your business has specific ActiveX technology needs, you are much more secure running Firefox than Internet Explorer.

I'll let you figure out which quote was from which review :-)

We've been serving up about nearly 50,000 downloads per hour today. Amazing. I don't think we'll have anything solid for first day stats until we get settled down a bit more but I feel pretty confident saying that we're having our biggest day of downloads ever and should more than double what we did on our first day of downloads for the Preview Release just two months ago.

I feel like I should post something profound but I'm just exhausted and don't have it in me. I suppose I should have prepared something ahead of time for this blog post but making Firefox better took precedence.

Thanks, definitely, to everyone who helped make this release happen. We're all very proud of it and we hope you enjoy it.

From /. take a look at this super-cool visualization project over at sourceforge.

I'm having computer problems (hard drive damage or corruption) and I've been mostly off-line since yesterday. Things are momentarily better, but I think I'm gonna toss this disk and start fresh in the morning.

Firefox 1.0 is so close you can almost taste it! Discuss :-)

This CBSNews article, by Larry Magid, is one of the better written articles I've seen in the mainstream press. It covers the Mozilla Foundation, various Mozilla applications, Open Source, and more -- and he does it in that difficult format (for most writers,) the 800 word column.

Feel free to email him with praise :)

Last night I made up a Windows XP user icon. This is the icons that shows up for each user at the login screen and at the top of the Start menu.

If you're interested in using this icon, which I've tuned to look nice with the default Luna theme, here are the instructions for making the change:

1. Right-click on the image and select Save image as.
2. Save the image to a safe location (I recommend C:\Windows)
3. From the Start menu, go to Control Panel.the User Accounts applet.
4. Select the user you'd like to modify and click the Change my picture link.
5. From the resulting Pick a new picture window, click the Browse for more pictures link and locate the saved image.
6. After selecting the saved image, just close the User Accounts window and you're all set.

   If you've got Firefox, Thunderbird, or Mozilla user icons of your own, feel free to share them here.

We're working hard to ship some localized builds simultaneously with the Firefox 1.0 release next week. To do that, we need your help. I'm not trying to step on the toes of the localizers or anything like that, but I figure that since time is really short we should get more testing sooner rather than later.

If you speak one of the languages listed below, it would be a great help if you would download the nightly build for your platform and let me know how it looks. Some good areas to look over include:

1. do the strings in the installer look like reasonable translations that would be well understood?
   
2. do the labels for the primary toolbar buttons look like reasonable translations?
   
3. do the items on the menubar and the items in the menus look like reasonable translations?
   
4. do the items in the preferences/options window, primary tabs, look reasonable?

German
Windows: firefox-1.0.de-DE.win32.installer.exe
Linux: firefox-1.0.de-DE.linux-i686.installer.tar.gz
Mac: firefox-1.0.de-DE.mac.dmg.gz

French
Windows: firefox-1.0.fr-FR.win32.installer.exe
Linux: firefox-1.0.fr-FR.linux-i686.installer.tar.gz
Mac: firefox-1.0.fr-FR.mac.dmg.gz

Spanish
Windows: firefox-1.0.es-ES.win32.installer.exe
Linux: firefox-1.0.es-ES.linux-i686.installer.tar.gz
Mac: firefox-1.0.es-ES.mac.dmg.gz

Italian
Windows: firefox-1.0.it-IT.win32.installer.exe
Linux: firefox-1.0.it-IT.linux-i686.installer.tar.gz
Mac: firefox-1.0.it-IT.mac.dmg.gz

Dutch
Windows: firefox-1.0.nl-NL.win32.installer.exe
Linux: firefox-1.0.nl-NL.linux-i686.installer.tar.gz
Mac: firefox-1.0.nl-NL.mac.dmg.gz

Polish
Windows: firefox-1.0.pl-PL.win32.installer.exe
Linux: firefox-1.0.pl-PL.linux-i686.installer.tar.gz
Mac: firefox-1.0.pl-PL.mac.dmg.gz

Swedish
Windows: firefox-1.0.sv-SE.win32.installer.exe
Linux: firefox-1.0.sv-SE.linux-i686.installer.tar.gz
Mac: firefox-1.0.sv-SE.mac.dmg.gz

Finnish
Windows: firefox-1.0.fi-FI.win32.installer.exe
Linux: firefox-1.0.fi-FI.linux-i686.installer.tar.gz
Mac: firefox-1.0.fi-FI.mac.dmg.gz

Danish
Windows: firefox-1.0.da-DK.win32.installer.exe
Linux: firefox-1.0.da-DK.linux-i686.installer.tar.gz
Mac: firefox-1.0.da-DK.mac.dmg.gz

Chinese (simplified)
Windows: firefox-1.0.zh-CN.win32.installer.exe
Linux: firefox-1.0.zh-CN.linux-i686.installer.tar.gz
Mac: firefox-1.0.zh-CN.mac.dmg.gz

Chinese (traditional)
Windows: firefox-1.0.zh-TW.win32.installer.exe
Linux: firefox-1.0.zh-TW.linux-i686.installer.tar.gz
Mac: firefox-1.0.zh-TW.mac.dmg.gz

Japanese
Windows: firefox-1.0.ja-JP.win32.installer.exe
Linux: firefox-1.0.ja-JP.linux-i686.installer.tar.gz
Mac: firefox-1.0.ja-JPM.mac.dmg.gz

Localization QA hasn't yet finished "blessing" these builds as RC2 yet -- that's why they're still in the nightly directory. If you find something horribly wrong with the build (like it not starting at all) then that's probably already being worked on. Other languages can be found at the FTP site. If you can please let me know what you think of the quality of the translation, that would be great. Thanks!

John Carroll, in this ZDNet article doesn't seem to like that Firefox is asking developers to improve their code.

What do you all think? Will developers support us as we work to make the Web a better place? Or will they say "bah humbug, IE is easier" and keep writing to that ancient browser? Does one bug cost Firefox the standards high-ground? Does one bug mean Firefox sucks?

Today we have, for your emailing pleasure, a brand new Thunderbird release, Thunderbird 0.9. Scott, David, te QA team and others have put a lot of hard work into this release and it really shows.

If you're a Thunderbird user (or a Mozilla suite user) I think you're definitely going to enjoy this new release.

My favorite new feature is the "saved search folders" (formerly known as "virtual folders.") This feature allows you to perform a search on your messages and save that search as a folder. Every time you select that folder, you see the results of the search as if it was a discreet mailbox. I've replaced all of my IMAP folders and message filters with virtual folders. If you liked "message views" this really takes it to the next level.

You can also find a new "grouping" feature that's gonna make a lot of people happy I'm sure. To see how this one works, just sort your messages by any one of your sorts (I use date) and hit the letter "g" on your keyboard or use View -> Sort by -> Group by sort.

Thunderbird 0.9 kicks serious butt. Get it!

Also available today is our (hopefully) final testing release candidate for Firefox 1.0. If all goes well with this testing release, we'll be on schedule for a November 9 final release (that's next week!!!) We're well past the point of new features so there isn't a lot of flashy new work to test in this candidate build, but we do have some areas where we took bug fixes and we really could use your help making sure we didn't break anything.

You can find all the details over at Ben Goodger's Inside Firefox weblog.

We're pretty much wrapped up with the few bug fixes we took after the first release candidate and we'll be pushing a second release candidate to the ftp server shortly. Stay tuned for more information.

Ask away. I'll pick a question to answer sometime in the next few days.

A9.com has announced the availability of the A9.com Toolbar for Firefox.