February 2005 Archives

We're in the early stages of pushing out the automatic updates for Firefox 1.0 users. We're doing a staggered rollout and the first two updates we've pushed are ca-AD and es-AR.

If you're using Firefox 1.0 in either of these locales and can tell me how your update went, please do so in the comments here.

I'll be updating this post as we bring new updates online. Stay tuned.

OK, we've pushed ru-RU. Feedback welcome.

And now it-IT is live.

OK, here's en-US.

Get your hu-HU while it's hot!

And now de-DE.

Oh, just a reminder, this is Windows only. If you're a Mac user or a Linux user, just head to the website and download there.

Ugh, seems like we were serving bits up to Mac and Linux users, which didn't work well considering they were Windows bits. We've temporarily pulled the update on all platforms and locales while we investigate.

update: The full installers per platform work great, it's just the automatic update that we're working on. To get the 1.0.1 update, head over to www.mozilla.org and download from there.

I mentioned in some earlier posts that I wanted to try to do regular interviews with Mozilla folks. The last one I did, with Bryan Ryner on XForms, was just me asking bryner a few questions. For future interviews, I'd like to solicit some questions from you all and add those to mine.

So, if you've got questions for Scott MacGregor, lead Thunderbird developer and Mozilla Foundation employee, please let me know. I'll try to assemble questions and do the interview sometime in the next week or two.

OneStat is reporting that Firefox's global usage share continues to rise, up to 8.45% this month (more than 1 percentage point gain since November.)

"It seems that global usage share of Mozilla's Firefox is still increasing and the total global usage share of Microsoft's Internet Explorer is still decreasing. It looks like that browser users of Internet Explorer 5 are switching to Mozilla Firefox instead of upgrading to Internet Explorer 6.0" said Niels Brinkman, co-founder of OneStat.com.

These numbers seem to look pretty similar to what WebSideStory is reporting, maybe a bit higher as OneStat is global and WSS is U.S. numbers.

With all the release activities sucking up my time, it took me a while to get to this installment of Ask Asa. If my answer didn't make sense, you think it's wrong (not unheard of) or you want more information, please let me know in the comments. I'll open up a new thread for the next installment of Ask Asa, so please don't as new questions here.

Without further ado:

i5mast asked, "Does bz work for mozilla?"

BZ works on Mozilla but I don't believe that he is a full-time employee of the Mozilla Foundation. update: told ya I'd be wrong on some of these :-) Like Josh Aas, Boris is working part-time for the Mozilla Foundation while he finishes up school. This is a recent development :)

Jason F asks, "Do you count Pluto as a planet?"

Jason, I haven't thought about this for a few years but last time I was thinking about this I remembered concluding that it just wasn't worth changing the classification. I'm all for adding more fine-grained classifications but the word "planet" is used loosely enough (think about all the talk of "extra-solar planets".) that I simply don't think it's worth making the Pluto re-classification.

John McDonald asked, "How can a company get a plugin added to Mozilla's plugin finder service?"

John, we don't have our policy on this issue finalized but we're working on it. In the mean time, I'd suggest emailing Chris Beard (cbeard@mozilla.org) and Johnny Stenbeck (jst@mozilla.org). Chris is working on the hosting policy and Johnny is the guy that implements the additions.

aasgier asked "What's the codename for Thunderbird 2.0?"

To tell you the truth, I don't think we have one yet. I can ask Scott. Perhaps that's a good question if I do an interview with him.

Dan Bodoh says, "I assume that given a bug, you can search for related Talkback data. But instead of starting from the bug, can you start from the Talkback data? Can the data store tell you the top five reasons for crashes? Can the data store initiate its own Bugzilla entries?"

Certainly, Dan. Most of our priority crash bug reports are the result of Talkback data. We have many great scripts, written by Jay Patel, that build reports out of the hundreds of thousands of pieces of data in the Talkback database. Right now it doesn't create the actual bugs, that's still done by a human, but the reports that Jay has created give us pretty much everything but the actual Bugzilla report.

Nils asks, "What do you think is broken with Mars Direct, and do you support it regardless?"

I've been reading stories about Mars Direct for a few years, and I've read or watched lots of interviews with Zubrin. I don't think there's anything wrong with that plan. Actually, I think many aspects of the program have already been adopted as reasonable tactics by NASA. I don't think it's going to happen, though, as a private project.

Stephen Smith asks about my perspective on Firefox/Thunderbird vs. Seamonkey. He goes on to ask about how many MoFo employees are involved in major decisions.

Stephen, if I answer this question directly, I'm likely to start a flame war. So, rather than give my personal opinion on your specific question, I'll just say that I firmly support the plan that's been in the Mozilla Roadmap for over two years to de-emphasise the Suite and focus our resources and community on the development and distribution of Firefox and Thunderbird. As far as how many people are involved in important decisions, "everyone who wants to be" is probably the best answer. Very few decisions are made by just one person. At the same time, most decisions are the result of some one person bringing up a problem or proposing a solution so it is definitely the case that it's often someone like "Ben taking a lead and seeking feedback."

modok says "XRE/GRE were planned to happen at some point. Is enough known about the details of these components/libraries/runtimes to have them in a schedule somewhere? I admit I am confused about their relationship to shipping projects (like does FF use GRE, but statically links it?)."

The GRE already happened and ships as part of the Seamonkey suite (I think since about 1.4). You might also be interested in reading about XUL Runner and libxul. Firefox and Thunderbird do not use the GRE.

Alex Bishop asks, "Why is there no list of all of the Mozilla Foundation employees?"

Alex, because we're all busy and no one has gotten around to it. It's being developed (with cute little titles and biographies) though, so hopefully will be posted soon.

Jo�l Kuiper asks "How much of the marketshare do you think firefox will have by the end of this year?"

That's a tough question. Would you consider it ducking the question if I said "as much as we can possibly get?" Probably :-) If I had to put a number on it -- and this is a total guess -- I'd say that the major reports like those from OneStat and WebSideStory will see us breaking 10%, others reports from major international websites will report as much as 20%, and some specific markets like Germany will see sites reporting upwards of 40%. So, it will really depend on how you define "marketshare".

David Tenser wonders about his cat, Tiger, who seems to spend an inordinate amount of time scratching in the litter box and telling him about it.

David, this is hard to judge from a distance. You know Tiger best and I always recommend that people living with animals trust their instincts if they feel like something is wrong. At the same time, remember that the litterbox is your cat's sandbox and sometimes the scratching is just play. Deanna says, "Some cats simply enjoy digging, and playing in the sandbox - just like little kids play, it's fun to kick up the dirt!" and recommends the article at Tidy Cats Health & Beauty.
About the screaming, it could be that your Tiger is having problems urinating and he's trying to get your attention to "show" you the problem. Our Siamese, Ptolemy, had urinary tract problems when she was young so we put her on a C/D prescription diet which controls struvite crystals and helps to manage Feline Lower Urinary Tract Disease. You can read more about FLUT at ,a href="http://www.lbah.com/Feline/flutd.htm">this page. Do you see any blood in the urine on the floor of the litter box? Is he getting plenty of water? It's definitely worth a vet visit if you're worried.
Don't forget, though, that cats learned to meow as a direct result of their contact with humans. They've learned to speak to us (the only time a cat usually vocalizes in the wild is during fighting or sex) with the meow and other vocalizations. It may just be that your Tiger is getting more communicative with age. There's a nice article on getting to know your cat's vocabulary over at The CatSite.
Tell Tiger that I said "hi" and I hope that every thing's OK with him.

M1Th asks if I've read the Harry Potter books.

Nope, M1Th, I haven't read those. I've seen bits and pieces of the movies on cable.

James Napolitano asks "what's the future of the App Suite?"

James, we've committed to maintaining the Mozilla application suite on the 1.7 branch with stability and security fixes for at least another year.

Brian Polidoro says "In the past month or so significant bug fixes have been checked in for xul error pages. Is it possible that Firefox 1.1 will ship with xul error pages enabled?"

It's definitely possible. If all the major bugs are squashed, I don't see why this wouldn't happen. Whether or not that's in time for 1.1, I don't know yet. If you remember, this was one of the early changes we made in Firefox (back before it was called Firefox) but we ended up disabling them again because of several serious bugs.

themask asks "What book(s) would you recommend on the topic of software quality assurance/software testing? What are the best test methodologies in your opinion?"

I don't have any recommendations here, though I'd be happy to hear if you or any others do. I think that there are several keys to the ongoing success of the Mozilla community QA process. The first is that we deliver mostly working software daily to thousands of testers so that we get a great breadth of ad hoc testing on all of the different configurations that we support. I think it's also critical that we emphasis testing and bug reporting throughout the development cycle and not just as a sanity check at the end of the process. During the development cycle we've got ongoing ad-hoc testing from our community of thousands nightly build testers, we've got feature documentation and testcase development happening, and we spend a lot of time digesting all of the various feedback sources from Bugzilla to the forums/newsgroups/weblogs and our automation and talkback crash reporting system. Near the end of development cycles we spend a lot more time focused on organized manual functional testing that covers everything from usability, to spelling, to feature functions.
To wrap that all up and answer your question more directly, the test methodologies I think are best include widespread ad-hoc testing with multiple feedback mechanisms, organized manual functional testing, and where possible, automation and unit-level testing. It's this third area that I think we need to dramatically improve.

Gary van der Merwe asked "What will happen with existing Tech Evangelism bugs in bmo when we start using the "report a broken website" tool? Will there be a way to transfer new bugs that are loged on bmo, and that have been determined to be Tech Evangelism, to the "report a broken website" tool?"

This is a nice segue from the previous question. As you know, Robert Accetura and I (mostly Robert) have been working for some months to develop a "Report a broken website" tool (named "Reporter" at this point) that will ship with the Firefox client and assist testers/users in reporting websites which don't work. This will be handled similar to how we deal with Talkback data -- that is, we'll look at the results in aggregate and focus on the highest visibility issues first. I think that if this new approach is successful, it will replace the old approach of taking bugs on random sites into the Tech Evangelism component in Bugzilla. I don't think we'll see Bugzilla bugs being transfered to the tool, rather, we'll see reports in Bugzilla that are the result of aggregated data from the Reporter database.

Christian asked "How is the Lightning project coming along? How many developers are working on it? How far away is version 0.1?"

Ugh. Sorry, Christian. I've been so busy with other things that I haven't been able to follow this as closely as I'd like. I'll try to get more up to speed on this and either answer in a future Ask Asa, or maybe I'll be able to get an interview with someone from the Lightning team and see if they can answer directly.

michaell asked for a picture of my cat.

Well, michaell, you can find one of her baby pictures here.

Matt Sayler asks "Is it OK to let my cats chase and/or eat raw celery, broccoli, and asperagus?"

Matt, definitely! Our cat, Ptolemy, doesn't eat vegetables but she loves kitty grass (a combination of oat, rye and wheat grass) and even the regular backyard variety. There's nothing wrong with your cat supplementing her diet with vegetables where she'll get an extra helping of fiber and some good vitamins but it's important that she also get her regular diet which contains necessary protein and minerals that they simply won't get from vegetables.
There are many recipes for making tour own cat food and most of them call for between 20% and 25% vegetables. Deanna recommends looking over Dr Goodpet and Holisticat for a couple good ones.

Matt asks, "Will there be a Firefox for the Palm OS?"

Matt, I think that's unlikely. Minimo is our smallest full-functional browser and it runs pretty nice on 64MB devices but I don't think we'll see it on Palm devices any time soon.

alfons says "Suppose we found life on Mars, and it would have DNA, wouldn't that be a real shocker? Your personal opinion, any interesting rambling? (I have been rambling about it the last few days... :)"

alfons, I think that if we find life on Mars that it will probably be DNA based. It just doesn't make a lot of sense to me to find something radically different on such a similar and close neighbor as Mars. I'd be thrilled if we had concrete proof of native life on Mars.

Neil Paris asks "Has gerv's proposal on automatically closing old UNCO's been implemented? If not, are there still plans to do it?"

Neil, the proposal hasn't been implemented yet. I'm definitely still interested in doing this.

Max asks "Do you believe in astrology?"

Depends on what you mean by "believe in" :-) I've always found birth signs interesting, both the western and Chinese zodiacs. I guess I consider them "amusing" but I don't take any of it very seriously.

Mikhail Capone asks "So when will the slashdot rendering bug be fixed? :D"

Mikhail, it's been fixed for quite some time.

nick asks "Will Firefox support the .jpf (Jpeg2000) format?"

Nick, I don't know of any plans for this any time soon.

Ivan Icin asks, "Will www.getfirefox.com ever get new content?"

Ivan, Get Firefox is simply a redirect to the Firefox product page. I suspect it will stay that way for the foreseeable future. What do you find lacking in the Firefox products page? It's easy for people to download Firefox there as well as learn about Firefox.

chuck v. asks "the new 202 fwy that is headed south will it have an exit on Main/Apache Tr.???"

I have no idea :) The only thing I remember about the 202 was crossing the Deleware into New Hope in some really ugly weather about 10 years ago. Is that your 202 or are you talking about a different one. Maybe the one in Arizona (Arizona transportation shares my name and google rank for "adot" :-)

Kroc Camen asks "Will Mozilla publish any offical documentation on their site to help end users with protecting themselves against internet nasties?" and "What is Mozilla's stance on advocates blocking IE users from their site, will there be any offical response on this that web designers can refer to?"

Well, we do post "get Firefox" links everywhere. Does that count as official documentation ;-) I don't believe we have any official stance on what websites do. I personally don't like the idea of blocking any browser from site content unless it's absolutely necessary to protect the users (in the case that the content isn't secure in a particular browser or something like that.)

Lino Mastrodomenico says "I'd really like to use Python as a scripting language for Mozilla, everywhere JavaScript can be used. When this will be possible?
Mozilla 2.0? In the far future? Never?"

Lino, I know that this is something that the folks thinking about Mozilla 2.0 are interested in. Whether or not it happens for 2.0 will, I'm sure, largely depend on people stepping up to do the work. If you're interested in this, perhaps you can help out.

Example asks "Why doesn't Firefox have better tabbed browsing?"

I think that Firefox's tabbed browsing is pretty good. You're asking for a lot of additional features there that I think could end up doing more harm than good for most users. We can always improve, and I think that one or two additional tab features might be worthwhile, but I don't think that bundling every possible tab feature into Firefox is the right approach.

POPUP HATER says "Why oh why oh why oh why oh why oh why oh why do IE and Opera now have better popup blocking than Firefox?"

I disagree that their popup blocking is better. The one major case where they block pop-ups that we don't, the flash triggered windows, is done by just disabling a feature. I don't think that approach is correct and I hope we can find a more elegant solution by the time we get to 1.1.

Wolf says "I second Alex Bishop's question for a list of Foundation employees. and can we get a current list of mozilla staff? :-)"

I don't have a list in front of me so this is from memory. If I've left someone off, I'm sure that I'll be corrected. Mozilla Foundation employees: me, Chris Beard, David Bienvenu, Brendan Eich, Chris Hofmann, David Baron, Johnny Stenbeck, Mitchel Baker, Myk Melez, Scott McGregor, Doug Turner, Marcia Knous, Josh Aas, Boris Zbarsky, Dan Veditz, Chase Phillips, Sarah Lieberman, Dave Miller, and Deb Richardson (Josh Aas and Boris Zbarsky are both part-time employees.) The staff@mozilla.org list looks pretty up to date to me.

Pipe asks "Are there any plans to update www.spreadfirefox.com, specifically in regards to some of the recent grumblings?"

Yes, Pipe. We're workin' on it.

dolphining asked "How much of a relationship does Mozilla have with Opera and Safari? I know there are projects (e.g. WHATWG) we all support/collaborate on, and there are developers that have worked on both Mozilla and one of the others, but is the relationship only "when there's a reason for it" or is it constant?"

I don't play a big roll in that area so I can't speak with authority. I do know that we have regular contact with folks from the Opera and Safari teams.

puerto says "Why are you guys all doing PR and interviews, but not coding?"

Puerto, where did you get the idea that there isn't any coding going on? The 150,000 lines of code changed since the release of Firefox 1.0 doesn't count as coding?

Jordon asks "Will 1.5 be Firefox's next highly publicized release? Or will 1.1, 1.2, etc. be given equal treatment? Or will these such things be considered on a "when-the-time-comes" basis?"

Firefox 1.1 was originally intended to be little more than a Gecko update, since the Gecko that shipped in Firefox 1.0 is now almost a year old. It's taken on a bit more significance than that with some feature additions and major security updates so I suspect that it will be highly-publicized.

Cosmo asks "What do you think about Stephen Hawking's claims to have solved the black hole information paradox? Are you sceptical (as I am) that it has taken so long to publish the paper?"

Cosmo, I wasn't aware that there was an issue here with the publishing schedule. Where can I read more about this?

jimich wonders if we'll get a "Add this RSS to Thunderbird" item on the Firefox RSS menu.

Jimich, I think that might be a little odd if you weren't using Thunderbird. Perhaps a "Add to RSS reader" item would be better and it could hand off the feed to your default application rather than Thunderbird specifically.

Robert Kaiser asks "How much support would the Mozilla Foundation give an effort to make Sea-Monkey a long-living product line? Would you guys provide e.g. a community site (in parallel to sfx)? To what extent would you support marketing efforts? (I know that all would need a developer group leading and caring for Sea-Monkey, like mconnor recently blogged.)"

I don't believe that the Mozilla Foundation has the resources to support an ongoing Seamonkey "product" (beyond our commitment to the 1.7.x releases) but I'll bet (I'm just guessing here) that the cost of supporting a Seamonkey "project" with CVS, FTP, www.mozilla.org pages, etc, wouldn't be a problem. We already do this for several projects that we don't actively "productize".

Chris asks "How do I download all email attachments, in one unmonitored session to my hard drive with T-Bird?"

I don't think we have that as a feature, Chris. Have you checked to see if there's a feature request filed in Bugzilla?

I hope you enjoyed this installment of Ask Asa. I'll try to open up a new installment sometime next week. Also, it's worth noting that I'm just one guy, an employee in a growing foundation and while I have an official role in the Mozilla Organization, these are just my thoughts and don't necessarily represent any official Mozilla policies or positions. Oh, and I'm probably wrong on some of the answers. This is just my attempt to open up communication a bit and try to help people understand what's going on.

I've finally finished up the 1.8 beta 1 release. You can read about it at the release notes and you can get it from the releases page.

Firefox and other Gecko-based browsers now account for 8.16% of the U.S. market, according to WebSideStory's latest report.

As Firefox and other Gecko-based browsers push toward 10%, IE has finally fallen under the 90% mark for the first time in WebSideStory's tracking history.

We're making great strides and doing it faster than anyone could have imagined. With your help, we're taking back the web.

Thanks to David for the heads-up.

After spending a couple of days at the Mozilla Foundation hacking and participating in informal interviews, Josh Aas has been hired on to help get our Macintosh story looking better.

Josh will be part time while he finishes up school and will come on full-time after that. Welcome, Josh, to MoFo. We're pleased as can be to have you.

Today the Mozilla Foundation's Thunderbird e-mail, news, and RSS client topped the 4,000,000 mark. It was just 23 days ago that it hit three million so the growth rate is still quite strong at over a million a month.

I've been seeing more and more of Thunderbird in the press lately. If you've got Thunderbird news or stories to share, please do so in the comments here.

If you are experiencing a crash when entering text into the address bar, you can correct the problem by removing the autocomplete.xpt file from your Firefox components directory, for example C:\Program Files\Mozilla Firefox\components. To avoid this crash, do not install a new installer build on top of an older zipped build.

This problem seems to only be impacting zipped build users of previous releases installing installer builds of 1.0.1. If you install a zipped 1.0.1 on top of an earlier zipped build, things seem to be working, and if you install an installer build over a previous installer build then things seem to also work.

If you're experience doesn't fit this, and you're crashing with entering text in the address field (or possibly the search field and forms on web pages) please let me know. Thanks.

update: if these steps aren't working, then simply delete your entire Firefox directory and reinstall. The above approach was meant to be as surgical as possible. But, before you delete that folder, please uninstall and send me a list of what's left in that folder. Something else there is conflicting, probably from a third-party extension that inappropriately installed to the application directory.

Get it while it's hot. Firefox 1.0.1 update is available. This is a security and stability update so not much in the way of new feautures.

• Windows en-US: here
• Linux en-US: here
• Mac en-US: here

Other languages can be found here. Thanks to everyone that helped make this release a reality. Thunderbird 1.0.1 and Mozilla 1.7.6 should be coming in the next week or so.

Over the last week I've seen about a dozen reports of people who recently started experiencing extreme slowdowns in Firefox. With a little investigation, it seems that the culprit is the Switch Proxy extension. If you're experiencing a recent and serious slowdown in Firefox and you've got the Switch Proxy extension installed, I'd recommend disabling it and seeing if that helps things.

(repost from my n.p.m.seamonkey post)

We've got a lot going on over the next week or so. Here's a quick list of what's happening.

Firefox 1.0.1 candidate builds are done -- we think these are the bits we'll be shipping tomorrow. Localizations are also done and are undergoing testing for a simultaneous release with en-US tomorrow around mid-day.

Thunderbird 1.0.1 still has a couple of fixes it needs and we hope to be able to get that wrapped up by the middle of next week.

Seamonkey 1.7.6 will be the security/stability update from the 1.7 branch that matches up with the Firefox and Thunderbird 1.0.1 releases. As soon as we get Firefox and Thunderbird shipped, we'll turn our attention to testing shipping Seamonkey 1.7.6. I'm usually overly-optimistic but I think we can get that out next week too.

Seamonkey 1.8b1 is done, I just need to get the release notes up and verify that talkback is doing the right things on Linux (if you've got "what's new" items for 1.8b1, please send them to me) and we'll push that out. That will hopefully happen tonight or tomorrow morning, though it's not the priority that Firefox 1.0.1 is so it may wait (some more) if I get busy with 1.0.1.

1.8b2 freezes in three weeks. I expect we'll be doing some kind of developer preview of Firefox 1.1 around the beta2. We'll stay frozen after beta2 until we branch for 1.8 and it's from that branch that we'll be shipping Firefox 1.1 and Thunderbird 1.1.

Please let me know if you have any questions about this schedule, and sorry for the lack of regular updates here.

We can always use more eyes on any of these builds before we ship. If you find any major problems send mail to drivers@mozilla.org quickly.

Well, we're there -- or nearly there. We're basically at code complete for our Firefox 1.0.1 update. The candidate builds are available for testing at ftp and if all goes well with our last minute testing, we'll be making these available as Firefox 1.0.1 sometime tomorrow afternoon.

We're still working on some with the application update infrastructure and the installer so for the first few days, we'll only be offering the release via full download at the website and then turning on the automatic update system hopefully sometime next week.

If you're interested in trying out these candidate bits, please download them and report back here if you find any problems. If you're a nightly build user, do not install on top of your current build. You'll likely experience problems, so uninstall first or install the candidate build to a new directory. If you're a 1.0 user, please do install on top of your current build -- that should work just fine.

This release is a security and stability update for 1.0.1 and does not contain significant new features. If you'd like to help us with testing, please look into the areas Jesse mentioned in the previous post, IDN, downloading, the lock icon in the status bar and address bar, autocomplete, XPI installation, the ways web applications can open and manipulate windows. I'm also interested in feedback on extensions, profiles, or any other areas that might be impcated by an upgrade.

update: We also have localized 1.0.1 candidate builds if you'd like to test those. You can get them here. Thanks to everyone that's been helping test these builds!

We're getting very close to having final bits for the Firefox 1.0.1 update and could use some help testing these candidate builds. The fixes were restricted to security and stability (and the security bugs haven't all been opened yet) so the main thing I'd like help with is making sure we didn't regress anything from 1.0.

If you're the kind of person that likes testing nightly builds and you're not desperate for a lot of new features, I sure could use help trying to find any regressions.

The latest 1.0.1 branch nightly builds are available here. If you find any regressions from 1.0, please let me know in the comments here. Thanks!

update:As Jesse noted in the comments, "The following areas were affected by security fixes: IDN, downloading, the lock icon in the status bar and address bar, autocomplete, XPI installation, the ways web applications can open and manipulate windows. If you want, you can concentrate testing on those areas. You might also want to test installing over Firefox 1.0 or a nightly build."

Also, We're aware of the talkback problem and of the multiple secure/insecure dialog problems. Any feedback you all can give is greatly appreciated.

It sounds like Nokia is rolling out Firefox to 55,000 desktops. If the reports are true, this certainly would be a good sign for enterprise adoption.

Deanna and I had a great weekend in and around Yosemite. I'll try to get some photos posted after we get these releases out. I'll have More on more on everything later today.

It's about that time again :-)

What do you want to know? I'm fairly knowledgeable about many things Mozilla but the questions don't have to be limited to just that. I've also got a keen interest in astronomy, planetary exploration, and cosmology. Oh, and I have a cat and consider myself fairly educated on the subject of cat parenting.

In addition to taking your questions, I'm interested in who else you'd like to hear from. I've got a plan to try to do a "mozilla person" interview about once a month and post it here to my blog so I'm interested in who you're interested in.

Oh, and I'm gonna be away for a few days celebrating my wife's birthday and one of our anniversaries up in the un-wired mountains so don't expect to hear a lot from me until Monday.

I forgot to mention in my earlier post that these very cool commemorative Firefox coins were donated by Coins for Anything. I'm not under any obligation to plug them but I think it's darned cool that they want to be a part of this celebration so if you've got any coin or commemorative medal needs, do give them a gander.

We've got a lot in store for you all in the next week or so. First, I hope to have some Firefox 1.0.1 (security and stability update) candidate testing builds sometime between Friday and Tuesday (depending on when we get the last of the fixes landed.) If all goes well and this update tests out, we could have a Firefox and Thunderbird 1.0.1 update by the end of next week.

We'll also be shipping an update for the stable Mozilla 1.7 application suite, likely to be called 1.7.6, about the same time as the 1.0.1s. This release would include primarly stability and security updates for Mozilla 1.7.x users. I expect we'll be supporting this stable branch with 1.7.x security and stability fixes for the next year or so.

We've also got a Gecko 1.8 Beta to ship. The delivery vehicle for this Gecko beta will be the Mozilla application suite. I think that'll happen sometime early next week, when we're mostly wrapped on the Firefox update.

At that point, we'll open the trunk for Gecko 1.8 Beta 2 development, and start the march towards the 1.8 branch, from which will come the Firefox and Thunderbird 1.1 releases. I expect we'll have at least two testing releases for Firefox before we come to the home stretch for 1.1 (at which point I anticipate at least a release candidate or two.)

There's a lot to do and not much time in which to do it. If you've got some free time, we sure could use it testing builds as we approach these releases. Keep your eyes on this blog and at mozillazine.org for more info as we start cranking out these candidates.

update: It sounds like we might be able to get 1.8b wrapped up a bit sooner and get the trunk open to beta 2 changes. I've got my fingers crossed.

JENNINGS: I read an article coming up here on Firefox (Web browser) and its perceived ability to do this better than you. Is that fair?

GATES: Well, there's competition in every place that we're in. The browser space that we are in we have about 90 percent. Sure Firefox has come along and the press love the idea of that. Our commitment is to keep our browser that competes with Firefox to be the best browser � best in security, best in features. In fact, we just announced that we'll have a new version of the browser so we're innovating very rapidly there and its our commitment to have the best.

JENNINGS: Are you going to have to push your browser faster because of competition?

GATES: Well, competition is always a fantastic thing, and the computer industry?

JENNINGS: I knew you were going to say that (laughs).

GATES: (smiles) � is intensely competitive. Whether it's Google or Apple or free software, we've got some fantastic competitors and it keeps us on our toes.

Yesterday we not only broke the twenty five million downloads mark, we destroyed it, topping 25,105,560 downloads in just 99 days. Wow!

We're taking back the web, folks, and we're doing it with a real product, not vaporware and promises of a better tomorrow.

Check out Spread Firefox later in the day for some exciting news about this awesome milestone.

As you can see from the charts below (click the image for a larger version,) we're holding a fairly steady line, averaging well above 200,000 downloads per day. It shows little sign of slowing down. The more people that learn about Firefox, the more friends, families, co-workers, classmates, and colleagues will hear about the browser that makes the web better today.

We're not going to stop at 25 million either. There are still hundreds of millions of people suffering the IE experience and that's going to change. If you know of people that are tired of the pop-ups, tired of the adware and spyware, tired of viewing the web through the distorted goggles of a browser from the last century, then take a minute to show them there's a better browser available today, one that puts the power back in the hands of the users rather than the web badguy flavor of the month.

Visit Spread Firefox and help the Firefox community take back the web.

The day is not up just yet but it looks like one of our single best days for Firefox downloads in the last couple of months. I guess a lot of people decided to check out the browser that's got Microsoft doing backflips :-)

We'll have some more exciting news on downloads for you all tomorrow.

I haven't looked at this very closely but I know people are always asking these kinds of questions, so here's a neat site called Browser speed comparisons. Let me know what you think.

The IE blog is reporting that Microsoft will be releasing an IE 7 this summer. It appears that their plans to use Longhorn as the delivery vehicle for browser upgrades has been reversed.

The only question I have is will they actually improve their rendering capabilities, or will this be a UI hackjob to bring their five year old app up to a contemporary featureset.

Actually, I have one more question. Why are they leaving out over hundreds of millions of users by not offering this to users of Windows pre-XPSP2? (it sure does sound to me like this won't even be available for XP users pre-SP2. do you all read this differently?)

Scoble's posted too. I expect Cnet to have something up today.

And here's the press release.

update: After re-reading, it sounds like this might be a bit further off than I originally thought. If they release a beta in summer, take feedback, release another beta, and take feedback, then I don't see them getting this thing out the door until 2006 at the earliest. Doesn't that line up with their plans for Longhorn ship dates? Or has that slipped out even further?

update2: and Cnet has a story up with the reasonable title of "Reversal: Next IE update divorced from Windows"

Analysts credited Microsoft's change of heart to the progress of the Mozilla Foundation's Firefox browser, which has made incremental but steady market share gains against IE in recent months. In a survey conducted late last year, Firefox nudged IE below the 90 percent mark for the first time since the height of the browser wars in the 1990s.

David makes a great observation in the comments, "This feels very much like a 'hang-in-there' message to all the corporations and orgainizations out there thinking of switching to a Better Browser(tm).... The description of what they are planning on releasing sounds very much like a glorified XP SP3." It does sound a bit like that, doesn't it :)

update 3: Mozillazine has the story up too.

update 4: Ben and Blake have posts up too.

more
The Register
Slashdot

We've been working for a while now to try to come up with a plan for routing around the IDN security problem created by a failure of some registrars to do the right thing when handing out domains.

Today, it is possible to register a IDN homographs for popular commercial sites which makes it fairly trivial to spoof users into accepting the bogus domain as legitimate.

I'm convinced, as are many others, that this is a failure on the part of the registrars but that being said, our users are put at risk by this failure and we'll be taking some fairly drastic steps (including breaking IDN in Gecko browser) to help defend our users.

If and when the registrars get their acts together, we'll reconsider enabling this support and IDN can start moving forward again.

Gerv's posted the Mozilla strategy over at his weblog.

This morning I woke up to not one but three press releases that feature Firefox. The first, XRamp Offers 256-bit SSL Certificates, says "Linux Web servers and Mozilla's popular Firefox Web browser support 256-bit encryption while Microsoft has not yet implemented 256-bit encryption for its servers or browsers." The second, Hypercosm 3D Simulation Tools for Mozilla Firefox Web Browser, is a plugin that "makes [Hypercosm's] 3D simulation capabilities available to the growing number of Firefox and Autodesk/Discreet 3ds max users." The third, New Open Circulation Edition of the Xandros Linux Desktop 'Reclaims the Web' With Firefox, Skype, and Thunderbird is pretty obviuos from the title.

I think these press releases say a couple of things. First, there is growing industry-wide support for the Firefox web browser. This is a good sign because tools and applications that support and interoperate with Firefox means that people are willing to invest significantly in Firefox's future.

The second thing here, I think, is that Firefox is hot. We're not just in the news, we're making the news and in some cases, simply owning the headlines. People want a piece of that and doing a press release that includes Firefox shines additional light to these other products tnat wouldn't have happened without the Firefox mention.

It might be nice to start a collection of press releases that mention Firefox. Do any of you know if there's some central database of tech-related press releases that I could monitor?

update And I just ran across a fourth, Linux Email Leader Scalix Tackles Email Administration Complexity with New Release Announced Today, that says "Scalix 9.2, a LinuxWorld Product Excellence Finalist, Also Extends Calendaring Features in Scalix Web Access, the Industry's Most Powerful Web Messaging Interface for Mozilla, Firefox and Internet Explorer".

update2 Here's a fifth. Feedster�s Developer Network Accelerates Company�s Growth which mentions firefox in this paragraph "
Independent software developers recently exhibited their creativity and expertise by developing unique applications using Feedster�s Developer APIs. New applications include use in an RSS aggregator, Firefox extensions, web applications, video blogging, publishing engine, and tutorials."

update2 Just to clear up my earlier comment, I'm not looking for a general news/article collection, but a "press release" collection that's just press releases.

Several years ago I sat down with Frank Hecker and Mitch Stoltz to hash out a policy for handling security sensitive bugs for Mozilla projects. I think we were fairly successful at balancing the various interests and in building a policy that allowed us to all get back to work.

Today, Frank has posted some of his thoughts as he re-evaluates the formulation of those policies. Go give his post, Full disclosure: for and against, a read.

I especially enjoyed Frank's conclusion which sums up my approach to most things Mozilla. You cannot resolve every controversy, "in the real world the best we can hope for is to manage controversies well enough to get some work done."

Daryl K Taft, over at eWeek has a speculation-driven article with a somewhat misleading title, which asks the question, "what will microsoft do with the browser" and doesn't provide much for answers.

What do you all think? Will we see major improvements to IE between now and Longhorn?

For nearly the last five years, I've been working full-time for the Mozilla project. Full-time for Mozilla, as I'm sure it is for many other projects, means seven days a week. I don't put in seven full days a week, but I can probably count on one hand the number of weeks where I wasn't doing something Mozilla related on the weekend.

This weekend is no different from most, I've been spending time in the garden with Deanna and the early budding and flowering plants and the rambunctious songbirds and reading and responding to bugmail and approval requests for the frozen Mozilla development branches.

I've had a laptop for as long as I've been working full-time on Mozilla and that lets me do quite a bit of work from the yard and garden. It's an interesting mix -- the Mozilla work, and my yard work, a fairly dirty laptop reminds me of that regularly.

I'm very fortunate to have a job that is filled with novel and exciting challenges nearly every day, and that brings me into contact with new people and new viewpoints as often as I could wish. I get much of the same kind of joy working with the trees, flowers, herbs, and vegetables in my small backyard garden.

It can be a great challenge but the payoff is as rewarding as I can imagine. There's no other life I'd rather be living.

(The photo at the left is the root of our phone system at the MoFo office. The photo at the right is a close-up on one of our two apricot trees.)

According to Janco Associates' browser market share survey which wrapped up at the end of Janary, IE is down to 84.85% of the market and Firefox is up to 4.48%. That puts Firefox in second place and ahead of AOL. Add in the Mozilla browser and Gecko is up over 8.5%. They've got some nifty looking charts there, so head over and take a look.

At the time of this post, we have accrued approximately 24,014,213 downloads of Firefox 1.0. We're still seeing over 200,000 downloads per day and things show no sign of letting up.

Well, here we are, coming up on the end of the Mozilla 1.8 Beta(1) cycle. We've still got a hefty list of things that I'd like to see fixed, but I suspect we'll punt on a few of them and try to get those in the Beta 2 cycle. The sooner we can get Beta out the door, and collect some feedback on the subset of Beta changes that are important to the 1.0.1 releases and the upcoming branch from which the 1.1 releases will ship, the better chances we'll have at getting any new problems discovered and fixed.

There's a lot that's about to happen so here's a rough outline of what we face in terms of releases. Sometime around the middle of next week we will have landed the majority of the changes on the trunk that we're hoping to get into the branch-based Firefox 1.0.1, Thunderbird 1.0.1, and Seamonkey 1.7.6. Once that happens, I'll try to get the trunk-based Seamonkey 1.8 Beta(1) shipped so we can test out those fixes before we ship them in our Firefox, Thunderbird, and Seamonkey stable update releases.

When we ship Seamonkey 1.8 Beta(1) the trunk will open for Beta 2 development work which should last about 5 weeks. Early during that cycle when things are less chaotic on the trunk, we'll test and ship the 1.0.1s and 1.7.6. Then we'll turn our focus to the Firefox 1.1 Developer Preview Release -- a Firefox 1.1 test build intended for community, not widespread, testing -- and getting the trunk in good enough shape to branch for Gecko 1.8.

At the end of the second beta, we'll freeze all localizable Firefox and Thunderbird strings which should make things easier on our localization teams. (If all goes well, Thunderbird will have official 1.1 localizations in Mozilla CVS, just like Firefox.) At about the time of the branch, we should be in good enough shape to ship the Firefox 1.1 Preview Release -- the more widespread preview of the Firefox 1.1 feature set and improved Gecko rendering engine.

Once branched, we'll be restricting all of the branch changes to only the most important fixes for the Firefox and Thunderbird 1.1 releases, with hopefully no major changes and a whole lot of bugfixing. The trunk will be opened to Gecko 1.9 development where lots of exciting gecko changes will be happening. On the branch, we'll probably have a Release Candidate or two in late May and if all goes well, the final 1.1 releases in the first week of June.

As you can see, we've got a very aggressive, and very full schedule between now and June. I'll be intimately involved in all of these releases (not to mention work on QA and test automation, community building, and spreadfirefox.com,) so I may not have as much time for blogging here, but where I can, I'll be posting progress updates and other bits that I think you all will find interesting.

This release schedule is a bit confusing but can be made more obvious if you spend a minute studying the roadmap graphics from my earlier post. If that doesn't clear things up, please feel free to post questions here.

Marcia's going to be up in Boston for Linux World from the 15th to the 17th. If you're in the area, head over and find her in booth 15 (in the dot org pavillion.) If you've got some extra time, she could use some help managing the booth. Last Linux World, we did about $2,400 worth of Firefox merchandise sales. We'd like to double those numbers this time and Marcia sure would appreciate some help hocking her wares. This expo we'll have the brand new, and certain to be popular, Thunderbird merchandise so it's gonna be good times! Don't miss it. Get your butt to LWE in Boston and lend a hand.

I've come into possession of a copy of the February issue of Wired magazine that's autographed by Blake Ross, Ben Goodger, and Dave Hyatt - the lead engineers behind the application that would come to be known as Firefox.

At first I was thinking of putting it up on ebay but marcia suggested I see if anyone at my blog was interested in purchasing it first.

I would be happy to see it go to a Firefox fan here if the price is right ;-) At the same time, I have no idea how I'd handle the transaction here.

Would you all be interested if I set up some kind of bidding process here or should I just take it over to Ebay? Do you know if there are any movable type plugins for something like that?

(and there are several "easter egg" autographs inside the magazine from other key developers.)

update If the general consensus is that I shouldn't profit from this then I've got no problem keeping it. It'll be cool to pull out of the drawer in 20 years.

Every once in a while I read a story and wonder why journalists let their editors (or sales department, or whoever) write the article's healine. That was the case with this Gartner caution on Firefox take-up (subscription required - use BugMeNot or visit via link at bottom of this story). The real headline here should be either "Industry realignment helping to fuel Firefox growth" or "Gartner tells corporate world to prepare for browser co-existance".

It's increasingly clear to me that the landscape has shifted and that serious Web developers and even corporate intranet developers must at least evaluate supporting Firefox. Many are seeing the light and working to ensure that, at a minimum, any new development is browser agnostic. Some may choose to put it off for a bit longer, but change is coming and those who start preparing now for a two browser world will be a lot better off.

Tracy Walker and I, with some pointers from Johnny Stenbeck, have started an effort to automate the Firefox basic functional tests.

We've started with the idea of using a XUL extension (in part to get access to chrome, and in part to make it distributable) to harness the testcases.

Here's a rough description of our plans:

XUL Driven Functional Test Automation.

The goal for this harness is to accept simple JavaScript testcases, execute them, report success or failure, and (eventually) be integrated into tinderbox and distributed as a testing tool to our QA community.

The application would behave as a Firefox (eventually Thunderbird too) extension running with chrome privileges. This testing harness would not do API level testing, but would attempt to simulate user actions as closely as possible w/o any user input. This should be done by using synthetic event dispatching to trigger mouse clicks etc when possible, or invocation of UI level code in cases where synthetic event dispatching is inappropriate.

This system needs to be easily expandable to include/exclude sets of tests depending on how detailed of a run we want, and ideally the system would be written such that we'd have one JS file per test and adding tests would be a matter of adding a file (and maybe an entry into a list, or some lists, somewhere).

We've just started this project and have a basic extension up and running and a first testcase JS file. If you've got JS and Mozilla experience and you're interested in helping us develop this preliminary app into something that can dramatically improve the quality of future releases, please let me know here in the comments or with an email to me and Tracy at mozomation@gmail.com

I desaturated the theme to see what that would look like. I assume this should stop the eye bleeding that several of you have been complaining about. I'm not sure I like it. It may not last.

update: To make this change, I just grabbed my colors and slapped them into a photoshop image and performed a desaturate and then did a search and replace in my text editor from the old colors to the new. What would be really slick is if I could feed my stylesheet into a webtool and have it display the color swatches and then let me manipulate those colors similar to the photoshop color picker and then have it regurgitate an updated stylesheet. Anyone know of anything like that?

I just found this great blog post that includes a Google Maps search plugin for the Firefox search bar. Great work (and fast!!!,) Judd Antin.

This interesting article discusses how Firefox is opening the door to Linux in Australia.

The lead is, "The success of the Firefox browser is driving takeup of open source applications in Australia and opening the door for widespread Linux adoption on the desktop, according to the newly-elected Linux Australia president, Jon Oxer." and the article goes on to quote Oxer as saying that Firefox is opening the minds of the the general public to alternatives.

I agree. I think that these early (still very early) successes of Firefox are helping to change the software landscape. We've still got a long ways to go, and some big challenges face Firefox and the rest of the open source software world, but I'm much more hopeful and enthusiastic than I was just a couple of years ago.

For the last year and a half I've been working on a solid Fujitsu N Series Lifebook (3010). It's a P4 2.66 GHz with 512 MB of RAM. The machine is a bit heavy and I suspect it's part of the reason I'm in physical therapy for an impingement in my right shoulder, but it's been a workhorse and I've been lucky to not have experienced the problems that Myk and chofmann have with their Lifebooks.

The key feature of this laptop for me has been the perfect resolution screen with amazing contrast and visibility. It's a 15 inch screen with 1400 by 1050 resolution. The 1050 lines in a 15 in form factor gives me just the right font size. After spending a couple of years on 1600 by 1200 in 15 inches and 1024 by 768 in both 14 and 15 inch form factors, I've decided that fonts are just too small in the UXGA displays and too large in the XGA screens. (Now, if they put those same UXGA pixels in a standard aspect ratio 17 inch screen, that might work a lot better for me :-)

Well, the time has come to replace the old Fujitsu and Myk (who still has the same Fujitsu as me) found an awesome deal, saving nearly $2,000, has just put in orders for our two new machines.

This time around we're going with IBM laptops. The model is the ThinkPad T42 and it comes with the 15 inch screen at 1400 by 1050, a Pentium M 1.8 GHz processor and Centrino wireless jazz, 2 GB of RAM, a 7200 RPM 60 GB hard drive, and a nice CD-RW/DVD-RW optical drive. It's also got that nifty nipple pointer thing that I miss from my Dell Latitude days.

This will bring me and Myk up to speed with brendan, bryner, dbaron, darin, and maybe some others at our office who have nice ThinkPads. I'll finally be able to run multiple VMWare virtual machines without having to pause one when I need to start up another.

+--------+---------+------------+
| locale | percent |   total    |
|--------+---------+------------|
|  enUS	 | 57.76%  | 13,467,267 |
|  deDE	 | 14.41%  |  3,359,658 |
|  frFR	 | 11.38%  |  2,652,133 |
|  plPL	 |  2.92%  |    681,879 |
|  enGB	 |  2.05%  |    477,950 |
|  esAR	 |  1.57%  |    366,421 |
|  nlNL	 |  1.37%  |    320,075 |
|  csCZ	 |  1.36%  |    318,023 |
|  fiFI	 |  1.17%  |    272,683 |
|  zhTW	 |  0.92%  |    215,558 |
|  ruRU	 |  0.91%  |    212,518 |
|  svSE	 |  0.69%  |    160,766 |
|  ptBR	 |  0.68%  |    157,719 |
|  jaJP	 |  0.52%  |    120,548 |
|  koKR	 |  0.50%  |    116,521 |
|  nbNO	 |  0.38%  |     88,116 |
|  daDK	 |  0.25%  |     57,534 |
|  elGR	 |  0.23%  |     52,605 |
|  huHU	 |  0.20%  |     46,557 |
|  itIT	 |  0.19%  |     43,673 |
|  slSI	 |  0.13%  |     30,641 |
|  heIL	 |  0.11%  |     26,682 |
|  caAD	 |  0.11%  |     26,353 |
|  trTR	 |  0.10%  |     22,578 |
|  roRO	 |  0.05%  |     12,118 |
| astES	 |  0.04%  |      8,423 |
+--------+---------+------------+

I've been asked on repeated occasions to provide locale breakdowns on the Firefox 1.0 download numbers. In the past I hesitated because the actual data I have is really sketchy and incomplete.

I have a pretty solid total download count number but I only have a small sample of the locale breakdown. The locale stats I have come from less than 30% of our mirrors and probably have a western skew (though I have no idea how much).

Also, I don't think that all of the shipping locales are represented by the mirrors I have access to.

For the next release, we should have a better tool in place to measure this but for now it's not very good. Please receive these numbers in the fashion they were delivered -- as little more than a guess.

The totals are derived by multiplying the estimated percentage against our reasonably well known total which has just past 23 million.

update: Again, this is all horribly unscientific and I don't have anything better to offer. Please do not use these numbers in reporting on Firefox. They are little more than guesses. Also, if you're the person or team behind one of these locales, I'm not trying to slight your effort in any way. These numbers probably undercount the number of people downloading your localization and may not count them at all (if you're one of the locales not listed here).

Mitchell Baker has a good post up covering some of the discussion that's already started within the Mozilla Foundation and the staff@mozilla.org group. Her post, mozilla.org staff and Mozilla Foundation Employees gives a brief history of how the Mozilla project has been managed in the past and some thinking about how it will be managed going forward.

My involvement with Mozilla started with volunteer testing which quickly turned into QA volunteer organizing and eventually landed me a job at Netscape, within the small group called staff@mozilla.org. When MoFo was created (thanks to the tireless work of Mitchell Baker and others,) I was hired by the Foundation to continue that work. I fall into both groups, staff@mozilla.org and MoFo employees, so I'm definitely interested in and will be participating in the rationalization of these two groups.

If you've got thoughts or ideas, please post them over at Mitchell's blog, unless they're specifically directed at me. I'll be following the comments over there pretty closely and may participate some myself.

http://maps.google.com/ is live.

update Blake likes it too

The greatest scientific instrument ever created to be destroyed :( It's a crying shame what gets budget priority in this country these days.

This Forbes article, Mozilla's Thunderbird Takes Off, is a good read. The money quote is "It's the best thing to happen to e-mail in a long time."

Today the Firefox download counter over at SpreadFirefox.com has past the 23,000,000 mark. I wonder if Firefox has surpassed AOL's 22.2 million users.

We don't have solid usage stats and I've been mostly going on the numbers I see from OneStat, TheCounter, and WebSideStory. The only problem there is that while they all generally agree that Gecko is somewhere between 7% and 8% of the market, neither say how large that market is. I suspect that they're assuming a global share of between 500 million and 800 million users (though this is nothing more than a guess.)

If that's anywhere close to reality, then there should be between 35 million and 60 million Gecko users. Assuming that a bit more than half of those are Firefox users (and the rest are legacy Seamonkey users or Netscape users) then there's a very real chance that Firefox usage is very close to or already past the size of AOL's user base.

What do you all think? Do you have any better sources of information here?

It looks like gmail is about to open up to the world. If you still don't have an account and you'd like one, I've got a few hundred to give away -- which basically means that anyone that reads this blog who wants one can have one.

To get the invite, please type your first and last name and email address in plaintext, unobscured, in the comments of this blog. If you don't want to do that, then I'm sure you can find an invite somewhere else.

I'll try to send out invites by next weekend. After that, I think I'm done (unless google gives me the ability to mass invite;) it's just too time consuming to send out all the individual invites.

update done :) I've sent out invites to anyone who submitted an unobscured email address.

has a great editorial titled Firefox and the Impact Curve where he discusses the growth of Firefox and the problems that may be in store for intranet application developers who don't get with the program and start considering support for Firefox now. Go give it a read.

Blake Ross, over at his weblog, is looking for feedback on how we can celebrate all of the people who helped us get to 25 million downloads of Firefox 1.0.

I've been working with the rest of the Spread Firefox admins, Daryl Houston, Chris Messina, Bart Decrem, Chris Beard, and Rafael Ebron, over the last few days to get things back on track at SpreadFirefox.com.

We had our pow-wow on Friday and I'm feeling re-energized about taking Spread Firefox to the next level. We're just getting off the ground with this community marketing effort and if I can make the time, I'm going to be more involved with it going forward.

Head over to Blake's blog if you have any good ideas for how to celebrate 25 million downloads.

The mozillaZine alternative, called MozillaNews.org, has been without an update since December 20th of last year. Almost seven weeks without any news has me wondering.

The cool cats over at JPL have assembled and posted some really nice color mosaics from both of the Mars Exploration Rovers. I especially love this one (full resolution version here, which shows the impact site for Opportunity's heat shield.

Opportunity spent quite a while investigating the heat shield impact site. As you can see from this very cool vertical projection assembled from Navcam pictures, that gives us a great "overhead" view, the rover covered all of the ground around this site. The polar projection is also quite informative.

There's also a great Spirit mosaic from several months ago. This image covers an area that Spirit's been traversing in Columbia hills. Check out the quicktime animation for a nice 360 degree panorama.

The rovers are still in good health and continue to make tracks on their respective sides of the planet.

In a somewhat confused article with a very misleading title, Christophe Guillemin from ZDNet France notes that Firefox has already gained more than 10% marketshare in France. I've seen some compelling data that suggests 20% or more in Germany, and we're definitely moving up the charts here in the US with somewhere between 6% and 8% depending on which of the major analyst you follow.

I'm looking for a few invitations to Rojo. If any of you can help me out, I'd greatly appreciate it. Thanks.

update: I'm all set. Thanks to everyone that responded.

Today, Tracy Walker and I (with some help from Sarah, Marcia, and Chase,) reorganized the QA space at the Mozilla Foundation. We condensed six desks holding 9 machines, 8 huge old CRT monitors, 8 keyboards, and about a dozen mice, into a much more comfortable four desks with two solid KVMs, that switch our primary 6 machines (two stations, each consisting of a Mac, Windows, and Linux boxen) so that we could get down to two nice LCD screens, and two keyboard mouse combos.

Tomorrow I'll be adding VMWare to the Linux and Windows boxen and wiping out the dual and triple boot partitions. That'll save us a lot of time and ease up testing tasks that require lots of clipboard/cut/paste stuff. It should also give us a little more control over keeping some "clean" and some "dirty" systems without the OS reinstalls that can take forever.

I think for the VMWare setups I'll start by making sure that the Linux machines also have access to a Windows install and that the Windows machines have a linux distro on them. Then we'll see about filling in any gaps in coverage with additional VMs.

To pull this all off, I still need to get two more machines, a G5 to replace the aging blue & white that just crawls with OS X, and an old Kayak PII that's been Sarah's primary Linux box for the last year. If I can get those two machines replaced and get a solid RAM upgrade for the other four, I think we'll have a much better time with our testing.

Anyone know where great deals on Mac G5s can be had? It doesn't have to be cutting edge, the 1.6 or 1.8 Ghz models would be a huge step forward. I think I can find a PC that stomps that old Kayak without too much difficulty, but Macs are so much more expensive. Also, if you know of good places to buy bulk RAM (where bulk is a few GB in 512MB sticks) please let me know. Thanks.

Linus Torvalds, as quoted in the InformationWeek Weblog makes some good points about motivation and open source software development. I believe that a big piece of the success of Firefox results from Firefox developer passion for "the code's problem-solving capabilities" rather than the more typical view of "[code] as a competitive advantage."

There's little doubt that open source is emerging as a logical step in a development career path. Linus, I suspect, thinks that's unhealthy for open source and would prefer that only the properly motivated dive in. Me, I welcome all comers. I think open source is already a stable enough movement that it will survive pretty much anything we can throw at it.

What do you all think?

Brian Ryner (bryner) brings us the news that he and the Mozilla XForms team "released a beta version of the XForms plugin for Firefox and Seamonkey" Yours truely spoke with Mr. Ryner at length about this release and here's some of what he had to say.

ad So, tell us about this beta release.

br Everyone put in long hours -- that would be Darin, Doron, Aaron, Allan and Olli; we're exhausted but we're pleased to have achieved this milestone.

ad After people install this plug-in, how is their browsing experience changed?

br It's probably not. This release is really something that will be mostly appreciated by forward looking web developers. That's the audience we're looking for with this beta.

ad When can we expect the next release? Will it be a final release? Will it be bundled with any of the Mozilla applications?

br The next release isn't scheduled yet but we'll most likely have at least one more non-final release. At this point, it doesn't look like we'll be seeing XForms bundled with the upcoming Mozilla product releases. However, we will be working to have installable plug-ins that are compatible with the major releases.

ad Thanks for taking some time out of your busy schedule. I'm sure that our readers appreciate that.

br No problem. Think this'll make slashdot ;-)

I spent a few minutes this last weekend trying to stitch together some raw images from the Mars Rover site into a panorama. Well, today I see they've posted just the panorama I was working on. The JPL image guys are awesome and they've certainly done a better job than I could have so I'm happy to see this nice mosaic arrive. You can find the medium resolution version here and the high resolution version here.

I've just begun work on a new mosaic from the Opportunity raw imagery. I've combined a couple of images, cleaned up a lot of noise and burned areas, and colorized it for fun. You can see the low resultion version here and the higher resolution version here. (If you're interested in the full resolution version, let me know and I can make it available for a short period of time.)

That hill in distance is actually Endurance Crater's rim. Opportunity spent the better part of last year rolling around in that crater and only recently surfaced. A bit closer in the image, you can see the wreckage of Opportunty's heat shield which just happened to be in her path as the trek southward began.

Today, Thunderbird 1.0 broke the 3,000,000 downloads mark and Firefox 1.0 broke the 22,000,000 mark. Happy day!!

update: Oh, I forgot to mention. We just wrapped up our third month since Firefox 1.0 was released. For the first two weeks, we had an amazing number of downloads, but for the last ten weeks, it's still quite strong -- averaging just over 1.6 million downloads per week. This 12th week was right on track, pulling in 1.62 million downloads. Good times!

update2: Oh, and I forgot to mention ;) Thunderbird's 3 million downloads happened in just 8 weeks. Rock on!

Ben has posted an update to the Firefox 2.o Roadmap with more some specifics on the Firefox 1.1 schedule. From that information I've constructed an updated Firefox 1.1 roadmap diagram.

I've posted an update to the 1.8 schedule and a new roadmap diagram for that. I've also put together a view of the two roadmaps that should help to make clear how the Mozilla roadmap and the Firefox roadmap line up.

You can see larger versions of the three diagrams by clicking on the thumbnails to the left.

And for those of you who haven't seen my latest update at n.p.m.seamonkey, here's the story on 1.8 Beta 2.

OK, here's the "more details" part.

In order to align the Firefox 1.1 and Thunderbird 1.1 goals with the current roadmap, we've decided to insert one additional beta before branching for Gecko 1.8.

We're still freezing for 1.8 Beta (1) at midnight, Tuesday, February 8th. That's one week away. This 1.8 Beta (1) release will hopefully be a fairly quick release from the trunk and then we'll open the tree for 1.8 Beta 2 work.

The Firefox team intends to release a Developer Preview Release sometime between 1.8 Beta (1) and 1.8 Beta 2 and we cannot afford regressions during this time. At the same time, we don't want to slow development to a crawl and we don't think the drivers' gate is necessary if everyone can exercise some care during this period.

During the 1.8 Beta 2 cycle, drivers won't be locking the tree and requiring approvals for every change but we need everyone to be very careful during this period, putting off any serious changes which aren't critical to a solid Firefox 1.1 and Thunderbird 1.1 until we branch for Gecko 1.8 and the trunk opens to 1.9 alpha development.

I've updated the Mozilla Roadmap diagram to show this additional beta cycle as "chilly but not frozen". I'll be posting a Firefox 1.1 roadmap diagram to the Firefox 2.0 Roadmap page later today or tomorrow and after that, I'll be posting a (hopefully) helpful diagram that shows the two roadmaps together.

--Asa

I'll continue to post updates here and at npm.seamonkey over the coming days. If you have questions or suggestions, feel free to post them here.

It's probably also worth noting that these roadmaps will likely evolve and exist to facilitate developer cooperation. They are not hard commitments to ship dates and should not be viewed or referenced as product press announcements.

I'll have more details shortly, but I just wanted to give everyone a heads up that we're going to be adding a second 5 week long beta cycle before we get to the Gecko 1.8 branch.

Also, I hope to have the diagrams for both the overall roadmap and the Firefox 1.1 roadmap posted today or tomorrow.