January 2006 Archives

A number of you had contacted me asking about how you could help spread the word about Firefox Flicks on your campus. I just finished posting a few flyers over at the Flicks Backstage blog so there you are. If you have ideas for other flyers, please let me know. Or, if you want to make your own, feel free.

Flicks is really starting to take off. We've already received a handful of entries and there are about 40 people (or teams) who have let us know they're working on something. To keep up with the latest goings on, head over to the Backstage blog.

DarkSyde, over at Daily Kos, has a wonderful article covering one possible end to the universe -- the big rip. An easy read and an amazing story, check it out.

Some scumbag over at a site calling itself Firefox Myths has quoted me as saying that his site is "good stuff." Well he's simply lying.

Don't give that jerk any more traffic, this is just to let those of you who may have already seen the quote know that it wasn't his site that I was complimenting. As a matter of fact, what I was calling "good stuff" was a post that trashed him and his bogus claims.

Oh, he calls himself Andrew K and apparently uses other names to troll the blogs in support of his bullshit. He can be reached at this email: Scumdrew K

Yet another acknowledgment that Firefox has become a mainstream browser, InformationWeek is reporting on Alternatives To Microsoft Internet Explorer And Firefox.

I've been saying it for a while, and it's nice to see others picking up on this fact, that Firefox is no longer an "alternative browser". "Mention 'browser,' and almost certainly Internet Explorer and Firefox will be up for discussion," says Jeremy Baumgartner at InformationWeek. Firefox has joined IE as a mainstream browser and brand recognized by pretty much everyone with a computer.

Mention "alternative browser" today and you're very likely to get a discussion of browsers like Opera and Netscape. This is a dramatic change from just two years ago when early versions of Firefox were much closer to the sub-1% marketshare of niche browsers Opera and Netscape. Today, Firefox holds about 20% of the market in Europe and between 10 and 15% in the US.

Not only is Firefox making serious gains in the mainstream browser market, it's clearly become the favored browser of those who have experience with all of the available choices, the tech press. CNET awarded Firefox 1.5 its Editor�s Choice award. Firefox has received two awards from PC Magazine: the Technical Excellence Award and the Best of 2005 Award. Firefox won PC Pro's Real World Computing Award, and was named the �Editor�s Choice� from German-based PC Professionell.

Cool article about trends in education lists Firefox as the #2 trend of 2005.

Over at the Flicks Backstage blog, I've just posted on some very exciting developments regarding the Firefox Flick 30-second ad contest. Rather than retype it all, I'll just paste it and save myself a bit of work.

We've been developing some great relationships with organizations in the indy film world. I mentioned in an earlier post that we'd partnered with "Flicks Friend" Celtx and that they were going to help us with outreach.

Today I'd like to let you all know about two new Flicks Friends who have joined with the team to help promote the contest -- and to make the rewards for participating even more exciting. The first of these new Friends to come on board was the Vail Film Festival. The Vail Film Festival is pretty new, this is their third year, but they're growing really fast. Last year they screened more than 70 films including the directorial debuts of David Duchovny, Tiffany Thiessen, and Luke Wilson. The event drew 10,000 people.

We've been talking with the folks at Vail for about a month and one of the very exciting developments is that they would like to screen some of the leading entries at this year's festival^(PDF) at the end of March. That's right before the end of the contest, but we should have our shortlist by then and this is a great opportunity for the producers of the leading entries to get some amazing exposure for their work.

The second Friend that recently joined us is the New York Festivals. NYf awards the world's best work in interactive and Internet communications, online advertising and alternative media and marketing. They're going to be promoting Firefox Flicks at this week's annual galas in celebration of the winners of the 2006 NYf awards for:

• Television, Cinema & Radio Advertising, and the AME Awards
• Film & Video
• Television Programming & Promotion.

In addition to helping out with Flicks promotions, we're working with the NYf to offer an awesome opportunity to our first place winner. In addition to the $5,000 for purchasing that next piece of equipment that we're already offering, the Firefox Flicks first place winner will automatically qualify as a Shortlist finalist in the 2006 New York Festivals of Advertising (NYFA) competition, and will be judged by NYf's international panel of advertising and creative professionals to vie for Gold, Silver, or Bronze World Medals against the top ad agencies in the world. This is a huge opportunity for worldwide exposure and recognition and we're very excited to be working with NYf to bring this to Firefox Flicks.

Things are getting exciting here at Firefox Flicks. Stay tuned to the Backstage blog!

If you're a creative type and you'd like to help Firefox and have a shot at fame and fortune (worldwide exposure for your ad and a $5,000 gift certificate to B&H Photo and Video super store) then head over to Firefox Flicks for information on submitting a 30-second ad for consideration.

Today the cats over at Performancing have released a new version.

The new version has improved Technorati support, new Delicious integration, Trackback, draft, and ping support.

You want this extension :-)

I want to say how much I appreciate and look forward to community participation through discussions at my weblog and at the same time, urge you all to try to keep the comments topical to the post.

Several recent posts that had some good comments and discussion were basically ruined by completely off-topic comments. Going forward, if I have the time, I'll be deleting comments that are off-topic so please work with me so I don't have to waste a lot of time doing that. I'd rather spend my time posting here than doing house cleaning.

Thanks.

One area that I think we've done a pretty good job of during the last two years has been the development of and marketing of the Firefox brand. Today we get another sign that our efforts in this area are bearing fruit.

According to the results of a survey announced today by online branding exchange Brandchannel.com, Firefox has moved into the top 10 most influential brands in the world. Sitting at number 8, Firefox bests Ebay and Sony. Not bad :-)

Brandchannel.com does issues this caveat:

"While it's true that our readers appear at first glance to be easily lured by shiny design, innovative technology, coffee, and booze, they should not be dismissed as a bunch of hyper-caffeinated gearheads. Year after year brandchannel voters identify brands that the mainstream world eventually catches up with; impact is felt first by these early adopters."

via Gerv's blog

For all you web developers out there, you're gonna love this new tool. It was developed by the amazing Joe Hewitt (creator of the DOM Inspector.) He describes Firebug is "like a combination of the Javascript Console, DOM Inspector, and a command line Javascript interpreter."

Other fun features:

* XMLHttpRequest Spy - Ever wonder what all them newfangled Ajax websites are up to? Watch the requests fly by in the console!

* One web page, one console - Tired of slogging through a zillion errors in the JavaScript Console trying to find the one you want? The FireBug console is built into the bottom of the browser, and only shows you errors and log messages that came from the page you're looking at.

* JavaScript Error Status Bar Indicator - It's a sin that Firefox doesn't include this by default, like IE does. When there is an error in the page, the status bar will let you know with a big red blob.

* Logging for web pages - Sick and tired of "alert debugging"? Jealous of all your C programmer buddies with their fancy printf? Now you can log text and objects to the FireBug console from any web page. See my website for more info on this.

It's been a couple of weeks since we launched the Firefox Flicks Ad Contest and we're already seeing a lot of interest, with dozens of people letting us know that they're working on something.

But we're looking to dramatically expand our outreach on this project and a key place we'd like to get the word out is in schools. If you attend a school with a video, film, TV, animation, advertising, or other creative media-related programs, or you know someone who attends one of these schools, please let me know.

You all have access to school bulletin boards (both physical and online) as well as forums and other places where we'd like to let people know about the Firefox Flicks Ad Contest. I've got materials and time to work with you to get the word out so please email me if you can help.

- A

I just found a wonderful Firefox testimonial that didn't make it into our official Testimonials project because it was too long.
Meredith's testimonial covers the four reasons she loves Firefox. As it happens, I think those are the exact same reasons I love Firefox. Check it out.

New Horizons is on the pad and expected to be launched soon. Tune in to NASA TV to watch the launch.
update: launch scrubbed for the day due to excessive winds. rescheduled for tomorrow at 1:16 PM Eastern time.

Susan has done it once again. Head over to 2020 Hindsight for Susan's excellent blogging of the Stardust sample return.

I had really hoped to do something similar but family concerns got in the way. Anyway, Susan's got the goods once again and if you're even the least bit interested, I encourage you to go give her coverage a read. It's just great.

Thanks, Susan. You made my day!

Wild.

I just ran across an Opera browser page that claims 100,000,000 downloads.

How is it that when Firefox reached 100,000,000 downloads we had earned about 10% of the browser market share and when Opera reached 100,000,000 downloads, they haven't even broken the 1% mark?

Either my math skills are really lacking, or Opera downloaders overwhelmingly discard the browser after downloading it.

• Automated update to streamline product upgrades. Notification of an update is more prominent, and updates to Thunderbird may now be half a megabyte or smaller. Updating extensions has also improved.
• Sort address autocomplete results by how often you send e-mail to each recipient.
• Spell check as you type.
• Saved Search Folders can now search across multiple accounts.
• Built in phishing detector to help protect users against email scams.
• Podcasting and other RSS Improvements.
• Deleting attachments from messages.
• Integration with server side spam filtering.
• Reply and forward actions for message filters.
• Kerberos Authentication.
• Auto save as draft for mail composition.
• Message aging.
• Filters for Global Inbox.
• Improvements to product usability including redesigned options interface, and SMTP server management.
• Many security enhancements.

For a couple of years now I've been wishing that I could bookmark arbitrary spots on a webpage. Today I've decided to reach out to the community and ask if someone could build this as a firefox extension. Ideally I'd be able to right-click somewhere on the page and the extension (through some JavaScript magic I wouldn't have the first clue about) would determine the nearest node above in the DOM and create a bookmark that contained that information. Then loading the bookmark would scroll the document to that place in the page. It'd be like having the ability to add arbitrary anchors to a page.

If you're interested in building something like this and would like to discuss it with me, drop me an email or comment here.

I know it's been a while since I posted on much other than Firefox, but this is going to be an exciting year in space exploration so expect more from me in the coming weeks and months.

So what's happening this week?

NASA's Stardust spacecraft is one week away from its conclusion, the return of a capsule carrying particles captured from Comet Wild 2. This will be the first time we've had our hands on the material from a comet and the science team hopes to learn not just more about comets, but about history of the early solar system.

Stay tuned for more updates on my particular interests in space exploration and astronomy.

Chris Pirillo reports that he's fled IE 7 on his Vista machine. Apparently it's just too darned buggy still. He's moved to Firefox 1.5 and pleased with the speed.

Yes, Chris. I am happy :-)

I just read over at Standblog that the French Gendarmerie Nationale (national police force) made the decision to move 70,000 seats to Firefox and 45,000 seats to Thunderbird. That's awesome!

When will we see similar moves here in the US?

Firefox was apparently a real "eye opener" for Fidelity Investments Inc. which has now made open source software an "anchor" of Fidelity's software strategies.

The Mozilla Firefox browser was an eye-opener, added Mike Askew, who also works in the technology center. A head-to-head comparison of Firefox and Internet Explorer showed that both had about the same level of security vulnerability, but ''the time needed to fix vulnerabilities in Firefox was much less,'' Askew said. That experience led Fidelity to look at open source more intently.