Asa Dotzler - Firefox and more

I just ran across this very cool sounding add-on via Guerrilla Innovation.

The idea is similar to Ad-Block, except that instead of simply eliminating the ads, this Firefox extension will replace advertising with images from a collection of contemporary art. The extension will be backed by a program of curators and regular art "exhibits" that happen every couple of weeks.

What a fantastic idea!

Wow, and the hits keep on coming. Via crackblur, I found this cool Firefox add-on called Real Costs.

Real Costs "is a Firefox plug-in that inserts emissions data into travel related e-commerce website. The first version adds CO2 emissions information to airfare websites such as Orbitz.com, United.com, Delta.com, etc."

According to the site, future versions will include emission data for car directions, car rental, and shipping websites. You can see some screenshots here.

More at Gothamist, including a video of the Real Costs creator, Michael Mandiburg. Check it out.

Samuel Sidler has a post up titled Furthering Customer / End-user Support. This is good stuff:

Have you ever triaged a bug that was really just a support request? Or browsed the mozilla.feedback newsgroup and seen the numerous cries for help? Or how about taken a day or two and just watched the confused users line up in the mozillaZine forums or the support newsgroups?

There are so many avenues for users to try and get support from that it can be confusing (not all of them are listed here or above). One of the things we're looking at for the future is improving our customer support options. Last November, Chris Hofmann posted to the mozillaZine forums about expanding our support options as Firefox continues to grow. It's something that's been on our minds a lot lately and it's finally time to take action.

Starting next Tuesday, we'll be holding twice weekly meetings to discuss the future of customer support. These meetings are to discuss implementing some very specific things that are no-brainers in the realm of customer support.

• Tuesday, May 8, 2007 at 10am PDT - End-user knowledge base
• Thursday, May 10, 2007 at 2pm PDT - End-user forums
• Tuesday, May 15, 2007 at 10am PDT - One-to-one / multiuser chat
• Thursday, May 17, 2007 at 2pm PDT - How MoCo's approaching this problem
• Tuesday, May 22, 2007 at 10am PDT - Recap and discussion of any other issues ideas
  

These meetings are open to anyone and everyone. If you or someone you know are currently providing any level of customer support, we want you there. Anyone who participates in any avenue of support is more than invited. That includes the mozillaZine forums and knowledge base, Mozilla's bugzilla, the support newsgroups, any mailing lists, IRC, anyone working with Hendrix, anyone who works on the in-app help documentation, etc etc etc.

We've created a newsgroup (Google Group) / mailing list (which you can subscribe to) where we'll be detailing ideas and plans for customer support options. Feel free to join in.

I'll be posting to the newsgroup with more details as the meetings get closer including the appropriate call-in number. As always, we want to see you there to help us further our end-user support and provide the best possible experience for Firefox.

Thanks, and we'll see you there!

I encourage any of you who have an interest in helping to improve our Firefox support system to go get involved. This is another one of those great opportunities for non-coders to make a major impact.

Foxkeh, our fun mascot in Japan just made his English debut.

Keep an eye on Foxkeh's blog for videos, wallpapers, and more.

Firefox's gains continued to come at the expense of Internet Explorer. "Even with IE7, Microsoft is still losing market share to Firefox," said Johnston, who noted that WebSideStory tracked a 0.5% decline in IE over the past month. "It's still eroding."

What does this new market mean for web developers? From what my few web developer friends tell me, this means three major browsers to code for. As they tell it, first you code for(/in) Firefox and that mostly "just works" for Safari (5%) and Opera (less than 1%), then you make it work in IE7 -- which is now much happier with at least some code developed in Firefox, and then you tackle the hardest one, IE6 which just doesn't work very well.

The plateauing of IE7 is both striking and no surprise, said Geoff Johnston, an analyst at rival metrics firm WebSideStory. "In the last three months, IE7's growth has slowed to a trickle," said Johnston.... "Lots of people are obviously quite happy with IE6"....Even the introduction of Windows Vista, which runs only IE7, hasn't made a difference of late.... Vista was released to consumers on Jan. 30 -- adoption slowed to 0.9% the next month and just 0.6% in March.

I think I was hoping that IE7 would quickly replace all or nearly all of IE6 usage. That doesn't seem likely any more.

What's your take? Will IE7 regain momentum? Will it be up to Vista alone to grow IE7 share from here on out? Will decisions to buck Microsoft and continue shipping Windows XP from major OEMs like Dell put break on Vista growth? How do you see the browser market today and is it an improvement from where we were before Firefox and IE7?

Want to learn more about Mozilla? Read John Lilly's latest blog post.

As we've been saying at Mozilla for ages, measuring users' security is much more than just counting bugs. Today, those guys who have done the most for publicizing bug counts have released some data about actual software installations and their vulnerabilities to vendor disclosed and patched exploits.

What Secunia found when looking at web browsers was that Firefox users were the most up to date of all, with IE 7 just behind Firefox 2, IE 6 pretty far behind that, and Opera users the least up to date of all.

Firefox's Application Update System has been a huge piece of work over the last three years and this study is a good validation that we're on the right track, beating even the Windows Update system.

AUS offers both patch updates and full updates for Firefox on Mac, Windows, and Linux across 40 languages, to our installed base of more than 100,000,000 users. It's an amazing system built by some of the smartest people on the planet and it's working.

No web-connected applications should be without this kind of update system. Not providing your users with timely automatic security updates is just irresponsible.

Four years ago, the Phoenix name was retired in favor of the even-shorter-lived, Firebird. Thanks to Jason Kersey for coming up with our best and last name, Firefox.

Naming is hard. If you can avoid doing it, I recommend you do.

Over his blog, lilmatt's got a great post up on what it often takes to get code into Mozilla. He offers some really good advice and anyone that's trying to get code into Mozilla, whether working on Firefox, some other Mozilla-hosted app like Calendar, or Mozilla-based apps at other companies or projects, would do well to read it.

(And, it goes without saying, we'd do well to do as much as we possibly can to make the process smoother.)

Lilmatt's been a great contributor on Calendar and Lightning and he's now working over at Flock. From this post, I can tell that he's going to be a huge asset to them and with this invaluable post, he's making it clear what an asset he is to the entire Mozilla community.

Thanks for the great post, lilmatt!

I've been running Firefox on Vista (on my Vista desktop and with BootCamp on my MBP,) without incident. How about you? Are you encountering problems on Vista?

I wonder what this will mean for all the Firefox+Google Toolbar MFA publishers.

Once again, Firefox makes the PC World 100 Best Products of 2007 list.

Mitchell Baker's got a great post up talking about Mozilla Community and Mozpad.

She's absolutely right that things get done when people come together and start "doing".

I tried to get involved with Mozilla the day the source code was released, way back in early 1998. Unfortunately for me, Mozilla didn't really have any opportunity for non-developers. They hadn't anticipated that open source would attract more than just coders and so they were simply unprepared for someone like me.

There were plenty of coder resources, at least as far as I could tell. There was CVS repository for the code and the website. There were docs on how to use those tools to pull and compile Mozilla. There were lists of who was coding on what and where a coder might get review. The entire operation was set up to attract open source developers but almost nothing had been done to accommodate other kinds of volunteers.

(You couldn't even test Mozilla unless you could compile the sourcecode.)

I really wanted to be a part of Mozilla and I didn't give up. I chased after semi-random ftp sites that contained the occasional compiled binary, I posted to newsgroups, I congregated with others at mozBin and mozillaZine (that was before their big merger) and eventually we got the beginnings of an open source testing community going.

As we started to demonstrate real value to the project, Mozilla staff and Netscape took notice and began to make infrastructure changes that supported our efforts, including the production of daily compiled binaries and some early testing documentation dumps to www.mozilla.org. The nascent testing community took that and ran with it, creating even more value and the whole thing spiraled up to about 10,000 people downloading and testing daily builds, reporting tens of thousands of bugs, creating a whole mess of testcases, producing documentation, and spreading the word.

Mozilla's open source quality assurance and testing program didn't just materialize out of thin air and it didn't happen because Mozilla or Netscape said "let there be an open source QA community." It happened because a few very determined volunteers, in the face of some pretty serious barriers, decided that the best way to make it happen was to start "doing".

via digg.

This is awesome! Awesome!

Listen here.

Can there be any doubt that Mars was once a very wet place? And has there ever been a more successful planetary exploration mission than the Spirit and Opportunity MER program?

After nearly 1,200 Martian days, the Mars Exploration Rover, Spirit, is still making amazing discoveries. Not even a busted wheel can stop Spirt -- just the opposite, actually. It's the rover's broken wheel that's scraping up this new evidence of the past presence of water.

And on the other side of Mars, the rover Opportunity has just gotten another energy boost coming in the form of a "dust cleaning event". This is the the second one this month allowing Opportunity to collect nearly as many watt-hours of juice as it could the day it landed! The solar panels on the rovers were designed to collect about 900 watt-hours each sol (Martian day). Because of the accumulation of dust and dirt on the solar panels, power collection had, at its lowest, fallen to about half that level. Opportunity is now collecting about 800 watt-hours per sol!! These cleaning events come in the form of a stiff breeze or a small dustdevil that clears dirt and dust from the rover's solar panels. They have helped to extend the lives of the two rovers nearly three years and a combined 11 miles of travel after the conclusion of the original mission.

The International Telecommunications Union, an agency of the United Nations, has awarded the Mozilla community with its prestigious World Information Society Award 2007.

Thanks to the thousands and thousands of dedicated project contributors, Mozilla is making a huge impact on the web all around the world. You all are amazing!

I've been playing around with ThumbStrips, a very interesting firefox addon coming from the Innovation Lab at Intuit. I really like it for quick access to history items and while I'm still trying to get used to how moving through history changes the order and how navigating the Thumbstrip interacts with tabbed browsing, so far I think it's a pretty nifty tool.

I guess the next step would be playing around with the sharing features. If you've been using ThumbStrips, let me know what you think about it. Maybe we can experiment with sharing.