August 2007 Archives

At least a few thousand of you read this blog in its HTML form so I thought I'd ask your opinion on the upcoming re-design.

I've got two changes in store. The first is to stop the major delineation between the different days on the main page. Right now I've got a big fat H1 separator thing between posts from different days. I don't really see that as adding much utility to the blog so I think I'm gonna drop it unless I hear concerns. I'll move that information into the footer for each post, like it is on the individual post archives.

The second change is to get away from gray scale and re-introduce some color to the site. I've been looking for a new color palette for a while and since you all balked pretty strongly at my last scheme, (based n the Firefox toolbar icon palette,) I thought I'd tone it down some and offer you all a preview. The palette I'm looking at can be seen here.

This is a pretty rich palette, and I think it will give the site some weight I feel has been missing since I went to gray scale. I don't intend to add any graphic elements beyond a possible image type treatment for the site header.

If you read the HTML view of this blog and have any objections or concerns, do let me know in comments. Also, if you're experiencing problems in not-Firefox browsers, now would be a good time to let me know that as well. Thanks. And thanks for reading.

My latest Vista on MacBook Pro problem is that it's not sleeping on lid close consistently. This morning when I arrived at the office and pulled my MBP out of the bag, the fans were all running full-blast, the shell was almost too hot to handle, and my battery was half drained. Apparently when I closed the lid and stuffed the machine in its bag at home about an hour earlier, it didn't actually go to sleep like it was supposed to.

I tested it a few times during the day and three out of four times I closed the lid, it went to sleep within about 10 seconds. One time, however, after 30 seconds it still wasn't sleeping and I opened it to see that everything was still running.

If anyone knows what's going on here, I'd appreciate the help.

Photo by Flickr user julian- and used under a Creative Commons license.

There's a great post from Ryan Paul at Ars Technica explaining how easy and how important it is that people get involved with the Mozilla quality assurance and testing program.

That's how I got my start with Mozilla (and many others did too.) You get to collaborate with some of the smartest people on the planet and you get to have a direct impact on more than 100 million people who are using Firefox. If you've been looking for a way to give something back to Firefox, there's really no better place to start.

Read Ryan's post and then head over to QMO, Mozilla's testing portal, to learn more.

I had planned on blogging this a couple of days ago, but just didn't get around to it. Mozilla Links has got the story up so rather than putting together a full post, I'll just link them.

Firefox used by 30% of WordPress visitors

In a post earlier today, I was suggesting a couple of features that exist as parts of add-ons today that I think, (personal opinion here,) should be folded in to the mainline Firefox. A rather exciting discussion ensued but because it was somewhat off-topic, I'd like to open it up to a full post and have a more focused discussion here.

This wouldn't be the first time we've incorporated features from add-ons. As a matter of fact, tabbed browsing and the pop-up blocker both started out as Mozilla extensions. This was before we had a real extension/add-on system but the idea was the same. Not too long ago, we added a spellchecker to Firefox, a feature previously only available as an add-on. More recently, we incorporated parts of the popular session restore add-on into Firefox. That's all to point out that we think one of the values of the amazing add-ons ecosystem is that it provides a R&D lab for the larger Mozilla project and it helps to prove out not just the idea and the implementation, but also the usefulness and desirability to people using the Web.

Today, I think there are two features that have gotten quite a bit of visibility as add-ons which have demonstrated both general usefulness and provided some strong direction for implementations. I don't believe that either of these features are right for Firefox as they are implemented today, but the value they provide to large numbers of users is, in my opinion, worth incorporating in some fashion into Firefox.

The first, and probably most controversial, is ad blocking. Let me again reiterate that I'm not talking about incorporating Ad Block Plus or any other existing ad blocking add-on. I'm talking about incorporating the user value not the particular implementation.

What do users get from ad blocking, or content blocking to be more precise. First, improved usability. The primary reason that we implemented a pop-up blocker in Firefox (one that worked without fuss, right out of the box,) was that pop-ups were a massive usability pain in the ass for pretty much everyone on the Web. That was not some jihad against advertising. It was about providing a better experience for users. By eliminating distractions from the task at hand, people will have a more usable experience. Second, potential performance gains. If the browser is focused on retrieving and displaying just the content that the user wants, performance should be improved. Finally, control. Just as users should be able to access content that some might find objectionable, so should users be able to protect themselves and their families (especially children) from any content they find objectionable.

Today, Firefox, IE, and Safari, the three browsers with significant market share, all block pop-ups "out of the box" so to speak. People aren't distracted, they can get things done faster, they're safer, and they're more in control of their Web experience. The Web is a better place because unrequested pop-up advertising has been mostly banished. There are lots of other annoyances and usability issues on the Web, but, based on the popularity of content blocking software, ads seem to rank pretty high on the list.

The arguments against incorporating some form of ad blocking that I've heard so far are 1) most ads aren't a security threat like pop-ups were. 2) ads today aren't as much of a usability/annoyance as pop-up ads. 3) pop-ups are not ad or ad-network specific so blocking them is fundamentally different from blocking other ad content. 4) it would lead to the end of free/subsidized content on the web or the Web would come to an end. 5) Mozilla would get sued. 6) Website owners should be in control of the user experience, not the users.

So, should Firefox offer users additional content-blocking features? Could usability of the Web be improved if users had more control over this aspect of their online experience? And, assuming the answers to those questions were mostly "yes", what should this new capability look like?

I'm going to share more of my thoughts on this in a later post but I'm curious to hear yours.

The second feature, and I thought it would be less controversial but I was apparently wrong, is video downloading, or more precisely, saving multimedia content that's displayed by the browser. Once again, I want to say that I'm not particular to any existing approach or implementation. I'm just talking about the idea of making it easy for people to save video, and all of the content they're looking at in their browser window.

Why should users be able to download videos? Well, why shouldn't they? They can save images they're looking at. They can save the text they're looking at. They can save the entire page to their hard drives. Every browser in existence that supports text and images allows for saving of that content. What's different about video, or audio, or any of the other types of content that have become more popular in more recent years?

I don't think the current situation makes sense to people browsing the Web. People who don't understand the technology that powers the Web (and shouldn't have to) must wonder why it doesn't "just work" when they go to save one particular piece of content in a Web page. The content is right there in their browser, just like the text is, just like the images are, just like the little animated buttons and icons, but for some magical reason, it's just not the same and can't be saved.

I think that's plain silly and I can't imagine why the fact that browsers haven't yet caught up to these new content types means that they shouldn't try.

The arguments I've heard for not making video and audio (or other "new" content) on the Web as usable as text and images are 1) audio and video technologies on the Web are content protection schemes, not just content, so making it possible to save the content would be illegal or at least invite legal scrutiny. 2) people don't actually want to save audio and video content like they do text and image content so it should remain an add-on. 3) There are other, more important things to change in Firefox than this.

So, should Firefox make multimedia content a first class citizen in the browser by allowing users to save it like they can any other content in the browser? How would this feature be exposed to people using the Web browser?

Again, I'll share more my thoughts on this in an upcoming post. What do you all think?

There is already some great discussion in the earlier post, here, so do check that out. But please make sure that you comment on these issues in this post rather than that one. Thanks.

It's AllPeer's birthday. I first blogged about them back in December of 2005 because it seemed to me at the time, and has been confirmed by their actions of the last year, that they were building on Firefox the right way. I said then, and still believe today, that the AllPeers approach of building on top of Firefox is better in every way than the Flock approach of forking and building an entirely new browser.

Congratulations, AllPeers, and good luck in the coming year.

Adblock for Internet Explorer is not an option

• Firefox is a decent platform. IE is not.

"shorter" concept stolen from Busy, Busy, Busy

Mashable has a nice rundown of some of the best Firefox add-ons. Now seems as good a time as any to revisit the age-old question of which of the features available today with add-ons (not necessarily the whole add-on, but a feature or capability offered,) should be incorporated into the mainline Firefox distribution.

Now, as usual, I'm on the side of less is more and think we're actually just about right where we are today with features. For those of you afraid of bloat, feel free to recommend a feature cut or removal to make room for something new.

I'll start off. My changes are assuming the bulk of the Firefox 3 PRD is implemented.

I would cut the remaining Web developer tools and make them optional at install-time or part of an alternate Firefox version. This would include Page Source, much of Page Info, and the Error Console. I'd pull DOM Inspector completely and make it an extension for XUL developers. I'd also whack the Page Style feature, Themes, the Character Encoding menus for en-US releases, and the current Work Offline feature. I'd pull the Creative Commons search service.

Having freed up some featurespace, I'd drop "Personas" into the spot formerly occupied by Themes. A personas-like feature would make Themes a lot more popular and easier to use. I'd add Text Area Resizer without a second thought. I'd replace DOM Inspector in the optional install-time developer pack with Firebug. DOM Inspector's a solid XUL developer tool, but Firebug is the tool for Web developers -- a much larger and more important audience. I'd add a light-weight version of Ad Block Plus with a default well-owned and maintained filter list subscription. The subscription would an option within the feature. I'd add a simple Video Download feature, though probably not the existing extension. Users should be able to save anything they see on a page, whether it's an image, a video, or a hunk of text. I'd include something like Link Alert or Target Alert so that people would have more information on the link they're about to click.

That's about it. So, what features from add-ons would you like to see adopted in Firefox?

Mozilla has just launched another custom edition Firefox. This one's for all you students heading back to school. Read all about it over at Paul Kim's blog.

If you haven't yet heard about it, head right over to the Mozilla 24 page and learn about this amazing world-wide event.

For those of you in the Bay area, you're not gonna wanna miss this. Seriously.

Saturday, September 25, at the Stanford Center for Innovations in Learning, Mozilla 24's primary US event will include speakers Dr. Vint Cerf, Dr. Lawrence Lessig, Mitchell Baker, Mike Shaver, and more!

Register today at upcoming for Mozilla 24.

Here he is. What an adorable and friendly little guy he is. Click the photo to see the rest of the set at Flickr. I'll be posting more in the coming days.

The main part of the lunar eclipse is just now starting. It'll be a couple of hours of good viewing so get outside and have a look.

Shooting without a tripod is getting increasingly impossible :-)

Unfortunately for the preservation of this beautiful sight, my camera battery has gone dead and after about 20 minutes of late night scrounging, I've yet to find the charger. The good news, for me, is that I'm still going to enjoy this eclipse with Deanna and a pair of binoculars. I'll bet that there will be plenty of great photos taken by others and I'll link something up tomorrow afternoon.

Here you are. Good night.

I'm not ready to bail yet, but Vista on my MBP is proving to be a bit more painful than I'd hoped. The majority of the problems are driver related, I think, so the blame there lies with Apple's Boot Camp & drivers and not with Vista, but it's still a pain.

First, the touchpad is a lot less functional. I cannot get horizontal two-finger scrolling to work at all and vertical scrolling is patchy. Whereas on OS X, you could get away with less than perfect vertical movement, on Vista if my finger dragging deviates from north south at all, scrolling stops or gets jittery.

Second, power management is abysmal. I'm getting about half of what I got under OS X and the Vista "power plans" don't seem to have any impact at all. I get exactly the same battery life on High performance as I do Power saver.

Third, the wireless driver is just piss poor. At home things seem to be pretty much OK but at work I can't move at all without dropping the signal. This definitely needs to improve and until it does, I may have to get a USB wireless adaptor.

Finally, this thing is way hot. I just thought it was hot on OS X. Now, I really do have to be careful that I don't really burn myself.

There are a lot of other smaller issues, but those are the ones that are most bothering me after just a couple of days on this setup. If any of you all know of solutions to any of these issues, please do let me know. Thanks.

The weather is still looking pretty good here in Redwood City for lunar eclipse watching. Clouds are scheduled to come in just after the moon leaves totality and that I can live with :-)

update: It's 12:40 and the skies are still holding out. I see a few clouds to the north but it doesn't look like they're coming this way. Yay!

update: It's 1:40 and the clouds are getting a lot closer but they're few and far between. The umbral eclipse beginning is only moments away.

About three weeks ago, Deanna and I were on our evening walk around the neighborhood when we saw 5 or 6 house rabbits in a small orchard. It was obvious from their black, white, and cream colors that they were domestic bunnies, no doubt dumped by someone who got them without thinking it through.

A couple of days later, again on our evening walk, we engaged with an older couple who were trying to rescue these poor bunnies from a certain and horrible fate as food for some predator or roadkill. They had already captured the three youngest ones but were unable to get two that were larger and more elusive.

About a week went by when on our walk, just across the road from the orchard, we saw the remains of one of the two remaining bunnies. There wasn't much left so we couldn't tell whether it had run over by a car or dropped there after becoming lunch for a coyote. It was then that Deanna and I decided we had to do something for the one remaining little house rabbit.

So, every day for the last week and a half, we've been trying to get closer to the bunny, offering it bits of fruits and vegetables. On Saturday, we were able to coax the little guy to eat from our outstretched hands and even accept a gentle brush from a finger or two on his back but he was a bit too cautious for me to grab him.

During this time, someone in the neighborhood was putting out food and water for him each afternoon under one of the larger persimmon trees at the woods edge of the orchard. Most evenings that's where we'd find him.

Sunday was a bit of a setback. After several trips over there and not seeing him at all, we finally found him relaxing near the big tree at about seven o'clock. I was able to get just close enough to make an attempt to grab him but he was too quick for me.

Today, we got him. While Deanna lured him in with a healthy chunk of banana -- he sure didn't want to let go his tight rabbit teeth grip on that peel, I was able to pin him and lift him to my chest. Deanna quickly brought over the cat carrier we had with us and we got him safely back to the house.

So, he's safe now, and while we hope to adopt him out, the worst case fate he faces today is euthanasia, no doubt better than yesterday's prospects of being ripped to shreds by a raptor or coyote.

Our next steps are to spend a few days with the little guy and see how comfortable he is being held and interacted with. He's been several weeks "in the wild" and I'm sure this "rescue" has been somewhat traumatic.

If we can't find someone to adopt him, we'll look to the Humane Society. I understand that if they think the rabbit can be adopted they'll take him and if not, they'll offer to euthanise.

I've been calling the rabbit a "he" but I really don't know yet if it's a male or female. Not having been a rabbit person until now, I guess I've got some internet reading to do.

Oh, and if you are in the Bay area and would like to adopt a cute little black bunny rabbit, or know someone who would, please let us know. I'll plan on posting some photos tomorrow.

For those of you lucky enough to live on the west coast of North America or the east coast of Australia (and New Zealand) and willing to stay up pretty late tonight -- actually early tomorrow morning, you're going to be treated to a full lunar eclipse.

It will reach its greatest eclipse at 10:37:22.3 UTC, which is 3:37am in my neck of the woods. But don't wait that long, though, unless you're really pressed for time or sleep. The total eclipse views can be had starting at 9:52 UTC and last until 11:22 UTC. If you've got the time to spare and the weather's nice, get there about an hour earlier than that to watch the Moon drift into Earth's shadow.

Oh, and this is a naked-eye event. You don't need a telescope, just a clear western view and some caffeine. If you've got a pair of binoculars and a friend or spouse, those are great to have with you as well. For photographers, take tripod for multi-second exposures. If you haven't shot the moon before, I recommend bracketing your shots as the moon drifts into and out of the Earth's umbra when the contrast is really high. Take lots and lots of shots during totality -- you might even get lucky and catch the first ever spark of a meteor exploding into the eclipsed Moon.

Photo by Flickr user tizianoj and used under a Creative Commons license.

Well, after only one full day on Vista, I've already turned off the User Account Control.

I can't imagine that this maddening series of dialogs is going to do anything but train users to care even less about security warnings. Windows has always been heavy handed with confirmation dialogs and other user interruptions but this was just plain ridiculous.

I know it was exacerbated because I'm setting up a new machine and that means installing and modifying a good bit, but that won't be terribly different from what many others are doing when they first encounter Vista, too.

The good news is that it was about as simple as could be to disable that annoying mess. They got something right :-)

This is pretty cool.

After a little more than a year of OS X as my primary, I'm going to give Vista a go. I'm still on my first generation MacBook Pro but rather than firing up Vista occasionally in Parallels, I'm shifting over to the Vista partition as my default boot. I'm finally able to make the move because Apple's Boot Camp driver package has gotten good enough with version 1.4.

The really cool thing was that I was able to just copy my Firefox and Thunderbird profiles over using Parallels and then boot into Vista and I've got 90% of my standard environment ready to go. Not only did I carry over my email and bookmarks, but extensions moved over seamlessly as well. I love our cross-platform programs :-)

So, I'm back to my trusty text editor, UltraEdit and my favorite IRC client, mIRC. I've still got to figure out what I'm going to do for IM to replace the amazing Adium program. I suspect I'll end up with Pidgin, the current iteration of gAIM.

Depending on how it goes, I'll be back here sooner or later with a report on what I love and hate about Vista. Stay tuned.

I've seen several reports in the last couple of weeks that the word "motherfucking" is included in Firefox's spellchecking dictionary. If you're seeing this, can you please comment here with your Firefox version, locale, and platform? Thanks.

update: I've traced the various posts back to their root at Worse Than Failure but the only thing I learned there is that people are not seeing it in the en-GB dictionary.

To test this, you simply type "buckinghamshire" in a text area and right-click to get the spelling suggestions. I don't see it, though, on my Mac trunk build (en-US).

late update: It appears this is already known and taken care of at bug 366077. Thanks for the feedback everyone.

Mike Shaver has a great blog post up today that I think goes a long way to clarifying the Mozilla platform story. All that, and it's less than 500 words long. Do read this.

In the comments section of one of my earlier posts, and elsewhere on the web I've been talking about WebRunner as an alternative to Adobe Air.

Today, Ceasar has posted more info on WebRunner. The first bit of news is that webrunner probably won't be available in stock Firefox 3 builds. The second bit, and exciting news is that Ceasar is working on a Firefox extension. Give his post a read and check out the early version of the WebRunner extension.

Just about every day I run across someone using Firefox's ancient, pre-1.0 logo. To most people it won't be obvious or it won't seem like a big deal, but it's a real peeve of mine so I'm asking you all to help me spread the word.

Below, I've provided a sample illustrating the two logos and offering some suggestions for quickly identifying which logo you're looking at. In addition, I'm providing a couple of links to the correct image in several sizes and formats. If you all could, please help me rid the web of that old version. Thanks.

And, as always, please also help others to use these logos correctly and legally. Thanks.

It must be a slow news day for Jeremy Kirk and InfoWorld to be publishing this kind of he said, she said tabloid news.

It's just a kook with a blog and a weak argument. He's already had his 15 minutes and it's long past time to move on. C'mon, InfoWorld, you're better than this.

If you live on the Nordic region, Schrep's headed your way.

Photo by Flickr user miguelb and used under a Creative Commons license.

I'm sure that one of you can help me figure out how to accomplish this task. If you've got ideas, please post them here or email me.

The goal is to be able to re-syndicate a subset of the feeds I'm consuming. Here's my setup:

I use ForumZilla, a Thunderbird extension which polls web feeds and displays them in Thunderbird as mail messages. I consume about 10 of feeds, each of which contain search results for terms like "mozilla", "firefox", and "web browser". ForumZilla pumps those messages up to my IMAP server where I run about 800 or so filters on the resulting messages, reducing the total from about 7,000 messages a day to around 1,500 -- filtering out non-English posts (since I can't read those,) splogs, duplicates, re-blogs and other noise.

I then read through most of those 1,500 posts and delete about half of them as missed by the filters or just un-interesting.

So, at the end of any given day, I've got about 700-800 posts that are relevant to Firefox and Mozilla and out of that batch, I flag 100-200 as posts that I think other people might want to read.

So, what I'd like to do is find a way to turn these messages into a web feed that others can consume.

I see a few approaches but I'm just not terribly technical so I have no idea if they are even feasible, or if there are better solutions. That's where you come in. Please let me know what you think.

The first idea I had was a Thunderbird extension or a standalone script that could simply read the IMAP headers (which, thanks to ForumZilla, contain the all important feed item URI,) on my mail server and generate a feed from those messages that I could share. Ideally this extension or script would be configurable as to which IMAP folders, headers, flags, etc it cares about and whether to generate a simple feed with URIs or a more complicated -- but maybe more useful, feed containing message bodies too. This would be basically a "syndicate my mailbox" extension.

The second idea was also a Thunderbird extension, but possibly a lot simpler. If there was a simple feature that let me click on a message and "send to feed," or "send to blog" where the extension would grab the message header containing the feed item's URI and append it to a published feed somewhere or post it to a blog where the blog could generate a feed.

The third solution may be mostly available today but I haven't investigated, and that's just using an existing blog platform's "post by email" feature and essentially forward messages from my inbox to my blog where a feed could be generated and published. The feed template would need to remove a lot of the unimportant noise from the post but that seems pretty doable. I don't know, though, if those APIs can actually pull from the email header as opposed to just the message body. That shouldn't be too much of a problem, though, because I think that ForumZilla includes a reference to the feed item URI in the body as well.

So, what do you all think? Is something like this available today? Anyone interested in building a Thunderbird extension? If it was doable, would you be interested in reading a fairly high signal to noise but high volume feed for "everything the blogosphere is saying about Firefox and Mozilla"?

Walt Mossberg, legendary tech writer, reviewed Dell's new Vostro line of small business computers (laptops and desktops.) Among other criticisms (like the Vostro not actually providing any small business-specific benefits,) Walt noted that it lacks, "a modern, secure Web browser. They come with the old, insecure Internet Explorer 6.0 instead of Mozilla's Firefox or Microsoft's much safer Internet Explorer 7.0. A small business buying a Vostro with XP would have to immediately replace the browser."

The good news, for Firefox and for Dell customers, is that Dell is considering adding Firefox to at least some of their PCs.

Now would probably be a good time to add your voice to the 107,500+ others asking for Firefox support from Dell.

Johnathan Nightingale , over at his blog, meandering wildly, has posted some really neat stats on SSL usage. It's mostly conclusion free, except for Johnathan's final paragraph, which I agree with wholeheartedly.

The results are out from the 2007 Desktop Linux Survey, and no surprises here. Firefox continues to dominate the Linux desktop.

Thunderbird still maintains its slim lead over Evolution but the real winner in this round of the survey is the web with more than 10% of respondents using some flavor of webmail.

Firefox, and Mozilla before it, is the reason that I was able to spend significant time on the (still) not very mature Linux desktop. Having a comfortable browsing environment, where I spend most of my computing time, allowed me to overlook all of the things that just don't work so well on Linux.

Now if only the Linux developers and vendors would put some time into building a real program install system that works for software vendors instead of locking users into their little walled gardens.... More on that later.

I'm sure most of you are already aware of it, but judging from my logs, many of you haven't actually moved to the latest Gran Paradiso release.

Gran Paradiso Alpha 7, built on top of Gecko 1.9, and the precursor to Firefox 3, needs you! Most important, we need feedback on website compatibility and stability. Gecko 1.9 has been under development for two full years now and there's a lot that's changed under the hood that will be of great interest to web developers. Some of the changes are listed below:

• Full page zoom of images, layout and text (see bug 4821)
• Color profile support (see bug 16769)
• document.all now returns a NodeList of elements (see bug 259332)
• Several new clipboard events (see bug 280959).
• Cross site XMLHttpRequest specification implemented (see bug 389508)
• A method for opening modal dialogs from content (see bug 194404)
• SVG lighting (bug 383184) and tile filters (bug 373572)
• Support for CSS text-rendering property for HTML (see bug 387969)
• window.getComputedStyle supports all supported CSS properties (see bug 316981)
• Browser-side support for windowless plugins on Unix/X11 (see bug 137189)
• A full Gecko 1.9 bug fix list

You can find the full set of release notes here.

And for the really brave (actually, it's not that scary,) you can get the latest nightly build here.

Photo by Flickr user johnthescone and used under a Creative Commons license.

Haavard and Daniel are engaged in some really good browser marketing discussions at their respective blogs. It's worth reading those threads to see how a big* company like Opera takes up the challenge of expanding product reach.

One thing that stands out to me in the comments there is that many of the participants in that discussion have an incomplete picture of marketing, often reducing it to just one of its many components -- advertising, or public relations, or branding, etc. Daniel's post does a pretty good job in pointing out how varied the activities and required expertise can be. Thanks, Daniel!

While reading through the posts and comments, though, something else struck me. Could Opera's name be hurting their efforts? It's a fine name and I'm not dissing it or anything like that, but it does mean that Opera has to share the search space with an entirely different category of content.

While Opera Software does hold the top spot for a search on "opera", the number 3, 4, 6, 7, 8, and 9 SERP spots are for "opera" the art form. It's even worse when you search news and blogs where the overwhelming majority of the articles and posts are about the art form and not the browser. I think it would be a nightmare just to try to track what the news and blogs were saying about Opera (something I do for Firefox,) given how noisy the results would be.

In my experience, building the browser turns out not to be the hardest part. It's reaching out to potential users and convincing them that they should learn more about your offering and showing them how to get it, try it out, and hopefully stay with it. For a product like a browser, where most people get it via the Web, being easy to find and distinct from the rest of the Web's "noise" seems pretty important to me. A new name could come with a fresh new logo, too. I don't know anything about the Opera logo, but the Firefox logo has been a real strong awareness driver on the web.

It is pretty cool, though, to see Opera reaching out to get this kind of feedback from the Opera community. I'm an occasional Opera user myself and for some time was a rabid Opera promoter (I even had Opera 3 banners on my site back in 1998 ;-) and I'm always happy to give feedback.

*Haavard says they don't have deep pockets but Opera has distribution, sales, and marketing personnel in the hundreds. While the "Desktop" team may not be that big, Opera Software is about four times the size of Mozilla today.

late update: Oh, and bring back Opera Man! He was awesome. Much cooler than these guys (yes, even the dungeon master w3c advocate.)

This is cool. Flash made video on the web, particularly YouTube, a real game thanks to its ubiquity. But Flash video has mostly sucked -- not just because services like YouTube crunch files down well beyond acceptable, but because the Flash video codec simply wasn't as good as h2.64 (commonly used in QuickTime.) With Flash's distribution, there's now a viable h.264 platform for video online. Let's see if people start using it.

Some of you will remember this; some, probably not.

We once had a weekly feature called "Friends of the Tree" where community members that had made recent significant contributions were recognized.

Friends of the Tree showed up as a highlighted block of content at the top of each week's status report with the contributor's name, the reason for their being called out, and the name of the person who nominated them.

It was a very simple system with nominations emailed to a maintainer who posted them along with the weekly status reports. We're posting weekly updates to the Mozilla wiki these days and I think that's a fine place for us to restore the Friends of the Tree tradition.

So, if you know of contributors who have gone above and beyond, or otherwise deserve a special notice, please email me with that contributor's name and their good deed(s). I'll update once a week but the nominations can cover any contributions in the last few weeks. That way we don't miss saying "thanks" just because the good work came late in the week.

Oh, and one more note. Friends of the tree began when the Mozilla community was dominated by engineers, hence the name. But we're a much larger and more inclusive community today so please don't limit your nominations to people working in the code.

And to give you a taste of what it was back in the old days, here are a few examples: 2001-10-31, 2000-09-13, 2001-09-13, 2001-08-30, and 1999-11-17. Oh, and here's one more.

Excluding extension features, what's your favorite Firefox feature. I think that for me, it's the spell checker. I'm actually learning to spell thanks to Firefox. That's just wonderful. I think that tabbed browsing is probably the Firefox feature I'd next most regret not having.

What feature do you wish that Firefox had built in, and for this one you can include extension features. For me, it'd probably be some form of adblocker, a text area resizer, or a simple language translation tool.

And finally, what popular feature, either in Firefox or available as an extension, would you like to see removed from or never included in Firefox. For me, I think that would be a toss-up between "most of Page Info" and the "Error Console" that I'd like removed.

Dave Winer, an early user and fan of the rss internet format, visited Mozilla HQ today. I stopped paying attention near the end of the Q&A when Dave said, "You could use my time better than this."

David, Rhian, Sarah, and John have done some great work to make this Mozilla Store relaunch a huge success. Go check it out and buy yourself some Mozilla colors.

Today's trunk nightly build has a nifty tab animation for overflow tabs. If you're not on the tip of the trunk, now's a great time. It's starting to get fun.

Things are getting a bit better for Spirit, but Opportunity's still dealing with near-record tau levels that are keeping its batteries pretty low. The next problem to be addressed is when the storms pass and the dust all settles down on the rovers solar panels. I'm keeping the fingers crossed and still think we'll see Opportunity come out of this in good shape.

IRC has been a key component of communication in Mozilla since I first got involved. The last couple of years I've been away from IRC and during that time I moved over to a Mac laptop as my primary machine and getting back on IRC has been painful because none of the clients I've tried offer the ease and comfort that I remember from mIRC.

I've tried Colloquy, Chatzilla (of course,) and X-Chat aqua. They're just not really comfortable. Colloquy has come closest but it's just terribly buggy for me.

Do any of you all have suggestions for an alternative IRC client for Mac?

David Utter, a tech writer over at WebProNews, says Firefox Needs To Go To School and I think I agree. Though, I would probably approach things differently than he's suggesting.

Putting aside the discussion on Mozilla's approach to improving retention rates, I do think that it's important to find a way for Mozilla to communicate with young children. David says, "Mozilla needs to target the most inquisitive, adaptable demographic with their efforts. Kids who work on computers in school each day have the 'E = Internet' lesson reinforced."

Rather than "target kids" with Firefox marketing programs, I think there's a more effective, and more important message we should be delivering. For some background on what I'm going to suggest, I encourage you give Mitchell Baker's recent blog posts, The Internet as a Public Good, and Firefox is Public Asset. I'll excerpt a small portion here, but you really should read the full articles.

I want to ensure that the Internet has robust public interest aspects. That the Internet has social, civic and individual benefits as well as commercial benefits. I suppose one could call this ensuring the Internet has robust non-commercial aspects. But this is a negative approach. I'm not against commercial activity being a vibrant part of Internet development. On the contrary, I believe commercial activity brings great value to individuals and society.

But I don't want to live in a world where the only thing the Internet is useful for, or effective at, or pleasant or fun, are activities where someone is making money from me.

[W]e want to create a part of online life that is explicitly NOT about someone getting rich. We want to promote all the other things in life that matter -- personal, social, educational and civic enrichment for massive numbers of people. Individual ability to participate and to control our own lives whether or not someone else gets rich through what we do. We all need a voice for this part of the Internet experience. The people involved with Mozilla are choosing to be this voice....

We need a public benefit aspect to the Internet. That's why we started building browsers in the first place.

So, rather than spending a lot of Mozilla's resources trying to "market" Firefox to young children -- something I'd rather not be doing at all, we could focus on education itself, teaching young children the importance of the Internet as a "public good" and raising awareness about all of the other-than-commercial activities that make the Internet such a valuable commons.

The other guys in this business have spent literally billions of dollars over the last several decades pushing their computing solutions and their view of that space into the classroom. With so many resource constrained schools across this country alone -- and my public middle school was a great example, administrators really, really appreciate that inflow of resources. For those big companies, though, I suspect that the business justification for gifting or severely discounting their products to schools was not that it was for the public benefit, but that it served to cement their positions being seen as "the computer" or "the operating system" or "the office suite" or "the Internet".

David is right when he says "the normal non-tech-absorbed person, who looks at a typical PC desktop and thinks the blue E symbolizing Microsoft's Internet Explorer equals the Internet" and this is a problem. It's not just a problem because it makes marketing Firefox more difficult. It's a problem because the blue E is not the Internet.

Mozilla's mission, as Mitchell described it, is to ensure that the public benefit aspects of the Internet, the social, personal, educational, and civic enrichment aspects have a strong and capable advocate. That is very different from Microsoft's mission and hopefully it will have very different outcomes.

I believe that Mozilla's mission, if it is to be successful, is one that we should be undertaking through activities outside of the direct production of software.

Participating in education programs is a service that would advance Mozilla's public benefit mission and at the same time help to counter the "the blue 'e' is the Internet" message that's being pushed on our children at an increasingly young age. Delivering an early education Internet curriculum to schools in need is an activity that our grass-roots community could accomplish with similar impact to the massive spending on hardware and software distribution undertaken by the big guys. This could be another highly-leveraged approach that would bring in a whole new kind of Mozilla contributor.

I haven't thought through the specifics a program like this would entail, but I do think that something like this would be a more practical, more effective, and more important effort than "marketing" Firefox by "targeting" children.

What do you all think?

Today's Gran Paradiso builds have a nifty new feature -- a plugin manager. It lives along side the extensions and themes manager and allows users to selectively disable Firefox plugins. Good job, Michael!

Cool.

My blog reading habits are a bit different from most. I only subscribe to two or three blogs and for the remainder of my reading I subscribe to topics through the various blog search services. In the last year, my feed inbox has gone from about 20% spam blogs to about 80% spam blogs.

I read feeds in my IMAP account and so I've got Thunderbird's powerful spam filtering, plus Message Filters and that helps me keep on top of a lot of it, but it's still getting pretty bad.

What's happening lately more than it used to is persistent and massive blog spam floods that are little more than jumbled text from real blog posts mixed with popular search keywords. Most of the time it's not long before I find that a persistent flood is coming from 20-30 blogger accounts and I can deal with it through a set of Message Filters on the site's URL.

Still, it's a pain in the ass and Google Blog Search and Bloglines seem to be the worst (out of my 10 or so blog search services.) Are they just not interested in keeping those indexes clean or have the spammers really beat them?

I posted some thoughts yesterday addressing AllPeers Matt's suggestion that Firefox be run as a traditional for-profit corporation. But Mitchell Baker says it like no other can. Go read her now.

Photo by Flickr user Bitterjug and used under a Creative Commons license.

In my previous post I wondered whether or not Firefox's adoption and retention rates were good or bad and if the very serious and very smart reporters over at ZDNet might be able to give us some examples of other software for download that was doing significantly better.

But that's not really the point, I think.

Regardless, and in absence of some measure to compare, we'd like to improve it.

The first step in the process was to make the best measurements we could. Since we're not in the business of tracking users, it's necessarily an imperfect science but what we've learned is that about 50% of the people who get Firefox from Mozilla actually launch it and successfully connect to the web. Over time, that group of people splits. About half of them keep on using Firefox and the other half returns to some other browser (presumably.)

We should figure out why and do what we can to improve. And that's what this Mozilla community discussion and resulting project is all about.

We've spent the last few years working on ways to improve our visibility and get more downloads of Firefox -- with quite some success. Right now, we're seeing just about half a million Firefox downloads per day. I think that's phenomenal.

Now we're starting to look more closely at what happens after someone downloads Firefox. If we can better understand this, we can try to improve it. Gains in the trial and adoption areas are significant since the difficult and often expensive work of attracting the download (and here I mean the time and effort spent by the millions of people who are spreading Firefox to their friends, family, co-workers, neighbors, etc) was already completed.

Some initial investigation and brainstorming suggested about a dozen changes we could make that might shift these numbers. We'll try some or all of them and do our best to measure the results. If you've got other ideas or want to help us implement this first round of changes, we'd love to have your help.

That doesn't mean we shouldn't continue to work to increase the total number of downloads, but it does offer up an area for us to investigate where we might get some big wins.

The Mozilla community is engaged in a discussion around user adoption and retention that's been picked up by some in the tech media with headlines and articles suggesting that Mozilla's roughly 25% adoption/retention number is shockingly bad.

I wonder what they're comparing it to. Do any of you all know of any other software organization that offers software for download and publishes information about the number of downloads they get, the number of people who actually install the software, and the number of people that continue using it for a month or a year?

Do Adrian and Larry at ZDNet have something to compare Mozilla's stats to? I'm assuming that they do since they feel confident calling Mozilla's adoption and retention rates "shocking" and "poor".

Me, I have no idea. Perhaps 25% retention is phenomenal for downloaded software. Maybe it's sub-par.

We've had nearly 400,000,000 downloads of Firefox and we've got about 110 million users. Is that good? Is that bad? How does that compare to Skype, or RealPlayer, or LimeWire, for example? I certainly don't know and I've actually been looking for that kind of information for three or four years.

Maybe those very knowledgeable reporters over at ZDNet can share some of their wisdom.

Matt, over at the All Peers blog, Peer Pressure, once again asks what would be so wrong with a traditional for-profit company making Firefox. His proposal goes, I think, something like this: The non-profit Mozilla Foundation builds the XUL Runner platform while a multitude of traditional for-profit companies build programs, including Firefox, on top of that platform.

What I think about this falls into three basic areas, the Mozilla mission, creating great code, and picking the right battles. Today I'll share some on the first one, with the next two coming up later this week (I hope.)

First, and most important to me, is that Firefox is more than just a program built on the Mozilla XUL platform. Firefox is the most effective tool that's ever been created for protecting and advancing the Internet.

I believe the Internet is a global public resource -- like the air and the water, and the Mozilla organizations exist to protect that shared resource and to help it grow in ways that are beneficial to everyone rather than just a few.

This public benefit mission is not something that should be entrusted to one or even a handful of traditional for-profit public companies. The entire history of the Internet demonstrates that if the whole show is dominated by corporate interests and their requirements for generating shareholder value, then innovation, interoperability, and the public good will be stifled or sacrificed completely.

This is what makes the charitable, public-benefit mission of the Mozilla organizations so important. And this mission is made manifest in Firefox by all of the contributors to the Mozilla community, including those paid by Mozilla, paid by other organizations, or working as volunteers.

The Internet, this extraordinary system of interoperating and open standards, is not yet safe. Today it us under a renewed assault from shiny new proprietary systems like Silverlight and Air, and Mozilla must use whatever leverage it has to continue to defend open standards and interoperability so that no one is locked out of participation or locked in to the single-vendor solutions that are corroding the foundations of this amazing global shared resource.

If protecting and advancing the Internet was second to the real legal requirements of creating shareholder wealth in a traditional public for-profit corporation, not only would Firefox not be the product it is today with the users and influence it currently has, but Mozilla would not be the project it is today with the amazing set of technologies and contributors that it currently has. People simply would not have made the kinds of contributions to either the product or the larger project knowing that some small group of others were going to become millionaires on their backs.

A thriving and participatory Internet matters a lot to me. I believe that Mozilla exists to promote and defend that. Mozilla, through Firefox, is not only the best suited to that mission, it has already demonstrated some success. Finally, I cannot imagine some other organization where this could have happened, nor could I imagine Mozilla being able to fulfill that mission without being fully committed to Firefox.

This time, things are looking up.

They're not out of the woods yet, but the skies on Mars have brightened some for the two little rovers that could.

The latest news from the MER team is good news and thanks to the slight increase in sunlight, both rovers have been able to fully recharge their main batteries.

I can't wait 'till Opportunity can dive down into that crater. It's going to be a whole new world.

More news as it comes.

If you're a Facebook user and a Firefox user, this will probably be of interest to you.

And if you can't get enough of those awesome visual stylin's you should check this out.

I posted last week about the horrible experience I had with the latest beta of the coComment system. I also posted some steps I thought that they should take to improve going forward. Today, I'm happy to share with you all that the folks at coComment have been actively participating in this most important discussion and the results are starting to show themselves.

The most important change, I think, was reverting back to the previous version of the extension. The new features included with the extension are interesting, but they weren't fully thought out and proved to be more of a problem in the real world than I'm sure the team anticipated.

They've also taken to heart many of the suggestions about the web service side of things, reverting some changes to the site and keeping some of the improvements. Overall, I'm pretty happy with the state of things today because it mostly works again.

I hope that the coComment team doesn't get gun-shy after this event, and I fully understand what it's like to be at the center of a user backlash and how easy it would be to let something like that turn your team more conservative. Experimentation and change, moving the platform forward, is a critical piece of making a successful product and building a successful company, though, and these kinds of setbacks will happen more often than you'd think if you're brave enough to give it your all. So, to those of you at coComment who have been living and working through this, keep your chins up and don't let us users grind you down too bad. We post because we care :-)

Great start!

Who out there isn't starting to get worried that Facebook's on its way to the usability and chaos of MySpace with the proliferation of Facebook applications. Well, Nicholas Pike has stepped up to do something about it. Read his blog post here and check out the early version of the Firefox extension.

Great stuff, Nocholas!

You know, the extension that kicked off the whole GreaseMonkey thing was called the All Music Guide Corrector. It was invented to fix the damage done by a very poor site redesign and it spawned a whole new category of tools that put a user in control of the content she's reading or interacting with.

This simple idea, that users should be empowered to deal with web content they way that they see fit, rather than the way the content producer intended, has fundamentally changed the web landscape and I believe this idea, powered by working examples like the All Music Guide Corrector, was instrumental in bringing about the revolution we've seen on the web in the last three years with mashups, the proliferation of web service APIs, and many other collaboration and sharing tools and systems.

So, what's next?

Photo, "It's all about control" by Flickr user ilmungo and used under a CC license.

The last week has been a disaster for most coComment users. I'm one of them.

I don't want the good folks at coComment to think I'm bashing, because I'm not. They've got a very talented group of people tackling an increasingly important problem, keeping up with conversations on the web. So, I hope this is taken in the best possible light -- as constructive criticism towards a service I'd like to continue using.

coComment, in its previous iteration offered a very simple solution to a difficult problem. There are more and more people who are commenting in an ever-growing pool of weblogs and keeping up with all of those threads scattered across the web is nearly impossible. Until Cocomment, I simply bookmarked all of the blog posts where I was participating in or just following the comment discussion and then each day I'd check back to see if there were new comments or responses to what I'd said.

coComment provides a web service that aggregates the blog posts you're interested in following. They offer two useful tools for accomplishing this task, a bookmarklet or Firefox add-on for delivering the blog post and comment thread to the coComment infrastructure when a user posts a comment, and a pretty nice web application for following the various discussions.

The Firefox extension was pretty simple. It offered a small toolbar that attached to the bottom of a weblog's comment box and a Firefox statusbar notification icon. The commenting toolbar allowed you to enable or disable coComment right there where you were making your comment. It also allowed you to tag the comment for easier searching or organizing in the coComment web application. The statusbar icon serves two functions. It offers a menu that replicates the enable/disable feature of the comment toolbar and it changes color to indicate whether or not it is active and if you have new follow-up comments ready for reading back at the coComment web service.

The coComment web service was also pretty simple and quite efficient. The key part was the "your conversations" section that listed each of the blog posts a user was following. Each post had a twisty next to it that would expand it to show the comment thread underneath. It did more, for example allowing a user to stop following a blog post, mark all the comments for a post as read, etc. The main point here, though, is that it was a pretty simple interface that served its major purpose quite well.

Now, both of these tools, the Firefox extension and the web service had bugs and some missing features that many users though would be important. For me, and several others commenting at the coComment user forums and blogs, a key missing feature was the ability to tell coComment, either from the Firefox extension or from the web service "never track conversations for this blog". Another problem was that it didn't work with every blog, though the major blogging platforms with "normal" themes all seemed to work fine. There were a handful of smaller issues around the less important features of the service but I was mostly satisfied.

Until last week when they started rolling out the beta of coComment v2.

Not only did they fail to address the problems with the current feature set, but they broke much of what was already working well. First, the extension is mostly useless now because a new v2 feature, an ever-present floating icon that sits in the top right of the web page. This icon floats on top of the web page's content and can be expanded into a toolbar so that coComment users can comment on and track any pages, even if they don't have commenting systems. In theory this is a nice idea, but the problem with this is that it breaks so many sites or just annoys users by blocking view of the page's content that it's caused me and other users to disable the whole Firefox extension. And that's on top of their not adding that most wanted blacklist feature. So, I'm back to using the bookmarklet which isn't nearly as cool or useful as the previous version of extension.

The service has also suffered. It is much less usable now that they altered the main "your conversations" section. Rather than letting you see all of the blog comment threads on one page with nice little expanding/collapsing accordion-like listings, now you have launch each thread in a new page and the navigation on that new page doesn't make it obvious how to get to the next and previous threads. In addition, they've added about a dozen new features focused on building communities ("your coComment friends, groups, favorites, followers and conversational neighbors", as they put it,) something I'm not at all interested in. Theses features overwhelm the user interface of the coComment web service, making the most basic, and useful tasks more difficult to find or access.

Finally, this is all beta but users are essentially forced to migrate from the previous version to this beta which has many small bugs and much more frequent service outages and login problems. They did have a private beta, but I think forcing this public beta on all of their users was a bit premature.

So, those are my big complaints. I said I wanted to make this constructive so I'll focus now on what I think they should do going forward.

coComment needs to nail the basics. The core function of coComment is giving users an easy way to track all of their conversations in one place. This needs to be rock solid.

The Web Service
1. Default to the My coComments -> my conversations -> me page, not the top level of My coComments. Exploring the cocommunity is not terribly useful, yet, and my groups and friends and favorites are just empty and useless blocks for me and many others.
2. Return to the accordion conversation expanding/collapsing widget from the previous version.
3. Add title tips for all links and UI elements on the page so the user knows what the heck is gonna happen when she clicks on something. I don't want to click on a link named "coColink" or "delete" until I know what exactly cocolinking is or until I know precisely what I'm deleting and from where.
4. Make conversations with new messages a lot more visible. The link color just isn't a good enough indicator.
5. Improve the infrastructure capacity and fix bugs to allow users to stay logged in. Right now, I'm having to log in again many times a day.
6. Drop the sidebar or pull it back to the private beta until it's more than a broken skeleton.
7. Fix the bug with Latest comment time which is showing up in seconds for at least Firefox 3 users.

The Firefox Extension
1. Fix whatever bugs or infrastructure problems that are preventing my posts from going through and add error handling to the toolbar so that if there's a failure at coComment the user is prompted to "submit anyway, without tracking at co-comment" or "try again." Under no circumstance should a user be prevented from commenting.
2. Make the toolbar work for more blogs.
3. Move the functionality of the floating toolbar thing to the statusbar popup or otherwise out of the content area.
4. Add the "blacklist this entire site" feature that defaults to blacklisting the entire domain but can be edited to use a simple regular expression like "blacklist: weblogs.foo.com/bar*" so that it can work for multi-blog sites. (Even better would be to add logic to do that without user intervention.)
5. Fix whatever bugs in the extension are causing any site breakage. Co-comment should not impact the page layout or functionality for any pages on the web. period.
6. change the - and + icons next to track and share. Why would you associate "track" with a minus sign?
7. Add meaningful title tips to all of your toolbar buttons and links and fields. Repeating the name of the button in the title tip isn't sufficient.
8. Ensure that the toolbar width is the same as the width of the posting box and that it aligns correctly with the bottom (or top) of the box.
9. Implement extension preferences that allow for the selective disabling/enabling of all of the features for the extension.
10. Make the drop-down menu button on the main coComment toolbar require a click rather than just a mouse-over. Right now it's too easy to accidentally obscure the close button on your way to clicking it.

Oh, and one other thing, get your Forums working so people can give feedback there. I've been getting MySQL connection errors for a couple of days now.

After weather led to fueling delays on Tuesday, which caused Wednesday's launch to slip, NASA's Phoenix spacecraft is set to launch in the early morning hours on Saturday. The two launch windows are 5:26 a.m. EDT and 6:03 a.m. EDT.

The Phoenix mission, jointly managed by the University of Arizona, JPL, and LMSS, was conceived and designed to answer three basic questions: 1) can the Martian arctic support life, 2) what is the history of water at the landing site, and 3) how is the Martian climate affected by polar dynamics? I'll have more on the science payload in upcoming posts.

So, if you're up early on Saturday, tune into NASA TV and the Phoenix Launch Blog to see the Phoenix spacecraft, atop a Boeing Delta II 7925, as it begins its 10 month journey to the red planet. And stay tuned here for continuing coverage as we try once again to beat the odds and put another one of these amazing machines in a position to reveal even more of Mars' secrets.

One of the things that really bothers me about the popular Linux distributions is the vendor lock-in and the loss of real user choice and freedom. I've got more to say about this so expect to see an article on this topic soon.

In the last few weeks, I'm seeing more people complaining about dramatic performance problems. I'm not talking about excess memory usage or a small slowdown in launch time or page loading time, but a serious degradation in performance. One report I just read was a user complaining that it took Firefox 2 almost 30 seconds to launch on his machine while Firefox 1.5 used to start in just a couple of seconds. Another report was of a machine hanging any time the user tried to open more than a few tabs at once.

I've experienced some pretty dramatic problems with Firefox 2 and 3 builds hanging really bad when I tried to open a group of tabs with more than about 6 tabs. Just recently I discovered that Firebug causing some of my problems. Apparently I'd set Firebug to be active on every page and so as I moved around the web, Firefox+Firebug was doing a lot of extra work. Disabling Firebug for everything except my blog where I use it cured me of my major performance issues.

This is the third or forth time that an extension has been the root of my Firefox woes and I suspect I'm not alone.

So, I'd like to do an experiment here. If you want to participate, here are the instructions:

1. List all of your installed extensions.
2. List out your hardware, OS version, and Firefox version.
3. Post your cold start-up time for Firefox - this means after a reboot, when the system is fully loaded and no other applications are running start Firefox and measure the number of seconds it takes to start loading the first webpage.
4. Post your warm start-up time. This means the time it takes to start Firefox after it's been shut down at least once.
5. Post the time it takes to load this set of pages in tabs (just load them as a tab group a few times and come up with an average time it takes to see the last tab's spinner stop: www.yahoo.com, www.cnn.com, gizmodo.com, www.myspace.com, and www.msn.com) or come up with your own set of tabs to measure.
6. Repeat steps 3, 4 and 5 running with all of your extensions disabled and post the results.

Of course, as with all clock on the wall tests, it's not critical that your measurements be exact. The goal here is to see if there are any dramatic performance issues running with and without your extensions.

Here are my results with all of my extensions fully enabled:

1. I have the latest versions of CoComment, Full Page Zoom, Nightly Tester Tools, and DOM Inspector.
2. I'm running a first generation MacBook Pro, 2Ghz Core Duo, 2GB RAM, with OSX 10.4.10. I'm yesterday's Firefox 3 nightly build.
3. Cold start averages about 8 seconds.
4. Warm start is between 1 and 2 seconds.
5. Tab group load takes an average of 8 seconds.
6. With my extensions disabled, my cold start is 6 seconds, my warm start feels a tiny bit faster, around 1 second and the tab group loads in about the same 8 seconds.

So, for me, the extensions seem to have a small impact on startup time but no impact on page loading time for this group of pages.

What's your experience? And if you can do more thorough tests, please do. I just provided these as guidance to try to learn something about extension impact on performance.

Photo by Flickr user pandiyan and used under a Creative Commons license.