chofmann's weblog

So you have to plunk down a good chunk of change if you want to make some of the key functionality in Mozilla 1.6, Firefox and Thunderbird available in the leading commercial offerings. But Mozilla offers lots of features and ease of use that you don't get with IE or Outlook.

Security and privacy is another area where I think Mozilla has a great deal of value to offer. When you are finished with installing some of the ActiveX extensions listed above to get IE up to the level of modern browsers like Mozilla 1.6 and Firefox you may also need some spyware killers to clean up your system, depending on the cost of package and the version you install. There is a lot to think about as you start to install add-ons on top of the architecture of what some have called "The Most Dangerous Software Ever Written."

Or... you can simplify this whole process and install the latest Mozilla releases and get a great set of integrated features and high quality software. Wired.com recently recommended Mozilla as good way to stay away from the increasing number of viruses, worms, and exploits that have plagued many in the last few months. In that recommendation they said:

Mozilla offers hundreds of dollars of value that you save in the cost of software and time saved in dealing with a wide variety of problems. Mozilla integrates all these features and puts them though a rigorous engineering peer review, testing, and evaluation by thousands of open source contributors that have a passion for high quality, security, and protecting the privacy of Internet users. Mozilla has been the primary source of innovation an continued improvement for many of these features. The project continues to make the Internet faster and easier to use for an increasing number of people who have stopped banging their heads against the wall with patches to 4 year old Internet technology, and don't want to wait another two or three years for improvements that might come with a costly new operating system release.

Even if you are not a regular Mozilla user you might consider donating to the project to help keep the competitive landscape for Internet software alive. The buzz around Mozilla features such as pop-up blocking and next generation Browsers and E-Mail clients is forcing Microsoft to respond as seen in recently announced plans to include pop-up blocking in an upcoming Windows XP service pack - so ALL Internet users benefit from the healthy competition that Mozilla provides.

You can help us to do more: invest in some of our current quality initiatives.

In the last six months we have converted from relying on AOL Netscape servers and infrastructure to a network of independent servers owned and managed by the Mozilla Foundation. The last piece of that full migration is finishing up the installation of Talkback software donated by Supportsoft.com, installed on a new high-powered server.

Talkback saves money and time though automated collection of crash reports and makes an amazing impact. It collects all incoming crash reports from consenting Mozilla users around the world and digests the reports by categorizing the incoming data and associating it with with debugging symbols and source code information, and then stores the information in a database. This real-time data allows us to identify the problems and bugs that users see most often and to point Mozilla developers to places where they can make the biggest difference, allowing us to produce the most stable browser ever released. While the automation is very good, the system does require powerful servers and take up a good chunk of bandwidth, costing us thousands of dollars each month.

Test tracker is another tool under development that will allow us to improve our certification and qualification process for testing and releasing software. The tool will harness efforts of the large volunteer testing network to allow us to systematically certify releases for a variety of features, use patterns, and applications that depend on Mozilla.

Efforts such as Talkback, Test tracker and nightly smoke tests are especially critical as we prepare for the Firefox 1.0 release, which will attract millions of new users. To fund these quality assurance initiatives, we hope to raise $35,000 by signing up 1,500 new contributors to the Mozilla Foundation. 1.5 million people have already downloaded Mozilla 1.6. A similar number of users have downloaded Mozilla Firefox 0.8.

If you appreciate the quality of our software and understand the importance of maintaining competition on the Net, take a moment to calculate how much Mozilla is worth to you, make a donation, and help us make our software even better as we gear up for the Firefox 1.0 release!

To make a donation, head to http://www.mozilla.org/donate - there are several easy ways to donate (including check, credit card, Paypal and e-Gold). If you make a donation of $25 or more, we'll send you free Mozilla CDs, t-shirts and more.

Donate Today!