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May 31, 2007

Heading back from China

Tuesday Li Gong and I spent most of the day catching up on Mozilla and brainstorming about the future of Mozilla China. Li's clearly great and we are rather fortunate to have him at Mozilla. Afterwards I made it to Tiananmen Square just in time to see the flag lowering ceremony during sunset. Also got to ride the subway during rush hour - which was an experience all its own. Lots of folks texting and playing games on their cell phones and not a single smart-phone in sight.

Wednesday Johnny joined me and we spent the day working with the Sun China folks. Many thanks to Alfred Peng for organizing the day. It was great to see the enthusiasm for Mozilla and the Mozilla + dtrace demos were quite impressive. We'll have some Sun folks over to MV to demo to a wider audience. Sun has been doing some great things with Bug and Test days in China - and they thanked Tim, Tomcat, Tracy, and Jay for their help. Hopefully we'll be able to do more here in the future. Finally, Johnny gave everyone some insights and history about the Mozilla platform. We'll have to get him on video for everyone to see. Alfred, Brian, and Emily then took us out for some great food including our own numbered Peaking Duck. It was really a pleasure to meet the Sun team - I look forward to working with them in the future.

Thursday was the Google developer day. It was packed and honestly I haven't seen an audience that excited, engaged, and full of questions at any event I've been at in recent memory. Nearly the entire room had heard of Firefox and Mozilla. Almost all of those used the en-US version. Lots of great questions about how someone can get started in open source. We did two rounds of press briefings with about 6 reporters each. The questions ranged from "what products does Mozilla build" to "what's our plan in China" to "how big is the office space." There were also many many questions about web compatibility problems and a few on memory usage. IE only sites and web compatibility is definitely an area we'll have to focus on to be successful here.

It is quite humbling to realize how little we, or more specifically I, understand about China. However, the energy of the people here coupled with the horrible state of affairs in web standards makes it obvious to me that with plenty of local help we can really make a difference. No pressure Li :-)

Posted by schrep at 10:24 PM | Comments (2)

May 28, 2007

In Beijing this week

Today I'm spending the day catching up with Li Gong . Tomorrow Johnny joins us to spend the day at Sun China. On Thursday I'll be speaking at the Google Worldwide Developer Day. If you are in the area please be sure to come by and say hi!

Posted by schrep at 3:07 PM

May 18, 2007

The importance of updates

Secunia just released an interesting study on the update rates of various applications. When it came to browsers they said:

"Comparing browsers and looking at Firefox, Opera and Internet Explorer, we found out that Firefox 2 is the least vulnerable, as only 5.19% of all Firefox 2 installations miss security updates, whereas 11.96% of all Opera 9.x installations miss security updates, and the numbers for IE6 and IE7 are 9.61% and 5.4% respectively. "

You should always be careful drawing broad conclusions from any one study (e.g. this one has a sample size of 350K). However, this does highlight to me the importance of all the hard work that goes on here to produce security updates. By keeping the update process simple, updates small, and the quality of those releases high we encourage people to take updates.

The speed and quality of updates is one of our best weapons again the advancing state of the art of exploits. Hopefully the teams working on this keep this in mind when they stay up late for another night of RC re-spins :-).

Posted by schrep at 1:56 PM

May 16, 2007

Mozilla Platform

There has been a great discussion going on with lots of thoughts and clarification about XULRunner and the "Mozilla Platform."

I believe part of the confusion here is a lack of a clear definition of "Mozilla Platform" and shared understanding what's being worked on. We got together a good bunch of the platform hackers with someone who has a much better aesthetic sense than I and produced an updated Mozilla Platform "Marketechture" Diagram: (yes yes I know - the actual relationship of the components is much more complicated than this simplified 2D plot):

What's interesting to me about this is looking at how big, rich, and *actively developed* the core platform is here. What do I mean?


This is just a snapshot - the full list here is very long.

This is not meant to dismiss the frustrations of people working with Mozilla when their particular use of the platform isn't being well enough supported. Firefox is the most widely deployed application built on the Mozilla platform - so it does and should get disproportionate attention from the Platform. But that doesn't mean there isn't tremendous investment in the platform in a manner which benefits all applications - it's by far the biggest area of Engineering investment by MoFo/MoCo.

So in short - I don't want us to lose sight of the work that has gone into the platform over the last few years, the dedication of people all around the world making this happen, and and most importantly the really exciting things planned for the future...

Posted by schrep at 11:50 AM | Comments (5)