The Mozilla Blog

As promised, we’ll continue to highlight some of the incredibly cool and useful Firefox 3 features you can expect to see.   Today’s installment on Firefox 3’s new bookmarking system is brought to you once again by Deb Richardson, the author of the about:mozilla newsletter.   Deb provides a clear explanation of the many improvements you’ll see, including:

• bookmark stars which allow for one-click bookmarking
• tags that allow you to add extra relevant information to a bookmark so it’s easier to find and organize
• smart bookmark folders or “saved searches” that automatically update when you add new items matching that search to your bookmarks

 Firefox 3’s bookmark dialog box

Take a look at her post for more details, as well as a great how-to.  I’ve found that I am using Firefox 3’s bookmarking with renewed gusto thanks to the little star and intuitive organization and search!

Look out for Firefox…he (or is it a she?) is on the loose at ROFLCon!  ROFLCon is a fabulous celebration of all the goofiness that the Web has helped unleash.  Mozilla stepped forward to help the conference because it’s just this type of creativity (or bizarreness depending on who you talk to!) that makes the Web so wonderful!

Firefox has been seen rubbing elbows with the Tron Guy and more.   You never know where Firefox will show up next!

Update courtesy of Ronaldo Lemos:  7,400 people attended FISL!

Mitchell Baker, Chris Hofmann, Chris Blizzard, Taras Glek, Marcio Galli and myself just wrapped up an amazing visit to Porto Alegre for FISL, Brazil’s largest open source conference.  The conference drew over 6,000 people from Brazil, Argentina, Portugal, Angola and more!  I wanted to extend a huge thank you to Bruno Magrani, Ronaldo Lemos, Mario Rinaldi, Clauber Stipkovic Halic, Giullermo Movia of Argentina, Felipe Gomes, Antonio Gomes, Andre Pedralho, Fernando Silveira, Marcelo Terres, Juliano Bittencourt and everyone else who helped make our experience so great!

Some of the highlights:

• We met many, many, many passionate Firefox users.  In fact, 6,000 of them and not nearly enough Firefox t-shirts to go around.  You can imagine the stampede!
• Our Brazilian contributors helped conduct a workshop on the various ways to get involved with Firefox and Mozilla.  Despite the heat and far off location we had a great showing of people. Stay tuned for video!
• In line with the Brazilian culture, we had a great community party to thank our Brazilian contributors and get to know some new people.
• Juliano Bittencourt of the One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) project took us to a local deployment where we met students who’ve been enjoying, customizing and learning with the computers.  It was pretty amazing to see OLPC project coming to life.

It was great to see all the contribution that is going on in Brazil and to meet new volunteers.  Thanks for the hard work!

Deb Richardson, author of the about:mozilla newsletter, wrote one of the better explanations I’ve seen on the “AwesomeBar,” Firefox 3’s revamped URL bar.   It’s not the most humble of names, but if you check out Deb’s post you’ll see why it’s earned it.

In Deb’s words, here’s a quick snapshot of what makes Firefox 3’s URL bar just so awesome:

Dubbed the “AwesomeBar”, it lets you use the URL field of your browser to do a keyword search of your history and bookmarks. No longer do you have to know the domain of the page you’re looking for — the AwesomeBar will match what you’re typing (even multiple words!) against the URLs, page titles, and tags in your bookmarks and history, returning results sorted by “frecency” (an algorithm combining frequency + recency).

Not only that, but the drop-list results show you the page’s favicon, the full title, the URL, and whether you have bookmarked and/or tagged the page in a richly formatted two-line display.

Example:  I start by typing “ginger”, and AwesomeBar searches through my history and bookmarks to return everything that matches that keyword, showing the first six and letting me scroll through the rest. You’ll notice here that several of the results are bookmarked (blue star icon on the right), and tagged (tag icon). The sites’ favicons are displayed on the left, making it really easy to scan through the results if you know what site you’re looking for in particular.

Check out Deb’s post for more on the AwesomeBar and check back here for more on the cool things to expect in Firefox 3!

Editor’s Note: I’d like to share a guest post from Ronaldo Lemos and Bruno Magrani of the Center for Technology & Society at FGV Law School, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. 

Bruno Magrani

Next week, Mozilla will participate in the 9th Fórum Internacional do Software Livre (International Free Software Forum - FISL) in Porto Alegre, Brazil. This is the second time that Mozilla will be in Brazil on an “official” visit. This time, the group includes Mitchell Baker (Mozilla’s Chairperson), Chris Blizzard, Marcio Galli, Mary Colvig, Taras Glek and Chris Hofmann. In their visit, they will be in touch with a vibrant and growing community of free software users, developers and enthusiasts. This is a great opportunity both for Mozilla and for the Brazilian community to get together and work with Firefox and other initiatives that promote the core values of the net, including openness and freedom.

Ronaldo Lemos and I have been helping support Mozilla’s presence here in Brazil and at FISL.  This is not the first time that our institution, the Center for Technology & Society at the FGV Law School in Rio de Janeiro has participated in the Forum. We’ve worked closely with FISL in the past few years and we launched the Brazilian branch of the Creative Commons project at the Forum in March 2004. This was an unforgettable event, I believe both for us, and for the more than 1,500 participants attending the launch, anxious to hear Minister Gilberto Gil, Marcelo Tas, Terry Fisher, Lawrence Lessig, Luis Nassif, André Midani, Claudio Prado, Joaquim Falcão, and so many others who care a lot about the future of the internet. A video of the launch can be watched here.

This year we are very happy to be back again at the Free Software Forum (this will be our 4th year at the event). Besides organizing/participating in a few panels, we will be there to support Mozilla´s visit the best way we can, including their workshop. We are very honored to do this, especially because we believe Mozilla will find in Brazil a place where not only we share common values, but also, put them into practice, thanks to our natural “tropicalist” mindset, and to the fact that the meaning of “openness” is very strong for us. One symbol of that is the fact that President Lula is expected at the Forum this year, and Brazil is well-known worldwide for its support of free software and free culture. Without further ado, we look forward to a great conference and Mozilla visit!

No Monday blues around here today — it’s Mozilla’s 10 year anniversary! On March 31, 1998 Mozilla was officially launched and the Mozilla source code became publicly available for the first time. Mitchell Baker has a write up of what Mozilla and its community have accomplished in these past 10 years and what’s in store for the next 10. Here are a few highlights:

• Converted a closed, proprietary development process into a vibrant, transparent, open source project
• Grown into a massive global community, quite possibly the largest open source project in the world
• Developed a set of long-term, vibrant projects — Firefox, Thunderbird, SeaMonkey, Camino, Bugzilla, Calendar — most, and possibly all of which have millions of users
• Become the software provider of choice for over 170 million people
• Proved that open source development can produce great end user products
• Brought the Internet to millions of people in their language
• Moved the overall state of browser software forward dramatically
• Become a technology platform others use to create products built on Mozilla technologies, and in some cases competitive with Mozilla products

A huge thanks to our wonderful community that has helped make this all possible! Please stay tuned for more details on how we’ll honor the anniversary over the year.

Monday marks a very special day in Mozilla history — the 10 year anniversary of the Mozilla source code release. We’d like to give you the chance to hear from some folks who have been with us from the beginning. Mitchell Baker, Brendan Eich, Mike Shaver, and Chris Hofmann will join us for a special one hour retrospective. Asa Dotzler, will be hosting and asking our guests to reflect on the early days, major inflection points for the organization, and what’s in store for the next 10 years of Mozilla. Prior to the live broadcast you can catch “Mozilla Memories,” video messages from community members and Mozilla employees, starting at 10 a.m. PDT.

So please join us on Monday for this special Air Mozilla Live.

Who: The Mozilla community, host Asa Dotzler, and guests Mitchell Baker, Brendan Eich, Mike Shaver, and Chris Hofmann.
When: Monday, March 31, from 11:00:00 - 12:00:00 PDT (UTC-07:00)
Where: View the webcast and join the chat at air.mozilla.com.

Also: As part of the year-long celebration of Mozilla’s 10 years, we’re gathering up video memories from our community of contributors. If you’d like to share some of your experiences with Mozilla, please upload them to YouTube and tag them with “mozilla-anniversary” so that we can locate them. You’ll be able to see the first batch of video memories starting one hour before Monday’s show and we hope to add another batch at least once a month.

(If you do record a video memory, hold onto the clip so that if we decided to put it into the Air Mozilla program, we can use the higher quality footage rather than YouTube’s downsampled version.)

A special thanks goes out to Mogulus for supporting this production of Air Mozilla.

[Mozilla announced Firefox 3 Beta 4 today, March 10th at approximately 5:30pm PT. See Mike Beltzner’s comprehensive post from DevNews, crossposted below. Please keep in mind that the Firefox 3 Beta 4 milestone release is intended for testing purposes only and is not for casual users.]

Firefox 3 beta 4 now available for download

Please note: We do not recommend that anyone other than developers and testers download the Firefox 3 Beta 4 milestone release. It is intended for testing purposes only.

Firefox 3 Beta 4 is now available for download. This is the twelfth developer milestone focused on testing the core functionality provided by many new features and changes to the platform scheduled for Firefox 3. Ongoing planning for Firefox 3 can be followed at the Firefox 3 Planning Center, as well as in mozilla.dev.planning and on irc.mozilla.org in #granparadiso.

New features and changes in this milestone that require feedback include:

• Improvements to the user interface: better search support in the Download Manager, ability to zoom entire page or just the text, continuing look and feel improvements on Windows Vista, Windows XP, Mac OS X and Linux.
• Richer personalization through: location bar that uses an algorithm based on site visit recency and frequency (called “frecency”) to provide better matches against your history and bookmarks for URLs and page titles, as well as an adaptive learning algorithm which tunes itself to your browsing habits.
• Improved platform features such as: support for HTML5’s window.postMessage and window.messageEvent, JavaScript 1.8 improvements, and offline data storage for web applications.
• Performance improvements: changes to our JavaScript engine as well as profile guided optimization resulted in significant gains over previous releases in the popular SunSpider test from Apple, web applications like Google Mail and Zoho Office run much faster, and continued improvements to memory usage drastically reduce the amount of memory consumed over long web browsing sessions.

(You can find out more about all of these features in the “What’s New” section of the release notes.)

Testers can download Firefox 3 Beta 4 builds for Windows, Mac OS X and Linux in over 35 different languages. Please be sure to read the full release notes before using this preview release. Developers should look at the Firefox 3 for Developers article on the Mozilla Developer Center.

Note: Please do not link directly to the download site. Instead we strongly encourage you to link to this Firefox 3 Beta 4 milestone announcement so that everyone will know what this milestone is, what they should expect, and who should be downloading to participate in testing at this stage of development.

Firefox just reached  500,000,000 downloads. This is an absolutely phenomenal milestone for Firefox. It is sort of hard to imagine what that number means. For some perspective, that’s roughly the audience size of 10,000 Rome Colosseums combined. It would be the weight, in kilograms, of 8,500 Boeing 747 airplanes. In dollars, for $500 million you and 15 of your friends can fly to the International Space Station.

OR, you can affect change and invite 15 of your friends to play a game and feed 25,000 people. With your help we can break another milestone today with FreeRice.com –500,000,000 grains of donated rice in one day. Imagine helping to feed the hungry while picking up some new vocabulary too!

Please join us for another exciting episode of Air Mozilla Live!

This week’s Air Mozilla Live broadcast will feature a discussion with David Ascher, CEO of Mozilla’s new Mozilla Messaging organization. David will be talking about the launch of this new Mozilla Foundation subsidiary, upcoming Thunderbird releases, and the future of internet messaging. The program will also facilitate a community discussion about the new native look and feel for Firefox 3 on Mac, Windows, and Linux. Our guest for this segment of the show is Alex Faaborg, the User Experience Designer who has led much of this effort over the last year. Got thoughts, suggestions, rants about the new themes? Alex can’t wait.

So join us, this Thursday for our live community discussion and “call-in” show.

Who: The Mozilla community, host Asa Dotzler, and guests David Ascher, and Alex Faaborg.

When: Thursday, February 21, from 14:00:00 - 15:00:00 PST (UTC -8.)
Where: View the webcast at air.mozilla.com and participate on IRC, IM, or email.

• IRC: join the discussion on irc.mozilla.org #airmozilla
• IM: instant message your questions to the AIM/YIM/GTalk screenname airmozilla.
• email: send in your questions before and during the show to airmozilla@mozilla.com.

Air Mozilla is now streaming 24/7 with a new live show every month (or as close to that as makes sense.) If you’ve got ideas for shows, please email us and let us know. Even better, if you’re a part of the Mozilla community and you’d like to be interviewed or present on our live broadcast, let us know.