chris beard's blog

Quick Update on What's New in Labs

Last week we launched major updates to a number of Mozilla Labs projects, including Weave and Personas. We also introduced a new project, Test Pilot, to propose a new user testing framework and community. 

Please do check them out and let us know what you think!

In less than six months, with little to no marketing or promotion, Personas has already gained a significant following with more than 200,000 unique users and growing daily. We're now working toward having a 1.0 release ready for the launch of Firefox 3.

Thousands of people are also helping with the early testing of Weave. The core data synchronization components are becoming increasingly solid, with bookmarks and browsing history securely reflected into the cloud and seamlessly synchronized across all of your devices.  We're aiming for a beta release of this base functionality (along with support for additional browser metadata) in time for Firefox 3 while work continues on building out the platform and its data sharing capabilities.

We also had an opportunity to speak with some bloggers recently, and you can see some of the coverage here:

• Firefox 4 will push out the edges of the browser (Rafe Needleman, Webware|cnet)
• Mozilla wants to put a Firefox in the cloud and your pocket (Ryan Paul, Ars Technica)

Special thanks to Dan Mills and his tireless efforts to advance Weave, Myk Melez for helping to take Personas to another level and one step closer to a production release, Atul Varma for putting together the glue that binds the Personas back-end together, and to everyone who has submitted bug reports, feature requests, and has helped with the testing so far.

Welcome to Jono DiCarlo, Aza Raskin and Atul Varma

As previously announced we've made some additions to the Mozilla Labs staff.

Today marks the first official day with Jono, Aza and Atul working full-time for Mozilla. They are now based out of the Mozilla Labs compound in Mountain View, Calif.

Please joining me in welcoming them to the team!

We're looking forward to moving even faster as we roll out new programs and continue to build out a virtual labs where people can come together to create, experiment and play with new ideas.

The Space Between, Part II

We’ve been exploring ways to enhance the Firefox user experience, increase user control over personal information, and provide new opportunities for developers to build innovative online experiences; and specifically, how we can achieve this through deeper integration of the browser with online services.

This is but one approach to the problem.  Here's the idea:

1. we move browser metadata into the cloud
2. we transparently reflect this data everywhere an individual gets online
3. we provide a basic framework for easily sharing and collaborating with friends and family
4. we develop tools and APIs for developers to extend this framework and to provide new user experiences

Jay Sullivan has posted some ideas on how this sort of approach could make the personalized experience portable.

We've also set out some basic organizing principles to help frame the approach that we'd like to explore.

What do you think?  Join us over at Mozilla Labs as we start to put together the building blocks and framework for exploring this idea further.

Personas for Firefox, Now With Snowmen

We've officially moved Personas into Mozilla Labs where we'll be exploring new forms of dynamic personalization.

Be sure to grab the new version, it's a major rewrite of the code and includes dozens of new designs. It also now works with the beta releases of Firefox 3.

Special thanks to Rhian for coordinating the development of new designs, and to Myk for driving this round of development. 

A new Web site and developer APIs will be released within the next couple of weeks.

Firefox Market Share

Early this morning I was catching up on a number of projects and I noticed that Net Applications is reporting a 1.04% jump in Firefox market share for November 2007.  Even accounting for seasonal fluctuations, that's pretty significant. What's also interesting, is that Firefox 3 is already starting to show up with a 0.06% share and that their data roughly reflects what we're seeing with more than 93% of Firefox users using the latest release. 

Source: http://marketshare.hitslink.com/report.aspx?qprid=1

Of course, this is only one source and it's still really hard, and somewhat frustrating, to get a good picture of browser usage particularly outside of the US and Western Europe.

John Lilly posted a couple of weeks ago about how we're thinking about market share in general and what we're measuring today to help us making decisions. Well worth the read if you're at all interested.

Firefox Flicks Redux

It's been almost two years since we announced the Firefox Flicks competition. At the time, this was still something relatively original and the term "user generated content" was still fresh.

Last week I found a DVD with some of the Flicks videos and screened them for some visitors to our office. It was great fun, and brought back a lot of memories. It also reinforced for me how great some of the entries were.

Mozilla Japan has now launched their own version of Flicks with the Get Firefox Video Award. Very cool.

In case you missed the original competition (or, might enjoy the distraction again), I'm including here some of my personal favourites. It still amazes me the level of effort and energy that went into producing each and every one of the 280+ entries.

• Double Click Relief by Craig Kuehne

• Smells Terrific by Doug Spice

• Xraalthraal and John by Matthew Beighley

The Space Between

It seems that as the Web continues to evolve and as more of our lives moves online, we could do more to broker even richer online experiences.

We've been thinking about this a lot lately. And, in particular, how the blending of the desktop and the Web -- through deeper integration of the browser with online services -- could further enhance the user experience, increase user control over personal information, and provide new opportunities for developers to build innovative online experiences.

For example, it could provide the ability for users to synchronize profile data between computers (with the ability to grant fine grained access rights to third-parties), or provide new tools for interacting with all of the various social networks, building on earlier experiments like The Coop and Joey.

And even though these sorts of things are possible today with existing tools, it requires considerable bespoke development and implementation of things (e.g. network operations, data synchronization, encryption, messaging, identity management, etc.) that should be common and provided by the platform.

And perhaps more importantly, without designed integration points in the browser or on the desktop, and with no guidelines or structure, user experience across the whole of the system suffers.

So, just like we have enabled massive innovation by making Firefox open on many levels, what if we did the same with services by developing an open extensible framework?

And while we've just started to explore this idea, we do have some proposed organizing principles. We would:

• provide a basic set of optional Mozilla-hosted online services
• ensure that it is easy for people to set up their own services with freely available open standards-based tools
• provide users with the ability to fully control and customize their online experience, including whether and how their data should be shared with their family, their friends, and third-parties
• respect individual privacy (e.g. client-side encryption by default with the ability to delegate access rights)
• leverage existing open standards and propose new ones as needed
• build a extensible architecture like Firefox

Early thoughts and feedback are most welcome, and especially from those interested in participating in the further development of this concept.

More detailed discussion and posts to follow.

Extend Firefox Contest - Technical Sessions and Q&A

It’s time for the second in our series of technical sessions for Extension Developers. Our first session - Mike Beltzner discussing best practices and design patterns for extensions – was awesome. If you missed it, the video can be found here. Definitely check it out, great content and questions.

Our next session will take place next Wednesday, 11/28 at 2:00pmPST. We will be discussing parts of an extension, interacting with web content, and general extension development. And of course we’ll be taking your questions! Next week’s session will be hosted by Air Mozilla and moderated by Asa Dotzler.

• WHAT: Firefox Extension Developer Roundtable
• WHO: Mark Finkle, Mozilla Platform Evangelist and Dave Townsend, Firefox Engineer
• WHEN: Wednesday, 11/28, 2:00pm PST

Details about the broadcast format can be found at Air Mozilla. We will send updated connection information soon. Get your questions ready!

See the complete schedule for all upcoming technical sessions at: http://labs.mozilla.com/contests/extendfirefox/developer.php.

Full contest details are available at: http://www.extendfirefox.com.

(Cross-posted from Rhian's announcement on the Extend Firefox blog.)

Mozilla Labs Update

We've had some recent additions to the Mozilla Labs team, and I'd like to make some belated introductions.

To begin with, Firefox engineers Myk Melez and Dan Mills have joined Labs full-time, transitioning in as they complete their Firefox 3 responsibilities, to focus on user experience and personalization experiments.

Rhian Baker, from the Firefox marketing team, and coordinator of the Campus Reps program, has joined as a project manager.

Also, please join me in welcoming Jay Sullivan, who joined us full-time about 2 weeks ago. Jay will focus initially on mobile user experience and product strategy. He comes to us with over 20 years of experience in the software industry and with deep expertise in mobile software and personalization. Most recently he co-founded and served as VP of Products at PocketThis (now PhoneSpots), a mobile software and services company.

Suffice to say, we’re super excited to get things rolling, so stay tuned over the coming days and weeks as we roll out new programs, restructure the group, and build out a virtual lab where people can come together to create, experiment, and play with new ideas.

Extend Firefox^2 - Judges

We're pleased to announce the panel of judges that will award the prizes in this round of the Extend Firefox competition.

Our judges will be:

• Garrett Camp - Founder & Chief Product Officer of StumbleUpon
• Brendan Eich – CTO of Mozilla and creator of JavaScript
• Tariq Krim - Founder and CEO of Netvibes
• Jesse James Garrett – President of Adaptive Path
• Joshua Schachter - Founder of del.icio.us, Director of Engineering, Yahoo!

Get more info and stay on top of contest news at the Extend Firefox site. Contest runs through December 31, 2007.