cbeard's blog

Don't Miss a Single Goal

We're really excited to announce the availability of the Joga.com Companion, Powered by Firefox.  We developed this new Firefox 1.5 add-on with Google and their partners, and we think that it's particularly cool (of course, we're biased!) as it allows football/soccer fans to:

• customize their browser with one of 32 national team themes
• track the latest scores and headlines
• view awesome football videos
• connect with communities of football fans
• and, receive up-to-the-minute match and goal notifications while browsing the Web

This is a project that came together rather quickly and we’re very excited to get this out the door and into the hands of football fans worldwide!  English, French, German, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese and Japanese are supported now, with other languages on the way.

Check it out!  Go to the Joga.com Companion page where you can easily install the Firefox add-on, or, if you're not yet a Firefox user, you can get a full Firefox 1.5 with Joga.com Companion built right in.

For more information, please visit: http://www.mozilla.com/add-ons/jogacompanion/

We do plan on open sourcing the underlying framework and code we developed to build this add-on -- although we still have some work to do in terms of licensing and code review -- we'll get to that now that we've shipping version 1.0. However, the graphics, trademarks and sports feeds used to build the official Joga.com Companion have been licensed from third-parties and will not be open sourced.

We hope you enjoy it!

Summer Projects at Mozilla

You'll be seeing a lot more activity over the coming months as we roll out new marketing programs and campaigns, and accelerate into the launch of Firefox 2.

There are also many new names and faces as we grow the team and community who are working together to raise awareness and drive adoption of Firefox worldwide.  (There are now more than 170,000 people registered on SpreadFirefox.com to participate in Firefox marketing activities!)

This week marks the start of Mozilla's summer internship program.  We had an incredible number of applications for these internship slots, and I'm very pleased to introduce you to the folks who have joined the market and product management team full-time for the summer:

• John Carey comes to use from Firefox Flicks (his entry was "Drama Queen") and he is currently attending college in Springfield, Missouri and plans to attend USC to pursue a degree in Film Production. In addition to experience on music videos, documentaries and events, John also has on-air radio experience.


• Matthew Shichtman also comes to us from Firefox Flicks (his entry was "Get Foxy") and he is currently studying Film and Media Arts at Temple University in Philadelphia. Matthew brings with him extensive short-film production experience and has recent directed a fifteen-minute documentary for A Safe Place, a women's abuse shelter in the Chicago area.


• Rachel Werner joins us as a diehard Firefox fan from UC Berkeley, where she is currently working on her MBA at the Haas School of Business. She also has a BS in Electrical and Computer Engineering from the University of Colorado at Boulder.

So what will they be working on?  I'll let them each give more details over the coming days and weeks, over on SpreadFirefox.com.  In brief, we're planning on launching new videos projects (possibly including a regular video podcast as part of a revised AirMozilla), the next phase of Firefox Flicks, and a community-based market research program to coordinate focus groups and surveys to support our marketing and product planning.

Calling Home

My earlier blog post on Web Analytics has raised a couple of good questions around how Firefox uses cookies to provide security and stability updates.

To answer these questions, here’s a brief description of the service, how it works, what information is collected, and how it is used by Mozilla:

Firefox 1.5 includes an automated update mechanism that calls "home" daily to check for, download, and install the latest security and stability updates. Specifically, Firefox will contact a Mozilla server hosted at aus2.mozilla.org, and a cookie named "aus" will be queried (or set) that contains a numeric value to distinguish individual Firefox installs. 

We use this information to deliver the update service and also to support decision making regarding feature and capacity planning (e.g. how fast our user base is growing, how many servers we need to add to support this automated update service, etc.). The goal is to improve our products and services. Individuals who do not wish to this cookie placed on their computers by Mozilla can set their browsers to refuse cookies.  The automated update mechanism may also be disabled in the options/preferences menu of Firefox.  To be clear, Mozilla does not collect nor track any personally-identifiable data or information about your Web usage.

For more information on Mozilla's privacy policy and standards please see: http://www.mozilla.com/privacy-policy.html

Web Analytics and Mozilla

Soon we will begin using a Web analytics software package to help us better understand and track the effectiveness of our marketing programs and to improve our products and services. I want to highlight what this will do for us, and the steps we have taken to protect our end-users’ privacy.

Until now we have been using a set of purpose-built and open source tools to monitor our Web traffic and gauge the success of our marketing programs. As we have grown (and our products, services, and marketing efforts have increased in complexity), we have been searching for more sophisticated analytic tools.  We looked for solutions that would allow us to track campaigns, understand where our visitors are coming from, and learn more about which outreach activities are generating the most interest.  We also required that any solution we adopted provide this insight without compromising our privacy standards.

The software package we decided upon is Urchin Web Analytics from Google.

While there are many Web analytics tools offered as hosted solutions, we decided that an in-house software approach is the best choice for Mozilla. Our hesitation to go with a hosted solution stems from the fact that the information is not stored on our servers, and we would have less control over our end-users’ data. We feel it will be more secure and more in line with our privacy standards to roll out Web analytics software on Mozilla-controlled servers.

To be clear, we are not expanding the collection of information, nor are we grabbing personally-identifiable information. The cookies we will use for visitors to our sites or advertisements will collect the same kind of information we already collect for session management and logins, and that enables product features like the new automated system in Firefox 1.5 to provide users with the latest security updates.

For more information and details on Mozilla’s privacy policies and standards, please see: http://www.mozilla.com/privacy-policy.html