On November 9, 2004, a brand new product stroke the web, and it changed. After a halt of 5 years , innovation became again part of the game and it hasn’t stopped since then bringing on millions of users, locales, communities, and equally importantly, competitors: Chrome, Safari, Internet Explorer, and Opera are all in the game of exploding the web again, and maybe not breaking it this time.

To celebrate, Mozilla is organizing Light the Web with Firefox.

The idea is simple: do something that involves light and Firefox: project it on a public place, make a Firefox signal with a flashlight, use candles, your cell phone, your house, your car. Take a picture, upload it to Flickr with the firefox5 tag and join the celebration.

Cool Firefox swag is available for the best entries!

You can also use a twibbon to share the celebration on Twitter, host a party. Whatever you do, use the #firefox5 tag.

Celebrate what the web is today: your communication hub, your way of expression, your hobby, your discovery playground, you name it. At the same time, help raise awareness on the importance on keeping One Web: for people of all languages, devices, nations, and conditions.

Get involved in any of several simple ways:

• Post about it on Twitter, Facebook, MySpace, Hi5, etc. Make sure to use the tag #owd2009.
• Grab a poster here, take a picture of yourself and post it to Flickr, make sure to use the tag #owd2009. Link to your picture here, and you may win a laptop bag!
• Grab an image here, print yourself a T-shirt and wear it around, or print a mini poster and show it in your car
• Donate to OneWebDay. Cold cash is also necessary.
• Share this link to perform an Internet Health Check, where unhealthy means using Internet Explorer 6.

To know the impact of the effort, register your event/aid at Mozilla Service Week web site, share your story, inspire others. Then come back and report how much time you actually served.

Personally, I have finished crafting a brand new web site for a school in Surco, close to where I live here in Lima, and I will give a talk on Firefox customization tomorrow at Universidad Nacional Federico Villarreal in the first CIDSOLI Install Fest, organized by the students’ open source community.

The latest Mozilla marketing project is asking you to submit a video of yourself performing some task really really fast.

To ignite the fire, videos of actual world record holders are being posted (starting with the fastest clapper) at the site. Just ensure not to use any copyrighted material, keep it under 30 secs/100 MB, encode as MP4, WMV or QuickTime (yes no Theora, but videos are converted to this format anyway) and submit it for others to enjoy before June 21.

You could win a Firefox 3.5 T-shirt if your video is selected for a video compilation.

Organized by OneRiot, AdaptiveBlue, and Sxipper, Add-on-Con will be the first conference dedicated to web browser add-ons with people from Google, Mozilla and Microsoft coming together to discuss the future of web browsing.

The one day event, that has Mozilla and Mashable as platinum sponsors, will have Business and Technical tracks with five sessions each, and two keynotes.

Add-on-Con will take place on December 11 at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View. Admission is $150. A portion of the profits will be donated to the One Laptop per Child Project.

But, as usual I’ve waited ’til the very last moment to share this with you (I’m at Philadelphia waiting for my 6 hours connection to Vancouver, after a 4 hours ride from San Juan, Puerto Rico), but hopefully I will be able to share some of the experience of talking about the future of Mozilla and even a release with you all, as Firefox 3.1 alpha 1 is expected to be released tomorrow, driven by Mike Beltzner, directly from Whistler.

So, what do you want to know? If you’ve ever wished to be there at some Mozilla event to learn or ask someting please let me know and I’ll do my best to get it for you.

Mari, Percy, and Cami, I already miss you! :(

Looking forward to meet a lot of local Firefox fans there and share ideas for promoting Firefox locally.

El sábado a las 8 en Telemundo!

Look for a party near you at Mozilla Party Central.

During this day, starting at 7:00am PST (GMT -7), users looking for a way to get involved with Mozilla will learn about opportunities to help other users with the upcoming Firefox 3. Either writing or editing articles, answering through live chat or in the forums, providing feedback, help with a favicon, there’s lots of things to do and most likely a way for you to help.

Join this Friday 11th, on IRC. Get ChatZilla, an IRC Firefox extension, or visit Mibbit and connect to irc.mozilla.org and join #sumo channel.

Visit Mozilla Support Day web site for more details.

Ten years ago, following an astonishing announcement on early January, Netscape opened the source code of Communicator 5, Netscape’s suite of Internet applications, effectively starting the Mozilla Project.

MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif. (March 31, 1998) — Netscape Communications Corporation (NASDAQ:NSCP) today announced that the first developer release of its Communicator 5.0 source code is available for download from the mozilla.org Web site. Targeted at the developer community, this unprecedented release of the client source code promotes acceleration of the evolution of Communicator 5.0 development by allowing the company to harness the creative power of thousands of programmers on the Internet, incorporating their best enhancements into future versions of Netscape’s software. This strategy is designed to accelerate development and distribution of future high-quality versions of Netscape Communicator to business customers and individuals, further seeding the market for Netscape’s enterprise solutions and Netcenter business.

Over the next years, much of the code would be completely rewritten, and Netscape, the product would eventually die; but Mozilla, the community of developers, testers and users, was already founded and it wouldn’t go away. The original suite still lives in SeaMonkey and more than 100 products based on Mozilla technologies are around.

To all who in some little or big way keep this project alive and healthy, Thanks & Cheers!

Full original press release.

Update: On Mitchell Baker’s take on the 10th anniversary, she comments on the future:

The next ten years have challenges and opportunities equal to those of our first decade.  The Internet is now interwoven into modern life, and it will certainly grow to be  more powerful.  There’s no guarantee that it will remain open or or enjoyable or safe.  There’s no guarantee that individuals will be able to participate in creating or (for the general non-technical consumer) effectively managing their experience.  There’s no guarantee that there is an effective voice for individuals  benefiting from the increased power of the Internet.

Mozilla can and should fulfill this role.  But not as a guarantor.   Mozilla is an opportunity for people to make this vision happen.    Mozilla is about opportunity and participation.

Yesterday, Mozilla hosted a blogger luncheon where a few bloggers from main media outlets were invited to introduce them to and discuss the upcoming Firefox 3.

Besides a couple of small announcements, the most interesting fact here is seeing Mozilla more actively engaging with the media to get the word around. Asa Dotzler has a nice writeup of the meeting in his blog.

During the meeting it was confirmed that Firefox 3 is expected for June and that due to Apple licensing limitations (and overall uncoolness), there are no plans for an iPhone version of Firefox any time soon.

Also, it seems the Mozilla folks really liked the T-shirt design contest candidates and at least one of the finalists was printed and given away to participants, according to these photos posted by Webware’s Rafe Needleman.

Note: Session picture courtesy of Wired Compiler.

Aza Raskin will be at Core Conversation: Designing for “Oh No!”. Monday 10 @ 11:30 – 12:30pm.
Brendan Eich will be at Browser Wars: Deja Vu All Over Again panel, sharing views with Opera and Microsoft folks. Monday 10 @ 2:00-3:00pm.

John Resig will be at Secrets of JavaScript Libraries panel. Tuesday 11 @ 2:00-3:00pm.

If you haven’t registered yet, you still have time to shell out $450 for late registration to the interactive section of this ten day event packed with hundreds of conferences, panels and readings.