The choices we make determine the quality of our life, and how we see the world. So many of these choices we take quite seriously, weighing the consequences, thinking about the implications, and choosing carefully and thoughtfully.

So it’s strange, then, that the majority of people in the world haven’t ever considered the Web browser on their computer or mobile phone — that so many people every day use the browser that comes by default.

It’s an important choice because the Web browser has become one of the most critical and trusted relationships of our modern lives – with nearly perfect knowledge of everything we do. It is the lens through which we look at the virtual world, and the medium by which we connect, learn, share, and collaborate. The browser you choose is responsible for providing you with the necessary tools to manage your online life, and to protect your privacy and security.

And so we’re pleased to support the European Commission and Microsoft in also recognizing how important choice is. In accordance with a landmark settlement, if you’re using a Windows PC in Europe and you’re still using the default Web browser, in the coming weeks and months you’ll see a Browser Choice screen appear. That screen will provide you the opportunity to make an active choice in the source of the software that acts on your behalf to broker your online experiences, and meet your own unique needs and interests.

As an international non-profit organization, Mozilla has always believed that the freedom to make smart choices should be central to making the Web, and the world, a better place. This shows through with Mozilla Firefox, a free, open-source Web browser that more than 350 million people around the world have chosen to use every day. Values of choice and self-determination are built into everything that we do, including Firefox.

We believe that the Browser Choice screen is an important milestone towards helping more people take control of their online lives — and we hope for the conversation to become broader and deeper. We’ve set up opentochoice.org as one place for you to discuss what this choice means to you — and we hope that you’ll add your own voice to this conversation and those to come.

Whether or not you decide to keep your current Web browser, we encourage you to learn more about your browser and the impacts it has on the way you see the world, and to make your own choice.

Mitchell Baker, Mozilla Chair & John Lilly, Mozilla CEO

opentochoice.org

Mozilla is now driving a donation effort to raise $10,000 to help the lemur conservation efforts of the Madagascar Fauna Group.

It is easy to give: Mozilla will collect the money via Paypal, and give it to the Madagascar Fauna Group.

You can also grab a button to display in your web site or blog, or post this link to your favorite social network:

https://www.mozilla.org/about/parks/

Is this a good time to propose Manu as the code name for the next Firefox release? Manu (ES) is the largest Peruvian National Park in the Madre de Dios and Cusco departments, near the city of Cusco, and home to several indigenous tribes, more than 20,000 species of plants and about 4,000 of animals, including this guy, known as cock of the rock or tunki (in Quechua language):

After all it seems it is time for a South American national park code name following Deer Park (1.5, North America), Bon Echo (2.0, North America), Gran Paradiso (3.0, Europe), Shiretoko (3.5, Asia), and Namoroka (3.6, Africa). There were also several pre 1.0 releases named after New Zealand suburbs. :D

It’s not the case however. Delphine Lebédel, a French Mozilla intern, explains: “The numbers I found astounded me: only 2% of women work in FLOSS communities, against more than 25% in proprietary software. In the development field, numbers are even lower: the percentage of Open Source women developers falls down to almost 1% (European Commission FLOSSPOL 2002-2005)”

To fix this, Mozilla has launched WoMoz, a new project that aims to increase the participation of women in open source projects: understanding why this gap exist, reaching, and making products and projects more attractive for women.

Also, the project now has a cool new logo, designed by Anamaria Stoica.

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.

Powered by Laconica, the open source microblogging engine, and setup and operated by a team of volunteers, it is pretty simple to follow and use  thanks to its simple interface and functionality.

It nicely integrates with Twitter, and supports OpenID  and SMS status updating for a long list of carriers.

Here’s the latest pearl from a Mozilla -inspired cook.

Get your mozillaca.com id now!

Its implementation would most likely consist of a menu where users can choose a browser to download and try and make one of them their default.

Which browsers would be listed? Perhaps it seems pretty obvious that it should be Chrome, Firefox, and Safari. Opera? Maybe. But consider that according to Net Applications, if Opera gets in, so should the corpse known as Netscape, as it is still ahead of it. Then, would it be fair to exclude a browser with small market share if it’s at least in part a consequence of Microsoft’s monopolistic tactics? SeaMonkey, Flock, Maxthon, K-Meleon could all claim its right to be listed as well. And, whose statistics should Microsoft take into account? According to XiTi Monitor, in Europe, Opera is ahead of Netscape and Chrome.

But most important is wondering how complete and effective a sanction like this would be. Mitchell Baker, Mozilla Foundation chair posted a couple of months ago, a series of principles the EU should take into account to ensure whatever sanction or action it rules will in fact prevent  the web browsers market innovation drought of the late 90s and early 2000s. They are:

1. Respect previous choice
2. Windows should not provide technical advantage to IE,
3. Must enable people to choose other browsers,
4. Microsoft’s incentives to distributors must be browser neutral,
5. Microsoft must educate about other browsers,
6. Microsoft development tools must not produce IE or Windows specific results.

Perhaps even more interesting is what could be a missing principle: why not just require Microsoft to support web standards? Mitchell gives three reasons: who would identify which standards have to be implemented and when are they implemented enough; and, most realistically and least obviously: “If Microsoft is legally required to implement a [web standard] specification, then it is hard to see the process ever coming to a conclusion. ”

Finally, here’s a short video of an interview last week to John Lilly and Mitchell Baker, Mozilla Corp. CEO and Mozilla Foundation chair, respectively, at the Wall Street Journal’s All Things D conference, on this and other interesting Firefox topics.

Via Windows IT Pro.

The upcoming Firefox 3.1 (now approaching Beta 3) will be the first Firefox release to implement the <audio> and <video> tags with native support for the Ogg Theora codec.

While the Theora codec has proved to be an efficient video encoding format it is still a rarity among the huge amounts of video content produced which is currently dominated by Adobe’s Flash proprietary video format.

“This grant will be used to support development of improved Theora encoders and more powerful playback libraries. These improvements will benefit future versions of Firefox, and anyone else who supports open video on the web.”, said Mike’s post.

I am pretty glad to see Mozilla extending its reach and role as a force for the open web to the producer side, easing the task of creating open content.

Mozilla has awarded similar grants in the past aimed to improve open web video accessibility. Another $100,000 grant was awarded to the Participatory Culture Foundation to support the open source Miro video player, now approaching version 2.

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! :(

Mozilla Support has prepared a day full of support sessions, chats and workshops for today, Friday 23, 2008. Here’s the schedule: (all times US Pacific Standard Time, GMT -7)

• 8:00 – 10:00: Support session #1
• 10:00 – 10:45: Workshop: Supporting Firefox 3 users with Live Chat
• 11:00 – 11:30: Chat with Mike Connor, Developer Lead of Firefox 3
• 11:30 – 12:30: Support Session #2
• 12:30 – 1:15: Workshop: Learn all about the new bookmark system in Firefox 3
• 1:30 – 2:00: Chat with Mike Beltzner, Usability Design Expert
• 2:00 – 3:00: Support Session #3
• 3:00 – 3:45: Workshop: Learn how to troubleshoot Firefox 3 like a pro
• 4:00 – 4:30: Chat with John Lilly, CEO of Mozilla Corporation
• 4:30 – 5:00: Chat with Asa Dotzler, Spokesmodel and Storyteller

All sessions, workshops and chats will take place on IRC (instructions to access audio and video will be provided during the sessions). To participate, just drop by Support Firefox Day page for the complete details and a web based chat client (powered by mibbit) you can use to join the party.

If you prefer to use your favorite IRC client (like ChatZilla), connect to irc://irc.mozilla.org/#sumo.

The list includes a couple of notable Mozillians: Brendan Eich and Wyndow Snyder, Mozilla Corporation Chief Technology Officer and Chief Security Officer respectively.

“Eich helps ensure that the browser is up to the task of acting as the operating system— running an increasing number of mission-critical enterprise applications in the cloud.”, says the article about Brendan who is ranked in the 30th position.

About Wyndow, in the 43rd position, it reads: “A former Microsoft security strategist, Snyder borrowed a page from Redmond’s playbook and introduced a comprehensive threat-modeling and penetration-testing routine to Mozilla.”

The list is headed by Larry Elison, Steve Jobs and Steve Ballmer and includes a long list of notable including Tim Berners-Lee, Nicholas Negroponte, Mark Zuckerberg, Marc Andreesen, and Ray Ozzie. Michal Zalewski, a famous white hat hacker who disclosed a few Firefox vulnerabilities last year, today and information security engineer for Google, is also in the list in the 51st position.

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.

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.

Ten years ago, Netscape announced it would release to the public the code of its flag ship product, Netscape Communicator 5, making it an open source product. The action came at a time when Netscape was still the dominant web browser: 65 million users and 90% market share in the educational segment according to Netscape’s own accounts. But Microsoft’s Internet Explorer was grabbing share at a furious pace thanks to it being free (at a time Netscape was about$30) and specially the fact that it came bundled with Windows 95 and upcoming Windows 98 (released on June 1998).

With a sliding market share, Netscape decided to focus on its enterprise oriented products and gave away the browser but most importantly allow volunteers to work on the product. Mozilla was nothing but Netscape’s user agent (the name a browser uses to contact the web server), a reminder of the first Netscape code name.

Over time, Mozilla would become the name of the open source project, AOL would buy Netscape and Internet Explorer would get up to 90%+ of market share leading to the worst period in web browsers’ history where innovation was a niche for Opera and IE remixes users.

In 2002, Mozilla would finally release its first public version with its crazy mantra: we are platform builders, we are for developers, we leave products for others.

Entered Phoenix, which took Mozilla, the application suite, and made a consumer product out of it. At about the same time, AOL spun off the Mozilla Foundation with a $2 million check. Phoenix, then Firefox, would become an instant hit in 2004 proving the user oriented approach to be the most effective way for Mozilla to achieve its goals.

It’s been ten years of hard times and good times, frustration and satisfaction. But in all, Mozilla existence and success is something we can all, as connected citizens, celebrate: having options when it comes to web browsing because it leads to standardization and innovation, no matter it comes from Opera, Safari, Mozilla or Microsoft.

Original Netscape press release from January 2008.

Complete Mozilla timeline poster.Reminded by Mitchell Baker.

For example, Enso, Humanized flagship product, is a launcher that quietly stays behind the scenes that you can access pressing and holding down the CapsLock key to bring a command line to launch applications, documents, perform simple calculations, minimize/maximize/switch windows, perform a Google search and other common tasks. Coincidentally (or not), Enso was made a free product today.

Songza, another example of Humanized’s work, is an amazing music search engine/player that I can’t recommend enough: search for a song or artist, get results almost instantly from anywhere it may be available in the web. Then you can play, share, queue or rate it through a positional menu optimized for fastest access. While no of these UI elements is an invention of the company, the precise combination provides it a unique user interface and makes it an extremely useful web tool.

(Note: For a taste of positional menus, try easyGestures which replaces Firefox 2’s context menu with a toolring.)

In some ways, Firefox 3’s awesome bar is an approach to the graphical keyboard user interface Enso proposes: you get to access your history, bookmarks tags, titles and addresses by entering a few letters in the location bar to get to the web page you want, no matter how exactly you got to it in the past. Another example is the Ctrl+ Tab extension (Firefox 3 only) which besides providing fancy tab thumbnails it lets you select the desired one by entering some tab title characters.

And it is no coincidence. Alex Faaborg, part of the Firefox user experience team, blogged last year about experimentation with graphical keyboard user interface in part inspired by Humanized and QuickSilver (a Mac OS X launcher similar to Enso). In his post, Alex provided some mockups of how this hybrid UI could translate for Firefox. One of them was implemented as the Ctrl+Tab extension mentioned before. Firefox 3’s tagging is another example of how the keyboard can be a more effective input mechanism.

While Mozilla hiring people is not really news, the point here is the specific people involved say a lot about where Mozilla is heading for the thing hundreds of millions of users face every day: the user interface.

As Aza summarizes: “The goal of Enso, Humanized’s flagship product, is to make computers more usable for everyone. You shouldn’t need to care about which application or web service has the functionality you want — you should just be able to use that functionality anywhere. You should be able to spellcheck your file names, add maps to your emails, and translate your IMs by simply telling your computer what you want.

There is clearly a lot in common with that goal and Mozilla’s goals. Although I don’t know what the final form will be, there is a huge opportunity to make both the web and the desktop fundamentally more humane.”

Aza and the other hires will join Mozilla Labs tomorrow, January 16.

Mitchell will remain as Mozilla Corporation and Mozilla Foundation’s Chairman.

On a blog post, Mitchell explains that the announcement is more about a title change, since in practice, John has been performing CEO tasks for a while now: “John and I have been unconsciously moving towards this change for some time, as John has been providing more and more organizational leadership. It is very Mozilla-like to acknowledge the scope of someone’s role after he or she has been doing it for a while, and this is a good part of what is happening here.”

John, a member of the Participatory Culture Foundation (maker of Miro) and the Open Source Applications Foundation boards, talked on his blog about his goals for the Mozilla Corporation he now runs: “The most successful case for Mozilla Corporation will be when the corporation itself is sort of invisible. That is, when MoCo can support Mozilla’s mission, providing economic sustainability, project coordination, and a connection to real users around the world, while getting out of the way of what our community all around the world is doing.”

Interestingly, John’s post lists the new messaging subsidiary as a top priority along with shipping Firefox 3 and a set of Mitchell’s new projects “that could have a great effect on the world”.

The transition will be the topic of the next Air Mozilla, this Wednesday. Precise time has not been announced yet but it should be around 2:00pm PST (GMT-8) as usual.

Congratulations to John for the appointment and best wishes for continuous success to Mozilla.

UPDATE: Air Mozilla Live, featuring John Lilly and Mitchell Baker on the transition will air Wednesday 9, 2008 at 10:00 am PST (GMT-8).

• With a current profit of $35 – $100 million after tax he values it in the range of $1.5 – $4 billion for an IPO (Initial Public Offering).
• It could happen this or next year.
• It would generate a boatload of money. Stock options will be distributed among core contributors with a four years vesting to ensure their continued participation.

Taxes, IPO, stock options, vesting.

Maslow said “If the only tool you have is a hammer, you tend to see every problem as a nail.”, so Blodget has started banging it like crazy since late December. The question is what is the problem?

I, like Blodget, would like to get rich in a couple of years or so, and a Mozilla IPO looks like a promisory way to get there. At first sight.

The problem is that the moment Mozilla becomes public it will exist for its shareholders benefit and not the web and its users. Not that their interests are diametrically opposed but any intersection less than a 100% could signal the end of Mozilla as we know it.

The main reason is exemplified by Blodget’s naive advise: “[There's] a lot more where that came from (advertising on the default landing page, for example).” That, of course, is the $52 million in revenue for 2006 announced a few months ago by Mozilla CEO, Mitchell Baker.

Mozilla would have the obligation to take every chance to cash in and Blodget have already envisioned that if Mozilla puts Firefox start page for auction it could make a few millions more. Now that’s talent. What about bookmarks? What about bundling MSN or Yahoo! Messenger, or Flash. What about several home pages!! Man, it’s going to rain money.

Wait a minute. Didn’t AOL just buried Netscape a few days ago? And didn’t it die of the same brilliant plan Blodget and me have just envisioned? Something’s not adding up.

And never will because this is open source. The minute users or developers sense the project is not going the direction they want they will take that little thingy called fork and fork it. The Debian guys have already done this with IceWeasel for much less. But this time, users (you can count me in) would follow.

Brand? Users? Developers? It can all be restored. Four years ago Firefox was nothing so at least we now have an idea on how long it could take.

Anyway, Blodge’s exercise is at least as entertaining as filling “O”s during a meeting, so give him credit for that.

Users who have tried live chat  with any provider in the past should recognize it as the most effective way of providing support: one on one.

People who want to act as support agents just need to download Spark, a Java-based instant messaging client that connects to Mozilla’s OpenFire servers. OpenFire is an open source real time communication server that uses XMPP an open instant messaging communication protocol.

Then, support agents need to configure Spark, create an account and connect so they are able to receive incoming support requests. Instructions are provided on Firefox Knowledge Base.

Users seeking support can visit Firefox Support and search the Knowledge Base to see if the problem is a well known one. On search results they are offered additional support options (live chat and forums).

An awake colorful Foxkeh image means there is at least one agent online who can help him. You need only to click on Foxkeh to get a chat window where you enter your name, question and the username of an agent you have contacted in the past in case this is an ongoing case. Your request then enters a queue waiting for the next agent to be available to help you.

On the agent’s side, he will receive a notification that a user needs help and his question. The agent can then decide if he can handle the request and accept or reject it.

When the agent accepts, a typical chat window appears and the agent and the user are connected for support.

For quality assurance purposes and to prevent agents to abuse the system and try to get unnecessary personal information, all chat sessions are logged and supervisors can see an ongoing session at any time.

I gave it a try and found it to be very straight forward.

Live chat support is in beta though and, David Tenser, Firefox Support lead has a wishlist including the possibility for agents to connect via Pidgin and multilanguage support, as there is currently no way to let the user seeking support what languages is help available at a particular moment.

Personally, I wish there was a web based client so there was no need to install Spark and a way to use it on port 80 which is tipically opened in firewalls.

If you have ever wanted to help Mozilla this is a wonderful way to share your knowledge with others, no matter how little you think it is. Remember to be courteous, professional and more than anything, patient: at some point we were all newbies who could hardly understand what somebody else meant by a button.

For complete details on how to become a support agent check Firefox Support’s Helping with Live Chat.

“QVM makes [ActionScript 3] bytecode execute on a majority of devices that consumers already own and is a key part of the future Flash Player and AIR strategies. The open sourcing of QVM will accelerate our device strategy and allow EcmaScript to scale up and down independent of system resources.”, reads Flex tech envangelist, Ted Patrick’s post on the announcement.

The release follows Adobe’s move last year when it donated its ActionScript virtual machine to then newly formed project Tamarin and fits perfectly with Mozilla’s mobile strategy unveiled a few months ago.

Tamarin is expected to debut as part of Mozilla 2, a major update to the Mozilla platform currently in development. It should be featured in Firefox 4.

According to the very little information available, Baidu will pay an undisclosed amount to Mozilla Online for bundling its search engine in Chinese editions of Firefox.

The agreement won’t make any difference for users of the Chinese Simplified (zh-CN) edition since Baidu is already included with Firefox as a bundled search engine since Firefox 2.

It is not clear if it will be added to Chinese Traditional (zh-TW) edition which doesn’t include Baidu as of Firefox 2.0.0.11. Also, Google will remain as the default search engine according to Mozilla Japan’s Gen Kanai.

Mozilla Online CEO, Li Gong, said that Mozilla’s relationship with Google will not affect it’s cooperation with other search providers.

So it sounds as a strategic move for Baidu to ensure a place in Firefox’s default search engines list.

This framework would provide or standardize common basic building blocks such as communications protocols, encryption, data synchronization and identity management. Mozilla could even provide a set of basic services.

I am very excited to learn this, It sounds pretty much like what I’ve been waiting for. As I’ve said in the past, integrated with A, B, C and the kitchen sink approach taken by products like Flock and The Coop, a Mozilla Labs project, is not viable in the long term: social networks are trendy: your friends were yesterday on MySpace, today on Facebook and YouTube, tomorrow never knows.

The time you invest today tweaking your photo and video galleries, your online disk, bookmarks and everything else, there’s no guarantee they will be accessible tomorrow, for your friends, family or even yourself.

So there’s a need for an open framework that standardizes on how to query a web mail provider to know if you have new email or not, or even better a complete messaging system, a common way to upload and share photos, videos and other documents, a common identity system probably based on OpenID, a social bookmarking system, etc. At the same time, flexible enough so providers can find a way to difference among themselves and monetize on their specific implementations while raising the bar for the benefit of the consumer.

Mozilla has the necessary trust and proven commitment to web standards, advancing the web and providing the best experience to its users to lead such an effort.

According to Giga OM, a related Mozilla site at services.mozilla.com was available for a few hours. The site has been blocked afterwards and, as of this post, shows the message: New account registrations have been temporarily disabled.

A new version (0.8) of the open source version of the popular Flash plugin, Gnash has been released.

According to the release notes, the most notable improvement in this release is without a doubt the added support for YouTube and Lulu.tv streaming videos which show how this implementation has matured during its first 18 months.

Unfortunately there are no binary versions of the plugin or the stand alone player that I could test. The screen shot above, courtesy of Wikipedia, shows the stand alone player running on Ubuntu.

Some quotes:

If you just think of what the internet could be, it had to be done. We are not exactly a last bastion, but it is hard to imagine any other business entity taking on the tasks we have.

If we got to a point, say 50 per cent or more, we would do a lot of soul-searching and we would probably think long and hard about what kinds of checks and balances we needed so we didn't become just like the problem we set out to solve.

We might only have got five or six hours of someone's time a week as a volunteer but it was expertise in an area that we may not have found anywhere else.

We came to a big holiday, Xmas or Thanksgiving, soon after I started and I asked about it and I was told that the Sheriff was not a person but actually a big instant messaging channel.

I asked what that meant, and I was told there were plenty of people around the world who were not on vacation and if something went wrong they'd go to this chat room and someone would step up and fix it. I was a little nervous about it, but that's how it works.

You can read the full interview at Australian IT.

Mozilla has announced that a $100K has been approved for the Participatory Culture Foundation, a Massachusetts-based non-profit that aims to make “watching internet video channels [..] as easy as watching TV and broadcasting a channel [...] open to everyone. Unlike traditional TV, everyone will have a voice.” Most notably, PCF is the maker of Democracy, an open source video player based on Mozilla among a variety of open source technologies. Democracy will soon be renamed Miro.

According to the announcement, “the Mozilla Board agreed to support them for the following reasons:

1. Their mission to ensure the continued rise of open source & open standards aligns with the Mozilla mission to encourage choice & innovation on the web.
2. They’re building something that can have influence on the way users browse web content, rich media, and desktop UI — and it’s based on Mozilla technology.
3. PCF is another example of that leverage we are looking for…they don’t have any venture backing, they’re running on a very lean budget, and they continue to seek creative resources to make a big difference in the way their users access content on the Web.”

You can read the full announcement here.

This situation, some arguments follow, resembles the venerable Mozilla Application Suite which in its time was accused of featuring everything but the kitchen sink and serving a user interface overloaded with preferences and mail, chat, and web page authoring modules that did nothing for a better web experience, supposedly, the core of the Mozilla suite. Firefox came in response to this situation proposing a browser only application, trimming all the fat, keeping its greatest talents and adding new features all users could benefit from.

The forgotten ware

I’d like to start demystifying the Mozilla suite, which seems to have become an example of what should be feared and avoided at all cost.

My perception of the fall of the Mozilla suite and the rise of Firefox is somewhat different. For the time I used the Mozilla suite as my main web browser (from late 2001 to very early 2003 if I recall correctly) I never really felt it as the resource hog it seems to be remembered as nowadays. Or at least not to the point to make me go back to Netcaptor or Internet Explorer or keep Opera for more than a few days. What bothered me was that even after choosing the Browser only installation mode, I was sure some code was unnecessarily loaded for a module that would never use it.

This was the main attractive for me when Phoenix (Firefox’s former name) entered the scene: it was developed as a browser only from the start so I believed I could safely assume no chat, mail or composing code could exist. Today I am not that sure since, after all, it was not a complete rewrite, but still sounds to me as a better option considering this fact alone.

The success of Firefox is in no small part due to the product itself, but no small part is due to the Mozilla Foundation’s decision of reaching end users with this new product as well. Before Firefox, Mozilla’s approach was to deliver a platform for Internet applications targeted to developers. The Mozilla Application Suite was nothing but a working example of what that platform could deliver, and its success, while limited, an unexpected consequence.

Firefox instead came accompanied with a strong grassroots marketing effort, first seen for an open source product. One of these efforts resulted in the creation of the Mozilla Links newsletter back in September 2003, which morphed into this blog on 2005.

Mozilla couldn’t be called a bloated browser because it wasn’t a browser but an application suite to begin. It was as bloated as a Swiss Army knife can be called a bloated knife: if you just need to cut or browse perhaps the problem is your selection and not the knife or suite.

Coming next: So what’s bloatware anyway?