bart's blog

It's up.

The new Mozilla site is live. It's been a long road, that started more than a year ago with work by David Shea, Rafael, Tristan and others.

Now Steve and Daniel at SilverOrange, with generous support from MozSource, have delivered a shiny new site, right on schedule. It looks awesome.

More details in Steve's blog post and Ben's blog post

Make planet rock even more

With the imminent arrival of the new web site, blog posts that are aggregated to Planet.mozilla.org will get featured on the Mozilla.org homepage (hurry, last 3 items only!).

Steven Garrity and Daniel Burke are working with Tor to give Planet a makeover, but they need your help.

Planet would look a lot nicer and be more useful if:
- People restricted their posts that get picked up by Planet to Mozilla-related posts.
- Everyone syndicated their entire posts, not just one- or two-line excerpts
- People included images in their posts.

So this is an appeal to all Mozilla bloggers to do each of those. Here is a copy of my RSS feed template for Movable Type if you're not sure where to start. You'll notice that my feed is only for posts to my "Mozilla" category and that I'm syndicating the entry body.

Coming soon: new web site

The new web site is just about ready, so Steve is looking for feedback on what we have so far (check out the new homepage!).

Needed an excuse to buy a wsj online subscription?

This is the perfect reason to buy that WJS Online subscription you've always wanted: a feature story on the rise of Mozilla on the front page of today's business section.

Need further inducement? OK, how about this. Log on or buy today's print version of the WSJ to see the story in its full glory, including pictures.

Tech's Unlikely Comebacks
Mozilla Nips at Microsoft
In Market for Web Browsers
By Promising Fewer Glitches
By ROBERT A. GUTH and DAVID BANK
Staff Reporters of THE WALL STREET JOURNAL
August 30, 2004; Page B1

A gang of Russian cybercriminals has helped accomplish what antitrust regulators couldn't: reduce Microsoft Corp.'s share of the market for Web browsers, if even just a bit.

Millions of computer users this summer tried to avoid an attack by computer hackers in Russia by installing free software from the Mozilla Foundation, a nonprofit corporation in Mountain View, Calif. July marked the first time since Microsoft vanquished Netscape Communications Corp. in the "browser war" of the late 1990s that the software giant's share of the Web-browser market fell.

It was a sweet moment for Mozilla's ragtag group of programmers. Many of them are veterans of Netscape, the onetime icon of the Internet that was absorbed, first into America Online and then into Time Warner Inc. A federal appeals court confirmed that Microsoft acted illegally in the browser war, but a settlement with the U.S. Department of Justice has had little effect on the company's dominance. Microsoft still holds about 93% of the browser market, down from 95% in June.

Mozilla and other makers of alternative browsers have found a chink in the software giant's armor: Concern about software security is high enough that a mass of people will stop using Microsoft products if they have a viable alternative. Those concerns were validated by the Department of Homeland Security's computer-security team, which recommended in July that personal-computer users switch to Web browsers that aren't subject to the barrage of attacks aimed at Microsoft's products.

At Boston University, Michael Krugman, executive director of information technology, in July recommended that 40,000 faculty and students replace Internet Explorer with Mozilla's browser, called Firefox. "I'm a very appreciative beneficiary of Microsoft products and services," Mr. Krugman says. "But the ultimate consequence of the world having only one operating system or one Web browser is nothing short of cataclysmic for both consumers and producers."

Such converts are shining a spotlight on Mozilla as the next grass-roots challenge to Microsoft's dominance in PC software. Like Linux, an increasingly popular operating system aimed at supplanting Microsoft's Windows, Mozilla is distributed as "open source" software, which means users can modify parts of it, and it is made by a loose-knit community of programmers.

Mozilla is one of several open-source browsers, which include Opera from Opera Software in Oslo. Some PC users are also switching to Apple Computer Inc.'s computers and Apple's Safari browser to avoid attacks.

One reason these alternatives fare better against attacks is that they are installed on far fewer computers than Microsoft's wares, making them a less juicy target for writers of viruses and spyware. Also, Mozilla Foundation members argue that certain methods of open-source development and bug-tracking make Mozilla software inherently stronger than Microsoft products. Last week, however, researchers identified a software flaw that affects Mozilla, and more are sure to emerge. (Mozilla plans to release the next version of its browser this week.)

The surprising resurgence of browser competition along with the growing concern about viruses and attacks has Microsoft on the defense. Although the shift from Internet Explorer thus far is slight, Microsoft is taking pains to make its browser more secure. A year ago, it revived its Internet Explorer product team, which had been absorbed into other operations after the victory over Netscape.

Microsoft is also mulling whether to accelerate the release of a new version of its browser. The current plan is to time the upgrade with the release of Longhorn, the next version of Windows, but that's not scheduled until 2006. (See related article2.) "Any time you have people who were your customers decide they don't want to be your customers, then that's a reason to be concerned," says Gary Schare, a director in Microsoft's Windows group.

Mozilla's programmers have labored mostly in obscurity since their project began in 1998. Early versions of the group's browser were panned by reviewers.

The project's fortunes began to change in July 2003, when Time Warner contributed $2 million and spun off the team as an independent organization. Now, the Mozilla Foundation coordinates hundreds of programmers around the world who contribute code and fix bugs in Firefox and other open-source Internet software from Mozilla, such as an e-mail package called Thunderbird that offers an alternative to Microsoft's Outlook.

A redesign of the browser earlier this year drew positive reviews. The timing was fortuitous: In June, Russian hackers harnessed several low-level flaws in Internet Explorer to take control of thousands of PCs to launch spam and steal credit-card numbers.

Downloads of Firefox leaped, helping lift the number of requests for downloads of all Mozilla software to 10.8 million in June, more than double the previous month's figure of 5.2 million. In July download requests hit a high of 14.6 million, according to statistics from Mozilla.

Mozilla's gain appears to be Microsoft's loss. In June, 95.48% of Web surfers used Internet Explorer, according to WebSideStory Inc., a San Diego technology analysis firm that tracks visitors to Web sites. Internet Explorer's share dropped throughout July and stood at 93.84% as of August 20.

"It's the first sustained decline in (Internet Explorer) browser market share that we've ever tracked," says Geoff Johnston, a WebSideStory analyst, who adds that Mozilla accounted for the bulk Microsoft's decline.

Microsoft helped provide an opening for Mozilla with what critics say was a lax response to Internet Explorer's security flaws. Last year, the company issued a warning for one vulnerability, but then waited as long as 10 months to respond to several other reported bugs. The flaws that were used together to create June's "Download.ject" worm seemed too insignificant on their own to fix immediately, say members of the Internet Explorer team. Microsoft, after all, had planned to release a major security upgrade to Windows XP in August that would include the most important software fixes for Internet Explorer.

"We were aware of a bunch of disparate small steps that an attacker could make but no one of which was genuinely bad or threatening," says Dean Hachamovitch, the head of Microsoft's Internet Explorer team.

On the day the worm hit, Mr. Hachamovitch, on vacation in New York, got an urgent call from a co-worker at Microsoft's Redmond, Wash., headquarters. The message: "The world is melting. I think you need to come back."

Internet security experts, law enforcement and Microsoft's security team were able to quickly block the source of the attack -- a server computer in Russia -- but Microsoft didn't have a single fix for the browser problem. Instead, over the course of a month, it issued a series of fixes and measures that computer users could take to guard against the worm.

Some customers chose to switch from Internet Explorer altogether. Jenny Zhang, a 20-year-old student, says her PC was wiped out five times over the past two years by viruses. Co-workers at the San Francisco nonprofit where she works recommended Mozilla. "People from work were telling me that you don't get viruses when you use Mozilla," she says.

But Mozilla users have to accept other tradeoffs. Ms. Zhang says Mozilla seems to run "a little slower" than Internet Explorer and the browser doesn't seem to fully display some Web sites with many pictures. There are also problems with a Mandarin-language site she frequents; as a result, she still sometimes uses Microsoft's browser.

For Mozilla's programmers, the recent gains are sweet vindication. "After you've been crushed down to a tiny fraction of market share, you want to come back and take some turf back," says Brendan Eich, a former Netscape engineer who serves as Mozilla's chief software architect. "We're not necessarily going to get to 50% market share any time soon -- though we do aim high. But we are going to take what we can get."

Restoring homepage tabs

A few weeks ago, I did a post about my brother's problem with setting a set of tabs as his homepage. He set his homepage to be a set of tabs. His problem is that after following various links off that set of tabs, he clicks on the home button, expecting to see his set of homepage tabs restored to their original state. Instead, a whole new set of tabs is opened (so instead of his original 5 tabs, he now has 9 tabs including several duplicate sets).

Does anyone know if one of the tabs extensions solves his problem by adding a button to the toolbar that (1) closes all his tabs and (2) opens up all his homepage tabs?

This would seem to be a super-simple extension. If it doesn't already exist, I'd happily pay a $20 bounty to the first person who creates this, so that I can get my brother off my back (and who knows, maybe there's demand for this simple extension).

website-beta

Our good friends at Silverorange and the Visual Design Team have unveiled
a new look and feel for the Mozilla web site. It looks beautiful! Can't wait to see this move to the production site!

detour

Visitors to Netscape.com may notice the announcement that the Netscape browser has been revved.

Congrats to the good folks who made this release happen!

Hilarious

This is hilarious.

HBImageProcessor

I LOVE this little piece of shareware: it converts my screenshots (PDF>JPG), crops them and resizes them in one easy operation. Well worth the $10.

This screenshot was edited with the little sweetie.

Ad donations: next step - the ad team

We got a terrific response to Blake's call for online and print ad donations.

Now we'd like to build on that success and put together a crew of 5 or 6 volunteers who focus on helping people that want to donate ads and reach out to major print publications and web sites, asking them to put up ads for Firefox. You'll be hitting up Wired magazine, CNet and others in the US and around the world - and we'll be there to lend a hand when necessary of course.

Please send mail to bart AT mozilla DOT org if you'd like to join this team and help us spread the word about Firefox.

Those pornsite referrers

I've noticed before from our logs that porn sites are among our biggest referrers, but Asa's post prompted me go check out a couple of these sites, and I was impressed with what I saw - I mean, not necessarily the main section, but how they promote Firefox:

Dean, Mozilla

I just finished reading Joe Trippi's book about the Dean campaign. It's a terrific read.

It should also be required for anyone interested in continuing to reflect on how the Mozilla project can most effectively tap into the creative energies of the thousands of open source hackers who contribute to the code, and the millions of people who love our software and what we stand for.

The book made me realize even more acutely that the community marketing initiatives that Blake and Asa are heading are key to our market share success.

Crap. I'm late for a meeting. More on this soon.

Giving up on email

I'm ready to turn a page. If I may say so myself, I've made a heroic effort this year to keep up with my email. Now it's time to toss in the towel. I can never seem to get below less than 200 email messages that require my attention, and I'm STILL a slave to my Inbox, which crowds out time I should be spending on more strategic efforts - the need to be proactive versus constantly responding to things.

So I'm going to just get rude and stop responding to all but the most critical messages.

So everyone: please be on notice that, henceforthwith, I am considering items in my Inbox, in the words of the great Chris Hofmann, to be mostly interesting FYIs that don't require a response. If you really really must find me, you can probably find my AIM login or cell ph number without too much difficulty.

I had one fun idea for which I'd love to get some help: a counter that I would syndicate on my blog showing how many items are in my Inbox, to help people gauge the likelihood that I'll respond to their mail. I could see this working two ways: by picking up the number of Inbox items on the server side, on my Dreamhost server (but Scott tells me I don't have an IMAP server, just an account, and that this will be difficult), or by collecting the Inbox data on my client (Thunderbird on OSX). I don't know how to do this, either way, so if someone here has a suggestion on how to do this, pls let me know.

[UPDATE] I want to clarify that I in NO WAY intended to imply that Chris Hofmann treats all of his email like FYIs. Additionally, I'd like to hereby extend an open forum/equal time offer to Chris to set the record straight on this.

[THIS SPOT RESERVED FOR CHRIS' EQUAL TIME POST]

Yum

Checked out a nightly build of Firefox tonight and was delighted to see the updated Pinstripe main toolbar buttons. They look delicious.

Great work, Stephen and Kevin!

Don't worry, Microsoft's got your back

Chris installed Service Pack 2 today to check out for himself what Microsoft calls the browser that's "a heck of a lot more secure than pretty much any other browser." That's a pretty big claim.

Chris was pretty darn excited about this upgrade to his OS, so he booted up AIM to tell all of his friends about it.

Ooops:

.

I guess AIM is dangerous stuff that is important to protect users against. I wonder if MSN Messenger is considered equally treacherous by Microsoft.

But let's move on. Chris booted up the new IE. Since he's followed Microsoft's recommendations and turned off Active X on his computer, he quickly encountered a page where some content was not displayed. Check out the new notification bar:

Since Chris cares about security, he clicked on the button to read more details. Oh, that button uses ActiveX so Chris can't read this important security notice because ... it was created using insecure technology.

A real shift of attitude at Microsoft? Feels more like patches to a fundamentally flawed security architecture and more of the same.

bugs

Gotta love this UserFriendly comic

Let's give Blake and Asa a hand

Hi everyone,

This week, Blake and Asa are compiling a list of 2000 sites that should have Get Firefox buttons but don't have them yet. They've got about 600 entries so far.

Please lend a hand by submitting info about a few sites that you think would be receptive to putting up Get Firefox buttons.

Click here for details.

Home button behavior brainteaser

My brother has set his Firefox homepage to be his favorite set of tabs.

Now he's complaining: if he has only one tab open and clicks on the home button, all is well: his homepage set of tabs appears. But if he has several tabs open and clicks on the home button, then his set of homepage tabs is inserted along with the previously open tabs (minus the active one).

Let me give the usecase scenario my brother experiences, which is especially counter-intuitive:
- He launches Firefox. His 7 most favorite tabs (his homepage tabs set) opens up. He squeels with delight.
- He flips through his tabs and clicks on a few links. Now 3 of his tabs are "messed up", so he clicks on Home, hoping to revert all his tabs to their original state
- instead, He ends up with 13(!) tabs, including 4 sets of duplicate (identical) tabs.

He thinks we're crazy. I think he's crazy. Except that I've bumped into a number of people who love this idea of having a set of tabs as their start page (the kinds of people we want flocking to Firefox). So I think he may not be alone in experiencing this issue.

So my question is: what is the appropriate behavior for a user who has set his homepage to be a set of tabs? What should happen when they click on the home button if they have several open tabs? Is the current behavior the optimal one? It feels weird, but then so do all the other behaviors I can think of.

Thoughts?

del.icio.us + live bookmarks = wow

Have you always wanted to share your bookmarks with friends? Or have your bookmarks on all your computers be synched?

Try this:
1. Get free account on del.icio.us
2. Add del.icio.us's bookmarklet to your toolbar
3. Visit cool site and add it to your bookmarks set on del.icio.us
4. Make a live bookmark based on your del.icio.us bookmarks list.

Voila.

So cool.

Ben whines: "I don't want to share my bookmarks".

Mike replies: "ah, but authentication works"

So if Ben wants to hack around for, say, 30 minutes, he could do a quick hack of his Movable Type RSS template (to create an RSS feed off his blogroll) and password protect his bookmarks blog, and he'd have the same thing as I, but private.

Of course, to experience this you need to either run a nightly build of Firefox or wait a few more weeks until the Firefox Preview Release comes out.

If you are running a nightly build and want to check out what I'm talking about, you can go to http://del.icio.us/bartdecrem and add a live bookmark for that page to your personal toolbar.