Mozilla

As I implied in my previous post, I don’t want to simply repeat all the great comments about Firefox 3 that everyone else is posting; better to read them in the original and not get them second-hand from me. But then I thought: instead of rehashing others’ posts, perhaps I can rehash my own? I’m quite fond of the theories of innovation created and popularized by Clayton Christensen, including his concept of “disruptive” innovations versus “sustaining” innovations, and have written a number of posts discussing those theories in the context of Mozilla and Firefox. What better occasion than the launch of Firefox 3 to write yet another? ...

Anyone reading this blog is almost certainly aware that Firefox 3 is going to be released tomorrow, so I won’t spend any time telling you how great it is, and how you should download it the first day it’s available. I’ve traditionally been a late adopter of new browser releases, and started using Firefox 3 on a daily basis only with the beta 5 release. I’ve very much enjoyed the new features (especially the performance improvements), have encountered very few problems, and had to make only two non-trivial changes to get it to work to my liking. (For anyone who cares, these were hacking the GTDinbox extension to make it compatible with RC1 and beyond, and setting the browser.identity.ssl_domain_display parameter to display the domain name for non-EV SSL/TLS sites.) ...

This is my report on activities related to the Mozilla Foundation for the week ending June 13, 2008. Projects for the week Here’s a summary of what Foundation-related activities went on last week; for more information about others’ activities please see the weekly status reports published by David Boswell, Gerv Markham, and Zak Greant. Grants and related expenditures I updated the list of Mozilla Foundations grants and related expenditures for 2007 to include all items approved in 2007. Gary Bishop of the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill published information on the atool project, a follow-on project to an earlier Mozilla Foundation-funded project to enable people with physical disabilities to do keyboard input using commodity webcam hardware. Legal issues Gerv published the new Mozilla committer’s agreement and related information on the www.mozilla.org site. CAs and related issues Kathleen Wilson updated the pending CA request list to reflect current information received from CAs; she’s still waiting on information from several CAs. Public communication David participated in a planning meeting on www.mozilla.org changes. David also had a call with the evangelism team about community content ideas for www.mozilla.org. Conferences Zak continued work on the proposed FOSSCoach event at OSCON. Other Gerv continued work on a project to calculate what percentage of the world’s Internet users have a localized version of Firefox available in their native language. Upcoming events and activities The Mozilla Foundation will be a sponsor of the Personal Democracy Forum conference (June 23-24 in New York NY). Brian Behlendorf will be speaking there, and I’m also planning to attend. David, Gerv, and Zak will be attending OSCON (July 21-25 in Portland OR) and the Firefox Summit (July 29-31 in Whistler BC). I will be attending the Firefox Summit but not OSCON.

This is my report on activities related to the Mozilla Foundation for the week ending June 6, 2008. Projects for the week Here’s a summary of what Foundation-related activities went on last week; for more information about others’ activities please see the weekly status reports published by David Boswell, Gerv Markham, and Zak Greant. Grants and related expenditures Alexander Surkov completed the intermediate milestone on his Mozilla Foundation-funded project to develop automated tests and regression fixes in the Mozilla accessibility module; so far he’s fixed 16 outstanding bugs (relating to crashes, regressions, and new features), as well as kept the accessibility API documentation up to date and worked on several other accessibility-related tasks. Proceedings, slides, and an attendee list have now been published for the Foundations of Open Media Software 2008 workshop, for which the Mozilla Foundation was a sponsor. Legal issues I approved a new privacy policy for mozilla.org sites and David Boswell posted it to www.mozilla.org. (Note that this is a separate policy from the privacy policy for mozilla.com sites, although it is based on that policy.) CAs and related issues Gerv proposed some ideas as to how we might address the Debian weak key problem in a Mozilla context. Kathleen Wilson is waiting on responses from CAs to close out her information-gathering work on their requests. I worked with her to identify a set of new requests to look at, including those for Trustis (bug 324126), Microsec Ltd (bug 370505), S-TRUST (bug 370627), and TC TrustCenter (bug 378882). I put Entrust’s request to enable the Entrust Root Certification Authority for EV (bug 416544) into the first public comment period. Public communication David Boswell continued work on a new www.mozilla.org design brief. David worked to help produce a new draft of the proposed Mozilla brochure and get model release forms signed for people whose photos appear in the brochure. Conferences Zak Greant continued work on the proposed FOSSCoach event at OSCON. Other Gerv Markham worked on a project to calculate what percentage of the world’s Internet users have a localized version of Firefox available in their native language. Gerv also worked on a project to compile a definitive domain suffix list, e.g., suffixes like “co.uk” that do not themselves refer to web sites (unlike, e.g., “co.org”); this list could be useful in contexts like handling of cookies, bookmarks, etc. Upcoming events and activities The Mozilla Foundation will be a sponsor of the Personal Democracy Forum conference (June 23-24 in New York NY). Brian Behlendorf will be speaking there, and I’m also planning to attend. David, Gerv, and Zak will be attending OSCON (July 21-25 in Portland OR) and the Firefox Summit (July 29-31 in Whistler BC). I will be attending the Firefox Summit but not OSCON.

This is my report on activities related to the Mozilla Foundation for the week ending May 30, 2008. Projects for the week Here’s a summary of what Foundation-related activities went on that week; for more information about others’ activities please see the weekly status reports published by David Boswell, Gerv Markham, and Zak Greant. Grants and related expenditures The Mozilla Foundation made a small grant to support the G3ict accessibility initiative. Among other things, G3ict has published a book, The Accessibility Imperative, discussing implementation of the UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities in an IT context. (I have a few copies of this book available for those who want one; please send me an email if you’re interested.) Legal issues Gerv Markham published an update to the Mozilla Foundation license policy, but held off on publishing the new Mozilla committer’s agreement pending a final decision on administrative arrangements for processing the signed forms. CAs and related issues Gerv worked with others to determine how the Debian weak key problem might affect CAs and SSL-enabled web sites. Kathleen Wilson worked on gathering information relating to requests from GlobalSign (bugs 406796 and 406796), secomtrust (bug 394419), Comodo (bug 421946), Wells Fargo (bug 428390), Verizon/CyberTrust (bugs 430694, 430698, and 430700), and TC TrustCenter (bug 436467). I communicated with various CAs regarding their planned applications for inclusion of roots in Mozilla, and posted a draft checklist for information needed for evaluating CA requests. Public communication David Boswell worked with Samuel Sidler on a www.mozilla.org design brief and archiving plan and posted to www.mozilla.org new featured Mozilla-based applications for June (Google AdWords Editor and Zimbra Desktop). David posted a draft copy of a proposed Mozilla brochure for public review. Conferences Zak Greant did a keynote presentation at eLiberatica, and worked on the proposed FOSSCoach event at OSCON. Upcoming events and activities The Mozilla Foundation will be a sponsor of the Personal Democracy Forum conference (June 23-24 in New York NY). Brian Behlendorf will be speaking there, and I’m also planning to attend. David, Gerv, and Zak will be attending OSCON (July 21-25 in Portland OR) and the Firefox Summit (July 29-31 in Whistler BC). I will be attending the Firefox Summit but not OSCON.