rebron.org

August 22, 2005

rise of the XUL applications

Yahoo's hiring XUL app developers as they should.

Google has some XUL developers on their payroll.
So does Amazon.com and there are several still at AOL/Netscape.
There are over 600 Firefox and Thunderbird extensions.

And, I've seen several internal XUL based applications...in production environments except I can't tell you where.

There's SimoHealth as a XUL based health management software.
There's the Amazon XUL browser built by an individual.

And let's not forget that Mozilla Suite (Netscape 7.x), n|Vu, Sunbird, Firefox, and Thunderbird are all XUL based applications.

What XUL apps would I like to see:
- an AIM/Yhoo/MSN/Jabber chat client
- a simple n|VU like editor for blog posting and maybe simpler documents
- XUL based media player
- a few more things...

Posted by rebron at 01:47 PM | Comments (2)

Google Desktop 2.0 thoughts

Here's the Google Desktop 2.0 client. It's along the lines of Konfabulator and Mac OS X widgets. The sidebar needs work. It's not a good form factor (I hate that term), and the way it was done (several blocks of content) was something we punted on when deciding what the UI was going to be for Netscape 6 way back when.

The best "sidebar" are the AIM/Yahoo/MSN clients. A buddy list is something you want persistent and maybe some content but not lots of mini blocks of content.

I'm wondering if the "sidebar" or Google Desktop expands into Skyline. I'll just stop there. Those who know Skyline know what I'm talking about. It also could morph into Marlon/Joe's task and contact oriented sidebar/messaging app. That was a pretty good idea too.

Posted by rebron at 11:17 AM | Comments (0)

August 18, 2005

trust (or no lipstick) marketing

I'm always having to describe SpreadFirefox. Other than it's a big 'ol experiment that's driven awareness, usage of Firefox/Mozilla products, it's also several concepts:
- open source marketing
- community marketing
- and trust marketing

We're actually defining all these as we go. I'm not aware of too many open source/community marketing projects out there. Trust and marketing don't often go hand in hand. So I think we're defining trust marketing too.

There's only been two places I've seen talk of trust marketing, this one article trying rename permission marketing to trust marketing and Steve Rubel.

"Permission marketing" apparently is all about opt-outs and opt-ins. Steve's brief mention of trust marketing is around citizen journalism and bloggers, and trusting your social circle which is a limited definition.

Well, trust marketing is all about telling the truth (easy enough) and being very open. It's not overpromising, it's not saying something is the best thing in the world, it's not saying we've solved the problem when we haven't, it's about being matter-of-fact, it's about being up front with problems, it's about going above and beyond when you mess up (over communicating). No one wants to be tricked into things.

Anyone notice that the prices at the Mozilla Store aren't $5.99, $14.99, or $19.99. The prices are like $6.00, $14.00, $17.00. So random and so refreshing. BTW, Windows XP SP2 is $189.99. So not only are you getting price gouged, you're getting tricked while you're at it. It's $200 for Win XP SP2, and what's the $50 difference between Home and Pro again.

The other piece of trust marketing is the word of mouth recommendation. It's much better to hear about something from your family, friend or co-worker then some spokesperson, analyst, etc. Trust marketing is also about helping that along, making sure folks are able to say great things about your product but also that people are equipped to know what to say when they do make that recommendation. So it's tell your friends and co-workers about Firefox, here's a blog space where you can do it, add this button to your site, get it installed on your family's computer, etc, and also some of the things you should point out are the tabbed browsing, popup block features, the security benefits, your favorite features, etc.

So that's trust marketing. Telling the truth about your products (no lipstick), being good to people, giving people an opportunity to recommend your product, and helping people come up with what to say when they do want to recommend your product.

Posted by rebron at 10:10 PM | Comments (0)

Gateway recommends Ubuntu

You know you're in trouble when you have to do marketing tricks like Gateway recommends Microsoft® Windows® XP Professional. What else could Gateway (or Dell|HP) recommend? Gateway recommends Ubuntu Linux? Linux folks need to come up with a good name that'll stick. But anyhow, MSFT wasn't the only one that used this marketing tactic.

I wasn't around then but I think it was Mike Homer who started the "Best Viewed in Netscape" campaign. It was a defensive marketing tactic and when you're on the defensive, you're not in a good position.

We don't recommend that folks do "best viewed in Firefox". However, we do recommend specifying system requirements, and it's ok to say you've tested/certified your web site or application to work in Firefox.

So when you see Gateway|Dell|HP "recommending" MSFT, give it some time because that recommendation is only there because of some silly marketing line item in some long contract.

Posted by rebron at 09:49 PM | Comments (0)

August 17, 2005

shaver on the case for identity 2.0

If someone can help solve identity on the Web, it'll be shaver. I had the fortune of working on UREG for Netscape as well as Screen Name Service for AOL. Screen Name Service is still used today by AOL (and could be more performant). Identity (authentication/registration) is a pain in the ass problem so it'll be interesting to see how identity 2.0 progresses.

Some observations:
- Splitting "profile" information from identity. Identity 2.0 can't have "profile" information nonsense, so establishing identity has to have the most minimal information possible just to establish identity none of this country of origin, male/female, age stuff. "Sharing" of profile information among identity partners is also a big hairy ball of a mess, so need to stay away from that.
- Central gateway, e.g. passport model doesn't work.
- Identity 2.0 can't be a password manager/wallet.
- There is a trust relationship that needs to be established e.g. iChat's @mac.com and @aol.com among those playing the game.
- A reset/migration of identity, is there something other than email that we can use.
- Political bs. The big players yhoo, msft, aol already have a namespace based on email. Google is building up a namespace. Small fry sites really have no chance if they're requiring people to sign-up yet again for some service. Wonder why AOL, MSFT, YHOO have not opened up instant messaging? It's not because they can't, they don't want to make a competitor's identity more powerful than their own (especially when identity is a billing relationship).
- "Trusted client" is going to sneak it's way back in to the mix (as if identity 2.0 wasn't bad enough).

So what's the identity problem again?
- Too many usernames and passwords and the security of it all.
- Single sign-on (the holy grail of authentication, if only we could all just get along).
- Spoofing/scams go away.

The net of this is, we can be in a much better place than where we are today with identity. Right now, it's just a complete mess. Maybe everyone should just install the bugmenot extension and call it a day.

Posted by rebron at 10:39 PM | Comments (0)

August 15, 2005

lipstick on a pig

Marty Cagan wrote this article called "Lipstick on a Pig" about product management and putting, well, lipstick on a pig (in other words dressing up a bad product). Coincidentally, the IE team came out with their new logo.

The logo is ok. I think the true test of the logo is if you can slap it on a t-shirt and see if anyone buys it. You think we'll see an IE 7 shirt for sale anytime soon? Yeah, not so much.

Posted by rebron at 02:29 PM | Comments (0)

August 14, 2005

Linux World Expo wrap-up

Linux World Expo was last week, August 8-11. We had a Mozilla booth and shaver keynoted on the 10th. chofmann also attended the Linux in Government day and Red Hat via blord announced the crypto stuff that was on tap for Firefox/Thunderbird (FIPS 140 re-certification, smart card features, FIPS 201).

Otherwise, not very happy with Linux World Expo. All the .org were up on the second floor away from the sales "droids" as dmose politely called them on the main floor. If the highlight was candy bar give aways from the Red Hat booth...yeah.

Two things I saw that were neat were: Scalix and Zimbra. Both were open source solutions for Groupware that were "ajaxed". Zimbra looked more interesting. Like I said, the next thing coming out of msft, twx, goog, or yhoo is going to be an "ajaxed" calendar even though no one is still using online calendars.

The only other thing I saw that was interesting wasn't related at all to Linux World Expo but was last Thursday after LWE over at OSAF, a Wikipedia talk given by Jimmy Wales. I'll talk about that in the next post.

Posted by rebron at 12:20 PM | Comments (0)

August 10, 2005

CCK 0.2 for Deer Park

mkaply is a stud. He's got CCK 0.2 out for Deer Park Alpha 2 aka Firefox 1.5. If you're a customizer/deployer, download it and give feedback to mkaply: http://www.mozilla.org/projects/cck/firefox/

Posted by rebron at 09:48 PM | Comments (0)

Festa's greatest hits

From the grapevine, today is Paul Festa's last day at c|Net. He's still going to be freelancing so not sure if he's going to write about Mozilla anymore. But anyhow, it sure was interesting (my bail out word).

Paul's had some good/bad/ugly/on the mark stories for us over the years. In a very strange way, he is part of the Mozilla family who sometimes you wished lived on the other side of the globe and just sent you money on your birthday and Christmas.

Good luck to you!

Posted by rebron at 09:17 PM | Comments (0)

August 09, 2005

experiencing difficulties @Library of Congress

Oh boy. I know the Library of Congress did not just write this:

"Today's notice seeks information as to whether persons filing the electronic-only preregistration form prescribed by the Copyright Office will experience difficulties if it is necessary to use Microsoft's Internet Explorer web browser in order to preregister a work."

Get ready for some letters. Who is doing this web site? Do they not read the news and follow what's going on in the TechWorld?

Posted by rebron at 06:56 AM | Comments (0)

thoughts on Yahoo!360

ouch. I don't know about all this free advice. Anyhow, Yahoo!360 which is known internally at Yahoo! as an experiment is doomed from the beginning. No matter how well it may do, it won't be able to get *everybody* because of the network effect, stuck like Yahoo!Messenger. That's aside from the fact that getting started on it is like getting started on the "big dig" with a little itty bitty shovel.

Make hosting something like rebron.org easy. Make me host my site at Yahoo, make it easy for me to upload files and change my stylesheets, make it easy for me to add yahoo services as well as other services. That's it. You get your money (advertising) back from the links off of my site. You may even be able to get me to integrate your ad sense type product or make me pay for hosting my stuff.

We'll see how it goes. It seems that Y!360 is more of a repository of Yahoo services which gets filled up when prompted by friends/others to do stuff on that service. They did get the Yahoo!Messenger integration concept right. I wish it was just a better service.

Why don't you guys talk to Anil or the WordPress guys and your own guys (geocities, domain/small business people) and come up with something better. It's annoying.

Posted by rebron at 12:13 AM | Comments (0)

"ajaxing" calendar

Well, clearly an "ajax" (gag) calendar is going to be the next thing out of either Yahoo, Google, MSN, AOL, or some start up.

Let's give it two more months. I'm still waiting on Yahoo!Mail's new update of it's service which will be based on Oddpost. I told him what they need to do is give users IMAP service over Thunderbird. If they worked HTML ads into Thunderbird (by dispalying HTML mail only) there wouldn't be any issues in terms of loss of advertising dollars.

Posted by rebron at 12:01 AM | Comments (0)

August 08, 2005

next step in blogging

This one is easy, the next step in blogging is aggregation just like I've told everyone I've come across. So no surprise to see, filter.msn.com which is essentially planet.mozilla.org or the aggregation one at mozillazine.

To do something like MSN Filter is like an instant portal, not very hard to do and the incentive on the blogger side is there if they're getting paid via advertising. The things is, in order for this aggregation to succeed, it needs to happen at a local level. Aggregation at a high level still requires top content providers so if you want Tech News you should be pulling in Walt Mossberg, Om Malik, David Pogue, etc and not some random blogger.

Some reporters and news agencies are really afraid of what's happening in the blog space. If they took the time to understand it and get blogging incorporated into the system it would work great. Let's get Ray Ratto (from SF Chronicle) blogging about Bay Area sports and have it syndicated in even more places then where he has it today.

Anyhow, this would be a great strategy for AOL, nscp.com, Ask Jeeves, and Yahoo as they're in the process of thinking up what the next portal looks like.

Posted by rebron at 09:51 PM | Comments (0)

August 05, 2005

OSCON 2005 Wrap-up

Just got back home from OSCON 2005 in Portland, Oregon which happened Aug 1-5th.

You can see what other people are saying about it in the "blogosphere" (cue scary music). I was mostly in the booth as the pet peeve bug collector but most people already used Firefox/Thunderbird so it was a procession of thank you's and we sold out of Firefox polos and hats.

Here's my bullet point wrap up:
- Howtoons.org is very cool. Worthy of a visit.
- Asa throws like a girl but would be a mean ultimate frisbee player. Great job on the keynote.
- Fine! mcolvig kicked my ass at the Vineman. shaver, dmose, asa shut it!
- Mitchell was impressive as always, especially with her keynote/interview.
- I had already Met the Flockers. Too bad I wasn't invited to the party, or given a shirt, or asked to provide feedback on their product (it's not like I have experience in this stuff or anything), but that's cool.
- We gave a Firefox polo shirt to one of the hotel receptionists who was a big fan of Mozilla/Firefox. shaver, shrep, mitchell all watched as I gave it to him. Of course his eyes lit up.
- Portland's Max Rail system rocks.
- Next year, we're going to have a Mozilla track at OSCON, at least that's what I'm pushing for.
- Everyone was asking about a Mozilla Developer Day. Don't have the answer for that. Should've been next week after Linux World Expo. Maybe piggyback Web 2.0 conference.
- Scott Kveton, Mike Morgan and OSL sure do know how to host and I mean parties (and I hear barbecues too).

Posted by rebron at 05:37 PM | Comments (0)

August 04, 2005

my MoCo statement

So by pinging me, not going to get anything more then what's located here: http://www.mozilla.org/reorganization/

What changes:
- email addresses, joy, so eventually rebron AT mozilla.com? (which will likely redirect to my meer.net account, double joy.)
- better clarity on product versus project, products are marketed by mozilla.com, projects are developed at mozilla.org
- no more "i don't know if we can do this, we're a nonprofit". It will be replaced by, "i don't know if we can/should do this."

And the big question:
- Are you going to get fat rims for the BMW X3 (which was largely funded by wife/Farella Braun & Martel and not MoFo, just so you know)? The answer would be no.

Posted by rebron at 08:51 AM | Comments (0)

August 02, 2005

@OSCON 2005

I'll be at OSCON in Portland, Oregon from Tuesday morning to Friday afternoon. Should be a fun one.

Posted by rebron at 05:46 AM | Comments (0)

July 28, 2005

The P3P Story

P3P not PSP. P3P has something to do with privacy policies as xml/client readable documents, in other words IE was supposed to detect a web site's privacy policy and show some obscure icon and block cookies if a web site didn't provide a p3p document or if the privacy policy said the wrong thing. Or something like that. Microsoft was trying to protect the user's privacy and they marketed the heck out of it.

In any case, IE 6 had P3P support if I remember right, and everyone at the time was jumping up and down, oh we got to get an audit of our damn cookies and find out what they all do and put this privacy policy together so that IE 6 doesn't display that stupid icon and break our web site. It was fun. It sure wasted a lot of folks time I don't know about at other web sites.

But boy, MSFT sure solved those privacy issues with that implementation. If it weren't for that privacy icon, I don't know what I'd do. There have been so many times I've not gone to a web site because that privacy icon showed up...Ok, I'll stop.

Privacy in 2000-2001 was the issue du jour. Phishing is the issue today. More thoughts on phishing soon because it's a lot more complicated than people think.

Posted by rebron at 10:38 PM | Comments (0)

July 27, 2005

Jon's got it, Yahoo!Toolbar 1.0 for Firefox

Granrose gets it. I sure hope that every product manager at Yahoo is paying attention to Jon.

If you're an Internet/Web company, it's about the browser. It always has been, it always will be so you best pay attention to what's happening in the browser world. I'm amazed by the number of so-called product managers at *web* companies who don't understand that or don't understand the basics of the Web.

When you build a web site, web application, toolbar etc, it's a checklist:

- am I generating income
- is it a good user experience
- is it cross-platform, localizable, accessible
- is it performant, speed, uptime
- will it make a difference
- what's the timing

Jon and team nailed it and they shipped! Congrats.
What's next? (jon knows what next)

Posted by rebron at 11:03 PM | Comments (0)

Phishing Detection Feature in IE 7

So apparently IE 7 will have or has a Phishing Filter. MSFT is going to promote it pretty heavily no doubt.

The breakdown is:
- They're likely getting the technology from Whole Security and the Phish Report Network.
- There is some sort of list for "legitimate" sites. Apparently, it's a quasi-default on feature. When you first get to a site that's not on "the list", MSFT warns you and says do you want to turn on the Phishing Filter feature.
- It's not clear whether IE 7 checks against a list that's stored on the client side that gets updated on a regular basis (what's the frequence), or if it checks against a list that's hosted server-side. Probably the former.
- Who is on that list of sites and how is it managed? Also, if it's list based, isn't this feature obsolete. You maybe able to protect some people, but the first few people will get in trouble because they never got the up to date list.
- What's the performance hit on the browser having to check against a list of "legit" sites?

I'm sure they've thought through all these issues.

Posted by rebron at 02:48 PM | Comments (0)

July 26, 2005

75 million downloads of Firefox

Another milestone, 75 million downloads of Firefox, yea.

FAQ
Q: Why are you counting downloads?
A: Because it's a metric, something we can measure. There are other metrics, downloads are one of them. Market share is another, and we're around 7-11% market share at some top sites.

Q: What's included in the download numbers?
A: We don't count updates through the the update mechanism for total downloads. We do recognize that some people will download the product multiple times or upgrade through the download links on mozilla.org. But, some folks also install Firefox on multiple machines personal, work and parent's computer and there are also corporate or school-wide deployments that are happening. Some also get Firefox on CD or other distribution method.

Q: When are you going to reach 100 million downloads?
A: Soon, hopefully.

Posted by rebron at 11:35 AM | Comments (0)

Beta Plaxo Extension for Thunderbird

Cool. A beta Plaxo extension for Thunderbird.

Fine. I knew about this press release and this extension a while back. I'll stop pretending this is news to me. What was funny though was that Mark Jen emailed me. I was like, don't I know you? Oh, that's right the infamous MSFT/Google blogger. That was pretty neat.

Posted by rebron at 09:40 AM | Comments (0)

July 25, 2005

konfabulator, mozilla connection

Congrats Arlo! Yahoo made a great acquisition by getting Konfabulator. What most people don't know is that Konfabulator uses Mozilla's JavaScript engine, SpiderMonkey.

Just so people know because there's 1000's of people using Bugzilla (like Yahoo and NetFlix) and Mozilla doesn't get credit for that either.

Posted by rebron at 06:20 PM | Comments (0)

Mo' MiniMozilla Screenshots

**Updated**
Minimo .007 released see DougT's blog.

Google.com, notice the progress meter.

Yes, Google Maps works in MiniMo. That would be Slashdot in another tab in the background.

A Google satellite view of my friend's house.

But can you view Slashdot...(yes you can!)

Posted by rebron at 09:31 AM | Comments (0)

July 20, 2005

Firefox's market share higher than expected?

I can make up juicy headlines too. Tom's Hardware has an article called: Automated scripts inflating IE's market share? Who's to say? Everyone has their own methodology.

I've been tracking browser stats since 1999 and have seen browser stats since 1995, stats that Netscape collected way back when.

The only real way to track browser market share is to get data from all sources and watch and track the data over time. You get the data from top sites directly from a summary report of their web server logs, and also third party reporting companies (Web Side Story, Omniture, Media Metrix, Xiti, etc). You ball park what the market share data is according to all data you gathered. I have Firefox pegged between 7 - 11% market share. We're the second most popular browser after IE 6 ~70%, and ahead of Safari and the AOL client at roughly 4% each.

Some people will give you market share based on page views, some per visitors, some with x or y stripped out, and others with x or y added. So everyone has their own methodology. I'm surprised web sites aren't more open about browser market share data, but it's actually really easy to get that information.

Want to know the secret? All you have to do is ask the right people. In one case, just about everyone advertises so all you really need to do is ask a salesperson from one of the top sites and they'll get that data for you in an instant.

In other words, I want my ads to be targeted to Firefox users, they're more active and are more likely to transact. What's the percentage of Firefox users on your site? Great, thanks for the info. Pretty easy.

Posted by rebron at 10:08 PM | Comments (0)

working the fast break

I'm worried that the Microsoft FUD marketing machine is starting to gear up.

We're going to need a strong SpreadFirefox marketing push and of course help from all our friends to get beyond the little whispers.

Choice, innovation, better (and cooler) products, are what's important.
Time to get back on offense and play our game - fast and fun to watch.

Posted by rebron at 05:36 PM | Comments (0)

my friend Jim @Ask Jeeves

Jim and I were co-workers at Netscape. We started off in the analyst group and we went off into product management. There were some trends we discussed that we hit right on the mark and it was certainly a fun and crazy time.

The reason I like Ask Jeeves isn't because of "Ask Jeeves", it's because they've employed a brand strategy and they own a lot of properties that people don't understand they own - a couple include My Way (a very good My Yahoo type portal), Bloglines, Teoma, Excite, and now Ask Jeeves is a part of Interactive Corp. A diversified brand strategy is unique to Interactive Corp and something that AOL tried to do but couldn't execute.

For Ask Jeeves to succeed, they still need to focus on technology, focus on the end-user, and quit worrying about Google and Yahoo. Provide a great search experience for the diversified properties, create and enhance services, and drive re-circulation. That's pretty much it.

Posted by rebron at 02:26 PM | Comments (0)

July 19, 2005

AOL Explorer vs. Netscape 8

AOL Explorer versus Netscape 8

If this were a movie, what would it be like? Attack of the Clones, Alien vs. Predator, Dumb and Dumber, the Titanic, Meet the Fockers, Home Alone 2: Lost in New York.

I'll stop, just *trying* to be funny. Congrats to AOL and Netscape for shipping products. Shipping product is hard work so congrats to both teams.

And Kerry Parkins you need to quit making stuff up.

Posted by rebron at 02:48 PM | Comments (0)

Yahoo! Hat, Google Polo

I'm also wearing eBay socks, AOL boxer shorts, Amazon sweat pants, and Microsoft flip flops.

More photos...

Posted by rebron at 11:33 AM | Comments (0)

July 18, 2005

recent press stories

The last few times talking with the press has been explaining "the hack" at SpreadFirefox and the discussion with localizers re: 1.0.5/1.0.6.

For both, we were clearly going to get press (we've been at the point where everything we do gets in the press) it was a matter of making sure press had the story straight and weren't going too far with their stories --aka the sky is falling stories. Both of these stories didn't make it into main stream press (e.g. New York Times, etc) only tech and blog press.

I've got to say there were a few in the press who were giddy over the SpreadFirefox issue even though we went above and beyond what was required for disclosure for a site compromise. That was pretty disappointing but expected. This reporter was writing about a group that wants to make things better for the Internet, and there was a hack, and the reporter was giddy about writing a story? Overall, the articles stated the facts and our message to our community and not too much more.

The MozillaZine post of a bug report and localizer comments was interesting too. A reporter pointed out, you would never see any discussion like that in a corporate environment, it's so candid...it's refreshing. Not exactly those words but that same idea. I had to pause for a second. He was right. We work in a glass bowl, we're open, we're exposed, people are free to say what they want. and what reporters and others are seeing is a passionate (and vocal) group of people who want to see where this web is going to take us.

It's great.

Oh, and that person who was all giddy about writing on the SpreadFirefox hack, was a SpreadFirefox member and big fan of Firefox. Funny how things work.

Posted by rebron at 08:43 PM | Comments (0)

July 16, 2005

Internet Explorer 7 analysis

Well here's what I think about IE 7.

# Internet Explorer 7.0 (MSIE) is a response to the popularity of Firefox, as well as a response to (end users and enterprise) customers and developers who are very unhappy with the security problems and nuisances that MSIE has not prevented.

# The focus of MSIE development had shifted to MSN Explorer, Longhorn and other products as there was no pressure or browser competition to warrant another Internet Explorer release. Some of the "premium" features of MSN Explorer, MSN toolbar, may make it's way into MSIE as well as MSFT's Anti-spyware products that they've recently acquired.

# MSIE 7.0 targeted at Windows XP SP2 users only, will not be provided to Windows 2000 users.

# MSIE 7.0 will be offered before Longhorn and targeted for a beta release in the Summer and likely a final release 3 to 5 months later or perhaps final release is Longhorn.

# MSIE 7.0 gives MSFT the ability to "break" sites and applications to an extent. Wholesale breakage won't be tolerated.

A few more thoughts:
# MSIE 7.0 will only work on Windows XP SP2, so MSFT is leaving much of their users out in the cold. Not to mention no solution for Mac OS X (and to a lesser degree Linux).

# New features? Wasn't this supposed to be a focus on security.

# Providing choice and innovation is key. Redundancy, meaning having two browsers on a machine and having web sites work in multiple browsers is a good thing. (this is what the web is all about)

What should be the top 5 key features in Internet Explorer 7.0:

* Some sort of security settings change, anti-phishing feature, anti-spyware bundling
* Tabbed browsing
* RSS integration
* International Doman Names Support (huge win for countries, and domain registrars)
* Best features are other people's add-ons like the Google or Yahoo Toolbar

Posted by rebron at 12:20 AM | Comments (0)

July 15, 2005

Thoughts about Extensions

So much for staying on the down low. This is the second time I've been MozillaZined. *sigh*

Extensions
- Extensions are very cool because folks can add their "pet" features on to the browser, to seemingly make their browser better. There are limits to what these extensions can do and it's interesting to see what people create. That's a fairly obvious statement but I said it anyway.

- Extensions are a great intro into hacking Firefox and Thunderbird. They're easy to create and can leverage the platform.

- For developers, I think it's a pretty fun playground. I hope that a big honor would be for their extension to be rolled into the core product similar to how tabbed browsing extensions became a core feature in Firefox and the Mozilla Suite.

- Security is paramount. At some point there maybe an evil extension out there. We'll need to watch out for that.

- As far as Mozilla Update, we're going to make this site much prettier and usable. What's good for Firefox (simple, stable, secure) is good for web site applications.

- Packaging. At some point, it would be convenient if we group or package extensions that make sense, like blogging extensions or "stop annoyances" extensions. We'll see that works.

- The majority of users will be happy with the default Firefox set up and there's plenty of customizations available without having to touch extensions, e.g. customizable toolbars, search plug-ins, bookmarks, live bookmarks, language prefs, text size, on and on. Extensions are for "power" users.

- I have to say Internet Explorer had us beat in the Netscape 6.x days on the extension front. There were all these toolbars and other customizations for Internet Explorer. It seems like Firefox has leap frogged IE on the extension front by a pretty wide margin. 600 extensions for Firefox is a lot.

Posted by rebron at 10:47 AM | Comments (0)

July 14, 2005

baby got back(end)

Before I left AOL, someone told me, "all that matters is 'controlling' the front end. The backend doesn't matter."

Anyway, Mozilla does encourage browser customizations, and we have policies to allow that and of course it's open source so people can roll their own.

If a company wants to take Firefox, make a few customizations that's allowed under the policies, that's great. If companies want to take the Firefox source, rebrand it, add some stuff e.g. Netscape 8 or others then that's great too (just follow the policies). And it's cool when this type of customization/rebranding is for a niche market like a browser kiosk, or a browser targeted for kids.

Building a browser is pretty tough though. What exactly do you have to do when creating a browser:
- supporting the product, customer support, documentation, FAQs, etc.
- supporting developers, web site developers, extension developers
- securing the product, security releases, adding your own security features
- core product development
- legal mumbo jumbo

On top of that, you're supposed to be adding your "value add".

Then you multiply that by platform and by language/locale. That's a lot of stuff. That's enough to deter most companies from trying to roll their own browser. In other words, while it seems like developing a browser is a low barrier to entry, it's actually pretty high unless you're going after a niche market.

What's interesting about browsers though isn't the front end, it's the backend because the whole point of the browser is the web sites it can display. While the front end UI of a web browser is significant, the backend is what it's all about. If you're not doing anything on the backend you're really not a browser shop. Period.

Posted by rebron at 11:43 PM | Comments (0)

Thoughts on Asa on Slashdot

If your butt gets Slashdotted that's great especially when it's commentary that's right on the mark, in Asa's case, "Linux Not Ready for the Desktop". Good stuff. We need to do more of this and provide commentary to lead this industry and move it forward.

For Mozilla people, if your butt gets Slashdotted and you didn't want to be, there are still things we can do to set the record straight if what you got Slashdotted for was taken out of context. It's very easy to get taken out of context, and spin statements every which way. There's a snow ball effect with Slashdot and so we want to get in front of the snow ball as fast as possible and melt it down. For the most part, everyone knows how to blog and communicate, but there's always that one comment that can be interpreted in several ways.

Linux thoughts...

There's more though re: Linux. Linux isn't ready for mobile devices either and lots of other situations but it is ready for many other situations.

It's funny to see all the commentary on Asa's blog regarding Dell and other OEMs trying to preserve MSFT's monopoly. Dell and others don't care about MSFT's monopoly they care about making money. It's going to take three things for the bigger OEMs to start distributing Linux: 1) a better Linux desktop, 2) a couple smaller OEM's to start distributing Linux, 3) and customers ASKING for Linux pre-installed on their machines.

A DellOS or GatewayOS based on Linux is not far off the mark folks.

Posted by rebron at 09:24 AM | Comments (0)

July 13, 2005

My Yahoo's "Mover & Shaker" and friends

Steve linked to My Yahoo's new promotion.

What's interesting about it is that it's the classic Internet demographic:

- Young/Teen audience, aka Bethany
- Family oriented, aka Rebecca
- Mover & Shaker, aka Anthony
- Professional (there's a better name here), aka Douglas

Apple's done this type of marketing. AOL follows the same research, it's pretty much all the same across aboard. This is the Web target audience. You can segment it out further and go into cultures e.g. Latino and African American demographics. This segmentation would apply internationally as well.

So what's interesting is what you do with that info since everyone has this same information. Yahoo and others have opted to tell people, we know who you are and what you want to do. We know you so well we can pre-configure what we think you're going to want.

Could be applied to other things?

Posted by rebron at 11:15 AM | Comments (0)

July 12, 2005

Firefox 1.0.5 is out!

Firefox 1.0.5 is available. Grab 'em.

Posted by rebron at 05:18 PM | Comments (0)

70 Million Downloads of Firefox

That's huge. 70 million downloads of Firefox in 9 months!

Posted by rebron at 09:07 AM | Comments (0)

Naked Broadband

DSL, Cable, other broadband providers should offer just a basic, no-nonsense, broadband service. Give me the connection info, give me a stable connection to the Web, give me a static IP, and that's it. Don't give me Webmail, don't give me other junk, or other "value-added" services. I don't want great customer service either, I shouldn't have to be calling customer service period, I don't care how great they are.

A fast connection and that's all. Is that too much to ask? Clearly it is.

Can you tell my home connection has been "intermittent", bad and slow?

Posted by rebron at 06:10 AM | Comments (0)

July 08, 2005

platypuses and XUL analogy?

Google engineer Justin says that XUL is like a platypus. Platypuses are pretty cool. They're one of the few mammals that lay eggs. They have venom in their ankles and they're semi-aquatic. They're found in Australia/Tasmania. I don't know if XUL is worthy of such a creature.

Oh yeah. Go get the Google Toolbar for Firefox plus extensions. My guess is that there maybe more to look forward to? Let's hope.

Posted by rebron at 09:49 AM | Comments (0)

July 07, 2005

Powerpoint, IE screen shots, to me...No

I don't think anyone really reads my blog which is great! Allows me to rant about pet peeves and stuff. Current biggest pet peeve is getting a powerpoint deck that includes screen shots with Internet Explorer.

Umm...It's fine except that you're supposed to be trying to impress me and missing a simple detail like this is pretty bad.

Posted by rebron at 02:56 PM | Comments (0)

July 01, 2005

EarthLink Toolbar for Firefox

Oh, what's this? An EarthLink Toolbar for Firefox.

Another ISP supporting Firefox. Very cool.

Posted by rebron at 05:00 PM | Comments (0)

June 29, 2005

AOL Search extensions for Firefox

Well, it's about time: http://ftp.newaol.com/aolsearchfirefox/firefox.htm

I hear there's more coming.

So why am I giving AOL a hard time with my "it's about time comment". Because Firefox was shipped in November 9, 2004 it's now end of June. These search engine plug-ins are very easy to create, they're the same ones that were used in Netscape 6.x+. And how hard is it to build a page with these plug-ins? Exactly.

So from November 9 through June, someone must've been working on getting approval through some constipated process.

Posted by rebron at 10:03 AM | Comments (0)

securing a computer, lessons from the 'hood?

There remains a digital divide because computers are still expensive and monthly access to the web is not yet "crucial" like cable tv and a telephone line. Many of the folks that aren't online don't care about online theft/computer fraud, they care about getting their house broken into and getting their computer stolen. Given that, can we learn something about securing a home that we can apply to securing a computer/software?

Some ways to secure a home:
- Move to a nicer neighborhood
- Install security doors and bars on the window
- Install motion detector lights
- Install an alarm
- Signage e.g. beware of dog, alarm sign
- Get a security review
- Install deadbolts
- Know your neighbors
- Install a fence/gates
- Get a dog, preferably a pit bull
(...and stay alert and look like you belong.)

That's about it. So does this translate into a securing a computer?
Not really, other than:
- Move to a nicer neighborhood translates into get a Mac
- Visit sites you trust
- Install firewall/antivirus security software
- Learn about the sites where you transact, that they're doing the right things
- Generally, stay alert

Securing a home versus a computer is really a whole different ball game. You don't fear for your life when thinking about securing your computer. It definitely puts things in perspective.

Posted by rebron at 07:18 AM | Comments (0)

June 24, 2005

RSS Support in IE 7

I could've told you that. It'll be interesting to see what the implementation is, whether they leverage how we've implemented live bookmarks or if they put in a full blown RSS reader in the browser.

Posted by rebron at 09:03 AM | Comments (0)

June 23, 2005

why parental controls don't work

Parental controls will work for children from K-3rd grade. After 3rd grade, kids are too smart. They have at least 3 hours a day from 3pm - 6pm to play around with the computer at home. Kids are the home's IT department. I've met so many people who've said to me, "Firefox is great! My son/daughter installed it on my computer and he/she loves it."

Parental controls maybe should work like spyware. It should be hidden and it has to be able to frustrate the kid to no end. And even then, that's only going to work for a while.

The best thing to do with kids and computers is to work with your kid, keep computers in a central location of the house, and talk to 'em.

It's interesting to see that parental controls are being built into the operating system. That busts the bubble for companies like AOL, Symantec, and others who provide that service. Parental controls seem to be something that should be standardized though and the feature set should be fairly consistent.

Posted by rebron at 10:39 PM | Comments (0)

Linux on the desktop predictions

I think I make pretty good predictions so here are a few thoughts on Linux on the desktop.

It's June 2005 and roughly 1% of desktops are on Linux, 6% on Mac OS X, and some version of Windows make up the rest (over 20% are on Windows 2000 and Windows 98).

Linux desktop players to watch are: Red Hat/Fedora Core, Novell, Ubuntu and maybe Linspire and Lycoris. None of these are stellar distributions that make me want to switch from Mac OS X or Windows but the opportunity is certainly there (JUST MAKE THE DAMN THING EASY TO USE!).

Companies are piloting linux on the desktop and replacing workstations that may just need a browser and office application, today.

What's going to be interesting is whether or not we'll see a DellOS based on Linux or a GatewayOS (again based on Linux). It all depends on the revenue, can Dell make more money selling their own linux based OS than getting the kickbacks from Microsoft. Dell, HP, Gateway, others all need revenue outside of the initial hardware sale.

So it's looking like this:
- 2005-2007; Linux on desktop is piloted and evaluated
- 2008; Open Office and Linux are finally polished, more apps starting to appear, more support for Linux; games starting to appear
- 2009-2010; DellOS or some other OEM OS, linux on desktop will be about 20-25%

(this is would be the worse case scenario for linux on the desktop)

The reason why Linux is going to do well on the desktop is potential. People believe there is potential to be on the desktop and potential to make lots of money whether it licenses, support, or some other model. I don't know if developers see that anymore with Microsoft.

Posted by rebron at 10:14 PM | Comments (0)

ubuntu linux

I installed ubuntu linux and it's ok. Linux on the desktop is still a good three years away. More in a future post.

Posted by rebron at 12:03 AM | Comments (0)

June 20, 2005

Rushing features in Internet Explorer to market?

A couple things on Internet Explorer:

- It sounds like IE 7 is rushing its tabbed browser implementation
"we're retrofitting multiple tabs into a browser that wasn't designed that way" and "some toolbars won't work with IE7 and will need to be fixed." That doesn't sound good and the MSN toolbar with Tabbed browsing wasn't great or good.

- IE 7 won't support Windows 2000. There's a bunch of people on Windows 2000.

- "Low rights IE", which will be hard for end users to understand, will only be available in Longhorn.

- It sounds like there's going to be a lot of bundling going on with the IE 7 release, bundle anti-spyware, etc.

I'm wondering why IE doesn't focus on just security for IE 7. Why introduce new features at all when that could open up potential for security issues. The whole point of this release should be security a "cover your ass" release for not doing such a great job on securing IE 6 for the past couple of years.

At least it's on the product roadmap to make IE secure.

Posted by rebron at 03:52 PM | Comments (0)

additional development, job creation/justification

If you're a company leveraging open source products and development, and you have your own development resources, a good use of those development resources is to not screw around with those good open source products and add features that no one wants or can be incorporated back into that open source product.

A good use of that dev money could be used for further integration into other products or even feature development into that core open source product or extensions to that product.

It feels like it's job creation, job justification, or something else that folks feel like they need to build features (fork) on top of open source products rather than doing something else with that dev money. I'm *not* talking about extensions here.

I'm rambling and only a few people know exactly what I'm talking about. It's just a waste of money and energy that can be spent on other things. Let the open source product guys (at least Mozilla) figure out what's best for the user.

Posted by rebron at 03:18 PM | Comments (0)

Browser Stat Check

It seems like websites can safely stop "supporting" Netscape 1.x-6.x and support just Netscape 7.x and higher.

Seems like websites can evaluate "dropping support" for IE 5.5x and below.

This all depends on browser stats on your web server, but considering I poll some of the top web sites on the web today, I'm making general statements for the web sites as a whole.

IE 5.5x and below and Netscape 6.x and below are not being used (less than 2%) and they've been on a slow/steady decline; sites should be encouraging their users to upgrade to more up to date and capable browsers like Firefox 1.x, Safari, Netscape 8, IE 6.x, Opera 8, etc.

Older machines should check out Firefox too. Sys requirements to run Firefox aren't huge.

Posted by rebron at 02:20 PM | Comments (0)

June 18, 2005

The Measure of Success

What are the metrics that say mozilla.org/Mozilla Foundation is successful?

The mission of mozilla.org/Mozilla Foundation is clear: to preserve choice and innovation on the Internet. So how should this be measured? Is it Firefox and Thunderbird market share? Is it the number of people working on the project? Is it the number of projects at mozilla.org and related areas?

Another measure (that's hard to measure) is the success of companies and individuals. When companies roll out standards based web solutions, roll out Firefox and Thunderbird to save money and increase productivity, that's a huge success. When a company gives their employees a choice to use Firefox/Thunderbird, that's another huge success. When web developers/designers/consultants make money because they're upgrading web sites to be standards compliant, that's a success too.

Is this happening? Yes. Companies, governments, universities, schools are rolling out Firefox and Thunderbird and developing standards based intranet and internet sites/applications. Opportunities abound for web consultants, designers, application developers to help push standards based solutions further. The scenario is easy.

web consultant (to client): It's time to upgrade your web site/application.
client: Why?
web consultant: Your web site and application is old, a growing number of people are using alternative browsers such as Firefox, Opera, and Safari, and upgrading your web site to standards will make your website more accessible to these browsers and others, you'll get performance gains (likely achieve your goals, higher conversion etc.), and you'll be better prepared for future changes.
client: Well, that makes a lot of sense. When do we start?

That easy. So it's interesting to hear the naysayers say well, there are a bunch of sites that internal/external that use proprietary technology and don't work on Firefox (it's actually not that many sites). To me, that screams major opportunity to help that site/company move to a standards based technology.

Posted by rebron at 01:11 PM | Comments (0)

June 17, 2005

Foxfire, err, Firefox

Foxfire is what many people say when they hear about this new browser called Firefox. I've heard it over and over again.

Now on the search results page for Google and Yahoo, Firefox isn't in the search results and I think it should be.

I'm guessing we could put foxfire in the meta tag for /products/firefox/index.html.

Hopefully that helps a bit.

Posted by rebron at 10:24 AM | Comments (0)

June 14, 2005

Antiphishing in IE 7

This is just my guess on what's on tap for antiphishing in IE 7. Microsoft and a few others (eBay, Whole Security, Visa) announced an initiative a while back called the Phish Report Network. I'm not sure why that was done outside of the Anti-Phishing Working Group though I suspect the latter was more talk/theory than action. There's a lot of groups that are part of the anti-phishing working group and I also suspect folks want Mozilla Foundation as part of the group.

Anyhow, the IE 7 implementation should look like this:

- Someone will own some "bad"/phishing web site list. I'm sure there will be a nominal charge to have access to this list and update the list.
- Companies will be able to add to that list, like an eBay or Visa.
- Internet Explorer may have a cached copy of the list like a set of virus definitions and IE 7 will be updated as there are new phishing sites.
- Alternatively, MSFT may just host that list and every entry into the location bar will check against that list. This is somewhat like Related Links/What's Related, there was a similar mechanism used here.
- There will be some warning for these "bad"/phishing sites.

That should pretty much explain the implementation as I suspect it will be. There may be an advanced option to turn this feature off.

So what are the issues around this implementation:
- Who owns that list, who's on that list, and how was ownership determined?
- How do you add to that list? Sounds like it will be a manual process?
- If it's a list that's hosted server-side, what's the performance hit?
- How effective will that list be when it only takes a 1-2 hour window or less to do a successful phish attack?
- Doesn't prevent man-in-the-middle attacks (though you're pretty much hosed in this kind of attack).

The other option or in addition, IE 7 may include some "real-time phishing detection" in their browser. WholeSecurity has a product called Web Caller-ID. Now if it already worked, I'm sure this would already be shipping as a part of the MSN toolbar. The premise is that there's some sort of logic that analyzes a web page to detect whether or not it's a phish site. I'm curious as to how that logic would work as I'm sure there will be a bunch of false positives.

Maybe I just need to call 'em and find out.

There is something to the whole "trusted client" whether or not that's the computer or the browser/app level. There could be elements such as bookmarked sites and password managed sites that could add to the trust level of a web site you visit often. The big problem would be bookmarking a phish site which throws this model off.

Posted by rebron at 09:02 PM | Comments (0)

June 13, 2005

Book of NSCP, 2:7

Bldg 21

Netscape 7.1 was launched end of June 2003, only 2 years ago. It seemed like a long time ago. Towards the end, there seemed to be some mad rush to get NSCP 7.1 out the door, it's like there was no way we could slip. I didn't really no why until we got closer to the date. Apparently, there would be no browser team left to ship the product if we didn't ship on time. Sure enough, after Netscape 7.1 was shipped, the big CPD lay-off happened and it was yet another really bad day in the history of Netscape. The day of the lay-off we all hung out at the first floor of bldg 21. Most of the browser/Gecko team we're let go (about 50 people?). There was a bit of a party with food, I handed out the rest of the t-shirts, but strangely enough, there was this calm in the room. Not all was lost.

I remember being taken into a room, and the Mozilla Foundation was being described to me. I just couldn't help but smile.

Anyhow, at this point there was no Netscape browser team, no nothing. My team got disbanded and moved on to other projects and even I was moved on to work on AOL Download Center (?). Yeah. That's what I said.

Well, clearly my days were numbered. The browser was effectively dead (not on anyone's roadmap, no team to build another version, not even plans to do a proper end of life--end it if you're going to end it).

Somewhere around here I decided to train for an Ironman. I don't know what that was all about. Probably to get my mind off of the bs. When I'm frustrated, I work out and I needed to do a lot of working out. Ironman seemed to fit the bill.

I was still 1/5 product manager for Netscape at the time when finally I was laid off in December 2004. AOL likes to lay people off in December, it was the 3rd or 4th time it had done that since I was there --just awful, awful management at the top. On that layoff day, my carpool buddy and a bunch of my friends got laid off too, along with the remainder of the browser team that was left from the July lay off. I gave a phone call to the Netscape.com owners in Columbus.

Now, if you were following along, Netscape.com was being run out of Columbus, Ohio or the 'ol CompuServe group. They had been running it since December 2002 or so. Because of weird org chart stuff, I was under AOL products and not Netscape.com (website versus client development). So I called up the "business owner" for the Netscape browser, and said, "Yo, I'm out." Not exactly that but they were a little freaked out considering I was the only one left who knew what the hell was going on and knew anything about shipping a Netscape browser.

I should've taken the AOL package and gone to Yahoo or Google or someplace but something told me to stick around and I did. Instead of being laid off, I signed on to do something with the Netscape browser, (considering there was no team, there was only a few options left.)

Chapter 2 is almost over...(of course this is just my short summary version of the story, I bet you others have much more colorful commentary. No one really likes to talk about this period though, it wasn't very happy.)

Posted by rebron at 10:21 PM | Comments (0)

June 10, 2005

Book of Netscape: Chapter 2 part 6 synopsis

Buffy, or I guess Buffy+. I think it was pav who came up with that codename for 7.01 and Buffy+ (after Buffy the Vampire Slayer) was "7.1". "Netscape" already lost meaning when AOL acquired it in '98. It used to mean innovation and web and cool. All the great images were made over because of all the different decision makers that came through: can you win with "cool", the green Mozilla lizard, the lighthouse, the nautical theme, the square N logo, constellation, all those great symbols done in by too many opinions.

What was the symbol/splash screen for Netscape 6? Exactly. Anyone remember the "blue buttons" on Netscape.com? Right. But how many people remember green Mozilla, the lighthouse, the big 'ol sailboat, What's New, What's Cool.

Back to the story. The plans or PRD for Buffy+ was largely written, a lot left over from Netscape 7.0 and I just listened to what the engineers wanted to do. It was some good stuff, junk mail filtering, clean up of the UI, find as you type, image resizing, IDN support, toolbar overflow, editor enhancements, and better popup blocking. We had a large team going into it and a core Gecko team backing us. It was a pretty major release with lots of goodness.

Buffy+ was considered "maintenance" though by management, essentially no new features (yeah). It was made even more clear when the app team was cut to 11 people total after a December layoff, that's 11 people for dev and qa for the whole app suite. No design, 1/2 a doc person, 1/2 a project manager, not much of anything. Mind you this was a product that had a *ton* of resources in the past. Essentially we were set up to fail and fail big time. But AOL mgmt was dealing with seasoned vets, an awesome engineering manager, and an awesome engineering crew (sspitzer and crew), so failure, not an option.

Buffy+ was supposed to be based on Mozilla 1.2 which then was supposed to be Mozilla 1.3, and then finally Mozilla 1.4. We were supposed to launch in March or April but we had a security release we had to deal with Netscape 7.0.2 (essentially Netscape's last security release). We needed to push back and Laura and chofmann were key to making Buffy+ based off of 1.4. The big sell job was we needed Buffy+ off of Mozilla 1.4 as the test vehicle for other things (I'll let you guess what those other things were). Somehow it worked.

We kept our heads down, focused on the work ahead of us of shipping a Netscape browser product. Not easy with all the bs around. (oh yeah, I sunsetted/EOLed Netscape Communicator 4.8 some where around here). We even got to do usability tests like we're supposed to be able to do.

An interesting decision point was made here. Remember, we were "maintenance". We evaluated Phoenix at the time to focus on that and ship that as the primary product. However, it wasn't ready, that wouldn't be construed as maintenance, we didn't have the resources, it didn't have a mail counterpart, and we just couldn't do it (but boy did we want to, because it was the right direction to go.) In other words, we could have shipped "phoenix" in 2003 and we'd be in a different world right now.

Back to Buffy+. Now, I wanted to call it Netscape 7.5. All the changes we did, it deserved that version number. From a marketing perspective, we would've gotten more downloads, made more noise. Mr. Cambell soup, excuse me, the head of Netscape.com at the time wasn't a fan of the browser at all (like the CompuServe guy knows what good software looks like...please). So the versioning was bumped down to Netscape 7.1, and I did let the team down here (but we were shipping, period, and that's really what mattered).

All that was left was the Netscape 7.1 t-shirt. No one was around to freaking lead that effort either so I had to get that shit done too. Now, if there's no t-shirt, then the project is ass, basically.

So, I talked one of our designers to create a matrix style t-shirt, with the slogan "the browser reloaded". The reason for that t-shirt design was because I had taken the team out to go see the Matrix Reloaded. It was a good movie and it was great taking the team out to go see it.

Next...Netscape 7.1 launch, the end of CPD (like someone going into bldg 21 to kill all the jedi) aka revenge of the DG, and a new hope...

Posted by rebron at 09:45 PM | Comments (0)

June 09, 2005

Book of Netscape: Chapter 2 part 5 synopsis

By now I'm sure my wife (who's a lawyer) is like, why are you writing all this? A: It's bedtime, someone asked, I didn't sign anything went I left AOL (they forgot about me), so here we go.

Last I left it was Oct 2002 and I just took over product management for Netscape 7.x. There were many people in CPD wondering what's next, what's there to do, what should I be working on. It was a bit before Netscape 7 launched and during the summer that Phoenix (now Firefox) was started.

Just so you know, Phoenix was the code name for a Netscape.com redesign. The NSCP.com designers created a pretty cool logo for it, the name sounded good and I guess that's why Blake and Hyatt used it for the browser or maybe it was for another reason, you'll have to ask them. Like all NSCP.com redesigns, the Phoenix redesign was never completed (I don't even remember what it was) and we moved on to another redesign and that's why there's 4 to 5 different designs on NSCP.com. Site architecture is important, and good design is something you build on not have to redesign again in 6 months.

While we're on code names, Netscape 7's was Mach V, named after the car in Speed Racer. Netscape 7 was all about speed. A lot of speed optimizations happened during this period, and I believe this is what helped phoenix move along as well.

A funny thing about Netscape 7 and Mozilla at the time. NSCP 7 was based on Mozilla 1.0. Mozilla 1.0 shipped in June. Mozilla 1.1 shipped in August and Netscape 7.0 also shipped in August. Needless to say, Mozilla took a little bit of steam away from the NSCP 7 launch especially since Mozilla 1.0 had a "popup blocker" and NSCP 7.0 didn't.

I had told the PM at the time, you should include the popup blocker. It was the right thing to do because popups were being abused by very, very annoying companies who aren't smart enough to keep people at their website thus making one page view equal two or more. Oh, but we work for one of those companies don't we. Right. Not so easy a decision. (The thing was, popup blocking was inevitable so we should've put it in.)

NSCP 7.01 was born specifically for the popup blocker err, "popup suppression" feature. "Block", "suppress", SAME FREAKING THING DG (and why is choice of word a VP decision?). It truly was a popup blocker feature though, the feature in Mozilla 1.0 just was a pref to disable window.open. But we got popup blocking out, it was a good implementation and set the stage for more browsers having built-in popup blockers (AOL client, IE 6 XP SP2, etc).

We launched Netscape 7.01 on a Monday and it went pretty smoothly, great in fact. It was exciting even though I had been through so many product launches in the past. This one was on me though, I pulled the trigger as to when we launched and it was an awesome feeling.

--
...so why care or work on a browser product that's on a decline and has single digit market share. A: Because it has single digit market share out of millions of users, I believed in the potential of the technology (you're seeing some of the results now w/ Firefox and Thunderbird), the NSCP browser generated money for Netscape, still does, and when I joined Netscape this is what I said I was going to do, lead a browser release. I didn't think I could turn Netscape around that would've taken a miracle. The whole time I was thinking, how can we keep people working on mozilla because this technology needs to keep moving.

Buffy ...you're going to like this next story.

Posted by rebron at 10:58 PM | Comments (0)

June 07, 2005

Opera? What are you doing?

Asa commented on this already but this is just dumb. How can Opera put on their homepage that they got PC World's Best Browser Award for 2005 when Mozilla Firefox won PC World's Product of the Year Award chosen best out of 100 products? Firefox beat out a lot of products like flat screen tvs, the Mac mini, etc. Opera's on that list at 88, in other words, 12 products from the bottom of the list.

We have a tag line, Firefox, the browser you can trust. There's a reason I felt comfortable with that tagline.

Opera, that's just embarassing.

Posted by rebron at 09:35 PM | Comments (0)

June 05, 2005

Om - I'm all in

From Om Malik, "These are trying times for Microsoft, but I would not even wager even a dime against Chairman Gates." Om, I've got that dime, and I'm all in.

We're talking MacTel duopoly, oops, I guess no one's called it that yet...Who'll be the first reporter to call it Mactel?

I'm not sure what's happening with Apple, Intel, MSFT, IBM, open source, but it's starting to get really interesting. How does an Apple/Intel relationship help Linux and applications for Linux? I guess we'll see in the next couple years.

Posted by rebron at 07:09 PM | Comments (0)

June 02, 2005

spreadfirefox...amazing

SpreadFirefox is a pretty cool project. Some foundational ideas: marketing shouldn't be left to the marketing department; sfx is the open source structure applied to marketing; and, community building is the key to it all. That in a nutshell is SpreadFirefox. There will be a meritocracy established and hopefully we'll be able to get some great marketing minds involved. There are lots of passionate folks already at SpreadFirefox, we need to make sure we have the scalable tools available for this new community to flourish.

The goals are clear - spread the word about Mozilla products, both Firefox and Thunderbird. Of course the unstated goal is to have lots of fun along the way. What gets in the way of having lots of fun? Pointy headed process that's unfortunately very necessary. Too many projects and lack of focus. Lack of clear communication and plans.

It's still a very early project and its definitely great to be part of it and watch it's evolution. It feels like lots of folks are watching too. Everytime I ask, have you seen SpreadFirefox. Yup. Are you signed up? Yup. Just amazing...

Posted by rebron at 11:42 PM | Comments (0)

Thunderbird 1.1 Alpha now available

Also for *tester's and developers only*, Thunderbird 1.1 Alpha. Thunderbird 1.1 is going to be nice.

What's in it?
- phishing detection to warn you before clicking on scam links
- podcasting support, improvements to RSS setup
- inline spell checking (huge!)
- ability to detach attachments from messages
- options were re-organized
- lots of goodness

Why no codename for the alpha?
- Thunderbird doesn't need no stinking codenames ;-)
I don't think Thunderbird has had any codenames outside of Minotaur? Don't need to start now with codenames.

Posted by rebron at 07:35 AM | Comments (0)

May 31, 2005

Deer Park Alpha 1 for developers is out

If you're a developer, grab 'em. If you're not a developer or part of the Mozilla community, don't say we didn't warn you. It's Deer Park so end users wouldn't download it because clearly Developer Preview Release will still get folks downloading the darn thing.

Posted by rebron at 10:13 PM | Comments (0)

Banking Online

It goes both ways. While there are now just a few banks not supporting Firefox, there are a bunch of banks that aren't doing a good job of securing their web site. Jesse has a write up here.

If you're banking online, you need to demand a secure experience or quit banking online. Some of the banks Jesse has listed is just really surprising. Maybe a small bank or credit union, but not US Bank or CitiBank. Login pages should always be done via https:. Essentially, don't ever login on page that's http or where the login of the page hides the url bar or is a pop-up.

Posted by rebron at 11:07 AM | Comments (0)

May 26, 2005

product management rule #185

I just made up the rule number but there is an unstated product management rule. If a product/product launch is successful, it's a team effort, a team win. Absolutely.

If a product/product launch blows/sucks/doesn't go well, it's all product management's fault. And that too is the truth! When something doesn't go well, you as a product manager have to own it. Sucks doesn't it.

Posted by rebron at 11:00 AM | Comments (0)

May 25, 2005

get to the beach - using Firefox and Thunderbird on vacation

I was in Cancun last month, never did get to write too much about it. Great time, here's the view from our room. Anyhow, I needed to check my email and just see what was happening at Mozilla and in the real world. Turns out, Club Med Cancun has an Internet cafe type setup.

It was like $10 per 30 minutes or something like that. They only had IE on the machine. I tried surfing around with it, and it just took way too long. Like seriously not usable. Especially having to pay by the minute, I don't think so. I downloaded Firefox, surfed around, checked out everything I needed to check out and I also downloaded Thunderbird too. I couldn't use webmail, I get too much mail so Thunderbird did the trick.

The point though is, if you really need to get something done on the web and time is money (or time not spent on the beach), then Firefox/Thunderbird really does the trick. Anyhow, I installed Firefox and Thunderbird on the rest of the machines. I figured I could help my fellow vacationers out - people should be at the beach not surfing around on the web.

Posted by rebron at 10:16 PM | Comments (0)

customers are choosing and their voices are being heard

There's a problem with a web site that you're visiting and you're using Firefox. Get them to fix it. Sometimes I think a web site is just broken in Firefox, I'll check it out in IE and it's broken with that browser too.

So the lesson there is, don't assume the web site works on Internet Explorer just because it doesn't work in Firefox. The web site could just be broken altogether.

Posted by rebron at 10:10 PM | Comments (0)

IBM's Blogging Guidelines

From their web site
Guidelines for IBM Bloggers: Executive Summary
with some commentary with how this could be applied to mozilla.org

1. Know and follow IBM's Business Conduct Guidelines.
> For Mozilla Foundation employees yes. I got to go look that up...for folks on the project you have your own set of guidelines.

2. Blogs, wikis and other forms of online discourse are individual interactions, not corporate communications. IBMers are personally responsible for their posts. Be mindful that what you write will be public for a long time -- protect your privacy.
> This says a couple things. Protect your privacy is probably the most important part of it. You are in the public eye.

3. Identify yourself -- name and, when relevant, role at IBM -- when you blog about IBM or IBM-related matters. And write in the first person. You must make it clear that you are speaking for yourself and not on behalf of IBM.
> It would be a good idea identifiying your contributions to mozilla.org but that will become apparent so not really necessary. If you want to write in the third person about yourself like Rafael thinks Rafael is cool, go right ahead.

4. If you publish a blog or post to a blog and it has something to do with work you do or subjects associated with IBM, use a disclaimer such as this: "The postings on this site are my own and don’t necessarily represent IBM’s positions, strategies or opinions."
> Yes. This is the cover my butt statement for something you shouldn't be posting.

5. Respect copyright, fair use and financial disclosure laws.
> Yes.

6. Don’t provide IBM’s or another’s confidential or other proprietary information.
> Yes as it applies to security, and other pointy headed stuff. For the most part, can't get any more open than mozilla.org.

7. Don't cite or reference clients, partners or suppliers without their approval.
> Yes, please don't do this unless it's publicly known e.g. via a news article. It stops people from wanting to partner or work on the project.

8. Respect your audience. Don't use ethnic slurs, personal insults, obscenity, etc., and show proper consideration for others' privacy and for topics that may be considered objectionable or inflammatory -- such as politics and religion.
> Essentially this is the be nice clause. Do what you want though being nice is highly encouraged.

9. Find out who else is blogging on the topic, and cite them.
> Don't need to do this.

10. Don't pick fights, be the first to correct your own mistakes, and don't alter previous posts without indicating that you have done so.
> If you want to pick a fight, see #4 above.

11. Try to add value. Provide worthwhile information and perspective.
> Ummm. No.

Posted by rebron at 12:43 PM | Comments (0)

so, your blog post just got slashdotted

We (mozilla.org) are in a crazy time right now with all eyes on our EVERY move, and reporters and bloggers seeming to hang on our every word, and every comment. There are news articles about job postings, meeting notes, and especially blog post comments.

So what to do:
- Contact me and we'll see what we can do if there are inaccuracies, e.g. contact the reporter, get things clarified.
- You can try and prevent it from happening in the first place by saying the, "these opinions are mine" line and "if you want official comments contact press@mozilla.org." If you're having to put that line in your blog post, re-read your post. MoFo isn't going to be the blog police, but just watch what you say.

That's about it as far as recourse and prevention. If you keep things on the up and up (or if you curse a lot), it probably won't get picked up.

We're working with reporters to make sure they go through press@mozilla.org for clarifications. It's a long road though.

Posted by rebron at 12:02 AM | Comments (0)

May 24, 2005

deconstructing the game

Just a quick post inspired by Jeremy Zawodny's post on My Google.

Yahoo, Google, MSN, etc they're all playing the game.

The game is who is the best referrer and who is the best host. That's it. Identity/namespace plays a part (e.g. who will own the biggest namespace and who will play nice) but the game boils down to referrer and host.

Whether it's the play to be the biggest referrer and biggest host or the company most able to monetize their position, that's the game. You can say that this is game will be won by operations rather than app development. Let's see how much more information Google will start to host (e.g. people's mail, map information) and let's see how they build more applications that refer users to more relevant content, advertisers, etc.

Part of winning the game is knowing what game you're playing in the first place. In other words, the game isn't about building the best search engine (or best portal).

Posted by rebron at 08:21 AM | Comments (0)

May 23, 2005

young guns are here

Welcome Josh and Blake K. I believe Jesse should be coming soon and of course we've had mconnor and bsmedberg working on the project for quite some time. It's nice to see the new influx of young guns working on the project.

I write this after finishing off my glass of milk and chocolate cake.

Posted by rebron at 11:06 PM | Comments (0)

May 21, 2005

more wishful thinking

So the concepts:

- user centric versus company/destination centric, i.e. web sites come to me instead of me coming to them and I broadcast back out to 'em
- need to figure out authentication model and "membership"/grouping i.e. I don't want to make my friends register for Flickr, Ofoto, Snapfish, Evite, some Yahoo service, some Google service, some MSN service, etc, etc.
- move concept of identity from email address to domain e.g. rebron@hotmail.com to http://www.rebron.org or http://www.googyhoomsft.com/rebron
- this is essentially an open version of .Mac meets LiveJournal/Movable Type
- storage galore

Posted by rebron at 01:22 AM | Comments (0)

wishful thinking

Bill Gates' vision was a PC in every home or something like that. Well, what I see (and someone already said this I'm sure) is a "home" on the web for everybody. Essentially, everyone should have a web site similar to mine, others from Mozilla. Of course I'm hoping these web sites are 100x more advanced than it is today and easier to manage.

What's funny is just the progression of things. One of the very first things people at Netscape were encouraged to do was build a web site for themselves. Everyone had a personal web site and now 10 years later people/employees are blogging like it's new or something and of course MSFT is leading the charge with the scobelizer as if they invented the whole thing.

What's "new" is that it's a little easier to post content on the web, and these blogs have features like archiving but the concept is the same. Further, sites like mine, we're adding functionality (like photo galleries) ourselves and being our own mini-portal ALREADY.

So anyhow the twist is, in order for this concept to work, companies like Google, Yahoo, MSFT, etc need to change their thinking of being a destination. Companies need to stop being so company-centric and be more user-centric. Companies need to think about being service providers versus trying to own the whole experience. Yahoo, MSFT, Google, etc they can't do it all.

What does this mean in practice? Here are some of the scenarios:
- When I meet someone, I give them my business card and all it has on it is my url, rebron.org. My website should have all my contact information on there and that person should be able to subscribe to my info if they want.
- When I want a job, I should login to rebron.org, upload my resume and it should ping careers.com, dice.com, etc. and they should be able to parse that structured resume.
- If everyone has a web site, I should be able to group a set of my friends (aka a blog roll, buddy list).
- I should be able to upload my photos to my website and managed it via my preferred service e.g. Flickr and print to my preferred photo printing company.

Jim Bankoff at AOL calls this the "a la carte" experience. The problem he tried to solve was how to win at each of those individual "a la carte" services. What he should have tried to resolve was how to bring these "a la carte" experiences together.

Posted by rebron at 12:09 AM | Comments (0)

May 20, 2005

That was quick, NSCP 8.0.1

It looks like NSCP 8.0.1 is out the door. Folks sticking with Netscape should get the latest version. I'm on my Mac right now so can't test it out for you to see if it included the fixes in Firefox 1.0.4.

Posted by rebron at 08:30 AM | Comments (0)

Netscape 8 Thoughts for Developers, etc

Like I said, others can comment on the Netscape 8 product itself. There are some things that need to be addressed. There are unofficial comments/opinions but I think they make sense. For official comments, folks should contact press@mozilla.org.

So here we go:

--

Q: How do I certify my web application for Netscape 8?
A: You'll need to ask Netscape but it seems like you code your web application to work on Gecko as you would and check against IE which is also part of Netscape 8. You wouldn't necessarily code for Netscape 8.

Q: Should Netscape 8 be part of our QA matrix?
A: That's a decision you'll need to make and should be based on YOUR web browser market share on YOUR servers as well as your resources. I recommend Firefox 1.0.4 Windows XP SP2 and IE 6 for Win XP SP as tier 1 applications to test at a minimum. These should also be the top two browsers in your web server logs.

Q: What version of Gecko is included in Netscape 8?
A: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.7.5) Gecko/20050512 Netscape/8.0 is Netscape 8's user-agent string. It's a little confusing since it should be rv:1.7.7 Gecko/20050415 if it's based on aviary-branch 1.0.3 as Netscape says. Netscape 8 is NOT based on Firefox 1.0.4.

**Update** Netscape 8.0.1 is based on Firefox 1.0.4

Q: Was the Mozilla Foundation involved in the creation of Netscape 8?
A: No, the Mozilla Foundation was not involved in the creation of Netscape 8. The Mozilla Foundation does encourage the use of Mozilla technology in other products.

Q: Is Netscape 8 Windows only?
A: You'll need to ask Netscape. That's what it looks like though. It also looks like its US-English only (for now, maybe a couple more languages will be added).

Q: Netscape 8 added IE for usability/compatability because they say Firefox isn't supported by all web sites. Is that true?
A: While there are a few sites that still may have issues, the issue is a bit exaggerated.

The fact is people are seeing that they have a say in what browser they use and people are choosing Firefox. Market share data and over 57 million downloads say so. Developers are taking notice and they understand the importance of building for web standards and building web applications not Windows IE applications. They can't ignore Firefox users or Safari users or Opera users etc, there's too many of them (you).

Q: What happened to Composer and Netscape Mail, did Netscape drop support for those applications? Will there be more versions of Netscape 7.x?
A: Again, those are questions for Netscape.

Q: What's Netscape's relationship with Mozilla? Will we see a browser from AOL that has dual-rendering engines or Gecko in it (finally)?
A: Sounds like reporter questions. Folks should contact AOL press for that.

Posted by rebron at 07:04 AM | Comments (0)

May 19, 2005

The Flying Mozilla

Mitchell is really the trapeze expert, I've only had the experience of doing trapeze twice, once at ClubMed at Turks & Caicos, and the other time here in Cancun.

This time I was able to do a knee hang "catch" hawk-style. I tried doing a "heels-off" but wasn't able to do the catch. So the photo above is the split second that's not supposed to happen where I'm supposed to be just hanging from Chucho's arms (versus still hanging from the other bar with my knees). It's a pretty cool photo.

Anyway, here's the rest of the slideshow of my trapeze efforts. It's a pretty fun sport(?)/activity. The thrill of flying and twisting in the air is pretty neat. Apparently there's places like Trapeze Arts in Oakland where I could go to school for this.

Posted by rebron at 11:36 AM | Comments (0)

Screw It, I'll Say It

Who in their right mind ships a product the day that the very last Star Wars opens (let alone on a Thursday)? We're talking Star Wars...the very last one.

Brand necrophilia is jwz's term for the Netscape ISP. I don't even know where to start with this one.

**Updated** Comment above is re: releasing on the day of a Star Wars release not a comment on the product itself. Ultimately users and analysts will provide the commentary, won't hear anything from me.

Posted by rebron at 01:32 AM | Comments (0)

SimoHealth

These guys figured it out - you can use Mozilla to build applications outside of email clients and browsers. It doesn't hurt that Marty Fisher, Bill Ong, and Richard Quach are involved. Congrats, congrats, congrats! Anyone wanting to check out yet another application built on Mozilla that's not a browser or email client or html editor or calendar, should go check it out.

I can't wait to see what's next. However, the trend of ex-mozilla (e.g. ex-netscape employees) folks coming out with stuff based on mozilla products is a very neat trend. Like I said, 1/3 of ex-mozilla is over at yhoo, another 1/3 over at google, and the rest at other large important companies or start-ups. And they all know what's up.

**Update**
Download SimoHealth. It's pretty sweet. I thought it was just demo- ware.

Posted by rebron at 12:55 AM | Comments (0)

May 18, 2005

The Duck Boat

Some combinations are awesome like the toaster oven. Genius. Others like the duck boat, well I don't know. It sure isn't pretty and may have served it's purpose but you certainly don't see people driving around in it (unless you're in Boston I guess).

You certainly can't blame the engineers for the duck boat because it works and it's a piece of work. You can blame the people who asked for the boat to be built in the first place though, what the heck were you thinking.

chofmann should go do a duck boat tour while he's in Boston visiting our friends.

--
Duck boat? I could be more explicit in my posts such as the duck boat is a lot like such and such but what's the fun in being explicit.

Posted by rebron at 11:43 PM | Comments (0)

May 16, 2005

What IBM Announcement Means...

So the IBM announcement means a couple things:

1) Here is your reference customer for supporting/deploying Firefox at your company. Do you really need another reference customer? 30,000 is a pretty good number of people and having it widely available to 300,000 employees is pretty good too. There's a bunch more customers like Komatsu (a competitor to Caterpillar), lots of Universities, lots of small to mid-size companies.

2) In case you don't read between the lines, the announcement means IBM is open for business, i.e. if you want help deploying Firefox or supporting web standards in intranet applications, you should go contact them.

I hope we see similar announcements from other consulting companies and software providers.

Posted by rebron at 08:47 PM | Comments (0)

May 13, 2005

Lead Sailboat Strategy

In a boat race (where there's two boats), the leading sailboat has the strategic edge. The boat that's behind has to take all the risks and hopefully catch a break to take the lead. Now all the leading sailboat has to do is watch what the other boat is doing and copy the strategy to win. There's really no point in trying a different strategy when you're in the lead but if it doesn't move fast enough, then the other boat can win.

Which leads us to, what's Microsoft going to do with Internet Explorer 7. Well this is easy, tack to catch that same Firefox wind. Focus on security features, add tabbed browsing, improve on some of the web standards compatability, and engage web developers. Go too much beyond that? Not necessary but I'm sure there's a few extras. In addition, continue hard coding links to IE from other applications, essentially continue those bundling practices that got them in the lead in the first place.

So what's a Firefox to do? Tack? Nope. Call it a day and pull down the sails? Nope. Pull out the motor and turn it on. Sounds like a good strategy to me.

Posted by rebron at 11:34 PM | Comments (0)

May 12, 2005

IBM Backs Firefox In-House, >30,000 users already

From the article...

IBM is encouraging its employees to use Firefox, aiding the open-source Web browser's quest to chip away at Microsoft's Internet Explorer.

Firefox is already used by about 10 percent of IBM's staff, or about 30,000 people. Starting Friday, IBM workers can download the browser from internal servers and get support from the company's help desk staff.

Posted by rebron at 09:31 PM | Comments (0)

"So Easy to Use No Wonder It's #1"

That used to be AOL's slogan and unfortunately their products (like their AIM beta or AOL browser) don't seem to reflect that statement.

I unfortunately still have options in TWX and I want to see AOL succeed. I just don't get what the deal is with all the features and trying to re-invent things when users want simplicity and interoperability (and a little bit of fun) and convenience.

What happens in the big company world is something gets on the roadmap, the train moves, and instead of trying to stop the train, you keep trying to add resources to the train to keep it going. Eventually the train really doesn't get you to where you want to go.

I need to dump these options (I don't have much), I don't know why I'm holding on to 'em.

Posted by rebron at 03:56 PM | Comments (0)

May 11, 2005

Firefox 1.0.4 is out - Go get it

Go grab 'em.

Posted by rebron at 08:50 PM | Comments (0)

Instant Messaging - removing pain points

I'll chat about the Mozilla Security release process, the news around it, the IE blog resposne, etc in another post. Briefly, I suck and the Mozilla engineers as always are doing an awesome job helping protect users on the web and responding quickly. People missed the fact that on Mother's Day, we made changes to update.mozilla.org to protect Firefox users.

Back to the main post. Instant Messaging is a pain point and Trillian is not the answer. WHY DO I HAVE THREE INSTANT MESSAGING CLIENTS ON MY MACHINE? WHY ARE THEY NOT INTEROPERATING? I have YIM, AIM, and MSN Messenger.

This is painful and needs to be fixed. No one is making money on Instant Messenger (I know this because no one buys the advertising in the IM clients, it's shoddy inventory). There's maybe some slight indirect revenue from advertising from embedded links to web sites in the respective IM clients but that's it.

Keep instant messaging simple and open it up so namespaces interoperate. You know, like the phone system. What's painful is I know who's involved in keeping this mess a mess, and I can't get them to budge.

Posted by rebron at 11:40 AM | Comments (0)

May 05, 2005

"Microsoft is Boring"

Well, yeah...I didn't say it, Dori Smith said it and Robert Scoble thought to blog about it, and I was thinking it when I was doing my other posts about OSU and their Kool Aid/corn starch escapades.

There was this interview with Bill Gates in Fortune too. Blake had a good post about MSFT's ad campaigns.

Life's too short not to have fun. Sucks to be boring. On that note...

Posted by rebron at 11:41 PM | Comments (0)

Go Beavs! Firefox Koolaid and an A+ in Art

Hey Kool Aid...

The folks at OSU are some fun folks. Check out what they did for the Firefox 50 million milestone.

A mural of Firefox on the OSU campus in Kool Aid. A+ in Art for:

* Beth Gordon
* Kim Marshall
* Brandon Philips
* Matt Viehdorfer
* Stuart McKim
* Alex Polvi
* Eric Betts
* Random insomniac guy

(you guys are bad ass!)

GO BEAVS!

**Update**
I just came back from 2 weeks vacation and will be posting more on the trip. That was a lot of fun but it's really nice to come back to fun (and fulfilling) work. How fun is this!

I raise my glass of Kool Aid to OSU!

Posted by rebron at 07:21 PM | Comments (0)

Firefox marketing metric

I was sifting through my bookmarks and found this:
Sites that link to Firefox products page via Google

In June 2004, it was 78,000 sites linking to the Mozilla.org Firefox products page. I wanted a Firefox 1.0 launch goal of 200,000 but don't remember what it was then.

As you can see, it's May 2005 and we're at 699,000.

For comparison, IE is at 137,000 sites linking to it's page.

--
I'm going to be a little chatty on my blog. I have been gone for a couple weeks.

Posted by rebron at 12:58 AM | Comments (0)

May 04, 2005

Editing Rant

I don't like that there are so many different interfaces to writing content on the web. I use Composer, Movable Type, and Wikis, three different interfaces, they all do something slightly different but it would be great if there was a little bit of consistency among all three.

- So I use Composer for simple html pages or complex ones that require greater control.
- I use Movable Type as my main interface for my web site.
- I use Wikis so that others can edit a shared document.

Anyone else feel my pain? Wikis and CMS apps like Movable Type and WordPress to need to converge e.g. Drupal but easier to install. Composer should be an extension to Firefox should be able to hook in to Wikis/CMS apps.

Posted by rebron at 11:51 PM | Comments (0)

April 17, 2005

Vacation Notification - Raf out until May 3rd

I'm out for vacation (Cancun, Mexico) for two weeks from April 18th to May 3rd. In my absence, you're in good hands. For press related inquiries, please contact Mary Colvig, 650-762-2820; Judi Palmer, 650-762-2812.

For Mozilla business related activities, please contact Chris Beard cbeard AT mozilla.org.

Posted by rebron at 05:13 PM | Comments (0)

April 15, 2005

And Chase said, "Let there be chocolate milk"

On the third day Chase said, "Let there be chocolate milk." And milk chuggs magically appeared. All was good in the land of Mozilla.

This is my ode to Chase post who's been an absolute rock star. Chase, I've got my marching orders.

I also stumbled upon Taquitos.net, a site that has 2500 snack reviews and more pictures of chocolate milks cartons. Amazing...Who needs all those reviews on snacks ;-)

Here's the obligatory rss feed: http://www.taquitos.net/snacks.php?page_code=107

Posted by rebron at 11:35 PM | Comments (0)

Jon Udell's Screencast of Greasemonkey/Library Look-up

Very cool, screencast on Greasemonkey and Jon's Library Look-up. Essentially if you don't want to buy a book on Amazon and see if it's at your local library, it's possible to do that with a Greasemonkey script.

We need to do a screen cast for the key features of Firefox and Thunderbird. I should ping Jon about it. Or I could ping my friends over at Macromedia.

He's got a write up on screencasting too.

Posted by rebron at 11:16 PM | Comments (0)

Inside Firefox 1.0.3

Seeing the dedication of the Mozilla community (which you and I are a part) with the Firefox 1.0.3 and Mozilla 1.7.7 release, first hand is just amazing. It's not new as we've been doing this for quite some time, but it's always, always awesome to see.

People's Friday evening plans are rescheduled, weekend plans, working with folks (as is usual) from all over the world whether it's Germany, Japan, too many countries to list.

The press won't see this dedication or maybe they will. Maybe they'll see all the different people involved from top companies and top community members working on the issues. Maybe they'll see the feedback loop and the high quality standards we've set for our products. Maybe they'll see that when we say we are passionate about security, we mean it. Maybe they'll see the fast response time and think of some of the personal sacrifices.

We do our best to work with the press to get the word out to make sure users get the latest security updates. It's tough when the press makes a story out of it instead of making it a public service announcement. The press may go in and compare us to MSFT (it's always favorable) but still not what the focus should be. Or they'll be completely off the mark trying to explain JavaScript engine memory heap vulnerability in their own words, but lately they've been pretty good.

Going forward, Firefox's update mechanism will be the primary mechanism for notifying users of updates versus also using a full on media blitz to get the word out that an update is available. Press releases for security updates seem to cause confusion so we've been going with a security Q&A that we give to reporters that has some better clarification.

Posted by rebron at 10:31 PM | Comments (1)

April 13, 2005

Tucker Carlson Uncomfortable

The IE Blog means well and does serve a purpose of communicating to developers. It's contrived though with this false sense of trying to connect with people.

This last post is like the others before:
Hi my name is x and I'm the person in charge of such and such. I feel for the people posting because it feels so forced. Then the blog post itself feel likes it's been edited by 3-4 people. I don't want to pick on Microsoft because they're trying and they do mean well. The IE blog is Tucker Carlson uncomfortable though.

Steve Rubel has other thoughts on contrived blogs. We'll see more of these "marketing" blogs out as more folks try and grok the whole blogging thing.

Posted by rebron at 06:07 PM | Comments (0)

"Open Source" as a Consumer Attribute Redux

I just posted about this and I forget that Apple has been marketing Open Source as well.

"Apple believes that using Open Source methodology makes Mac OS X a more robust, secure operating system, as its core components have been subjected to the crucible of peer review for decades. Any problems found with this software can be immediately identified and fixed by Apple and the Open Source community."

Let's not forget Apple.
- How do you make money on Open Source? Well, look at Apple.
- Is open source more secure/reliable? Apple thinks so.
- Who markets open source, consumers don't care? Apple thinks they do and should care.

They do a great job of hyping up their open sourceness.

Posted by rebron at 02:32 PM | Comments (0)

April 12, 2005

In Between Condi and Martha Stewart

Do grab yourself a copy of Time Magazine this week. Mitchell is just below Condi Rice and above Martha Stewart on the cover. Inside, I'm actually in the picture with Mitchell, I'm the pair of hands towards the top left corner. You can see my wedding band.

I can see the modeling agencies calling me up to be a hand model. The phone is ringing off the hook. It is pretty neat though to be in Time Magazine. We're certainly proud of Mitchell and I'm glad the project, as a whole is getting recognized (even more). Mozilla contributors are outstanding.

I remember when the Time Magazine guy came in to do the photo shoot. He took a bunch of shots and week after week, I was waiting to hear when the Time article was going to happen. I think we did the interview in December or January. So now it's finally here.

Posted by rebron at 10:49 AM | Comments (0)

open source as a consumer product attribute

Should "open source" be a consumer product attribute? It would apply to Firefox, Thunderbird, Linux desktop, other software on the Linux desktop like Evolution.

What would "open source" imply? How about:
- quality/stability (tested by hundred of thousands of people)
- secure (still dependent on management of security issues)
- innovative (collective brain-power tackling new concepts)
- collaboration
- standards
- community based AND commercial support options

I feel like "open source" already means all of the above so let's get it to stick!

What should "open source" not imply? How about:
- free (as in the software is free, lots of confusion here)
- anti-business or capitalism
- IP nightmare
- "volunteers" (people who are unpaid), this essentially becomes unreliable, unsustainable

Well, given that quick little exercise it sounds like "open source" is something we do want to use as an attribute. Other companies like Yahoo and Google and such who do use open source products/solutions on the server-side should do it too. Just about everyone uses bugzilla and lots of companies are on the LAMP server-stack. That screams we're spending money on the right things.

Also, speaking more about the testing community and that process, will hopefully establish "open source" as the more reliable solution.

Posted by rebron at 07:55 AM | Comments (2)

Anyone remember Backflip?

Exactly...

Posted by rebron at 07:20 AM | Comments (0)

MoFo "Distribution Guy" says 44MM downloads not too shabby

Today's my first day as the MoFo "marketing guy". I guess Product Marketing Manager doesn't work so well. (I was the MoFo "marketing guy" before too since June but in a contracting capacity).

As the "marketing guy", how 'bout them downloads...

Seriously, I understand the stigma attached to the "marketing guy" and I need to come up with a new name. From me, you're not going to get "Mozilla is the best thing since sliced bread," "Microsoft sucks and here's why," "these Firefox features are killer."

You will get, here's what we like about Firefox, we've had this many downloads and increased to x% market share this month, we're constantly looking at providing the best user experience possible, and come help us spread the word and help us distribute our product.

I guess I should be "distribution guy" as I'll be working on making sure our products are well placed and distributed too. I can't be the "marketing guy" if what I'm doing is telling the truth ;-)

Posted by rebron at 12:16 AM | Comments (0)

April 11, 2005

mozilla's humility

When you get a FedEx with a red envelope that's folded fancy, has a ribbon on it, and one phone number with an RSVP for a dinner invite on it from Time Magazine, chances are you won something -- an award, maybe a life time of Time magazines? So guessing that Mitchell was on the Time 100 list of most influential people for 2005 was an easy one.

I would say she ought to be in the Leaders and Revolutionaries section or even Builders and Titans. Eh, Scientists and Thinkers works I guess. I was chatting with some folks today and it didn't really phase me that Mitchell/Mozilla won the award. But that's part of being in the thick of things.

It's great to see Mitchell on that list considering how difficult to get all of you (developers, contributors, folks in the industry, me too) to act right and do the right things. You know who you are :-)

"Truth without humility is an arrogant caricature" and I'm thankful that Mitchell, other leaders of mozilla.org, and mozilla.org are humble caricatures. I don't believe you can become arrogant or stay humble (you can certainly show signs at times). You're either inherently arrogant or humble. Humble doesn't mean you're not aggressive or focused or determined, to me it just means you're thankful, you play fair, and act right. Mitchell's thoughts on the award is an example of that.

Posted by rebron at 11:38 PM | Comments (0)

April 08, 2005

Scott Schiller.com and TechTalk @Yahoo

It's fun visiting the Yahoo campus, I love seeing all my old friends. Anyway, I attended a TechTalk a week or so ago, over there to listen and give out some Firefox shirts and some posters. The guys were using the S5 template for their presentation from Eric Meyer and the SpreadFirefox project.

Anyhow, I ran into Scott and he showed me his web site ScottSchiller.com. It looks like Flash, but it's not. Pretty sweet though.

Posted by rebron at 07:13 PM | Comments (0)

When Craig's List met Google

What you get when you cross Craig's List and Google Maps.
http://www.paulrademacher.com/housing/

Thanks Mary.

Posted by rebron at 04:50 PM | Comments (0)

April 07, 2005

Firefox HAS "Crossed the Chasm"

I knew I should have gone to the Open Source Business Conference but chofmann and mitchell were already attending. Apparently Geoffrey Moore doesn't think Firefox has crossed the chasm.

Geoff, we've had over 30+ million downloads of the product. That's a lot of "early adopters" and boy we sure do get a lot of calls from some random people, grandma, grandpa, everyone really.

The chasm's been crossed dude.

Posted by rebron at 12:12 AM | Comments (0)

April 06, 2005

Quoting Blogs, or Bo Jackson didn't do steroids

So you're a reporter and there's this blog post that has this good quote and tidbit of information.

a) Go for it, write the story, quote the blog. You know who the blogger is, it's a great quote, it's a good story, and you quote from blogs all the time.

b) Wait, I don't understand what this blogger is saying even though it sounds like a really good story. Well, check-in with the blogger and ask, what does this mean I'd like to quote you and write a story about it.

c) Ooh, this is really good, I want to write a story. Looks like this blogger is associated with an organization, let me check with the organization first, they may have more information or a comment. Then quote the blogger.

I think the wrong approach is to just quote the blog and write the story. Otherwise, you could end up like Jim Mohr who misquoted someone for saying that Bo Jackson took steroids. He didn't quote a blog but looks like he didn't check his facts.

No one wants that.

Posted by rebron at 07:58 PM | Comments (0)

April 05, 2005

meetings, meetings, and spreadfirefox S5

I get the pleasure of meeting with Anil and the Six Apart gang tomorrow. They may not remember that I said hi to a bunch of them at the BlogOn conference back in October (?) over in Berkeley. It looks like Mr. Jamison is over there too. He's the dude on the right.

Touche. I met up with an old friend of mine, Jim, who's been at Ask Jeeves for a while now. He actually reads my blog. I like Ask Jeeves for several reasons:
- they've survived the bubble, and they have a brand strategy similar to Interactive Corp and AOL (pre-TW merger).
- they're based out of Oakland
- they provide different technology (and they've acquired a bunch)
Interactive Corp now w/ Ask Jeeves is certainly a company to watch. Jim and I went to eat at Les Cheval in Oakland. Good food.

Finally, I sat in on a very cool tech talk at a fairly large Internet company. They talked about an intranet site just about Firefox, talking about Extension development, even haing an extension building contest. I think this company may come out with some cool extensions. The whole point of this ramble though is that the presenters (employees at this company) were using an S5 template from Spreadfirefox. Huge! Chalk up another win for the Spreadfirefox.com project, very proud of you guys!!!

Posted by rebron at 12:30 AM | Comments (0)

April 04, 2005

Product Marketing Manager - Mozilla Foundation

Ack, a title. Well, first day on the job (w/ new title) is April 11th. I need to come up with something cool for my business card and I can go correct the Wikipedia entry on the Mozilla Foundation that had me down as a contractor. Oh wait, it's been corrected. Amazing.

I love the Internet.

Posted by rebron at 11:49 PM | Comments (0)

April 01, 2005

"netscape" vs "netscape"

It's funny that there's this Google versus Yahoo thing going on. What's interesting to me is that there are so many ex-netscape people over at Google and Yahoo that it's very much a "netscape" vs. "netscape" battle. I can go to either campus and run into a dozen ex-netscape people without breaking a sweat.

Well, what about the "actual" "current" Netscape, shouldn't this be a "netscape" vs. "netscape" vs. Netscape. Well, the current Netscape is really folks from CompuServe based out of Columbus, Ohio. It's a good group over there, the Columbus folks are great people and have a long history with interactive services, battling w/ AOL directly, and the Internet. And, they know how to make money. But it's a little different out here.

Posted by rebron at 01:51 AM | Comments (0)

March 31, 2005

huh? - we don't pay people to fix bugs

A representative for Microsoft said: "We don't pay people to fix bugs, but there are other ways we try to fix security as much as possible."

The inverse of this Microsoft statement is, "we pay people to create bugs."

Folks at MSFT should contact c|Net to retract that statement or have them make a correction because I'm sure that's not what they meant. Right?

Anyhow, our Security Bug Bounty program is about paying people to find security bugs, not actually fix them. The community/MoFo will take care of fixing them.

Posted by rebron at 10:59 PM | Comments (0)

Pop-ups Must Die! Extension for Firefox

We mean it when we say, "knock it off" pop-up abusers. If you don't get that people don't want pop-ups (valid application type pop-ups are okay this is for the new breed of unwanted pop-ups), you're in for another smack down.

Asa has the details.

Or download the extension here. Pop-ups Must Die! extension.

Posted by rebron at 08:50 PM | Comments (0)

March 29, 2005

thoughts on Yahoo!360

Everyone and their mamma is going to be writing about Yahoo!360 which looks *a lot* like what the tribe.net folks are doing.

The things is (as I had mentioned in another post), these guys need to make their service user-centric not yahoo-centric, or google-centric, or msn-centric; meaning give users a true home on the web, let them store data where they want, pull data from where they want, and mix and match web services. I guess an easy way for yhoo folks to understand this is to keep all the goodness in My Yahoo but invert it so that a users content becomes syndicated because what they're already doing with my yahoo is great. That's one way to look at it.

You want to see what Yhoo!360 should really like?
You're looking right at it. Make my web site easier for me to use and set up and to integrate with others. Make something easier for folks like Scott or Blake or Joe.

So what the hell does that mean?
- make it easy to register domain names as it is getting an email address
- host these "home" pages
- have a blog module a yhoo version or if i want to plug-in movable type or word press let me do that
- have a photo module, let me plug-in ofoto, shutterfly, an open source solution or flickr
- presence and contact, let me have some type of communication module
- make it extensible for more "modules" or web services so I can add an Amazon wishlist to my homepage

What Y!360 is really supposed to be is your "home" on the internet, but it's a half-assed implementation because it's a rigid layout, rigid widgets, and essentially there's data lock-in. Yahoo should do what it really wants to do which is own the user's homepage. Yahoo.com isn't fitting the bill nor is my.yahoo.com for some people. What would, however, is something like an rebron.org that's hosted by Yahoo that has some of the modules from yahoo, and then let me link with my yahoo friends as well as my AOL friends, msn friends, and other friends.

Where companies are struggling is with standardization, mix/match of services, and allowing people to import/export their data. You want an analogy? Extend what we've got with mail to these other services. With mail you have identity, connection with other people (via addressbook), standardization with IMAP/POP3/SMTP, and some other stuff. I think that makes sense?

Posted by rebron at 11:50 PM | Comments (0)

March 28, 2005

Making Money w/ Open Source

Here's an article from ZDNet. Good quote comparing proprietary software.

Proprietary software provides a comfort zone for many people, but as Taylor is keen to point out, it isn't necessarily that comfortable: "You try to get support for Win NT nowadays," he says. Look at (financial software product) Quicken, which was arbitrarily and rather suddenly discontinued. People should be very concerned with proprietary software, they can and do pull the plug at a moment's notice."

So the question is, where are all the consultants deploying open source solutions? Spike Source is one and then the big boys Red Hat, Novell, IBM, HP, etc. Where's that next level though, the consultants for small businesses and existing consulting/support companies? Unfortunately, it's going to take a Gartner or Jupiter report before someone jumps on this opportunity.

Posted by rebron at 10:05 PM | Comments (0)

MSFT IE 7 and Info Card

Looks like IE 7 will have something called "info card". I'm thinking it's like a client-side version of MSN Passport.

Authentication/identification/profile is pretty hard to figure out. It'll be interesting to see how they're going to architect this and I'm thinking they're marketing this as a means to stop phishing e.g. use info card, store all your information here and you won't have to give your information to web sites anymore, we'll do it for you via info card.

This could go the way of P3P, Content Advisor, and Security zones, good ideas but hard for end-users to grok.

Posted by rebron at 09:23 AM | Comments (0)

March 25, 2005

Google/ Domain Name Registration & Yahoo!360

A while ago, it was announced that Google will also register domain names. Why I wondered, but it actually makes sense given what I've been noticing myself. A domain name will equal online identity and will supplant email as a primary identity. (email and domain name maybe bound).

So what's going to happen is (as just one use case), instead of giving someone your email address you'll give them your domain name which will have all your contact information on there. It used to be vain to register your own domain. Now it's looking like it's going to be a part of an integral Internet sign-up experience as common as getting an email address.

This will be a pretty fundamental shift when everyone has their own domain name/web presence/home base. Most people already have some sort of web presence but it's service-centric and not user-centric, e.g. Yahoo member vs. own web site/blog.

Somewhat related, I'm hearing good things about Yahoo!360. Yahoo!360 sounds pretty neat but is one step away from the ideal experience (which is to be data/service independent so that it's interoperable with say an MSN Spaces).

marca is right in that data lock-in is a problem so you don't want to give too much info to Yahoo (or any service for that matter) unless you can get that data out somehow and use it somewhere else. It's your data isnt't it.

Posted by rebron at 10:37 PM | Comments (0)

random tax payer math

The US Federal Gov't is the largest employer with over 2.75 million employees (so we're not even counting local and state employees). BTW. Walmart is the largest private employer with 1.1 million employees.

Let's say 10% (or 275k) of federal employees were converted to using strictly open source products, Linux, Firefox, Thunderbird, and Open Office.

Let's also assume that you're saving $200 a seat per year (probably higher) from MSFT licensing (that's less whatever Linux licensing there is and maybe support licensing for Linux, Firefox, Thunderbird, and Open Office).

Well, that simple math yields a $55MM savings. That's not to mention having to deal less with malware, spyware, etc which would be even more savings.

Maybe someone else has more accurate numbers but the bottom line is there's a signficant savings here and this money could go somewhere else.

Something tells me that "government" is "getting" open source and it's just a matter of time. Maybe this will mean having to pay less taxes...yeah, right. Fine, maybe this will mean we can put the money to use some place better.

Just so I'm clear...did y'all get that link. http://www.gocc.gov That would be the Government Open Code Collaborative.

Posted by rebron at 03:19 PM | Comments (1)

March 23, 2005

Firefox 1.0.2 - that was smooth

Firefox 1.0.2 was a pretty smooth release. Press so far has been on the money, mirror network/download site/update service all good. Still need to do a better job with communicating with Mozilla Europe, Japan, and China. Otherwise, still very good.

--
Off topic but a recurring dream. I still must say I see visit more and more personal web sites (not just blogs), that a company (Google, Yahoo, MSFT or other) will eventually figure out that people want things to be easy and customizable and revolve around them.

So the ideal experience is that my web site has the following:
rebron.org
- blog
- aggregation page (like a personal my yahoo service)
- photo service
- file server service
- contact service (standardized contact info, maybe resume)
- calendar service
- my wishlists and recommendations
- personal wiki

The idea is to be able to give someone my web address in place of my business card to interact with me, and for me to be able to do the same thing with anyone that's set up like that. This could all be hooked up by web address, e.g in your buddy list, you'd have my AIM screen name but really be connected via the web address (as a GUID).

Package this service up, keep it all standardized, and let 'er rip. This stuff is already happening, just need to make it easier.

Posted by rebron at 09:19 PM | Comments (0)

mustard post, or the joy of discovery

My last post about dijon mustard seemed pretty random. The thing is, people love "discovering" new things and then naturally want to tell people about it. That's why I love downloading daily builds of Firefox and Thunderbird (like so many other testers). That's why I love "discovering" Gmail or Google Maps or a blog post about something really cool. That's also why I tell people about Firefox and why many others do as well.

I'll stop here before I go into the importance of personal recommendations and chat up the Berkeley parents network, epinions, and what an epinions 2.0 would look like.

Posted by rebron at 08:22 AM | Comments (0)

March 21, 2005

Thanks Doc...

Here's Doc Searls at ETech last week modeling one of the earlier (now discontinued) Firefox t-shirts. I don't remember if I gave him this t-shirt at LinuxWorld in San Francisco a year ago, or maybe he bought this one on his own.

It looks good though.

Electrolicious, on the other hand, thinks the Firefox hat she got for Christmas was the "Geekiest Christmas Gift EVER!". Well, she doesn't know yet that "geek" wear will be the next hot trend in the fashion industry -- you just wait and see.

Posted by rebron at 11:25 AM | Comments (0)

March 20, 2005

Ask Jeeves to be bought by Interactive Corp

note: these are my random opinions/observations, not representing anyone but me.

$2Billion for Ask Jeeves? Apparently, Interactive Corp, Barry Diller's company, wants to buy it. It makes perfect sense for Interactive Corp as Ask Jeeves has been buying up properties like Excite, iWon, MyWay, Bloglines, etc.

Someone was telling me they were thinking that Ask Jeeves was up for acquistion. He said a different company, and I said, not that company but maybe somebody else (but wasn't sure who). I kinda thought Interactive Corp, it's a good fit, and it looked like Ask Jeeves was trying to be Interactive Corp for the past couple of years. I do have somewhat of a good track record of predicting purchases, like AOL's acquisition of Mapquest, and Yahoo's acquisition of Flickr (that one was too easy).

I can tell you the next to be acquired are Movable Type and Technorati. (Too silly to even say, as this is pretty obvious).

Can I tell you what's wrong with Interactive Corp though? It's too disjointed, they're all over the map. They've got too many brands, they pretty much rely on online advertising, and they're ripe for the next wave of Internet apps and companies to take them out. Just like Google Maps will take out Mapquest, either Google or someone else will take out their dating service, their travel service, their Evite service, etc.

This is what happens when you buy technology and not actually build/architect the technology. We'll see, but that's my prediction. This too may be obvious as you see there's no Chief Scientist or Chief Technology Officer for Interactive Corp. Interactive Corp is good though. They know how to buy technology, buy companies, and to make money (for now). BTW, a couple of Barry Diller's "boys" are running AOL now, Jon Miller and a few others. Which means we should see acquisitions from AOL too.

Posted by rebron at 10:14 PM | Comments (0)

March 16, 2005

A9's OpenSearch ok, "Discover" more interesting

Last post for today promise.

A9's OpenSearch is cool but let's call it what it is. It's a combination sherlock/dhtml/meta search engine function. I think A9 is an outstanding search engine but I'm not impressed with OpenSearch.

What's more promising is this "Discover" feature that they currently have in beta. They'll recommend sites based on browsing and search history. The A9 guys are some of the same guys from Alexa and What's Related so they have some experience here. "Discovering" new web sites is still an unsolved problem. People mostly stick with a half dozen to a dozen web sites. So I'm curious how they'll approach this problem.

Posted by rebron at 11:51 PM | Comments (0)

Microsoft's Mozilla Envy

I'm sorry but this is just lame. Walking around New York City with dinosaur costumes. C'mon now. Over at CES show in Las Vegas, MSFT had people dressed up in butterfly costumes.

Jeff Bezos mentioned in Wired magazine (January 13) that, "If today the successful recipe is to put 70 percent of your energy into shouting about your service (or putting people into dinosaur costumes) and 30 percent into making it great, over the next 20 years, I think that's going to invert."

At Mozilla Foundation, it's like 99% making the product/service great and 1% shouting about the service.

Posted by rebron at 10:31 PM | Comments (0)

when online calendaring will succeed

Interesting article on c|Net about calendaring. It's going to pick up steam as the hot new app in the next couple of years. My commentaries will never be as good as jwz's but here's what it'll take for calendaring to take off.

Calendaring needs to act more like email. There needs to be:
- a standard protocol like POP/IMAP (this should eventually be CalDav)
- an "address"/location of someone's calendar
- access controls to that location
- independence for front end ui (either web interface or client interface)

The kicker will be to integrate some sort of evite type service. I'm not sure who will be the "server" side for this, either the mail provider or hosting provider (which essentially can be the same provider).

The problem that Yahoo Calendar, MSN Calendar, and all these other calendar systems have had (and why calendar usage is anemic) is that they've all focused on the user interface and then hosting the calendar data (essentially data lock-in) and not some sort of standard protocol.

Posted by rebron at 10:00 PM | Comments (0)

March 15, 2005

2 More Wins for Firefox

Yahoo vows to open all services to Firefox
Ask Jeeves announces Firefox toolbar

Not bad, guess I need to speak with these guys more often :-) I also hear we won a bunch of awards from magazines over at CeBit.

Posted by rebron at 11:01 PM | Comments (0)

Firefox has 20% market share in Europe

Tristan says Firefox has 20% market share in Europe. Ok. So that's not what he said. On a recent Sunday (weekends normally display lower internet usage but higher Firefox usage), German market share for Firefox was 21.4%. That's not bad. The rest of Europe looked pretty good too.

We should see higher penetration of Firefox outside the US, that's an easy one to predict. The hard one to predict is when.

Posted by rebron at 08:28 AM | Comments (0)

March 10, 2005

Mozilla Product Plans, or the sky is *not* falling

Here we go (and per Mitchell's blog, never trust the headlines, go to the source in this case www.mozilla.org, mitchell (overall Foundation), brendan (dev roadmap), ben (firefox roadmap). If you're a reporter and you're quoting someone else from the Mozilla community, make sure you're at least contacting that person and have some context.

So here are the plans for Seamonkey. There's going to more details in the months to come on Seamonkey, Firefox and Thunderbird.

Here's Mitchell's blog post about it.

And here's what Ben has to say about Firefox development.

I'm hoping reporters learn to follow up with organizations and the actual blog writers before quoting them directly. Probably not, and they'll just go off and write their story without any context. It's definitely a challenge. Reading into meeting notes without context is also a challenge. Communicating in general, in a high profile open source project, is a challenge.

Posted by rebron at 03:08 PM | Comments (0)

March 09, 2005

I'm tired of the superficial analysis

I'm reading this article from Managing Technology @Wharton. It's the same set of observations, same set of questions, and nothing new. I was expecting more especially from Wharton professors. The article was fine, the observations from the Wharton professors were superficial.

The same comments and questions:
- Firefox is successful because of the security woes with MSFT and IE. (partly true)
- This is MSFT's game and once IE 7 is out, a whole new ball game. (time will tell, but I think they're wrong)
- What will happen when Firefox gets hit with security issues too? (umm, as we've said, no one builds bullet proof software, we've been fixing security issues all the way back to '94)
- Mozilla can't maintain it's marketing efforts. (absolutely false)

The observations I want to see are:
- Wow, these guys are able to build software and features really fast, oh and the localization is easy too. Mozilla's architecture is really good.
- Wow, Mozilla's open source model has trickled to get contributions from designers and marketing professionals, and legal folks and more. What an interesting model, I'm wonder what's next and where this model can be applied.
- How does a commercial entity compete with a non-profit? Did Mozilla change the game here?
- (and the kicker) Wow, Firefox has taken market share from Internet Explorer. Do you know what that means? It means that more people are converting and using Firefox than there are new users to Internet Explorer or new computer users in general. That's different from the "browser wars" before when the Internet population was doubling/tripling. Guess that would mean the Internet population is nearing a fixed population and browser market share is a zero sum game? Hmmm...

Think. Where's the good analysis? Btw, I thought the Gartner report was rather weak as well (anyone citing it should know that the folks who wrote the article didn't even bother to speak with folks at the Mozilla Foundation to get a briefing. We did speak to other folks at Gartner but not those authors).

Posted by rebron at 11:29 PM | Comments (0)

what's after blogs...personal portals

I'm still amused by this whole blog phenomenon when blogs are just really a better implementation of GeoCities - better content creation, syndication, etc.

I've been meaning to put this post together as to what's next after blogs. I think it's pretty clear. The short term will bring aggregation like planet.mozilla.org or channel9 to blogs and make that more prevalent. There'll be more features and modules added to make the ui whiz bang. There'll be more improvements to blog readers like Firefox/Thunderbird or bloglines.

In the longer term, the blog will transform into a personal portal, essentially all the services @Yahoo or .mac now like Mail, Calendar, Notes, Addressbook, photos, wishlist etc will all be available via one's portal.

Also, it's interesting to see blogs take on the roll of identity. Rather than give someone an email address, people are giving out their web address (as it contains contact info and other stuff). Maybe this is how we solve authentication problems, everyone has a web address.

I'm sure others are thinking the same thing about personal portals, I've been thinking that this was going to happen long before blogs. It's almost kind of obvious. I do wonder who's going to get there first, Yahoo, MSFT, Google, or a Movable Type or other company.

I'd hate to think that rebron.org is just a blog. I've got some photos going, I have my contact info going, I'd like to host my own calendar information, rebron.org acts as a file server, I'd like to set up a wiki soon, this site acts like a database for my recipes and other ideas. I always like stating the obvious.

Posted by rebron at 09:56 PM | Comments (1)

March 07, 2005

MiniMo(zilla) coming to a cell phone near you

I thought Asa was going to beat me to the punch with these photos. Here are a couple of photos of MiniMo on a cell phone and PDA taken on my camera by Doug or Asa, not sure who. Anyhow, it's very cool and can't wait for us (well, dougt) to get this out to people. A very rich browser experience on a PDA or cell phone is going to be interesting for both content developers and consumers. The form factor of cell phones and PDAs definitely presents a challenge, but you can see it's not too shabby in these two photos. Having access to the web via these devices is convenient and may prove invaluable.

**Update**
Even more photos of MiniMo in action. Just in case you can't get enough...

**Another Update**
MiniMo project can be found here: http://www.mozilla.org/projects/minimo/

It's a stripped down browser only product ala Firefox. This is a Windows CE port and also works on Familiar Linux and Symbian. Maybe others on the way, not sure. This is based on Gecko 1.8 off the trunk so fairly recent.

Posted by rebron at 10:09 PM | Comments (47)

March 04, 2005

Firefox and Thunderbird Deployment Resources

This is an unofficial draft and set of links and instructions for deploying Firefox and Thunderbird. Note that companies are already deploying Firefox and Thunderbird and others are writing up the documentation and building the tools out to support it. I'll be consolidating the resources here, and then publish on mozilla.org when ready.

Also note that Mozilla.org is focused on end user consumers (home users) and we are NOT at this time doing enterprise customer support or deployments. Supporting enterprises is HARD because everyone does something a little different and want x or y feature or x level of support. That takes up a lot of resources and we'll need to rely on consultants, and internal IT staff, etc. who already do this.

That said, there are features in Firefox and Thunderbird that are enterprise friendly and companies that are large enough have the resources to support themselves in deployment. Certainly other companies are able to provide customer and deployment support.

• Automated deployment of Firefox with extensions, themes, and pre-configuration
• Firefox ADM (Active Directory deployment)
• Lock settings such as homepage, proxy and many others in Firefox
• Set defaults on many settings within Firefox
• Create a profile on user first usage
• And feature list ever growing (already on way to same feature-completeness as IE's Group Policy setting features)
• Firefox .msi builds (for testing only, give me feedback)

More tools and documentation to come.

Posted by rebron at 11:34 PM | Comments (3)

MoFo Cantina Recipes - Margarita

Margarita

3 ounces Tequila
1 ounce Triple Sec
2 ounces Lemon Juice
1 ounce Salt

Salt a margarita glass. Shake the ingredients with crushed ice, strain into the salt-rimmed glass, and serve. You may prefer to substitute the lemon juice with sweet and sour or sweetened lime juice.

I'm not sure if this is Brendan's recipe. The sidecar I got from him last week, I had to stay in the office an extra hour and a half. I was doing margarita's tonight. Sidecar next week...

Posted by rebron at 08:06 PM | Comments (0)

Welcome Mozilla China

I'm hoping people pick up on the importance of Mozilla China. It's a pretty huge deal.

The Institute of Software, Chinese Academy of Sciences backing the Mozilla Foundation like this is a really big deal.

Li Gong, who's driving a lot of this, is a stud. He's the director of ERI, Sun's presence in China.

I can't wait to see how this plays out.

It's a little all too convenient that a "Firefox" is actually a Chinese Red Panda.

Posted by rebron at 07:55 AM | Comments (1)

Netscape 8, Practical Thoughts

I'm reading all these blog posts about Netscape 8. I'll leave others (and end users) to do the critique.

So what next? Well I have to come up with the party line.

For developers: nothing's changed, you develop against standards that are common in all modern browsers, Firefox, Opera, Safari, and IE 6. I'm not sure how to code for Netscape 8, hopefully they can tell us. The browser switching piece on the back end is confusing to me so I can't comment there. Thankfully they're still in beta.

For end users: It's great to have choices and now here's another one with Netscape 8. I have a feeling users will stick to Firefox or continue to migrate to Firefox from Internet Explorer.

Posted by rebron at 06:47 AM | Comments (0)

March 03, 2005

Netscape 8, AOL browser: Part 1

Anyone care to guess what I think? I'm actually the author of the Netscape 8 product requirements document. I left right after I wrote it and before any coding and decisions took place. In effect, I had nothing to do with Netscape 8.

If I were to write that PRD again or lead the development, what I would do is take Firefox, superficially customize it with Netscape logos, links, etc as allowed in the trademark policy, and release that product as Netscape 8.

The product would've been released last quarter and then we would see a Netscape 8.01 this month. Same goes for the AOL browser, could do the exact same thing just skin and alter links in the client. It's not too late to do but it won't get done.

I think this may need a part 3, 4, AND 5. Too much to say, too little space.

Posted by rebron at 11:33 PM | Comments (2)

watch me, watch me, watch me...

I mean watch us of course but "watch us, watch us, watch us" just doesn't sound right. It looks like a former Microsoft Engineer/Architect has had it and is now going over to Google. He questions Microsoft's ability to ship software and recommends people to watch the companies that know how to ship software.

I guess he would mean Mozilla? Apple does a good job too. There are others.

Posted by rebron at 03:10 PM | Comments (1)

Open Office - making progress

I don't have Microsoft Office on my laptop and I don't regret it one bit. I do get the occasional file that doesn't look just right because it came from MS-Office. For the most part, all the document I receive open up just fine in Open Office and lots of the same features work.

I've you've been following Open Office, you know how much progress it's made. It started off as this monolithic desktop environment with an OS look and feel. It still feels pretty big and overwhelming but it's moving in the right direction.

I think the next big step for Open Office is just to deliver the main set of products, Writer, Calc, Impress (and maybe dBase), and de-emphasize the other tools. It maybe good to even split those applications out even more, right now it feels "seamonkey-ish" and a little too integrated to the detriment of a single app.

Anyhow, Open Office is moving in the right direction. I don't need MS-Office. Open Office is painful to use at times, e.g. Impress which isn't all there yet, but there's definitely an opportunity here. Open Office is going to get better, it's going to get faster, better in compatability, and will be much smoother.

Some additional next steps for Open Office is to follow Firefox's design principles a little more and really simplify the user experience but mimic the current standard applications out there (MS-Word, Powerpoint, Excel), so it's easy for users to migrate to it. Then, blow out the extension capabilities so that features can be added for specific people like lawyers, accountants, who may have special needs.

I'm compelled to do some work over at Open Office to help push things along to relieve some of my own pain.

Posted by rebron at 10:19 AM | Comments (0)

March 02, 2005

"moving the web forward"

"moving the web forward" is a theme/phrase that I've been working with to describe what the Mozilla Foundation is doing. We are in fact moving the web forward, and will continue to do that. It's a phrase that Blake said.

I'm blogging about it here so "moving the web forward" continues to be something that's attributed to Mozilla before it gets co-opted by you know who or some other company. The company who should not be named should use "keeping the web where it is".

Maybe someone else is using it as a tagline. Hopefully not.

Posted by rebron at 05:43 PM | Comments (0)

February 27, 2005

Firefox market share clarification

I'm estimating that we're at 8% browser market share for Firefox world wide as of February 2005.

It's funny, though, that Web Side Story thinks that the Mozilla Foundation is basing a so-called 10% market share target on the numbers that they provide. We did say 10%, but didn't really put much thought into it. We were backed-in to providing that number by reporters. We shouldn't have said anything.

Mozilla Foundation is not targeting a 10% market share goal, we haven't set a goal yet and we may not set a goal. We probably don't want Firefox market share to exceed 64%, that would classify us as a monopoly by Standard Oil terms. But we haven't set a target yet.

Web Side Story is NOT the authority of web browser market share. They haven't provided us with their methodology, so we don't even know if what they're recording is accurate. Further, web sites need to make decisions based on the browser market share from their own logs not from a monitoring company.

That said, it's nice to see that Web Side Story provides these web browser stats and that the numbers for Firefox are stil going up.

I'm working on getting some top sites to open up their web browser stats. Once they do that, you can base your numbers off of those and see how they compare to Web Side Story, OneStat, others.

Posted by rebron at 04:39 PM | Comments (0)

Identity 2.0: Solving Single Sign-on

(disclaimer: i'm not an expert so I really don't know what I'm talking about)

I have so many usernames and password on the Internet that it's pretty ridiculous. Here are some:

- Gmail, @netscape.net, @yahoo.com, @hotmail.com (original email, till it got really bad), @meer.net
- Bank site/bill pay, 401k site, student loans, credit card, insurance, cell phone, taxes, paypal
- web sites: ny times, other newspapers, AIM screen name, Flickr, Shutterly, oFoto, IronTeam.net
- Windows desktop

A lot isn't it, it's pretty nasty. You may have as many.

The many problems caused by the mess above are:
- identity theft via fraud, spoofing/phishing, etc
- real dollars lost from fraud, real dollars lost (purchases/cost savings via efficiency) from people afraid to transact online

The three problems of authentication and single sign-on are:
- companies having to support a standard
- multiple identity support (everyone wants more than one identity)
- profile information and privacy as it relates to synchronization and sharing
(the problem with profile information is that everyone ones a piece of information that's different, along w/ synchronization, and that just messes everything up)

So is there a solution:
- Yes, but only partial. True single sign-on is never going to happen, one username and password (or authentication method) to unlock everything? Nope. That requires coordination. There are no standards for something like this, and single sign-on or a single point of failure also isn't secure. One key to rule them all, I don't think so.

- Client based authentication? This may work. AOL had the right idea with Screen Name Service, MSN Passport as well. The main problem was that it was too hard for partners to integrate and a lot of what was happening was server-based versus client/local based. It was to hard to integrate.

What is client based authentication. Well you authenticate to a local credential, which is stored on the client side. It could be a cert, another file on the machine or some other token. That set of credentials then talks to the web and web sites via auth web services?, which then can parse that information after you've allowed the particular web site access to your credentials.

An example would be signing into AIM or Yahoo Messenger. You sign into a client. When "signing into" a web site, there is no signing in, you either click on a button or just pass on through. Could be IM client, could be a web browser, it was supposed to be your Windows Desktop. The point is, there's no providing of username and password info to a web site or profile info for that matter.

I guess what I'm describing here is what some companies are trying to do? There's more to what they're doing but this is basically it.

The user experience to figure this out is a little crazy.
- Can you sign into the web browser and single sign-on into everything?
- When does that sign-on get invoked, at first launch or when coming across a site that needs authentication
- Can't that sign-in be spoofed (can't authenticate to it, but still can be spoofed).
- What about profile, storage, synchronization, privacy policies, etc. Could be messy.

The convenience of having a secure single sign-in would be pretty huge. Bound by a single sign-on, stored and controlled locally is the way to go. This would certainly give phishers fits, but this is a long time coming as it's going to take people to buy in to the idea.

Posted by rebron at 01:05 AM | Comments (0)

February 23, 2005

Attn Sites: publish your browser web stats!

It doesn't matter if other people know what browser your customers are using. It doesn't matter and that information isn't going to hurt you. The only reason not to publish that information is that it maybe a hassle to publish it.

Here are some sites that publish their web stats:
- http://www.boingboing.net/stats/
- http://www.w3schools.com/browsers/browsers_stats.asp
- http://www.gameshout.com/news/022005/article485.htm

I don't believe that Internet Explorer has 90% market share. I believe it's down between 70% - 85%.

If you know of other web sites who publish their browser stats shoot me an email rebron AT gmail.com

Posted by rebron at 02:53 PM | Comments (0)

February 22, 2005

more awards for Mozilla Foundation

Awards wrap-up:
Thunderbird won Technology and Business Magazine Editor's Choice Award

Mozilla Foundation won Editor in Chief Award from SC Magazine.
http://www.scawards.com/winners/2005.asp

Wired Rave Awards. We lost out to Howard Stern but it was an honor to be nominated. I mean c'mon, the other nominees were Jon Stewart, the Google guys, and the guy who built a space ship.
http://biz.yahoo.com/prnews/050222/sftu064_1.html

Posted by rebron at 10:03 AM | Comments (0)

February 18, 2005

Exciting Times

I don't know about you but it's exciting to see all that's happening in the industry. People are connecting and talking and looking to solve problems big and small. People are understanding the importance of interoperability, cooperation/communication/openness that's going to drive innovation.

So this doesn't become such a pointless post, I've got a lot of work to do this weekend. Mostly around our releases, but also product roadmap drafting for Mozilla products, and I have to nail down some talking points for Mozilla and the enterprise. And about another 15-20 other things (oh and training this weekend too).

Posted by rebron at 09:33 PM | Comments (0)

February 17, 2005

Return of the King...(sorta)

There was this woman who came in to do an interview and she asked a bunch of people if Mozilla were a movie what would it be? She kept pushing Star Wars and luckily no one answered. It was just such a random question.

For the longest time we (netscape|mozilla people) were on some sort of Matrix kick. It was a cool movie, we had shirts made up and we had tag lines like "browser reloaded".

I always thought that we were more like the "Lord of the Rings". Y'know Ben is from New Zealand and all. So who's the king? Well, jwz of course. How cool would that be for jwz to come back with the ghost army of ex-netscape and kick some butt.

I bring that up because his thoughts on Hula were right on and I consistently see glimpses of the king in action.

In summary:
Groupware Bad
Users Good
Calendars useful

oh and build software that will help you get laid. Doing stuff for "enterprises" does suck. Not fun. Productivity is productivity, whether you're looking to get laid or just wanting to schedule a meeting.

Posted by rebron at 11:47 PM | Comments (0)

Pimp My (Firefox) Browser...

I've been writing a lot today. I had to feed my "new" blog set up in other words reset my blog and take it more seriously. I had to blog about Pimpzilla though. Probably the coolest theme I've seen yet. I'm a big fan of Pimp my Ride and actually met up with Mad Mike and Alex over at the CES show this year.

But Pimpzilla...This thing is banging. Go download it.

Posted by rebron at 05:31 PM | Comments (0)

Internet Explorer 7 - Thoughts...

Some thoughts on IE 7 since some folks have asked and there are sure to be more of these "Firefox is in for it" types of articles.

- That's great that Microsoft is developing Internet Explorer 7 and focusing on security. Nothing has changed, though, in relation to Mozilla and Firefox.

- IE 7 is not available today. Bill Gates announced a beta of the product and there is no date or time frame. It looks like IE 7 will be available to Windows XP SP2 users. We don't know about Windows 2000. People should continue to move forward with supporting a multi-browser world.

- We actually don't know what's in IE 7. The roadmap and PRD for Firefox is out in the open though.

Posted by rebron at 04:04 PM | Comments (0)

the ripple effect

I stumbled on the Government Open Code Collaborative and I'll see what I can do about getting Oakland a part of that.

Looks like a lot of companies are saving money and man hours by deploying open source solutions like Firefox and Thunderbird.

Looks like the City of Los Angeles is looking at a $5.2MM savings from deploying Open Office over MS-Office. They'll save more if they deploy Thunderbird/Lightning over Outlook, and save users time and money by deploying Firefox.

My next steps are to build out the business and use cases. There's plenty of them, it's just a matter of putting it together.

Despite what Gartner says, business's are ready for open source solutions and specifically solutions from the Mozilla Foundation. I should know since I talk to many of them. Unfortunately, didn't get a chance to talk to the good folks at Gartner before they issued their commentary.

Posted by rebron at 01:35 PM | Comments (0)

Commuting to work

I live in Oakland California and commute down to Mountain View. It takes an hour to and from work and I normally don't listen to music. It gives me lots of time to think but I wish I was able to get all those thoughts out in this blog.

Some of those random thoughts include:
- going over my talk that I'll be giving at Yahoo this afternoon
- thoughts on Google re: their employee mix, how it's very engineering heavy and how that's really good
- blogging and how it becomes a basis for news articles, we (I) need and the industry needs a blog policy for the press
- random training thoughts
- how Mozilla is NOT anti-Microsoft and how we need to re-position ourselves there
- how cool it was to hear about Peter Jennings ask Bill Gates about Firefox

Posted by rebron at 09:59 AM | Comments (0)