Following a great suggestion by ian, I just finished adding album reviews to mashTape (well, a first pass anyway… I’m sure we’ll have more visual follow-ups - but the core of it is there).
Obligatory screenshot here:
Album Reviews in mashTape
One of the fun parts of working on mashTape has been finding multiple providers… it gives me a general guideline to follow in determining what fields of data are common across different providers. Unfortunately, the only album review data I can find that is accessible via an API is from Amazon’s AWS. It looks like MetaCritic has some awesome data aggregated from other sources, but doesn’t provide an API to access said data.
Anyone know of any sites that have externally accessible review data?
We will have a scheduled maintenance window tonight from 6:00pm to 12:00pm PST. This is being tracked in master bug 465599. The following changes will take place:
Please let me know if you have any reason why we should not proceed with this planned maintenance. As always, we aim to keep downtime to as little as possible, but unexpected complications can arise causing longer downtime periods than expected. All systems should be operational by the end of the maintenance window.
As mentioned, this maintenance window is tracked in bug 465599. Feel free to comment directly in that bug (or this blog) if you see issues past the planned downtime.
In my last post, I covered a bit about the role of marketing, highlighting the balance between art (creative output) and science (data insights). In this post, I want to delve a little deeper into the kinds of data that can make us smarter about our current audience and opportunities to grow share among users who’ve yet to move to Firefox.
At the highest level, virtually anyone who uses the Internet at home, work, school, in an Internet cafe or on a mobile device is a potential Firefox user. While some marketers may be accused of overstating the viability of a sizable market — like say, a beverage maker who cites “anyone with thirst” as a potentially huge target market — in this case, if you use the Internet, you probably really do need a web browser.
Thus, huge markets beget opportunity. In fact, according to Internet World stats, the worldwide market is closing in on 1.5 Billion Internet users (last updated in June 2008). Wow…When you stop to really think about that, it can be somewhat paralyzing to know that there are that many people out in the world who have a fundamental need for your product. So how do you even begin to think about who the target audience is?
The answer starts with data. First, let’s break it down by region.
Source = http://www.internetworldstats.com/stats.htm
Worth noting here:
Now let’s look at Internet World stats’ penetration data — the percentage of the total population with Internet access.
source = http://www.internetworldstats.com/stats.htm
Interesting, but what’s the takeaway?
Ultimately this begs a question of focus — if we lack the resources to promote Firefox everywhere in 2009, why not place some educated bets? Should we bet on where the market is today (Europe and North America) or where it is emerging tomorrow (Asia and Latin America)? To get a clearer picture, let’s break this down further between mature and emerging markets.
Here I’ve created a simple chart that combines the % penetration and % growth from Internet World stats with NetApplications‘ most recent browser marketshare data. Then, I’ve categorized into general buckets for an at-a-glance comparison among countries. The rough buckets are as follows:
Here’s a look at the mature markets — those with greater than 50% Internet penetration:
Source: Internet World stats, Netapplications, oct 2008
As you can see:
While much could be made of each of these data points, for now let’s just compare to the “emerging markets” — those with below 50% Internet penetration:
Source = Internet World stats, NetApplications
Looking at this kind of data can help get our arms around potential opportunity areas. Of the mature markets, the US has to remain a strategic focal point given raw size and high penetration today. Germany and France remain are among the strongest footholds in mature markets of significant size, while the UK and Italy could use a boost.
Of the emerging markets, we obviously can’t ignore China, and have begun to take some marketing action in Brazil and consider future activities in India and Russia. But beyond the BRIC nations, who’s next? Mexico, Argentina? Vietnam? Poland? All of the Above?
While we can certainly build on and continue to grow our active communities in all of the markets above, we’re also looking for markets where specific marketing activity–either via events or word-of-mouth evangelism — can ignite or at least accelerate the organic growth they are already experiencing. Where is Firefox spreading totally organically (Indonesia?) or poised to top 50% because of an active community (Poland?). If we hone in on only the markets with greatest potential, are they large enough to swing overall WW market share points or are we better off battling for another 3-4 points in the UK?
These are all the insight-driven kinds of questions that help us think about concrete marketing strategies to grow Firefox market share in 2009. Once you can boil down the 1.5 Billion users in the WW market, we can begin to understand where we have real traction and where we lack it. We can also start to better understand the unique dynamics of those markets, what we know about our users there — and what we need to know about the “other 80%” of users not currently using Firefox.
In the coming days and weeks, Alix will be sharing some interesting survey data conducted in a few high-growth markets to better understand awareness and Firefox adoption trends. And I’ll be posting more about some in-depth market research conducted in the US to better understand our core user base and where we might expand to reach new consumer audiences. IMHO, surfacing data-driven insights can only help to inform and inspire our marketing efforts in 2009 and beyond.
* [Note: 220M US Internet users is significantly larger than sources like Comscore tracking "active" Internet users at 190M in Sept 08, but for purposes of comparison, I've used InternetWorld stats here].
Posted in Mozilla Tagged: Data, Market Share, Marketing
We’ve just released Camino 1.6.5, a maintenance release which contains various security and stability updates to Camino 1.6.x. All users are urged to update.
In addition, Camino 1.6.5 is available in the following languages:
Download Camino 1.6.5 in English or its multilingual version now.
I’ve just finished documenting the Element Traversal API that is supported by Firefox 3.1. This involves several new attributes added to the DOM Element object:
childElementCountchildrenfirstElementChildlastElementChildnextElementSiblingThese make it easy to walk through a document’s elements to manipulate the element hierarchy. You can work with them in real-time, making live changes to the elements, adding new ones, and so forth.
While savvy Firefox users have reaped the benefits of add-ons for some time, reaching out to new users has been a bit of a challenge. We’ve been looking for ways to improve how users can get introduced to Firefox add-ons and today we saw the culmination of a lot of hard work come to fruition with the launch of “Fashion Your Firefox“.
The “Fashion Your Firefox” web application was developed to help the less tech-savvy user wade through the thousands of Firefox add-ons available. These add-ons, many of which are on the AMO Recommended List, were chosen explicitly for their consumer-centric uniqueness and appeal to a broader audience. FYF allows a user to focus on a small group of really useful add-ons and easily install these add-ons via an intuitive point-and-click interface.
David Rolnitzky, lead for the Fashion Your Firefox project, had this to say:
One of the great things about the Fashion Your Firefox collection is that it allows users to bundle a bunch of different add-ons together all at once. In essence, it’s like having a shopping cart that you can use to select any add-on from the Fashion Your Fox collection, “check-out” with just one click, and after a quick Firefox restart, have a whole new browser that’s made just for you.
The add-ons for this first collection were chosen based on a number of criteria:
The launch of “Fashion Your Firefox” offers some interesting opportunities to Mozilla, its users and its development partners.
Benefits for Mozilla:
Benefits to the community/add-on authors:
The really interesting part of the “Fashion Your Firefox” web application is the opportunity it presents to provide “theme-based” collections of add-ons to users. Add-ons can now be grouped into specific topics such as sports, news, photography and music giving Mozilla users a very rich and precise experience when searching for “just the right add-on”. This a HUGE distinction for Firefox in terms of the way that browsers have typically handled add-on management and a clear step forward in helping introduce users to the power of add-ons without completely overwhelming them. By enhancing the delivery model, we’re now providing users with the ability to quickly choose from “best of breed” add-ons that match their specific tastes, all of which falls perfectly in line with Mozilla’s focus of empowering the community.
data:text/html,\
<html><body><script>\
var url = '%s';\
var stripPrefix = /^news:(\\/\\/[^\\/]+\\/)?/;\
if (/@/.test(url))\
window.location = 'http://groups.google.com/groups?selm='+url.replace(stripPrefix, '');\
else\
window.location = 'http://groups.google.com/group/'+url.replace(stripPrefix, '');\
</script></body></html>
javascript:
var Cc = Components.classes;
var Ci = Components.interfaces;
var handler = Cc['@mozilla.org/uriloader/web-handler-app;1'].createInstance(Ci.nsIWebHandlerApp);
handler.name = 'Google Groups';
handler.uriTemplate = "data:text/html,\
<html><body><script>\
var url = '%s';\
var stripPrefix = /^news:(\\/\\/[^\\/]+\\/)?/;\
if (/@/.test(url))\
window.location = 'http://groups.google.com/groups?selm='+url.replace(stripPrefix, '');\
else\
window.location = 'http://groups.google.com/group/'+url.replace(stripPrefix, '');\
</script></body></html>";
var eps = Cc['@mozilla.org/uriloader/external-protocol-service;1'].getService(Ci.nsIExternalProtocolService);
var handlerInfo = eps.getProtocolHandlerInfo('news');
handlerInfo.possibleApplicationHandlers.appendElement(handler, false);
handlerInfo.alwaysAskBeforeHandling = true;
var hs = Cc['@mozilla.org/uriloader/handler-service;1'].getService(Ci.nsIHandlerService);
hs.store(handlerInfo);
window.location = "data:text/html,\
<body>\
<p>The news: link handler for Google Groups has been installed.\
Try it with these links:</p>\
<ul>\
<li><a href='news:mozilla.support.firefox'>news:mozilla.support.firefox</a></li>\
<li><a href='news://news.mozilla.org/mozilla.support.firefox'>news://news.mozilla.org/mozilla.support.firefox</a></li>\
<li><a href='news:37604264.65F502CD@netscape.com'>news:37604264.65F502CD@netscape.com</a></li>\
<li><a href='news://news.mozilla.org/37604264.65F502CD@netscape.com'>news://news.mozilla.org/37604264.65F502CD@netscape.com</a></li>\
</ul>\
</body>";
In this issue…
Fashion Your Firefox
With several thousand add-ons available for Firefox, sometimes it can be hard to find the right one. Today Mozilla is announcing Fashion Your Firefox which lets you select a set of add-ons based on how you use the web. Profiles include Shutterbug, News Junkie, Social Butterfly and others. See the Fashion Your Firefox post on the Official Mozilla Blog, the FAQ or David Rolnitzky’s blog post about it.
Firefox China Edition Released
Today Mozilla is announcing the availability of Firefox China Edition. Li Gong writes “Today we released Firefox China Edition, which can be downloaded at g-fox.cn and other popular download sites. Based on the tremendously successful Firefox 3, the China Edition is a super-charged version that provides a whole range of benefits to Internet users in China.” Mike Beltzner has an excellent write up of some of his observations of how people use the Internet in China and how the China Edition tries to create a localized experience for users in China. You can download Firefox China Edition from g-fox.cn.
about:labs - A New Weekly Newsletter About Mozilla Labs
The Mozilla Labs team has started a weekly newsletter to cover the exciting things that are going on in Mozilla Labs. The first edition of about:labs covers Weave, Ubiquity, Snowl and the Concepts of the Week. Right now you can follow the newsletter on the Mozilla Labs Blog. In the future you will be able to get the newsletter in an email format, just like about:mozilla.
Bugzilla at NASA
CNet has a story about a tool that’s being used inside of NASA to track issues and communicate more effectively. The Problem Reporting Analysis and Corrective Action (PRACA) system is based on Mozilla’s own open source bug tracking system, called Bugzilla. The article says “According to Alonso Vera, the lead of the Ames Human-Computer Interaction Group, the single, universally accessible PRACA package is replacing a set of more than 40 different database systems that had been used over the past 30 years by the many different parts of that Shuttle ecosystem.” You can read more about it in an article on mozillalinks.org and in a post by Max Kanat-Alexander.
Firefox 3.0.4 and Firefox 2.0.0.18 Released
Mozilla has released Firefox 3.0.4 and Firefox 2.0.0.18 as part of its ongoing support for existing products. These updates contain stability and security fixes and it is recommended that all users update to these versions of the browser. See the post in the Mozilla Blog for more details.
Spread Thunderbird
Mozilla Messaging has launched Spread Thunderbird, a site that lets people who love Thunderbird come together and work to promote it. See the announcement by Mary on the Mozilla Blog for more information.
Developer calendar
For an up-to-date list of the coming week’s Mozilla project meetings and events, please see the Mozilla Community Calendar wiki page.
Subscribe to the email newsletter
If you would like to get this newsletter by email, just head on over to the about:mozilla newsletter subscription form. Fresh news, every Tuesday, right to your inbox.
This next Thursday in São Carlos ( pt-BR ) we will have the first Brazilian discussion related to 2010 Goals project. I am supporting design discussions, in coordination with many other local and some remote contributors, and wanted this to serve the main goals purpose but also to serve as a case to support others implementing their discussions in BR. We will also try to record a video ( not sure full or part of it ) and push the case online. I find this event a good start for the discussions in BR since we received support from members of the two major universities in the Sao Carlos area, UFSCar and USP. This event should take place in the auditorium at ICMC / USP. Thanks for local city contributors for their support Felipe Gomes, Filipe Grillo ( AMO pt-BR ), Wellington Macedo , and Clauber ( Moz BR ). Also great thanks to professor Dilvan Moreira at USP for helping us with communication and organization. If you participated or coordinated a discussion related to 2010 Goals and has tips on the good practices please let me know.
Today Mozilla released Fashion Your Firefox, a new Web application that enables Firefox users to customize their browser based on their interests and online activities. With Fashion Your Firefox, add-ons that fit people’s online lifestyles are organized in easy to discover ways and are available for installation in just a few easy clicks.
Fashion Your Firefox presents add-ons in activity-based categories that make them easy to find and install. Categories in Fashion Your Firefox include:
• Shutterbug: View and share pictures and videos online
• Rock Star: Listen to music while surfing, working, emailing or researching online
• News Junkie: Get the most up-to-date news and weather
• Shopaholic: Shop and take advantage of online deals
• Digital Pack Rat: Keep track of favorite sites, bookmarks and blogs
• Social Butterfly: Share, bookmark, and e-mail web pages via an array of social networking & bookmarking sites
• Finder and Seeker: Find and make information on the Web more relevant
• Decorator: Apply browser themes
• Executive Assistant: Organize online activities
For more information see our press release, FAQ, and David Rolnitzky’s, Mozilla’s add-ons program manager, blog post.
One of the best aspects of being a Firefox user is the chance to make your copy of Firefox unique to what you like to do on the web. More than any other browser, Firefox offers an amazingly diverse ecosystem of add-ons that lets me do everything from check the weather, monitor my online auctions, listen to music, and find cool new stuff on the web — in fact, there are more than 5,000 different add-ons to choose from.
This week, the number of add-ons downloaded (from the more than 5,000) has reached 1 billion! That is an absolutely staggering number. Firefox is truly unique in having such a large community of add-ons creators that are passionate about extending the capabilities of the web through Firefox.
To make things a little easier for users new to customizing Firefox to sort through all those add-ons, we’ve built a super-simple web application called Fashion Your Firefox that takes a collection of some of the more popular ones and groups them into categories based on how you might use the web. For example, the “Social Butterfly” category for those that are into social networking, “Decorator” for those into changing their Firefox’s color or look, or “Rock Star” for those that want to listen and find new music online.
One of the great things about the Fashion Your Firefox collection is that it allows users to bundle a bunch of different add-ons together all at once. In essence, it’s like having a shopping cart that you can use to select any add-on from the Fashion Your Fox collection, “check-out” with just one click, and after a quick Firefox restart, have a whole new browser that’s made just for you.
There will likely be more collections down there road beyond Fashion Your Firefox. For example, you could imagine a “News Hound” collection with add-ons specifically around news and alerts; a “Web Monkey” collection of add-ons that features tools to help web developers; a “Multi-media” collection that focuses on music, video, and photos; and so on.
A lot of great work went into making this first collection happen — special thanks to Fred Wenzel, Stephen Donner, Fligtar, Neil Lee, Mike Morgan, Boriss, Nicole Loux, Mary Colvig, Mike Shaver, and Rey Bango.
Turns out that there won’t be any changes to the DOM workers spec after all, so they’re fair game. I’ll be resuming work on this documentation shortly.
For the past few days, I’ve been doing little bits of work here and there on some of the smaller topics that need covering, updating articles that only wind up needing a paragraph tweaked here or there, that kind of thing. It’s not glamorous, but it’s a living.
As we make our way headlong toward shipping Firefox 3.1 beta 2, if you know of something that you think should be documented prior to its release, please feel free to make your suggestions. While we’re on a very good track to have the documentation essentially complete by the first release candidate, we won’t have everything done by beta 2. So I’m working on prioritizing now.
As you may have learned recently on Seth's blog, we have been working lately on creating translated landing pages on mozilla.com for all of the locales that are not already supported on an official regional portal (that is those not on Mozilla Europe/China/Japan).
Now that I have a bit of time I can blog a bit about how this project is going.
We have created this week landing pages on mozilla.com for 7 of our locales (Afrikaans, Frisian, Irish, Indonesian, Georgian, Slovene, Swedish) which is a good start given that we (Laura and me) plan to have all of the 37 locales we are targeting done by the end of the year. By the way, the list of targeted locales is on the Web Dashboard, if your language is on the list of languages we are targeting, don't hesitate to come and help with the translation!
So what does it change for let's say a Slovene user compared to the previous situation? Until one week ago, a user with Internet Explorer in Slovene going to getfirefox.com or mozilla.com was redirected to mozilla.com/en-US/ and was offered a link to download Firefox in Slovene but the page was all written in English. This is good enough for people speaking English as a second language, but our target audience is no longer the computer and English savvy advanced users. We were certainly losing potential users for one of these reasons:
It is very clear to me that translating a whole portal like mozilla.com and keeping it up to date is not scalable. Maintaining a reduced version of a portal like we do on Mozilla Europe for 22 languages is already a very big task and could be seen as an ideal solution, but many of the locales we are speaking about have little human resources to keep and, more importantly, maintain an entire web site.
Another drawback of a multilingual portal is that any technical change in the reference language (English) may have an impact on localized pages. This is particularily true for stylesheet changes, I have already seen minor visual fixes on an English page impacting negatively the same page for other languages. So as to avoid that, updates on the English version have to be very carefully done and planned and lots of QA of localized pages has to be done when some files are updated in English. Definitely, this is not scalable or would be possible for a handful of languages only.
The solution chosen is one single landing page to propose the download of Firefox, give a few informations (among which a link to the locale's community portal) and also a link to Thunderbird pages in English. We have a separate stylesheet for that and we only share a cut-down version of the mozilla.com template. Our Hebrew localizer is also working on a Right-To-Left stylesheet, thanks Tomer for that!
Additionally, offering the right locale in a page written into the right language is not the only good news about it. This is also going to help promoting localized versions of Firefox more easily with a short url such as www.mozilla.com/af for Afrikaans. Great for printed material, banners or simply to give the url of the site verbally to a friend. This will also allow us to do real Search Engine Optimization in the user's language (as we did in the past on mozilla-europe.org) and one of the next things to do will be to evaluate the wording of this page for better result, I'll open bugs about it and we will work with our communities on optimizing the language for better search results. By the way, these pages are in Google results since this morning, which is a good start :)
One other good news is that we promote on this page community portals, which means that this will give more visibility to these portals and hopefully new contributors will join the Mozilla project.
Here is the list of current languages done (in the visitor's language so as to give it a small SEO boost ;) ):
UPDATE:
One more locale done today, Galician:
Please join us on Wednesday Nov 19th for our bi-monthly events call tomorrow at 10 a.m. PST (7pm CET, 6pm GMT). Dial-in is +1 650-903-0800, ext 92, id 248 or + 1 800-707-2533, password 369, ext 92, id 248 and #events on irc.mozilla.org.
We’ll mainly focus on two events that are taking place next month in Mountain View:
* FOSSCamp, Mountain View, Dec. 5 - 6: Organized by Ubuntu folks.
* Add-ons Conference, Mountain View, Dec. 11
Plus an update on our attendance at Netcamp in Bucharest
make source-package in your toplevel objdir now and get a source .tar.bz2 in dist/.A couple of months ago I had the good fortune to travel to China in order to spend some time to get to know the team at Mozilla Online in Beijing. My goals were twofold: to get to know the requirements of Chinese users, and to better understand what my colleagues in Beijing were trying to do to address those needs.
China is obviously a very different place from Canada, but I don’t think I fully understood how different until I asked Gong Li, Jack, Mi Jia, Sun Bin, Amax, Wendy, Doris, Sharon and Cathy how they would go about finding information. I’m used to a very search-based culture, and was shocked to discover that search - while still important - was a secondary task for all of my Chinese colleagues. Their normal pattern would be to first visit an authoritative source (a portal of some form, either a media hub, a news site, or a topic-oriented site like one for music) and then drill into the information presented. For example, if I’m interested in going to the movies, I would search for “showtimes toronto” and then navigate from there. My colleagues, on the other hand, would more likely navigate to a place where they knew they could find reliable data, follow links to showtimes, and only then perhaps invoke search on the individual movies to find out more about them.
This struck me as incredibly foreign, and quickly made me realize two things. First (and perhaps foremost) was that I carry a great deal of cultural context with me when participating in discussions and decisions about Firefox. Second, that while the Internet is a global phenomenon that connects people together in a web of information, the ways in which people like to interact with that information is likely to be heavily influenced by their cultural contexts. Obviously Internet users are themselves influenced and affected by their experiences online - the speed at which memes travel and cross cultures is evidence of that - but it’s bi-directional. We can’t just assume that everyone wants to or should interact with the Web in the same way, and moreover, we shouldn’t assume that it would be good for the web if everyone did.
None of these observations on their own are particularly original or stunning, of course, and I don’t at all mean to imply that I am reporting some sort of revolutionary news. “People around the world are different and have different needs” is the type of truism that doesn’t need a lot of repeating. It’s just not every day that you have that truism smack you in the face with such a sharply drawn example as happened to me that day.
Awakened, I started to pay more attention, and noticed seemingly tiny differences that carried huge implications. When back at home, if I were watching someone “surfing” the net I’d see them leaning forward, one hand on the mouse and another on the keyboard, typing and mousing equally. In China the keyboard was far less frequently used, and the standard posture was leaning back from the monitor slightly, one hand on the mouse. This isn’t to say that users in China weren’t doing a lot: most of them were watching a video while scrolling through news and perhaps another site. They were, however, letting the information come to them and drilling down when something caught their interest, as opposed to seeking out relevant information and branching out from there.
In addition to these anthropological observations, Gong Li and his team were able to provide a wealth of contextual information about the market. While the challenges they were facing (distribution, awareness, poorly coded sites that had compatibility problems) were reminiscent of those faced elsewhere, the Chinese market seems to move en masse, with most people doing what everyone else does. Almost everyone has Windows XP, many from a pirated version of the CD that shipped with Maxthon and other software, and the idea of downloading and installing new software isn’t as commonplace. The National Banks all use an ActiveX control on their login pages to prevent keylogging (ironic!), and most e-commerce sites use direct-debit from these banks as the primary form of payment.
It was immediately apparent that Gong Li and everyone at Mozilla Online were as passionate about bringing the power of Firefox to the Chinese market as they were knowledgeable about their special needs. This was made clear when they started telling me about the project they were working on: Firefox China Edition, which went into beta today.
This package bundles Firefox 3 along with several features which the Mozilla Online team believes will be useful for Chinese users, such as:
Firefox China Edition isn’t going to replace the product that we ship as Firefox in China, and as with any bundle, if a user decides they want to remove this extra functionality, they can do so in the Add-Ons manager. Even so, Li and his team have been careful to ensure that as a product produced by Mozilla Online, it adheres to the values and principles our community shares.
I’m really interested to see what the response is in China to a set of features which have been prepared specifically to create a browser for locals. The Mozilla Online team will be tracking response closely, to see if this helps them gain additional traction in China. I’ll also be watching to see what sort of things we should be considering for inclusion in future versions of Firefox, based on what we learn from our colleagues overseas.
The beta launch of Firefox China Edition is a fantastic achievement for the Mozilla Online team, and is leaving me with a lot to think about in terms of what other assumptions we make glibly when building a supposedly global product.
Today (11/18/2008) we released Firefox China Edition, which can be downloaded at g-fox.cn and other popular download sites. Based on the tremendously successful Firefox 3, the China Edition is a super-charged version that provides a whole range of benefits to Internet users in China.
1. The China edition (literally) creates more browsing space by providing Live Margins, a sidebar to the right of the main browsing window. Live Margins provides additional search results, relevant information, music, video, and much more, all at the same time allowing the user to continue normal browsing activities in other tabs. This is a unique solution to the longstanding problem of tab browsing where only one tab is visible at any time. Live Margins gather information from multiple sources (such as typical search engines but also Wikipedia and other more vertical and focused information websites such as financial sites and weather forecast) and provide a comprehensive information feed that is more 360 degree (and not just a flat list of web links).
2. The China edition provides a number of convenience features. For example, it has a built-in button to let users easily choose the display fonts (among those available on the user’s particular system) and change their sizes. It has another one-button access to desktop functions such as Calculator and to browser shortcuts. It also enables a number of tab operations that are favored by local Chinese users, such as double click to close a tab (instead of having to bring that tab to the front and then find the little x to click on).
I strongly encourage you to try this out at g-fox.cn and also provide feedback at the discussion forum there. Note there are both a Chinese version and an English version, and we provide downloads that run on Windows, Mac, and Linux. The English version also has the same services targeted at users in China, so it may not bring up the liquor store in your neighborhood strip mall. Personally, I have been using this drag function as an online dictionary — try it and you will like it, no more need to open a dictionary site and type in the word.
This release reaffirms our long-held belief that our mission is to keep the internet open and freely accessible, and the best way to achieve that is to provide viable choices for people to get online and have a personalizable user experience. And the best way to achieve viability is to continue to innovate.
Moreover, one of our unique strength is our willingness, and ability, to partner and collaborate. In this release, we specifically partnered with a number leading content providers in the local market. So now you can monitor that Youku video (the Chinese Youtube) in Live Margins while keeping an eye on your regular work; you can listen to background music off the hits list provided by Sina Music. You can simply highlight a word and with a little drag motion, you can view, via Live Margins, restaurant reviews provided by Dianping (the Chinese Yelp), artist info and songs from Yobo (the Chinese Pandora), and of course search results from Baidu. You can also access Chinese books online (provided by 17K), shop online (360Buy), and see maps and a ton of other information at your finger tips. We have had Linkool Labs as our technology partner in developing Live Margins. They have separately developed Juice, a Firefox addon in English and targetd at western (North American) users, which is based on the same basic concepts but with different UI elements and linked to a different set of web services.
The release of the Firefox China Edition is an ambitious experiment on the part of the Mozilla world. We would very much like to hear your views and experiences with this experiment. Do let us know!
Halloween weekend, I was at my family’s home in Illinois, playing with my sister Aleksa. She’s eight years old and crazy about video games. I’ve been teaching her to play the old classics from when I was her age.
Some of the most innovative user-interfaces are found in video games. Why is that? I have a theory.
Users of business/productivity software complain loudly when an interface differs from what they’re used to. Rightly so — time spent learning an unfamiliar UI is time not getting work done. Business software is rightfully cautious of UI experimentation.
Gamers, in contrast, are willing to invest time and effort in learning a new, unfamiliar game. Novelty is part of the value. Gamers will learn a specialized interface, if it’s efficient and well-suited to the tasks the game requires.
So I like to analyze the UI of games to see what lessons they have to teach. Even a very old game may hide a great idea that has been forgotten — or never learned — by the wider world of software design.
Today’s example comes from The Legend of Zelda (copyright 1987, Nintendo):
(Image used without permission)
The Legend of Zelda plays a distinctive eight-note melody when you discover a secret — e.g., finding the one loose block that can be pushed to open a path. (If you’ve played a Zelda game, you’re probably hearing the melody in your head right now.)
This “discovery fanfare” is interesting from a UI perspective because of how much it manages to communicate. Most video game sound effects are stimulus-response: whack something with your sword and it makes one noise; pick up a coin and it makes another. But the discovery fanfare is semantic. Not a response to an elementary action, but an indication of what that action means to the ongoing story. It’s like the game is winking at you, to say “Yup, you got me — that’s the answer.” It means not just “You found a secret”, but also, “I understand what you just did.” “This thing you found? It’s important.”
Hearing the discovery fanfare makes you feel smart. It’s about the strongest positive feedback that it’s possible to get from a video game. Such reinforcement is a big part of what makes The Legend of Zelda so addictive.
But how is that relevant to non-game UI design and/or web design?
Positive feedback is important. It lets the user know that the system “understands” what they’re trying to do. Lack of feedback creates pure frustration.
Watch any first-time user of the Unix command line. They type a command, hit enter, and nothing visibly happens. At that point, many people get confused or worried. What happened to the command? In fact, silence means that the command executed successfully. But this is a hard idea to grok, because it’s contrary to all our instincts.
On the Web, how many times have you seen a message like this one?
Why are users clicking more than once?
Maybe because the first time we click, nothing happens. Nothing visible or audible, anyway. In fact, an upload is being processed, but silently and invisibly. Since there’s no feedback, our instincts tell us, “You didn’t click it hard enough. Better do it again”.
The “Don’t click more than once” warning in text is ineffective. It’s just not strong enough to overcome human nature.
I bet we’d send many fewer duplicate POSTs if some kind of visible or audible congratulations happened in response to clicking the “submit” button. Not for every form — just the large multi-page ones. After all, completing those forms is at least as difficult as solving a Legend of Zelda puzzle, and a lot less fun. Don’t we deserve some celebration afterwards?
This summer, thirty interns participated in the Mozilla summer internship program. They worked in virtually every area of the Mozilla project: Firefox, Thunderbird, testing, the build system, marketing, analytics, web development, IT. You can read their blogs here.
If you’re a college student, you can apply now for a Mozilla internship in summer 2009.
Sound good? Keep in mind that:
If you think you can live with all that, apply online (that web site is kind of weird; poke around for “Intern” positions) or send email to julie at mozilla dot com. Internships will be awarded by the end of February 2009 or so.
dougt and Lucas Adamski are coming to London, and we're meeting up for a drink on Wednesday 10th December. If there are any Mozilla people in London at that time who'd like to join us, drop me a line.
This weekend I represented Mozilla at the >play Expo at the Haas School of Business at UC Berkeley and the San Francisco Green Festival. This was the first time I’d ever represented Mozilla at a public event, so it was quite a learning experience. It was also fun trying to get an idea of what an individual was interested in and connecting it with something relevant about Mozilla.
The >play Expo
At the >play Expo, Myk Melez, Jay Patel and I were specifically representing Mozilla Labs, and most of the people we spoke to were MBA students or industry professionals. As such, when asked what Labs was, I tended to focus on the concept of innovation—something relevant both to business and Mozilla. In particular, I focused on Labs as a solution to what Clayton Christensen called The Innovator’s Dilemma. I also made sure to bring up the Mozilla community, explaining that all Labs projects were community experiments that anyone could contribute to, and that some of them, such as the Concept Series, were actually experiments in figuring out how to “scale” disruptive innovation within the context of a global community. I also explained that a big part of facilitating community-wide innovation was fostering an attitude that failure is OK—that in fact, it could be said that if none of our experiments failed, we may not be pushing hard enough. (As a side note: despite the fact that all of this has been told to me by other Labs folks, I don’t think that it’s actually been blogged about much, so I’ll probably write more about it soon.)
Almost all of my conversations ultimately resulted in the question of how Mozilla makes money, to which I gave them the standard profit-sharing response. Sometimes this segued into an interesting conversation about what the Mozilla Foundation was, since many people didn’t know that Mozilla was a non-profit at its core.
Aside from that, I also explained what some of the Labs projects were and demoed them. Virtually everyone we met had heard of Firefox, and many of them already used it, but few of them knew about the Foundation or Labs, so it felt good to educate people on these topics.
The San Francisco Green Festival
This was the more fun of the two, largely because it seemed rife with idealists who either hadn’t heard of Firefox or didn’t know that it was backed by a non-profit foundation (and that its for-profit subsidiaries were wholly-owned and had no investors). I wasn’t there for very long—only an hour and a half at the tail end of the festival—but I’m pretty sure that I turned at least two people on to Firefox who had never heard of it, and that felt really good.
Most of my conversations with people included some sort of abbreviated form of my What Mozilla Means to Me blog post, which was very well received. In particular, given the context of the Green Festival, I tried relating the Mozilla Manifesto’s view of the Internet to the way that many environmentalists viewed the environment: as a public asset and a public benefit, and—in the words of one person I talked to—”something that needs to be saved”.
One frequent question asked of me was “how is Mozilla green?”, to which I had to respond honestly that I didn’t know, mostly because I didn’t actually know what the word “green” meant. I told them that I did read Michael Pollan’s The Omnivore’s Dilemma, though, and that the history of the word “organic” did resonate with me. The origin of the organic movement from the 1940’s to the 1960’s, as explained by Pollan, was something that featured a heavy focus on community and genuine social relationships between producer and consumer—concepts that Mozilla shares, but that have since been excised from the word’s meaning since it was embraced by capitalism over the past few decades. While the word has recently been used for marketing Firefox, it’s a term that I’ve heard used informally to describe the bottom-up, participatory approach that we try to foster when developing experiments in Labs.
After explaining these things, the people I talked to—at the very least—seemed to walk away with a much better impression of Mozilla. It was particularly exciting to talk to folks who hadn’t heard of Firefox, because when I talked about how all of these “organic” ideals fostered more secure, more responsive, and more user-respecting software like Firefox and its addons, they really seemed to get it.
Attendees: djst, cilias, zzxc, cww, nkoth, lucy
Sumo
Roundtable
A couple months ago I mentioned how things have grown in the past two years at Mozilla. Back then we barely pushed any traffic to the Internet and survived on less than a dozen app servers.
Things have changed. I’ll highlight just a couple of them:
That last bullet point brings us to today.
The two BGP speaking routers in San Jose both have Sup32 (the “CPU” of the router) and they have a limit to the maximum number of routes they can hold in their FIB TCAM (”route lookup table”). Routes that can’t fit in the FIB TCAM end up being forwarded in software at the cost of CPU. The more traffic we push, the high the CPU tends to run and lately it’s been running close to the point of uncomfortable.
I’m routinely getting alert emails:
border1.sj.mozilla.com five minute load average 62% exceeds 60%
border2.sj.mozilla.com five minute load average 83% exceeds 60%
And from trend graphs, it’s quite obvious.
I will be upgrading the Sup32s this week to Sup720-3BXLs. I plan on doing one Tuesday and the other Thursday. For the most part, this should be non-user impacting. Most of the headache is going to be in the backend, moving router interfaces around, moving cacti graphs around and updating aggregtate graphs.
This post is about how the JavaScript engine represents JS objects in memory. I’m afraid a lot of it will seem obscure and opaque unless you already know a bit about SpiderMonkey internals, or you have the perseverance to click some of the links below and read the documentation.
First of all, what is a JavaScript object? Paraphrasing the documentation for JSObject, obj