Mozilla Labs, Higher Education, and New Opportunities

Aza Raskin — Wed, 30 Apr 2008 19:09:20 +0000

One of the Mozilla Labs‘ goals this year is to bring the open-Web innovation process to a wider community. We’re working on a number of new programs, and one of them is a more formal way for engaging with higher education. More details soon as we continue the roll out, but we wanted to let you know about a few of our early efforts:

1. Following on the success of our mentorship program last year, Northwestern has joined ranks this year with Stanford and Berkeley MBA students working with us to help tackle questions of strategy relating to open innovation. Cross-pollination is critical in connecting classrooms and academic research to products and end users.

2. We’re participating in a pilot program at the University of Illinois at Champaign’s IllinoisVENTURES 10 program. This program lets teams of university students, from any place in the world, apply for having their startup incubated at UIUC. Included in the 10-week summer camp is food, offices, help with incorporation, and seed funding. Mozilla Labs will be participating by highlighting opportunities for teams to advance the open Web and by providing mentorship where apropos. If you are interested check out the web site. Deadline for applications is May 15th, 2008.

Overall, we’re super interested in looking for other schools interested in working with us in pragmatic research on technologies that profoundly affect the lives of our families, friends, and communities. If you or your school want to get involved, please let us know by leaving a comment or giving as an email at partners@mozilla.org.

Performance and Stability Update to Weave Prototype

cbeard — Tue, 01 Apr 2008 02:16:30 +0000

Weave is a Mozilla Labs project to explore the blending of the desktop and the Web through deeper integration of the browser with online services.

Today we’re releasing an update to the core data synchronization components of Weave in preparation for the introduction of data sharing and third-party APIs.

Major Updates and Features

Significant reworking and strengthening of core synchronization architecture, improving robustness and overall responsiveness.
AES (Rijndael) encryption is now used by default for all user data.
(Note: external calls to OpenSSL are being used temporarily while we continue to work on extending NSS to support the necessary functionality.)
Public Key Infrastructure (PKI) back-end implemented in preparation for the introduction of data sharing capabilities.
Support for the new Firefox 3 native JSON parser for security, speed, and reliability.
Synchronization of browser history data is now based on visits rather than URLs.
Enhanced logging and debugging tools.

Get Weave for Firefox

Install Weave v0.1.28 for Firefox 3.0b2 or greater, Windows/Mac/Linux
Warning: This is early prototype software. Use at your own risk.

How to Get Involved

We’ll be rolling out prototypes of various components of the framework, gathering feedback, and hosting a series of discussions and sessions on the Mozilla Labs site to plan, design, and further develop Weave.

Learn more about Weave
Discuss, debate and add to the design in the Weave forum.
Join us in #labs on irc.mozilla.org.

Major Update to Personas for Firefox

cbeard — Tue, 01 Apr 2008 02:14:06 +0000

Personas for Firefox is a prototype extension that adds lightweight dynamic theming to the browser.

This version builds upon the previous release and allows developers and designers to submit Personas that are based on Web content, including support for anything that can load in a browser window, including HTML, CSS, PNG, JPG, Javascript, SVG and Canvas.

Major Updates and Features

support for dynamic Personas that can change over time and can incorporate rich web content (HTML, SVG, etc.):

custom persona editor that makes it easier to customize Firefox with your own style:

styling of additional UI elements like the window titlebar on Mac and the Find toolbar on all platforms:

various bug fixes and other minor enhancements.

Personas Directory

Coming soon: a new directory of personas to make it easier to contribute and browse them. In the meantime, see this documentation on creating a persona.

Get Personas for Firefox

Install Personas v1.0a1 for Firefox 2 or greater, Windows/Mac/Linux
Warning: This is early prototype software. Use at your own risk.

How to Get Involved

Discuss, debate, ask for help, and add to the design in the Personas forum.
Report bugs using Bugzilla.
Get the source code and fix a known bug or add a new feature.

Translate and localize for your language and locale.

Introducing Test Pilot

cbeard — Mon, 31 Mar 2008 20:09:25 +0000

Test Pilot is an idea for a new user testing program for Mozilla Labs that aims to build a 1% representative sample of the Firefox user base for soliciting wide participation and structured feedback for Labs experiments.

Presently, whenever Mozilla publishes a new experiment we rely upon the blogosphere and word-of-mouth to attract the attention of people interested in trying it out. We then hope that some number of those early adopters will come back and find the appropriate place to provide feedback.

The problem is that we are systemically biasing feedback towards only those who happen to hear about a particular experiment (on a given day) and in those cases skew to the technically-savvy early adopter. It is therefore very hard to derive conclusions representative of our much larger and increasingly mainstream user base.

We also have no structured way in which to request feedback, and in particular, positive feedback. People are much more likely to take the time to dig in and figure out how to provide feedback if they have a negative reaction. It’s also likely true that the less technical adopters are confused when faced with Mozilla’s panoply of feedback options.

And finally, at the end of this “testing process,” we effectively throw away the interested people who have taken the time to volunteer as testers and start over again from scratch the next time around.

Overview of Test Pilot
We can provide a much more satisfying experience all around by putting in place some basic infrastructure. Here’s the idea:

We develop and promote a formal Test Pilot program with a Firefox add-on at its core.
The first time the Test Pilot add-on is run, it asks a few simple non-personally-identifiable questions in order to put the user into a demographic bucket, e.g. technical level, locale, etc., and to let them opt in to additional anonymous instrumentation.
Test Pilot will then notify its users when a new experiment is available for testing. If the user opts in, it will download the required software (if any) and load any information required to get started with the new experiment, e.g. overview, use cases, etc.
After either a specified amount of time or upon completion of a specific action, Test Pilot will prompt the user for feedback. The feedback form will only ask a few questions selected from a much larger set. A link will be provided to provided more comprehensive unstructured feedback or bug reports.
The set of questions posed for feedback will be randomly distributed within each demographic bucket to ensure statistical significance of the results.
Anonymized aggregate results and analysis will then be posted automatically to the Test Pilot site.
All participants will receive a “flight badge” displayed in their Test Pilot profile and available to embed on blogs, social networks, etc.

The idea is that by reducing the amount of required feedback to only a few clicks we can increase overall rates of participation.

While this will not take the place of our traditional testing and feedback mechanisms, Test Pilot should provide a new set of tools and capabilities to increase the efficiency and effectiveness of our user testing. It should also allow us to grow our community and mindshare with people who want to help but to whom we haven’t yet given the opportunity to participate.

Roadmap
We’re pulling together a basic framework now with plans to launch the first version within the next few weeks. Specific features and roadmap are being developed in the Test Pilot discussion forum on the Mozilla Labs site.

Getting Involved

Discuss, debate, and add to the design in the Labs discussion forum
Jump into #labs on irc.mozilla.org

Mix Your Passions, Ignite the Web with Music

cbeard — Mon, 31 Mar 2008 18:17:41 +0000

Last.fm sponsors Best Music Add-on for Firefox Developer Contest

We’re pleased to announce that we’ve partnered with Last.fm as part of Extend Firefox 3 to offer up a prize package for the best new music-related Firefox Add-on that demonstrates excellence in user experience, innovativeness, and use of open standards.

Prize package includes a trip to London and VIP tickets to a Last.fm/Presents live event along with a Logitech Squeezebox network music player.

Toby Padilla, Last.fm VP Desktop and Client Software will also be joining our panel of judges — to be announced later this week.

Official rules and details on this new addition to Extend Firefox are available at www.extendfirefox.com.

Extend Firefox 3 is Here!

Mozilla Labs — Wed, 19 Mar 2008 22:11:32 +0000

Are you ready to take the first hill? Now is your chance. The next edition of Extend Firefox is here!

Extend Firefox 3 is a global developer contest with prizes awarded for developing new Firefox Add-ons for the upcoming production release of Firefox 3.

All entries will be judged by a panel of experts, with Grand Prize and Runner’s Up prize packages awarded for add-ons that take advantage of the new capabilities being introduced in Firefox 3 and that demonstrate excellence in user experience, innovativeness, and use of open standards.

You can check out the winners from the last edition of this contest over on the Mozilla Labs blog.

This edition of Extend Firefox is open to even more countries and we’re also opening up a special category to award prizes to existing Firefox Add-ons that are updated for Firefox 3 and that show significant improvements in performance and user experience.

Special thanks to our sponsors, ActiveState and VMware, for offering up some cool prizes and for helping to promote and get the word out to the wider development community!

So what are you waiting for? Start creating!

Extend Firefox 3 is open now and runs through July 4th, 2008.

Official contest rules and information are available at http://www.extendfirefox.com/.