Firefox 3.6, codename "Namoroka", looks to improve startup time and general responsiveness, among other issues.

"Should everything run smoothly during testing this is what will be released to our users as the official version after a beta period," reads the description on Mozilla's development wiki.

Downloads are available for Windows, Mac and Linux from Mozilla's FTP site.

One interesting aspect of the directory is that Mozilla decided to eschew a standard, table-based layout for the directory in favor of an HTML 5 canvas based design that focuses on the products' logos. Because of this, the directory will only work on modern browsers like Safari, Chrome, Opera, and Firefox, but Internet Explorer users will be locked out.

As of now, only a small number of tools are in the directory, but, keeping in style with the purpose of the directory, Mozilla is using a Google Spreadsheet that allows developers to submit their applications.

We have to say, however, that the layout of the directory can be rather confusing and given that all a user sees is a product's logo, it is rather hard to figure out what a tool really does. As Mozilla adds more products, it will only get harder to use, though thankfully, Mozilla does also offer a plainer version of the directory.

More to Come

In the long run, Mozilla also plans to roll out comments, more social features, and ranking tools (maybe similar to what Launchly does).

As is typical for Mozilla Labs products, Mozilla is releasing this early and encouraging feedback from the community.

For now, Mozilla will start the program with a survey that aims to get a better understanding of who is joining the Test Pilot community. The first actual tests should arrive soon after this first survey is complete.

Mozilla stresses that it will take its users' privacy seriously. Participants have to opt-in and data will be stored in anonymous form. Only aggregate test data will be made available to the public.

Overall, this looks like a great project. Usability studies tend to be slow and costly, yet with Test Pilot, Mozilla will be able to quickly enlist feedback about new design ideas from its large community of users.

According to an email we received from Mozilla, "Everyone should have the opportunity to know how to use the Internet, have easy access to it, and have a good experience when they're online. This new initiative is looking for people with a talent for writing, designing, programming, developing, or all-around technical know-how. Internet skills, no matter how novice or advanced, can change people's lives and make the Web better for everyone." Mozilla Service Week will take place from September 14-21, 2009.

According to the Mozilla Foundation's Executive Director, Mark Surman, this program is designed to allow all kinds of users to volunteer their time. Some of the skills required for the above-mentioned goals are as simple as data entry or basic web surfing.

"We're inviting people to get involved with Mozilla in an active way," he is quoted on the Mozilla blog, "even if they can't code, test, or localize. It lets anyone and everyone feel like they are contributing to the cause of building a better Internet."

Interested parties can learn more at the Service Week website. The site allows would-be volunteers to find ways to give their time and skills to the cause, and it also lets those in need, be they individuals or organizations, request help.

The Mozilla Foundation is a non-profit organization dedicated to fostering openness, innovation, and opportunity on the Internet by supporting the community of Mozilla contributors and by helping those who build technologies that benefit users around the world.

Compared to Safari and Google Chrome, Firefox's JavaScript engine (TraceMonkey) is still a bit slower, though in day-to-day use, most users aren't likely to notice any real differences.

Obviously, this is a beta product and you will inevitably run into some problems (here is a list of known issues), but in our own tests with Windows 7 and on OSX, beta 4 felt very fast and, maybe more importantly, extremely stable. You should, however, be aware that a lot of plugins and extensions like Greasemonkey will not work in beta 4 yet, though usually it only takes a few days before developers update their programs.

Bugs can be reported confidentially through Mozilla's bug tracking software, though Mozilla will also pay when researchers disclose security bugs publicly. The organization, however, encourages researchers to disclose these security issues privately.

Only a few Mozilla products are ineligible for the bounty program. The Mozilla Suite, an all-in-one Internet application suite that resembles the old Netscape Communicator product, isn't eligible, for example, as Mozilla stopped development on this program in 2008.

$1,337: What Others Pay

A number of other companies have established similar bounty programs. Google, for example, pays $500 for "interesting and original" security vulnerabilities in Chrome and $1,337 for severe bugs. Some researchers, however, have called Google's $500 bounty "insulting." When Google established this program, it cited Mozilla's $500 bounty as the reason for choosing this price, so it will be interesting to see if Google will also bring its bug bounty up to $3,000 as well.

Local File Handling

Another example that Mozilla uses in its documentation is photo thumbnails. Normally, you would have to upload the image to the site's server before you could see a thumbnail. Now, developers can easily render and display these thumbnail before the file is uploaded.

Support for the HTML5 file handling API is the only major new feature in this latest beta, though Mozilla also made some tweaks to how extensions integrate with Firefox, which should improve stability.

Help Mozilla to Test Add-Ons

Mozilla also recently launched the latest version of its Add-on Compatibility Reporter tool. If you want to help out Mozilla and your favorite add-on developers, this tool will send back information about how an add-on performs in whatever version of Firefox you have installed on your machine. About 70% of all Firefox add-ons are already compatible with Firefox 3.6.

Test Pilot is currently only a "still-in-concept platform," but the plan is to build a representative sample of Firefox users that will be recruited to evaluate new interface concepts and features.

How it Will Work

After the installation, the Test Pilot addon will gather non-personally-identifiable information from its users and then put these users into different demographic buckets. Depending on the tests that need to be run, users will be selected to participate in different experiments and will be asked to provide feedback on a regular basis. All the information gather through this plugin will be made available to the public.

This sounds like a great project, and we are happy to see that Mozilla is moving forward with this. It will probably still be a while before we see the fruits of this idea, however, as Mozilla is only now hiring a full-time developer to create the actual implementation of the Test Pilot program.]]> Discuss]]> http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/mozilla_test_pilot_usability_study.php http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/mozilla_test_pilot_usability_study.php News Tue, 20 Jan 2009 12:05:40 -0800 Frederic Lardinois Mozilla has cultivated one of the most interesting and healthiest ecosystems for extension developers around its popular Firefox browser. The problems with this, of course, is that whenever Mozilla releases a new version of Firefox, developers have to make sure that their software is compatible. For the next release of its browser, Mozilla aims to make sure that 90% of those add-ons that make up the top 95% of add-on usage will be compatible with the latest version of Firefox. The release of Firefox 3.1 is still a while off, but currently only 28% of the top extensions are ready for the transition.

According to Mozilla's Justin Scott, 861 add-ons make up 95% of the total usage, while the other 5% are distributed among close to 5000 add-ons. 94% of the top add-ons are currently compatible with Firefox 3.0.

According to Mozilla's compatibility dashboard, as of today, only about 28% of the top 861 extensions are compatible with the latest builds of Firefox 3.1.

Getting to 95%

Currently, Mozilla's evangelism team is trying to reach out to all Firefox developers to make sure that everybody is ready by the time Firefox 3.1 is released. The release date for Firefox 3.1 is currently a moving target, but the second beta version should be available to the public by the end of this month, which might be followed by a third beta before the final version is released.

Some extensions, of course, are abandoned by their developers over time, so it might not be possible for Mozilla to get to the 95% mark for Firefox 3.1, but given the importance of Firefox and the extension ecosystem around it, it is good to see them reach out to developers proactively. For developers, getting ready for 3.1 should also be a priority, as Firefox users tend to update their browser very quickly after a new version is released.

For more information about the transition to Firefox 3.1 for extension developers, have a look at Mozilla's 'Add-on Compatability Center,' which will soon also feature additional tools for developers.

The moment has arrived, Mozilla has pushed the go-live button on Firefox 2. The new final 2.0 version of the browser is now available for everyone to download.

Read/WriteWeb has been actively covering the launch, most recently with a pre-launch interview with Chris Beard - Mozilla Vice President of Products. We've also reviewed the product and have additional notes on how Mozilla plans to market Firefox 2. Digg and Slashdot have additional commentary.

For a look at the competition, you may also want to check out our comparative review of Internet Explorer 7.

And the R/WW coverage doesn't stop there! We have a couple of other in-depth articles coming soon, one about Firefox add-ons and a special one on a yet-to-be-disclosed topic ;-)

Editor's note: This story is part of a series we call Redux, where we'll re-publish some of our best posts of 2009. As we look back at the year - and ahead to what next year holds - we think these are the stories that deserve a second glance. It's not just a best-of list, it's also a collection of posts that examine the fundamental issues that continue to shape the Web. We hope you enjoy reading them again and we look forward to bringing you more Web products and trends analysis in 2010. Happy holidays from Team ReadWriteWeb!

First Tests Are Coming Soon

For now, Mozilla will start the program with a survey that aims to get a better understanding of who is joining the Test Pilot community. The first actual tests should arrive soon after this first survey is complete.

Mozilla stresses that it will take its users' privacy seriously. Participants have to opt-in and data will be stored in anonymous form. Only aggregate test data will be made available to the public.

Overall, this looks like a great project. Usability studies tend to be slow and costly, yet with Test Pilot, Mozilla will be able to quickly enlist feedback about new design ideas from its large community of users.

Click here to read more on Jobwire about why Rouget's is our hire of the day.

MafiaaFire redirects traffic from seized domains to other domains. According to Mozilla legal blogger Harvey Anderson MafiaaFire "seized domain names allegedly were used to stream content protected by copyrights of professional sports franchises and other media concerns." The domains in question alleged acts of piracy have little to do with Firefox itself and MafiaaFire just redirects from those seized sites. Mozilla is not going to disable the extension just because DHS wants them to. It wants legal justification.

According to Anderson, the questions Mozilla asked were similar to these:

• Have any courts determined that the Mafiaafire add-on is unlawful or illegal in any way? If so, on what basis? (Please provide any relevant rulings)
• Is Mozilla legally obligated to disable the add-on or is this request based on other reasons? If other reasons, can you please specify.
• Can you please provide a copy of the relevant seizure order upon which your request to Mozilla to take down the Mafiaafire  add-on is based?

The question about the extension is less about professional sports teams, piracy and copyright and more about threats to the open Internet. Mozilla is an open source supporter and its developers are big contributors to open source projects and community members on code-sharing forum GitHub. Mozilla is looking for due process and transparency from DHS. It is the right stand to take, even if MafiaaFire and the seized sites it redirects from are not the most upstanding citizens of the World Wide Web.

"The problem stems from the use of these government powers in service of private content holders when it can have unintended and harmful consequences," Anderson wrote. "Long term, the challenge is to find better mechanisms that provide both real due process and transparency without infringing upon developer and user freedoms traditionally associated with the Internet."

Earlier this year, when we wrote about plans for offline apps in Firefox 3, Robert O'Callahan from Mozilla told us that applications would need to be reengineered to be taken offline with Firefox 3. That's not the case with Prism, which can take apps to the desktop as long as they run in the browser (though, as we mentioned, Prism doesn't actually take web apps offline, just puts them in their own desktop window).

The Mozilla Labs crew said that they're working on an extension for Firefox that will add Prism to the browser and make taking web apps to the desktop a one-click affair.

Except for the minor convenience of running oft-used web apps in their own dedicated window and making them accessible via a desktop icon, Prism isn't really all that exciting in its current form. It doesn't offer much of a benefit over bookmarks and your current browser window. However, the implications for the future are big. "This is a pretty huge deal," writes Ryan Stewart, "and it shows a trend that I’ve been preaching/tracking all along; that the desktop isn’t dead at all and that a hybrid approach is a successful way to go."

There is prototype of Prism for available on the Mozilla labs blog post, as well as links to the source code.

The new beta Labs site is powered by the same social network technology as Mozilla's innovators' social network Drumbeat. Drumbeat seems relatively well adopted, but at launch the new Labs site is sparse, incomplete and a little challenging to use. Hopefully the new site will help more Labs projects get more consumer engagement, more developer support and thus lead to more innovation for web users.

"Mozilla Labs is building quite the assemblage of interesting hack tools, and it's interesting how significantly they're aimed at the developer and encouraging lots of add-ons and after-market extensions for the browser. I wonder whether this is a deliberate strategy ('community will beat off Chrome!') or whether it's a simple consequence of the fact that Mozilla is a developer organisation."

So far, Mozilla's developer-friendly tools haven't really helped it avoid substantial user attrition to Chrome, but perhaps steps like today's new Beta Labs site can increase user engagement. Perhaps.