Easy Firefox

Editor’s note: On Mar 11, Mozilla announced over 100,000,000 downloads of Firefox 3.6 to date. Firefox users on prior versions will be offered an upgrade to Firefox 3.6. For more details, check out Mike Beltzner’s Dev News announcement, reposted below.

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Your online identity, which is key to enabling a personalized Web experience, is not simply a single atom of data. It is a dense cluster of your accounts (e.g. e-mail, banking, shopping, etc.), relationships and other personal information, spread across the Web and throughout all of your personal computing devices.

Your Web browser, as your most trusted relationship in your life online, has nearly perfect knowledge of everything you do on the Web. We envision a world where your browser will play an even more active and critical role in helping you control and shape your online experience.

To realize this vision, we need to increase the browser’s understanding of your online identity and provide a platform for building new capabilities that securely take advantage of this rich, dynamic set of data that represents the digital “you.”

And so, today we are announcing an initiative as part of the Mozilla Labs Concept Series to explore these and other new concepts for online identity in the browser.

Ideas, Use Cases and Open Questions
Here are some of the initial ideas, use cases and open questions to help get things started.

• As you connect with new sites and people online, how can your browser help you manage all of your account information?
• How can your browser help when you discover something cool on the Web that you want to share with your friends?
• What role can your browser play in helping you manage your Web contacts and relationships?
• What can your browser do to enable you to securely share data with websites and third-parties in return for context-rich Web experiences?
• How can your browser help you manage and stay informed about how and where your data and data about you flows on the Web?

Guiding Principles
We believe any solution that helps people take control and manage their online identity should:

• ensure that it is easy for people to set up their own services (as needed) with freely available open standards-based tools
• provide users with the ability to fully control and customize their online experience, including whether and how their data should be shared with their family, their friends, and third-parties
• respect individual privacy (e.g. client-side encryption by default with the ability to delegate access rights)
• leverage existing open standards and propose new ones as needed

Initial Concepts and Prototypes
Over the next few weeks, you will see a wide range of activities as we begin a focused exploration through the Mozilla Labs Concept Series and host discussions with the wider Internet community about your online identity. We hope that you’ll add your voice to the discussion.

To kick things off, we will be releasing a series of initial concepts and prototypes to provide thought, facilitate discussion, and inspire future design directions for Firefox, the Mozilla project, and the Web as a whole.

How to Get Involved

• Read more about and explore the initial concepts and prototypes for Online Identity
• Learn more about the Mozilla Labs Weave project
• Discuss, debate and add to the conversation around online identity in the Online Identity Concepts discussion group
• Join us in #labs on irc.mozilla.org.

– Ragavan Srinivasan on behalf of the Mozilla Labs team

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Connect as a first class action in the browser

Today’s Web is highly personalized. If you take a look at a lot of today’s top Web sites, you’d be hard-pressed to find one that doesn’t allow some sort of personalized experience. From posting photos to customizing your homepage to your banking, your online identity is an important piece of the Web experience.

The experience of signing up and connecting to sites, however, is stuck in time: Consider that the way that we use usernames and passwords to log on to most web sites hasn’t changed in more than a decade, even while the number of unique businesses and services that we use online has increased dramatically.

Even new technologies such as OpenID still require a similar (and sometimes even more confusing) experience. Browsers have evolved slightly to try to cope with the situation by remembering usernames and passwords, but browsers are currently unable to do much more, because so much of the process is different for each site.

What we are doing

As part of the Mozilla Labs Concept Series, we’re actively exploring new approaches to online identity management in the browser. We envision a world where your browser will play an even more active and critical role in helping you control and shape your online experience. Read more about Mozilla Labs’ online identity concepts.

This prototype, which we are calling Account Manager, is an effort to dramatically simplify how users connect to sites. We plan to achieve this by adding the ability for the browser to intelligently act on your behalf.

Here’s a very early mock-up of what you might expect in the future:

The Account Manager prototype consists of two pieces:

• A proposed specification for browsers to discover web site capabilities (e.g. sign in, sign out, create account, etc.), exposing connected state to the user (e.g. are you signed in?)
• A Firefox add-on that implements a sub-set of this specification, providing common UI for connecting and disconnecting to sites

Our add-on additionally has hard-coded support for a few major sites, such as Google and Yahoo!, so that users can get a feel for how the feature might work in the browser.

Try it out!

There is an experimental, alpha version of the addon available for download.

Please be aware that this experimental code. If you are not comfortable with running software that can crash your browser, or potentially cause you to lose your work, you may want to wait.

Since the Account Manager add-on proposes a new way for sites to interact with the browser, Account Management support is limited to the few sites that support it. The goal at this stage is to refine the design and the protocol itself, so we are most interested in feedback from site administrators.

Dig deeper

As with all Mozilla projects, Account Manager is developed in the open, and we welcome participation from everyone.

Hack on the project sources.
Read a draft of our proposed specification.
Read the project wiki.
Discuss on our forums.

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Mozilla Labs is back with a new Design Challenge! Participate in the Collaborative Subtitling Design Challenge and help the Participatory Culture Foundation and Mozilla make video on the web more accessible.

The Brief

For this Design Challenge we are focusing on finding creative solutions to the question: “Collaborative subtitling — How can users quickly create a timed transcript of any video on the web?”

Participatory Culture Foundation and Mozilla are working to build a universal system for creating and collaboratively improving subtitles for any video on the web. We believe that many users would be willing to contribute and translate subtitles if there was an easy way to do so. And that we can use this energy to knock down language barriers for popular online video.

The Concept

The Vision

• Publishers can add collaborative subtitling and translation to their own sites.
• Video hosts will have an easy way to add subtitling support to their Flash players.
• Users can install a Firefox extension to enable this technology on any compatible video they watch in Firefox.
• Subtitles themselves will live “in the cloud”, stored on one or more community sites where users can collaborate and compete to create the best subtitles.

However, the most important question to answer is also the least straightforward: what is the best way to solicit and facilitate the creation of high quality subtitles from viewers? Most subtitle interfaces, designed for highly committed professional users, have too high a learning curve and are too complicated to be helpful examples. And they aren’t built to take advantage of multiple collaborators. For collaborative subtitling to work, it needs to be easy to learn, easy to use, and fast.

PCF has created a prototype that lets users create a transcript as fast as they can type, and create an aligned set of subtitles as they watch. Teams’ work will start with data from user tests on the prototype and propose new designs to address these problems in the form of a mock-up and video. PCF will select winning ideas and integrate them back into the subtitling interface (teams will see the results of their work in action).

How it Works

To participate in this Design Challenge you need to submit high-fidelity mock-ups (PSD, HTML or image files) along with a short video describing your mock-up and what influenced your design. Upload your video to the web and submit your entry using our submission form.

To provide you with some insights to help inspire your designs we conducted a series of usability studies with the current subtitling interface – head over to the Collaborative Subtitling Design Challenge site to check out the results!

Important Dates

• March 2010 – Launch of the Collaborative Subtitling Design Challenge
• April 26th, 2010 – Submission Deadline
• April 29th, 2010 – People’s Choice Voting starts
• May 11th, 2010 – People’s Choice Voting ends
• May 17th, 2010 – Best in Class honors, development plans are announced
• June 11th, 2010 – New prototype released
• June 18th, 2010 – Usability study of new prototype released

Head over to the Design Challenge site and get creative!

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In the past 50 days, Firefox 3.6 has been downloaded over 100,000,000 times by people looking to improve their web experience, and install the world’s best web browser. Mozilla believes that the user’s choice of web browser matters, and is extremely proud of how many people have chosen to use Firefox.

Starting today, users running older versions of Firefox will be offered the choice of upgrading to Firefox 3.6. We’re presenting this upgrade offer for our users who may not realize that a new version is available:

As always, users will be able to choose between:

• deferring the decision for 24 hours (“Ask Later”),
• declining the offer (“No Thanks”), or
• accepting the free upgrade (“Get the New Version”).

The offer screen will only appear after 60 seconds of keyboard inactivity to ensure we don’t get in the way of anyone’s activities. If a user declines the offer and later regrets that choice, they’ll be able to get it again simply by selecting “Check for Updates” from the “Help” menu.

Firefox 3.6 has already been chosen over 100,000,000 times by users, and we’re proud to offer it to the remaining Firefox user base. It’s fast, stable, compatible with over 90% of the thousands of Firefox Add-ons, and contains new features such as lightweight themes and plugin version checking.

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The History Submenus extension for Firefox is here to make thumbing through the browser’s history easier.

The browsing history in Firefox is one of the most taken for granted features, that can sometimes produce amazing results.  Say you check out a web page today, never think about it again – and then tomorrow you say, “what did that article say again?”.  Just browse through your Firefox history, and you can find the answer. 

What the History Submenus add-on does different, is it places each day’s entire browsing history in a submenu of the history’s menu from the menu bar in Firefox.   Simply put, it makes the History menu much more usable. 

You can pick up the History Submenus add-on on the Firefox Add-on’s web site.

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© Mitch Keeler 2010 | Check out my personal blog and my hosting podcast too!

 
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We are excited to launch Rock Your Firefox today as a place where Firefox users can learn how to customize their Web experience and discover cool new add-ons.

The first add-on featured on Rock Your Firefox is Yoono, the most popular social networking add-on that nearly 4 million people use today. Yoono is a cool sidebar that integrates all of your social networks and displays them in one stream.  There are thousands of Firefox Add-ons to choose from and hundreds of millions of people worldwide have already downloaded nearly 2 billion add-ons.

Get ready to Rock Your Firefox every Monday, Wednesday and Friday to see what Firefox Add-on is featured next!

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Test Pilot recently concluded a study on how the Firefox menus are used. Now, the results are in, and the data is available.

The study was designed to answer such questions as: Which menu items are used most often? How often do people use keyboard shortcuts to activate these items? When using the mouse, how long do people spend looking for the item they want, and which menu items take people the longest to find? You can read more background about this study here: Menu Item Usage Study.

Mozilla Labs is continuing to analyze the over 8,000 submissions we received as part of this study. At the same time, as part of our goal of being an open research lab, we are offering the data as a public resource. Various sample sizes of the data can be downloaded from this page, which also includes an explanation of the file format. The data has been sanitized and aggregated to ensure the privacy and anonymity of those who participated, so it contains no URLs, bookmark names, or anything of that nature.

We encourage anyone with an interest in usability research to download these samples, do their own analysis and draw their own conclusions. We would love to hear what you can find.

If you are looking for data samples from older studies, those are available too:

• A Week in the Life data samples
• Accounts and Passwords data samples
• Tab Open/Close data samples

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Longtime Ubiquity contributor and community member Satyr has continued working on the Ubiquity codeline. He’s posted a build of the extension based on the latest source from his personal code repository.

Satyr’s build is based on the 0.5 codeline and it should be able to work with Firefox 3.6, so you may want to try it out if you have been frustrated by the incompatibility between Ubiquity 0.5.x and Firefox 3.6.

Satyr provides the caveat:

“latest source” means it is pre-beta and most likely has issues, which won’t be fixed unless users report them in detail.

Still, if you are using Firefox 3.6 and you want features that are not available in Ubiquity 0.1.9.1, you may want to try out Satyr’s build.

Problems and workarounds with this version are being discussed on GetSatisfaction.

Thank you Satyr!

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Lanikai Beta 1, available now for download, is built on top of the Gecko 1.9.2 platform. While this milestone is considered to be stable, it is intended for developers and members of our testing community to use for evaluation and feedback. Users of this latest alpha version of Thunderbird should not expect all of their add-ons to work properly with this milestone.

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