Archive for the ‘Mitchell’s Blog’ Category
August 19th, 2009
I’m leaving tonight for a vacation, so I’ll be pretty quiet for the next couple of weeks. Maybe a few tweets here and there, but probably not a lot more.
When I return we’ll be close to Mozilla Service Week, which should be a fun and interesting way to kick off the fall season.
August 18th, 2009
A few weeks ago Microsoft and the EC announced they are discussing a settlement proposal. Asa Dotzler did an evaluation of the proposal in view of the principles we have previously, noting both items that appear promising and those that appear weak. In all things the implementation details — all the way to the most mind-numbing level of specificity — will have an immense impact on the proposal’s effectiveness, so we’ll have to wait and see what those details turn out to be. Here I’ll outline a couple of aspects where the proposal itself could use improvement.
The overall point that may get lost is that — even if everything in the currently proposed settlement is implemented in the most positive way — IE will still have a unique and uniquely privileged position on Windows installations.
- It is always there, often with prominent placement in the user interface. Choosing another browser as a default doesn’t change this. Contrast this with all other browsers who aren’t available without separate installation.
- Choosing another browser as a “default” does NOT mean that the other browser takes the place of IE. For example, the IE logo (”shortcut”) still remains unchanged on the desktop. The shortcut / logo of the browser the user has selected does not replace this, it is added elsewhere. As a result, the familiar location remains IE, not the user’s choice.
- IE appears to retain other privileged positions in the user interface, depending on the exact windows operating system configuration one uses. The most important of these is probably in the Taskbar of Windows 7, which contains IE prominently. Microsoft has described the Taskbar as the “beachfront property of the Windows OS” — it’s next to the Start menu and you see it even when your desktop is covered with all your program windows.
Nothing we’ve seen suggests these items will change when a person chooses to make a different browser his or her default. These shortcuts back to IE remain unless the user makes another browser his or her default and then figures out how to “turn off” IE.
A second way in which IE remains uniquely privileged is the difference between having a piece of software on one’s machine and needing to download, install and make something your default. This may seem irrelevant to those of us who live and breath Internet software, but it’s a significant barrier for a lot of people. IE doesn’t face this issue since it’s on Windows machines when people receive them. The ballot could do a better job of reducing this difference. Right now the ballot is about downloading software. It could be designed to help people get further in the process of downloading, installing, opening and making the new software the default. As proposed, we expect to see many people who want other browsers get lost in the process before they actually succeed in making an alternative browser their main browsing tool.
A third way in which IE retains a uniquely privileged position is the Windows update system. It makes sense to include IE updates in this system, even if a different browser is the default — it’s important not to have “dead” pieces of old software on one’s machine for security reasons. So we do not take the position that the Windows Update system should exclude IE. However, a few safeguards for protecting the prior choice of another browser should be in place. Most important, if IE presents itself to the user as part of an automatically triggered update process, it should close immediately after the update process completes. It should not use this Windows update process as an opportunity to ask to become the default browser.
Another way IE remains privileged is that it looks like potentially all Microsoft products other than Office 2007 may still include hard-coded links to IE. This appears to be true even for the upcoming release of Office. This is the kind of “remedy” that so often seem ludicrous in hindsight. It is also at odds with a person who has already chosen to use another browser.
Comments more specifically tied to the exact language of the documents can be found at Harvey Anderson’s blog.
The importance of the myriad of details makes it very difficult to predict how effective the proposed remedies will be, or the extent of any side-effects. In any case, addressing the issues raised above would improve the proposed remedy significantly.
August 5th, 2009
Jesse and Elizabeth will be at Mozilla today to talk about building the open web. This talk will be streamed over the web at air.mozilla.com. I hope to archive this as well, especially given the short notice.
Jesse and Elizabeth are planning on talking about ” the ideas of social movements and engagement as they apply to the Internet, . . . draw[ing] upon successful examples to discuss the factors involved in engaging large amounts of people to support an issue. We will discuss what is needed to communicate complex ideas in a more accessible fashion, and examine ways to inspire people to think more about these ideas, and to get them to actually do something about it.
Jesse Dylan is a filmmaker and idea generator. He has worked with organizations such as RED, Bono’s one campaign, the Clinton Global initiative, and TED. He is the founder of Lybba, a medical non-profit seeking to provide medical information openly and accessibly on the web. Jesse created the “Yes We Can” video in support of the Obama campaign, which garnered over 100 million views.
Elizabeth Stark is a free culture advocate. She teaches at Yale University, founded the Harvard Free Culture group, and most recently produced the inaugural Open Video Conference in NYC. She has worked for years engaging a variety of communities and organizations around the ideas free knowledge and cultural participation.
August 1st, 2009
In the early 2000’s about a million people would download a release of the Mozilla Application Suite, which was our product offering before Firefox and Thunderbird. We were extremely proud of this number. For 2000 or 2001 it was a very surprising number, quite large for an open-source consumer product. It was a tiny number compared to IE of course, and that product never cracked the barrier into general consumer awareness or adoption. But everyone who heard that number was astonished. In fact, that million-a-release download number helped us obtain some early support when we formed the Mozilla Foundation a couple of years later.
With Firefox, we had a million downloads well before the product reached a 1.0 phase — something like 3 million people were using Firefox as we came up to the 1.0 release in the fall of 2004. That’s partly how we sensed we had something big on our hands during the long summer of 2004 trying to finish the 1.0 version.
Today we crossed the billion download mark for Firefox. That’s an astonishing number. It reflects both the popularity of Firefox and the enormous growth of the web. The latter — the growth of the Internet — is not so surprising. The Internet is a fundamental tool for human interaction, it will grow for a while yet. The Firefox number is something else. Born of the impossible, coming into existence because it had to be, from a small band of seemingly outdated browser-centric dreamers to hundreds of millions of people.
Wow.
July 25th, 2009
Microsoft and the European Commission have announced they are discussing a proposal for Microsoft to include a browser ballet in European versions of the Windows operating system. The ballot approach has many positive possibilities. However, the precise implementation will determine if the ballot approach is likely to be a useful remedy. For example:
- Does the ballot apply to the copies of Windows that go through the “OEM channel” (approximately 95%) and are installed by the OEMS on computers when people buy them?
- Will Microsoft’s update service present this ballot choice to people who already have PCs ?
- Microsoft’s statement says their proposal will allow people to “easily install competing browsers from the Web.” It’s not clear yet if the user can set another browser as the default browser — that is, the browser that opens up when one selects a URL. If the ballot screen doesn’t allow one to make something other than IE the default then the so-called “remedy” looks pretty flimsy.
- Can Microsoft impose terms and requirements on products or providers listed in the ballot?
The answers to these types of questions will have a huge impact on the number of consumers who actually see a choice.
It is also critical that Microsoft respect the choice of people once they have chosen other browsers, and that neither Windows nor IE nor the Windows update system are used as tools to undo the choice of another browser. We would like to see a commitment to respecting these choices as well.
July 21st, 2009
Here’s the business approach of the then-current CEO of a very well-known Internet company. (He’s gone now.)
- get eyeballs looking at my site
- find or create content that keeps them at my site as long as possible
- monetize them as much as possible while they’re there.
There are times when each of us will be happy to be a pair of eyeballs with a wallet attached, to be a “monitizable unit.” In our physical lives this is a little like going to the mall. I may “window-shop” and I may enjoy a comfortable environment. But there’s no doubt in anyone’s mind that the point of the mall is to for people to purchase things.
There are times, however, when being a wallet attached to eyeballs is not enough. The possibilities available to us online should be broader, just as they are in the physical world. Sometimes we choose to skip the mall and go to the library, or the town square or the park or the museum or the playground or the school. Sometimes we choose activities that are not about consumption, but are about learning and creation and improving the environment around us.
We have public spaces for these activities in our physical lives. We have public assets, and the idea of building some part of our infrastructure for public benefit as a necessary complement to private economic activity.
Mozilla strives to bring this public aspect , this sense of compete human beings, the goal of enriching the full range of human activities to the Internet. We envision a world where the Internet is built to support these varied aspects of the human experience; a world where robust economic activity lives alongside vibrant social, civic and individual enrichment.
We’re building this world so that we can all live in it.
July 14th, 2009
What’s the most interesting thing about the Internet today? To me, it’s not an application, it’s not a technology, it’s not a characteristic like “social.” The most interesting thing about the Internet is me. My experiences. And you. And your experiences.
I can name a set of applications that are important to me today. Tomorrow and next month and next year that set will be different. The things I want to do will be different. The types of information I want to access and share will vary. I will want to integrate some information across all the applications and sites I access. I will want to maintain some information under my control and share subsets of it selectively with web applications. I’ll want to be able to access a website or its information with a very precise and rich identity, so the site delivers a highly personalized response. Other times I’ll want a general identity or anonymity so I see information which I can filter for myself.
In other words, I don’t want to be the invisible part of my life. Not in my physical life and not in my online life. I want to have a presence that is me. That presence won’t be a pre-existing web application. It won’t be a number or an identity managed by a web application. That presence will be an odd collection of information and approaches and unexpected connections that is the online manifestation of who I am. It will be ideosyncratic, it will be flawed, but it will be me.
July 6th, 2009
Starting today, July 6: 11am Pacific time is the new time for the weekly Monday project -wide status meeting.
We’re moving the meeting 2 hours earlier in the day to make it easier for European contributors in particular to participate. It still isn’t perfect, especially in Asia, but we haven’t magically found a time that works in all time zones.
This is the first change to the time of this meeting we’ve made in at least a decade. We’ve been meeting at 1pm Pacific time since mozilla.org was tiny, many of us were employed by Netscape and long before we had even started developing the products we know today as Firefox and Thunderbird. In fact, we set this time when SeaMonkey (officially released in June 2002 as the “Mozilla Application Suite 1.0″ or “Mozilla 1.0″) was still years in the future.
June 30th, 2009
Firefox 3.5: fonts, speed, privacy enhancements and much more.
Available tomorrow by download or by using Firefox’s “check for updates” feature, which is found in the “Help” menu.
Plus “Shirotoko Shock” — a fun, easy way to be part of the launch!
June 26th, 2009
The role of Firefox:
Firefox enables the web and web applications to be ever more robust and exciting. The web enables Firefox to be more flexible, more agile and more responsive. Firefox builds an experience where the center of the entire system remains a person. Not a website, not a business, not a piece of software. The most important actor in the entire picture is a human being; an individual. You. Me. Each person living part of his or her life online.
That’s the last paragraph of my last post. A bunch of people said I should have put made it the first paragraph, so here it is.