One of our Mozilla Campus Reps came up with the idea last year, and we recently launched the Mozilla “On the Street” interviews project!

With the Firefox 3 release just around the corner, I thought now would be the perfect time to get our Campus Reps out there to: A.) find out what people have to say about Firefox in general, and B.) spread the word about Firefox 3.

It’s a busy time for a lot of our Campus Reps, but we hope to get some great video footage before they take off for the summer. We have students from over 30 countries representing Mozilla at their colleges and universities, so it will be great to see their interviews from cities and campuses around the world!

I think this is a project that we can eventually open up to the entire Mozilla community and provide everyone with the opportunity to be a broadcast reporter for a day. :-)  But first, let’s see what our Mozilla Campus Reps can come up with…

As promised, we’ll continue to highlight some of the incredibly cool and useful Firefox 3 features you can expect to see.   Today’s installment on Firefox 3’s new bookmarking system is brought to you once again by Deb Richardson, the author of the about:mozilla newsletter.   Deb provides a clear explanation of the many improvements you’ll see, including:

• bookmark stars which allow for one-click bookmarking
• tags that allow you to add extra relevant information to a bookmark so it’s easier to find and organize
• smart bookmark folders or “saved searches” that automatically update when you add new items matching that search to your bookmarks

 Firefox 3’s bookmark dialog box

Take a look at her post for more details, as well as a great how-to.  I’ve found that I am using Firefox 3’s bookmarking with renewed gusto thanks to the little star and intuitive organization and search!

Look out for Firefox…he (or is it a she?) is on the loose at ROFLCon!  ROFLCon is a fabulous celebration of all the goofiness that the Web has helped unleash.  Mozilla stepped forward to help the conference because it’s just this type of creativity (or bizarreness depending on who you talk to!) that makes the Web so wonderful!

Firefox has been seen rubbing elbows with the Tron Guy and more.   You never know where Firefox will show up next!

Update courtesy of Ronaldo Lemos:  7,400 people attended FISL!

Mitchell Baker, Chris Hofmann, Chris Blizzard, Taras Glek, Marcio Galli and myself just wrapped up an amazing visit to Porto Alegre for FISL, Brazil’s largest open source conference.  The conference drew over 6,000 people from Brazil, Argentina, Portugal, Angola and more!  I wanted to extend a huge thank you to Bruno Magrani, Ronaldo Lemos, Mario Rinaldi, Clauber Stipkovic Halic, Giullermo Movia of Argentina, Felipe Gomes, Antonio Gomes, Andre Pedralho, Fernando Silveira, Marcelo Terres, Juliano Bittencourt and everyone else who helped make our experience so great!

Some of the highlights:

• We met many, many, many passionate Firefox users.  In fact, 6,000 of them and not nearly enough Firefox t-shirts to go around.  You can imagine the stampede!
• Our Brazilian contributors helped conduct a workshop on the various ways to get involved with Firefox and Mozilla.  Despite the heat and far off location we had a great showing of people. Stay tuned for video!
• In line with the Brazilian culture, we had a great community party to thank our Brazilian contributors and get to know some new people.
• Juliano Bittencourt of the One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) project took us to a local deployment where we met students who’ve been enjoying, customizing and learning with the computers.  It was pretty amazing to see OLPC project coming to life.

It was great to see all the contribution that is going on in Brazil and to meet new volunteers.  Thanks for the hard work!

Deb Richardson, author of the about:mozilla newsletter, wrote one of the better explanations I’ve seen on the “AwesomeBar,” Firefox 3’s revamped URL bar.   It’s not the most humble of names, but if you check out Deb’s post you’ll see why it’s earned it.

In Deb’s words, here’s a quick snapshot of what makes Firefox 3’s URL bar just so awesome:

Dubbed the “AwesomeBar”, it lets you use the URL field of your browser to do a keyword search of your history and bookmarks. No longer do you have to know the domain of the page you’re looking for — the AwesomeBar will match what you’re typing (even multiple words!) against the URLs, page titles, and tags in your bookmarks and history, returning results sorted by “frecency” (an algorithm combining frequency + recency).

Not only that, but the drop-list results show you the page’s favicon, the full title, the URL, and whether you have bookmarked and/or tagged the page in a richly formatted two-line display.

Example:  I start by typing “ginger”, and AwesomeBar searches through my history and bookmarks to return everything that matches that keyword, showing the first six and letting me scroll through the rest. You’ll notice here that several of the results are bookmarked (blue star icon on the right), and tagged (tag icon). The sites’ favicons are displayed on the left, making it really easy to scan through the results if you know what site you’re looking for in particular.

Check out Deb’s post for more on the AwesomeBar and check back here for more on the cool things to expect in Firefox 3!

Editor’s note: Mozilla released a security and stability update for Firefox 2.x users today. Check out the Mozilla Developer News announcement reposted below for more details.

Firefox 2.0.0.14 security and stability update now available for download

As part of Mozilla Corporation’s ongoing stability and security update process, Firefox 2.0.0.14 is now available for Windows, Mac, and Linux for free download from http://getfirefox.com.

We strongly recommend that all Firefox users upgrade to this latest release. If you already have Firefox 2.x, you will receive an automated update notification within 24 to 48 hours. This update can also be applied manually by selecting “Check for Updates…” from the Help menu.

For a list of changes and more information, please review the Firefox 2.0.0.14 Release Notes.

If you are still running Firefox 1.5.0.x, you are highly encouraged to upgrade to the Firefox 2 series as Mozilla ceased supporting Firefox 1.5.0.x in May 2007. Simply choose “Check for Updates…” from the Help menu to begin the upgrade process.

Editor’s Note: I’d like to share a guest post from Ronaldo Lemos and Bruno Magrani of the Center for Technology & Society at FGV Law School, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. 

Bruno Magrani

Next week, Mozilla will participate in the 9th Fórum Internacional do Software Livre (International Free Software Forum - FISL) in Porto Alegre, Brazil. This is the second time that Mozilla will be in Brazil on an “official” visit. This time, the group includes Mitchell Baker (Mozilla’s Chairperson), Chris Blizzard, Marcio Galli, Mary Colvig, Taras Glek and Chris Hofmann. In their visit, they will be in touch with a vibrant and growing community of free software users, developers and enthusiasts. This is a great opportunity both for Mozilla and for the Brazilian community to get together and work with Firefox and other initiatives that promote the core values of the net, including openness and freedom.

Ronaldo Lemos and I have been helping support Mozilla’s presence here in Brazil and at FISL.  This is not the first time that our institution, the Center for Technology & Society at the FGV Law School in Rio de Janeiro has participated in the Forum. We’ve worked closely with FISL in the past few years and we launched the Brazilian branch of the Creative Commons project at the Forum in March 2004. This was an unforgettable event, I believe both for us, and for the more than 1,500 participants attending the launch, anxious to hear Minister Gilberto Gil, Marcelo Tas, Terry Fisher, Lawrence Lessig, Luis Nassif, André Midani, Claudio Prado, Joaquim Falcão, and so many others who care a lot about the future of the internet. A video of the launch can be watched here.

This year we are very happy to be back again at the Free Software Forum (this will be our 4th year at the event). Besides organizing/participating in a few panels, we will be there to support Mozilla´s visit the best way we can, including their workshop. We are very honored to do this, especially because we believe Mozilla will find in Brazil a place where not only we share common values, but also, put them into practice, thanks to our natural “tropicalist” mindset, and to the fact that the meaning of “openness” is very strong for us. One symbol of that is the fact that President Lula is expected at the Forum this year, and Brazil is well-known worldwide for its support of free software and free culture. Without further ado, we look forward to a great conference and Mozilla visit!

The Firefox Support team (support.mozilla.com, or SUMO for short) would like to invite you to our first SUMO day! This Friday, starting at 7 AM PDT, we’ll be hosting a day all about getting to know SUMO and learning how to use our site to help other Firefox users enjoy their favorite browser.

If you haven’t already, this is a great opportunity for you to get involved with Mozilla, regardless of your interests or expertise. We need people to write articles, create screenshots, correct spelling and grammar, answer people’s questions in the forum, or interact directly with Firefox users in live chat — just to name a few of the many ways you could help us out. Even if you’re just curious to learn more about the project and don’t really plan on participating, we’d be really excited to have you joining us on Friday.

Of course, we’d be even more thrilled if you stayed with us throughout the Firefox 3 launch, which is going to be an exciting event for the SUMO project. Have a look at the SUMO Day home page for more information and please pop by on Friday!

[Mozilla announced Firefox 3 Beta 5 today, April 2 at approximately 10:10am PT. See Mike Beltzner’s comprehensive post from DevNews, crossposted below.]

Firefox 3 beta 5 now available for download

Please note: Firefox 3 Beta 5 is a public preview release intended for developer testing and community feedback. It includes new features as well as dramatic improvements to performance, memory usage and speed. We recommend that you read the release notes and known issues before installing this beta.

Firefox 3 Beta 5 is now available for download. This milestone is focused on testing the core functionality provided by many new features and changes to the platform scheduled for Firefox 3. Ongoing planning for Firefox 3 can be followed at the Firefox 3 Planning Center, as well as in mozilla.dev.planning and on irc.mozilla.org in #granparadiso.

New features and changes in this milestone that require feedback include:

• Improvements to the user interface based on user feedback, including changes to the look and feel on Windows Vista, Windows XP, Mac OS X and Linux.
• Changes and fixes for new features such as the location bar autocomplete, bookmark backup and restore, full page zoom, and others, based on feedback from our community.
• Fixes and improvements to platform features to improve security, web compatabilty and stability.
• Continued performance improvements: changes to our JavaScript engine as well as profile guided optimization continues to improve performance over previous releases as measured by the popular SunSpider test from Apple, and in the speed of web applications like Google Mail and Zoho Office.

(You can find out more about all of these features in the “What’s New” section of the release notes.)

Testers can download Firefox 3 Beta 5 builds for Windows, Mac OS X and Linux in 45 different languages. Developers should also read the Firefox 3 for Developers article on the Mozilla Developer Center.

Note: Please do not link directly to the download site. Instead we strongly encourage you to link to this Firefox 3 Beta 5 milestone announcement so that everyone will know what this milestone is, what they should expect, and who should be downloading to participate in testing at this stage of development.

The Firefox 3 T-shirt design contest has wrapped up and we’re excited to announce the winners! Congratulations Tracie Andrews from the UK, for having created this winning design which will be featured in the Mozilla Store as the official Firefox 3 T-shirt:

The runners up were Kevin Weagle, Ali Riyaz, Mathew Anderson, and Brett Rex Cannell.

We received close to 2,000 submissions representing many hours of hard work from a global design community that came together on the Flickr contest group. Selecting the top 5 was a very challenging task as there were many great designs to choose from. We’re proud of the talent that has come through in support of Firefox and are looking into ways to “open source” these designs so that they are publicly available for print. Thanks again to everyone for your support and creative contributions throughout this process. Please join me in congratulating all the winners!