New Features, Less Interruption For You On The Web

During the last weeks, thousands of Mozillians have coded and tested the next version of Firefox to a fare-thee-well. A few days ago, we were proud to finally release Firefox 20, in which we have fixed about 300 bugs. But we also added new features: You can now open Private Windows that allow you to surf the web without saving any information about which pages you’ve visited. We have also added a new download button to your toolbar. Last but not least, Firefox is now able to open PDF files directly without using a plugin like Reader.

Find out more about the new features.

Samsung, Mozilla And Our Browser Engine
Firefox is already fast by default, but at Mozilla Research, we want to make it even faster by experimenting with what’s next when it comes to the core technology powering the Web browser. Since we need to take advantage of tomorrow’s faster computing architectures, we’ve recently teamed up with Samsung on an advanced technology Web browser engine that is called Servo. This program is basically a clone of Firefox that has been built from the ground up on modern hardware. It’s been written in a language that prevents entire classes of errors that lead to crashes and security vulnerabilities.

Find out when the first major revision of Rust will be completed in Brendan Eich’s blog post.

Public Mozillians Profile Mozillians.org is our community directory that our core contributors use to find and contact each other. Several of you have asked us for an option to share their profiles with other people who aren’t registered and we’ve listened to them: From now on, you can also display your profile publicly by using the new privacy controls. You can choose which information you want to be on your publicly viewable profile. If you want your profile to remain visible to only Mozillians, you do not need to make any changes.

Read William Reynolds blog post, in which he explains how to change the visibility for your profile.

Preparing for the Next Chapter
When Gary Kovacs became the CEO of Mozilla in 2010, he joined us to make a dramatic pivot – to move Mozilla from the desktop browser world into the mobile ecosystem with Firefox for Android and Firefox OS. We have accomplished so many things since Gary joined us. Last Wednesday, Mitchell Baker, Chair of the Mozilla Foundation, announced that he will step down as CEO later this year. This is the perfect time to thank him for his contributions to our cause, and for bringing new things to Mozilla.

Find out more about his accomplishments in Mitchell Baker’s blog post

Thoughts on Mozilla Research
Brendan Eich, inventor of the JavaScript language, gave a brief talk at the Mozilla Research Party, which happened to fall on the celebration of Mozilla’s 15th anniversary. In his talk, he talked about his memories, but also about his thoughts on Mozilla Research. He started off by stating the main problem: Software, especially “in the large”, remains quite challenging. In his opinion, calling software an art should not relieve us from advancing computer science. In the past, we already found that out: Because code kind of rusts over time, Brendan declared it time to rebuild major parts of the code back in 1998. Today, he designates this near-total rewrite as a big mistake.

Find out how this mistake hurt Netscape but helped Mozilla, Firefox’s predecessors.

Mozilla Summit 2013
Every once in the while, the core contributors of Mozilla from all around the world get together in one place. This is called the Summit. This year, we’re doing something different: We want to have three locations with up to 700 people, some shared content and some innovative ways to join the three locales. If you’re a registered Mozillian, you have already received an e-mail with instructions on how to be considered for an invitation. Till the deadline on the 17th of April, you can still apply for an invitation that will be sent out in May.

Read more about Mitchell Baker’s greatest hope for the Summit.

Photo of the Week

Mozilla Festival in Bhopal, India. Find some more pictures of the event on Flickr.

Upcoming events
* April 12-14 – Cluj-Napoca, Romania: Mozilla Meetup Romania 2013
* April 13 – Toronto, Canada: Open Web Open Mic
* April 13 – Utah, US: Mozilla Utah MozCafe
* April 13 – Durgapur, India: MozConnect-Durgapur
* April 13 – Long Mountain, Mauritius: Webmaker
* April 16 – Bogotá, Colombia: Mozilla Colombia Meetup
* Find even more near you on the Events Calendar

Get Involved
These are just some of the available contribution opportunities. Learn more about other ways to get involved and find other Mozillians in our community who share your interests.

About about:mozilla
The newsletter is written by Mozilla’s Community Engagement team and is published every Tuesday. For more on what has been happening this week also checkout the Mozilla Project Meeting. If you have anything you would like to include in our next issue, please contact: about-mozilla[at]mozilla[dot]com or send us a status message on mozilla.status.net or a tweet @aboutmozilla. You can also subscribe to the email version.

Have a good week folks and keep rocking the Web!

15 Years of Mozilla – Celebrate With Us!

Fifteen years ago, the source code of Netscape was published as open source – this marked the birth of the Mozilla project. And also made this day a special day: It’s Mozilla’s 15th birthday and we want to celebrate with you today. You can attend one of the three events in India, France or Serbia. Or you could submit your personal webstory and tweet it with the hashtag #webstory. No matter if it’s just a tweet, a video or an image – we’ll be retweeting and responding throughout the day to amplify these stories around the world.

Help us marking the beginning of our year-long celebration.

Checkboxes That Kill Your Product
It’s time for us to do some scrubbing and cleaning of the Firefox settings – this is Alex Limi’s conclusion when he looks at some of the checkboxes in the current version of Firefox. In his latest blog post, he takes a look at the settings and found some things that we need to fix: There are too many options that will render the browser unusable to most people by preventing the browser to load any images, disabling JavaScript and making all buttons disappear.

Read more about how we got to this point with Firefox and learn more about the settings that you should better not change.

Get Excited with Firefox OS
The Mobile World Congress 2013 in Barcelona was definitely a success! Thanks to our awesome team of supporters, we were able to show everyone the power of Firefox OS, our upcoming mobile operating system. Although the congress is over, we are only just getting started! The excitement of Firefox OS is still in the air. If you missed Jay Sullivan’s demonstration at MWC, we have good news for you: It’s available online.

Watch (or re-watch) it on air.mozilla.org to see how Firefox OS will change the way you interact with the web on the go.

Mozilla Paris: Finally United!
Gold leaf walls surrounding and uniting Mozillians – that’s the best way to describe the new Mozilla office in Paris, the City of Light. This day marks the first day in the office, which is inside a historic building with fascinating architectural details. But until our grand opening celebration in June, we still have lots of things to do (and to polish). Since all Mozilla spaces aren’t just designed for the paid stuff but also for volunteers (like you!), you can also feel free to come by and code, design, research, talk or have a drink.

Learn more about the Mozilla Space in Paris and when the grand opening celebration happens.

Find Things Faster With Firefox
Finding things on the Internet with Firefox is very simple – you just have to enter the phrase you’re looking for into the Awesome Bar and hit the enter key. But sometimes, when you’re busy, every second counts. And to help you find stuff even faster, there are four handy search shortcuts that are easy to use. No matter if you want to search with the Awesome Bar without having to reach for your mouse or touchpad, or if you are looking for a link on a specific website.

Find out how to use the shortcuts on our cozy The Den blog.

Photo of the Week

Meetup of the Hispanic Mozilla community in Perú. Find some more pictures on Flickr.

Meet Some Mozillians
Mozilla says bonjour to Konstantina Papadea. Read more about how she contributes to Mozilla.

Upcoming events
* April 5 – Subotica, Serbia: Serbian Community Meetup
* April 5 & 6 – Istanbul, Turkey: Free Software and Linux Days 2013
* April 6 – Athens, Greece: Athens Webmaking 101
* April 6 – Cluj-Napoca, Romania: Selenium Unconference
* April 6 – Nashik, India: Webmaker init() Nasik
* April 7 – Mumbai, India: BarCamp Mumbai 2013
* Learn more about these and more events or find even more near you on the Events Calendar

Get Involved
These are just some of the available contribution opportunities. Learn more about other ways to get involved and find other Mozillians in our community who share your interests.

About about:mozilla
The newsletter is written by Mozilla’s Community Engagement team and is published every Tuesday. For more on what has been happening this week also checkout the Mozilla Project Meeting. If you have anything you would like to include in our next issue, please contact: about-mozilla[at]mozilla[dot]com or send us a status message on mozilla.status.net or a tweet @aboutmozilla. You can also subscribe to the email version.

Have a good week folks and keep rocking the Web!

Introducing Open Badges 1.0

Imagine that you could earn badges for skills you learn online to show them to your friends, teachers or perhaps your future employer. Well, you no longer have to imagine: After more than two years of hard work, we are proud to announce that Mozilla Open Badges 1.0, an open platform that recognizes learning, has finally been released. Because we all learn things in a wide variety of ways these days, there have to be more opportunities to gain formal recognition for these skills. And since there was never a way to take all these skills and show them off in one place before, Open Badge changes that! Find out more about how you can get started and earn your first badge now.

Firefox OS Simulator – Previewing Version 3.0
Three months ago, we told you how to test Firefox OS on your computer using the Firefox OS Simulator. We’ve made a lot of progress since, and now, we’d like to show you a preview of the upcoming new version. One of the biggest new features is that you are able to push apps installed in the simulator directly to your Firefox OS device, if you have one. And you can finally rotate the simulator or validate your code. Last but not least, the user interface of Firefox OS has been updated too. Be among the first to test the preview and give us some feedback!

Interviews About Contributing to Firefox
This semester at Michigan State University, a group of students will be working on a senior capstone project with Mozilla. Jared Wein shows them how to fix bugs and improve the multi-touch gestures in Firefox. And they’ve made a lot of progress! A couple of days ago, Jared sat down with the three students and asked them about their experience and what they thought about contributing to open-source software. Go ahead and watch the interviews on his blog.

And the Game On Competition Winners Are…
This year’s “Game On” competition was all about pushing the frontiers of gaming on the web. And now, after we have received more than 165 awesome entries, with competitors from Morocco to Russia to Canada, we are thrilled to announce the winners! Many took advantage of new open web innovations to showcase new gaming potential on the web, like the grand prize winning game “Zumbie: Blind Rage”. The best “hackable game” Code Injection allows you to inject real code to move your character around. Check out (and play) the winning games or other entries on the Mozilla blog.

Why Cameron Switched (Back) to Firefox
Cameron Paul is a software engineer who likes maths, music and computers. Firefox had been his browser of choice for years, but in 2008, he switched to Google Chrome, because he thought that Firefox was bloated and slow. Now, he’s having issues with general slowness in Chrome too. So he decided to use Firefox again and noticed that it got faster and has more developer tools. “I honestly believe Mozilla is committed to freedom and privacy on the web. Google is committed to making money and knowing everything I do.”, he says in his blog post. Read his full story or let us know if you know somebody else who switched (back) to Firefox.

Photo of the Week

Volunteers at the Hive learning network in Athens. Cheese!

Upcoming events
* March 19 – Malaga, Spain: Firefox OS Talk and Hackday
* March 22 – Toronto, Canada: Game Night
* March 23 – Mombasa, Kenya: Firefox OS App day
* March 23 – Puerto Ordaz, Venezuela: Document Freedom Day
* March 23 – Makati City, Philippines: SMART Game Development Conference
* Learn more about these and more events or find even more near you on the Events Calendar

Get Involved
These are just some of the available contribution opportunities. Learn more about other ways to get involved and find other Mozillians in our community who share your interests.

About about:mozilla
The newsletter is written by Mozilla’s Community Engagement team and is published every Tuesday. For more on what has been happening this week also checkout the Mozilla Project Meeting. If you have anything you would like to include in our next issue, please contact: about-mozilla[at]mozilla[dot]com or send us a status message on mozilla.status.net or a tweet @aboutmozilla. You can also subscribe to the email version.

Have a good week folks and keep rocking the Web!

Brand New: Mozilla to Mobile OSes: Fox You.

Unlike the system icons or logos of Safari and Chrome, Firefox’s has always been the most memorable, with an adorable fox wrapping its tail around the globe. Since we didn’t want to reuse the exact same logo for Firefox OS, we worked with Wolff Olins to unleash the fox with an awesome branding. Here you can see the first drawings of the fast and powerful fox. Why don’t you take a look at the finished illustrations and the different poses of the fox?

Wrap Long Lines & Watch Videos at Ludicrous Speeds
Who doesn’t love a sneak preview? Well, we do! In his latest two blog posts, Jared Wein tells you about two upcoming features that you can already test in a bleeding-edge Nightly build< /a> of Firefox. The first feature allows you to read long .txt files easier than ever before by adapting the line length to the size of the browser window. The second addition allows you to adjust the playback speed of a video by simply right-clicking on it. So now you can watch videos in slow motion, high speed or ludicrous speed.

Webmakers Shake Athens & MozFest 2013
Matt Thompson, Chief Storyteller of Mozilla, has got so many new updates regarding the Mozilla Webmaker project for you this week! The most exciting thing that is new this week is a video that explains what the “web literacy standard” is and how you can get involved. The second update is from Hive Athens, a new webmaking network in Greece that drew over a hundred kids to multiple activity stations for webmaking (and doing the Harlem Shake). Last but not least, Matt tells you the date for this year’s Mozilla Festival in London, an event that provides a mix of making and learning mayhem.

Making HTML5 work with Firefox OS
Christian Heilmann just got back from CeBIT in Germany, the world’s largest and most international computer expo. His part of the show was to give a talk about Firefox OS and what it means to HTML 5. He went through the different parts that make Firefox OS special – for example to search for apps by content. For example, you enter the name of a band and get Music, Video and Lyrics apps. He also came up with an interesting simile: Find out why Firefox OS is the Volkswagen Beetle of smartphones in his blog post.

Font Inspector in Firefox Nightly
If you’re a developer, you probably already know about the element inspector that allows you to test changes to your websites and view the source code of other pages easier than ever before. Paul Rouget, a Mozillian since 2003, now built a font inspector you can access in the inspector. It shows you the font used by the selected element, its name and a preview. Find out more about the font inspector on his blog.

Video of the Week

This is the Mozilla edition of the Harlem Shake in Greece. Woohoo!

Upcoming events
* March 14 & 15 – Munich, Germany: UX Munich
* March 16 – Sucre, Bolivia: Firefox OS App Workshop
* March 16 – Tunis, Tunisia: WoMoz Café
* March 16 – Zamboanga City, Philippines: Zamboanga City goes Mobile – Open Source Style
* March 17 – Haldia, India: MozCamp @ HIT
* Learn more about these events or find even more near you on the Events Calendar

Get Involved
These are just some of the available contribution opportunities. Learn more about other ways to get involved and find other Mozillians in our community who share your interests.

About about:mozilla
The newsletter is written by Mozilla’s Community Engagement team and is published every Tuesday. For more on what has been happening this week also checkout the Mozilla Project Meeting. If you have anything you would like to include in our next issue, please contact: about-mozilla[at]mozilla[dot]com or send us a status message on mozilla.status.net or a tweet @aboutmozilla. You can also subscribe to the email version.

Have a good week folks and keep rocking the Web!

Redesigning the Tab Bar: More Progress!

More than six months ago, Jared Wein worked on the upcoming redesign of the tab bar. When Matthew Noorenberghe took over the work, only Windows users were able to test the new curved tabs. Now, after lots of lines of code, you are finally able to test them on both OS X and Linux. Thanks to the many optimizations, these new tabs also close faster than before. Find out how to try out the curvy tabs.

Winners of the January 2013 Dev Derby
Last month, we wanted to see what you could do with drag and drop interaction, and we’ve received more than 18 awesome entries. The judges have decided on the three winners: Seba made it to the first place with his interactive story called Pete’s Adventure.

Webmaker: Popcorn Maker and Cloudmashing
Matt Thompson, Chief Storyteller for Mozilla, summed up what’s happening with Mozilla Webmaker this week: A new feature for our Popcorn Maker, which allows you to enhance, remix and share web video in your browser, is about to be released. The sequencing feature allows you to edit multiple video and audio clips from across the web and publish them. Like copy and paste for web media. Find out how to try it out for yourself now.

Mozilla’s DNA and Mobile World Congress
Tristan Nitot is now back from the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, at which Mozilla has introduced Firefox OS. Thanks to HTML5, we’re building a mobile Web ecosystem, with applications that can run on multiple mobile operating systems. In his blog post, he doesn’t also talk about what open source and non-for-profit means for the users and developers, but he also talks about you and the other volunteers. Because Mozilla would not exist without participation of volunteers in every aspects of Mozilla’s work.

Mozilla Tagalog Localization Marathon in Manila
Philippines has rich linguistic diversity: Today, you can hear smattering of at least five languages in Tagalog, the widely used Philippine dialect. In 2010, Seth Bindernagel kick-started the localization of Mozilla Tagalog. While 42% have already been translated, it looks very promising. This quarter’s translation efforts will be kicked off with a Translation Marathon in April. Learn more about how you can take part in Arky’s blog post.

Photo of the Week

Firefox has got your back! Learn more about the Firefox Arena Football Mexico event or take a look at some more pictures.

Meet Some Mozillians
Mozilla says bonjour to Joanna Mazgaj, Mozilla Bangladesh and the new members of the ReMo Council. Read more about how they contribute to Mozilla.

Upcoming events
* March 7 – Santa Cruz, Bolivia: Firefox OS Conference
* March 9 – Tunis, Tunisia: WoMoz Café
* March 10 – Cluj-Napoca, Romania: WebQA Selenium workshop
* Learn more about these events or find even more near you on the Events Calendar

Get Involved
These are just some of the available contribution opportunities. Learn more about other ways to get involved and find other Mozillians in our community who share your interests.

About about:mozilla
The newsletter is written by Mozilla’s Community Engagement team and is published every Tuesday. For more on what has been happening this week also checkout the Mozilla Project Meeting. If you have anything you would like to include in our next issue, please contact: about-mozilla[at]mozilla[dot]com or send us a status message on mozilla.status.net or a tweet @aboutmozilla. You can also subscribe to the email version.

Have a good week folks and keep rocking the Web!

Mozilla Unlocks the Power of the Web

This will be one of the most exciting weeks ever! One year ago, we promised to change the way you interact with the web on the go. And Sunday, at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, we announced the release of the probably best smartphone operating system ever. (If we do say so ourselves.) While the first Firefox OS phones are quite powerful and look pretty fancy, they are also affordable in the developing world: At less than $100, it’s ten times more affordable than many other popular smartphones.

Firefox 19 and its PDF viewer
A few days ago, we were proud to release Firefox 19, the latest version of your favorite browser. It comes with some new features, but the most useful one is definitely the built-in PDF viewer. Now, you can read PDFs directly within your browser and for example check out a menu card from your favorite restaurant. Without having to interrupt your browsing experience with extra clicks or downloads.

Helping or Hurting?
When Christian Heilmann started as a web developer, there was no such thing as CSS. He had to use complicated tables for layout to display a site correctly. But there were still browsers that didn’t render the pages right – which led to the use of massive code snippets. According to Heilmann, the mistakes of the earlier days are being repeated: Many websites expect scripts to be flawlessly executed, which can be a problem. Find out how even Google experienced that we rely far too much on them for incredibly simple tasks.

New Features On the ReMo Platform
During the last month, the Mozilla Reps Web Development team has been working on improving reps.mozilla.org and last week, Pierros Papadeas showed off the two best and new functionalities: You can now see all events in a handy timeline to visually identify events worldwide and through different time periods. And if you are a vouched Mozillian, you can log into the portal – even if you are not a Rep! Find out why this is useful and get to know about the other features in his blog post.

UI Improvements in Firefox for Android
In Lucas Rocha’s latest blog post, it’s all about the recent changes made to the user interface of Firefox for Android. One of them is the two-way tabs tray which now displays the tabs horizontally whenever it improves the use of your screen’s space. The Firefox User Experience team also worked hard on streamlining the look of Firefox: It should feel like the same browser wherever you use it. You can test these new features in a bleeding-edge Nightly build.

Photo of the Week

Mozilla Representatives at the Mobile World Conference 2013. Follow us on our Yammer network for more pictures and news by signing up with your vouched Mozillians e-mail.

Meet Some Mozillians
Mozilla says bonjour to Bas Schouten, Jovanka Gulicoska, Mexico and our little surprise guest. Read more about how they contribute to Mozilla.

Upcoming events
* March 15 – Santa Clara, CA: PyCon US
* March 23 – Cambridge, MA: LibrePlanet
* Find more events near you on the Events Calendar

Get Involved
These are just some of the available contribution opportunities. Learn more about other ways to get involved and find other Mozillians in our community who share your interests.

About about:mozilla
The newsletter is written by Mozilla’s Community Engagement team and is published every Tuesday. For more on what has been happening this week also checkout the Mozilla Project Meeting. If you have anything you would like to include in our next issue, please contact: about-mozilla[at]mozilla[dot]com or send us a status message on mozilla.status.net or a tweet @aboutmozilla. You can also subscribe to the email version.

Have a good week folks and keep rocking the Web!

WebKit: An Objective View
If you love reading online news websites, you’ve probably stumbled across something like this: “Oh no, Opera will move from Presto to WebKit!”. While this seems to be pretty alarming, it’s hard to have an objective view on this. But luckily, Robert Nyman and Rob Hawkes wrote an objective blog post, in which they explain what WebKit actually means, how new features get into it and what it actually means that Opera moves to WebKit.

Summer of Code 2013

Google Summer of Code (“SoC”) is an annual program that pays students to work on free software projects over the summer. This program has already led to some great results: Tilt for example also used to be a SoC project. Mozilla has been invited to participate in SoC each year since the program began in 2005, and for this year, we are already collecting interesting 8-week tasks. If you can think of one that you might be able to guide a student through, read Gervase Markham’s blog post to find out how to propose your idea.

SUMO in 2013: Firefox for Android
David Tenser’s series of blog posts continues and this week, it’s all about Firefox Android and SUMO. The goals can be summarized in three words: Community, mobilization and, oh, community! One of the aims is to allow contributors to help others on their mobile while for example waiting for the bus to arrive in the morning. But this year, SUMO will also aim at some other things: Read David Tenser’s blog post to find out how we can enable fully community-driven self-service support for Firefox for Android.

Creating a Mozilla workshop
In her latest blog post, Lukas Blakk describes how she organized a Mozilla workshop for beginners that consisted of hacking on mobile HTML5 games. After a few lunch time meetings, she drove to Redwood City with 20 laptops and 15 Firefox OS test devices. At Dare 2B Digital, an annual conference for 300 young women, the future webmakers have created customizations to their matching game. More importantly, they’ve earned first-hand experience with the power of creating web apps that can run on any web-enabled device. Read Lukas Blakk’s blog post to see the results and find out what’s next.

Contribute Form for Everyone
In the last few months, our contributors and developers worked hard on improving the Mozilla.org contribute page‘s functionality in terms of localization. The outcome is mind blowing: You can now translate the site, make it respond automatically and embed the “Want to help?” form on any website. Read Rubén Martín’s blog post to find out why this is important, how it works for you and what the next steps are.

Photo of the Week

Because we got such a great response from our last wallpaper giveaway, we thought we’d do it again. Download the Firefox for Android wallpaper for free.

Meet Some Mozillians
Mozilla says bonjour to Lucas Rocha, Claire Clarista and Mozilla Bangladesh. Read more about how they contribute to Mozilla.

Upcoming events
* February 21 – Zürich, Switzerland: Mozcoffee Switzerland
* February 21 – In over 10 cities in Mexico: Translathon
* February 22 – Los Angeles, US: SCALE 11x
* February 23 – Cambridge, MA: LibrePlanet
* February 23, Manado, Indonesia: MozKopDarManado
* See more in our weekly event guide about:events or find more events on the Mozilla Community Calendar

Get Involved
These are just some of the available contribution opportunities. Learn more about other ways to get involved and find other Mozillians in our community who share your interests.

About about:mozilla
The newsletter is written by Mozilla’s Community Engagement team and is published every Tuesday. For more on what has been happening this week also checkout the Mozilla Project Meeting. If you have anything you would like to include in our next issue, please contact: about-mozilla[at]mozilla[dot]com or send us a status message on mozilla.status.net or a tweet @aboutmozilla. You can also subscribe to the email version.

Have a good week folks and keep rocking the Web!

Firefox Flicks Returns
Last year, our global video competition Firefox Flicks, which aims to tell people the Firefox story, was a huge success. More than a thousand filmmakers submitted hundreds of entries from all over the world. And this year, Firefox Flicks is going to return and we are giving you the chance again to win prizes. This year’s theme “Get Mobilized” is about enabling more people to take advantage of the full power of the open web – no matter where they are. So go and get some inspiration (and get your camera and clapperboard ready!).

Announcing the Firefox OS Developer Preview Phone

Many developers who code apps for Firefox OS, Mozilla’s upcoming mobile operating system, have to test their apps in a rather inconvenient way: In a simulator on their computer. But now, we are proud to announce something that will make them cheer: A Firefox OS Developer Preview Phone. These well-equipped phones, which are meant to be used by developers, make the mobile web more accessible to more people. More importantly, they give coders the chance to create and test apps, powered by the openness, simplicity and freedom of Firefox OS.

A Learning Standard for Web Literacy
Doug Belshaw, Badges & Skills Lead of Mozilla, has published a series of blog posts about getting closer to a Web Literacy standard. Mozilla is working with the community to define a new standard for Web Literacy, and anyone can be involved. From our starting point, we’ll start charting learning pathways. This open learning standard will mark the areas as important, co-ordinate efforts, and improve the experience for the learner.

HTML5 Support for MP3 and MP4
If you love listening to music, you probably stumbled across an MP3 audio file on the Internet before. Unfortunately, Firefox wasn’t able to play it on its own and needed a third-party plugin’s help. Now, this problem belongs to the past: Our contributors and developers are working on making it able to play MP4 videos and MP3 audio files in HTML5. If you are using Windows 7, you can already test this feature in a Firefox Nightly build.

SUMO in 2013
If you ever happen to have any problems with Firefox, Thunderbird or other Mozilla products, SUMO will be there for you. David Tenser, who is responsible for this global and open source support platform, announced the overarching mission for 2013: Delighting the users. It means going above and beyond and providing support that is better than they expected, it means making sure everyone visiting SUMO will get an answer to their question. Read his blog post to find out how to achieve this goal.

Photos of the Week

Top: Mozilla is officially the most trusted Internet company in privacy. Hooray! Bottom: The first Firefox Donuts ever.

Upcoming events
* February 15, Ilfov, Romania: OSOM EvolutiON
* February 15, West Mifflin, US: Introducing the IT Field
* February 16, Manila, Philippines: Junior Form Function & Class
* February 19, Sarajevo, Bosnia and Herzegovina: Mozilla Intro at Sarajevo
* Find more events on the Mozilla Community Calendar

Get Involved
These are just some of the available contribution opportunities. Learn more about other ways to get involved and find other Mozillians in our community who share your interests.

About about:mozilla
The newsletter is written by Mozilla’s Community Engagement team and is published every Tuesday. For more on what has been happening this week also checkout the Mozilla Project Meeting. If you have anything you would like to include in our next issue, please contact: about-mozilla[at]mozilla[dot]com or send us a status message on mozilla.status.net or a tweet @aboutmozilla. You can also subscribe to the email version.

Have a good week folks and keep rocking the Web!

Devices and Dark Matter
Firefox OS is the upcoming operating system for mobiles that lets you put a powerful and open world into your pocket. Lots of people have asked the project manager Dietrich Ayala if will run on their phones. Sadly, the answer is usually no, because porting an operating system to a device is very tricky (and likely to turn your hardware into a paperweight). But don’t give up on your hopes yet! Read his blog post to learn more about the efforts to port Firefox OS to various devices.

Webmaker in 2013

A year ago, we set out to move people from using the web to making the web with Webmaker. It teaches the art and craft of webmaking to anyone who wants to make something on the web. A few days ago, Matt Thompson explained in his blog post that the plans for 2013 have already been made: Webmaker will be refined, there’ll be better ways to level up skills, craft and code as you make and the global community of mentors to power Webmaker will be grown. Read more about the goals and what we built so far in his blog post.

Are apps really the future?
Christian Heilmann, a developer evangelist living in London, still remembers the time when you had to install software to get directions or edit images. Over the last few years, all of this moved to the Internet – you are able to get directions just by typing in an address into your favorite search engine. But now, we seem to be stalling, if not moving backwards in the evolution of content delivery. Read his blog post to find out why this is not something that users want.

New Webmaker Prototypes
For the first week back to work, a small group of Mozilla employees worked on new features in Webmaker that help users create new types of content. Brett Gaylor shows five of them in a blog post. The first prototype combines the Thimble and Popcorn Maker interfaces. Thimble is a tool for making the creation of websites easier than ever, while Popcorn Maker allows people to create and remix videos. Merging the two results in something that allows you to learn to code while making cool, time based media. Learn more about the other four prototypes.

Leading Mozilla: Focus Forward
Brendan Eich, inventor of JavaScript, has been the Chief Technology Officer of Mozilla since 2005. And now, he is proud to announce that he will also be managing the product and platform engineering teams. On his personal blog, he explains that this would be a privilege he takes seriously and that we will continue to innovate with even sharper focus on what’s in front of us.

Photo of the Week

Firefox OS App Days in Jakarta

Meet Some Mozillians
Mozilla says bonjour to Melek Jebnoun, Julien Wajsberg and a new boy band. Read more about how they contribute to Mozilla.

Upcoming events
* January 26, Mandalay, Myanmar: Barcamp
* January 26, In over 20 cities: Firefox OS App Days
* January 26, Hunedoara, Romania: MozCofee Hunedoara
* See more in our weekly event guide about:events or find more events on the Mozilla Community Calendar

Get Involved
These are just some of the available contribution opportunities. Learn more about other ways to get involved and find other Mozillians in our community who share your interests.

About about:mozilla
The newsletter is written by Mozilla’s Community Engagement team and is published every Tuesday. For more on what has been happening this week also checkout the Mozilla Project Meeting. If you have anything you would like to include in our next issue, please contact: about-mozilla[at]mozilla[dot]com or send us a status message on mozilla.status.net or a tweet @aboutmozilla. You can also subscribe to the email version.

Have a good week folks and keep rocking the Web!

Reboot of the German-Speaking Community
Is there any better way to start 2013 than to reboot your local community? Of course not! That’s why the German-speaking Mozilla community that includes many folks from Switzerland, Austria and Germany met in Berlin. After some brainstorming, discussions (and post-it notes fun), they came up with a new mission statement and improved structure. “A strong community for the open web”, that’s what Germany needs. And with the new structure, that will be possible. Read more about the results of the meeting and get to know about two interesting facts in Brian King’s blog post.

How to Install Firefox and Thunderbird on Ubuntu

Installing Firefox is very easy: You just download it and run the installer – that’s it. Unfortunately, this only applies to Windows and Mac OS. If you’re using Ubuntu, installing Firefox can be a little bit more difficult if you have removed it for some reason. But the definitely most difficult thing is to install a Nightly build. Thanks to Christie Koehler, it has just become easier then ever. In her latest blog post, she shows you how to install any version of Firefox and Thunderbird on Ubuntu.

Firefox Challenge + You = Success!
During the last few weeks, we kept you updated on the Firefox Challenge, which came to an end a few days ago. Thanks to you, we were able to raise over one million dollars. And we are also proud to announce the winner: Ian Somerhalder! He received over 1,700 donations, raising more than $120,000 for the Ian Somerhalder Foundation. Only $600 separated the winner from the second place, Jimmy Kimmel. Check out the full results on our Crowdraise page.

3 Sneak Peeks for Firefox for Android
Who doesn’t love a sneak peek? Last year, our developers brought you many new and great features, but now we will show you three things you can expect to see in 2013! The first thing is private browsing, which is useful if you want to buy a gift for your loved ones without letting them know about it. Also, we’re working to bring you themes for your Android browser and last but not least, we are planning to make Firefox for Android available for more devices than ever. Read more about what 2013 holds in store for you.

One Year at Mozilla
A few days ago, 40,000 feet up in the air over the Atlantic, Rob Hawkes looked back at 2012 and his favorite moments. In his first full year at Mozilla, Rob traveled around the world – five times: Having traveled for 1/3 of the time, he left behind over 134,000 miles. He also describes how and why he fell in love with Firefox OS, but he also talks about the most difficult part of the last year: His decision to leave Mozilla. Read more about his personal highlights and wishes for 2013 on his blog.

Photo of the Week

The Firefox OS Team in Berlin during a workweek. During their workweek, they have fixed all (over 200) blocking bugs. (By asullivan06)

Meet Some Mozillians
Mozilla says bonjour to Fabio Magnoni, Brad Lassey and the Firefox OS team. Read more about how they contribute to Mozilla.

Upcoming events
* January 19, Iași, Romania: Firefox 18 launch party
* January 19, Dakar, Senegal: Firefox OS App Day in Dakar
* January 20, Tocho Ajusco, Mexico: Firefox Clinic
* January 20, Taichung, Taiwan: Firefox & Fedora Party
* January 20, Gaza Strip, OPT: Hack Your Browser
* January 20, Hyderabad, India: 6th MozCafe
* January 21, Jakarta, Indonesia: Firefox OS App Day
* See more in our weekly event guide about:events or find more events on the Mozilla Community Calendar

Get Involved
These are just some of the available contribution opportunities. Learn more about other ways to get involved and find other Mozillians in our community who share your interests.

About about:mozilla
The newsletter is written by Mozilla’s Community Engagement team and is published every Tuesday. For more on what has been happening this week also checkout the Mozilla Project Meeting. If you have anything you would like to include in our next issue, please contact: about-mozilla[at]mozilla[dot]com or send us a status message on mozilla.status.net or a tweet @aboutmozilla. You can also subscribe to the email version.

Have a good week folks and keep rocking the Web!