“Happy birthday to you, happy birthday to you…”

The Mozilla community is excited to celebrate the 6th birthday of Firefox, the Web browser of choice for nearly 400 million people worldwide.

Image Credit: Gen Kanai

Mozilla was established more than 10 years ago as a non-profit organization with a mission to promote openness, innovation and opportunity on the Web. Six years ago, Mozilla released Firefox 1.0 offering people a better Web experience.

Today, Firefox is available in more than 70 languages and offers an easy way for people to enjoy rich Web experiences. Nearly a quarter of Internet users choose Firefox as their trusted ambassador to the Web. More than 150 million people choose Firefox Add-ons to customize their Web experience.

The success of Firefox is due to the passionate and dedicated Mozilla community, comprised of tens of thousands of developers, localizers, testers, ambassadors and campus reps.

This year, to celebrate Firefox and the Mozilla community’s work promoting innovation, choice and openness on the Web, we ask for your help to showcase how people love and use Firefox in your part of the world. Just send us a postcard with your message about Firefox and your FoxCard will be featured in our Mountain View or Paris offices. You can even win Firefox goodies when you send in your FoxCard. Check out our FoxCards page on Facebook or Spread Firefox for more information.

If you want to know what’s next for Firefox, help us test Firefox 4 Beta and send us your feedback.

Earlier today we announced the appointment of Gary Kovacs as our new CEO. While Gary will not be officially starting until November 8th, he wanted to take this opportunity to introduce himself:

This week Mozilla joined Open Invention Network as a licensee. OIN is an organization which helps protect the Linux ecosystem by building a variety of defenses against patent attacks. These defenses include both traditional mechanisms, like defensive patent pools, and more innovative approaches, like the Linux Defenders project, which uses a variety of methods to proactively prevent the publication of particularly egregious patents. As a licensee, we’ll have access to OIN resources in case we’re threatened by operating entities with patents, and over time we’ll likely become more involved in providing our own ideas and resources to OIN projects.

Patents owned by Open Invention Network are available royalty-free to any company, institution or individual that agrees not to assert its patents against the Linux System. By joining, Mozilla receives cross-licenses from other OIN licensees, but more importantly, for the long term, it affords us a chance to work with OIN in reducing IP threats to open source development and innovation. This may include a defensive publications program that would make it harder for others to patent work created by Mozilla contributors, sharing defensive tactics, and cooperation to minimize patent threats.

This doesn’t mean we’re suddenly enthused about patents in any way, but OIN is doing some good work, and I believe that any protections that they afford Mozilla are on the whole more positive, and outweigh reservations about the patent the system.

Today, Mitchell Baker was announced as the recipient of Frost & Sullivan’s 2010 Growth, Innovation and Leadership Award. Mitchell will be honored for her achievements at the annual GIL 2010 event in Silicon Valley on September 13, 2010.

The award honor was announced in a press release issued by Frost & Sullivan, excerpt below:

“Profiled in TIME Magazine among their top 100 Scientists and Thinkers, Mitchell Baker is the visionary behind the Mozilla Project and is responsible for organizing and motivating a massive, worldwide collective of employees and volunteers who are breathing new life into the Internet with the Firefox Web browser and other Mozilla products.

Serving as general manager of the Mozilla project since 1999, Baker shaped the license under which Netscape’s source code was released. In 2003, she became president and founder of the Mozilla Foundation, a non-profit organization dedicated to openness and innovation on the Internet. As Chairperson of Mozilla, Baker continues her commitment to an open, innovative Web and the infinite possibilities it presents.”

Please join in congratulating Mitchell on this achievement!

Firefox enables hundreds of millions of people all over the world to each have a Web experience that’s unique. They can make Firefox look and feel the way they want with Add-ons and Personas. And more importantly, Firefox becomes their trusted guide to the Web. It intelligently searches browsing history and bookmarks to help people get to their favorite sites with minimum effort using the “Awesome Bar”. Tabbed browsing allows people to efficiently work with multiple sites at the same time while Password Manager and automatic form fill help them quickly get things done.

But the world is changing. People access the Web from many devices, including their mobile phones. As people move through the day from their home computer to mobile phone to work computer and back again, the rich personalization provided by Firefox is sacrificed.

At the same time, faster networks, cheaper cloud storage, and more powerful hardware, especially on mobile devices, enable new possibilities.

Mozilla launched an exploration (the Weave project) into how multiple devices, connected through the cloud, could make the personal Web experience portable across multiple computers and devices, while providing unprecedented privacy protection. That exploration has resulted in a set of products, features and services that provide great user experiences and begin to create new possibilities for developers:

Firefox Sync (formerly Weave Sync) – Currently packaged as a free Firefox Add-on, Sync will be an integrated (opt-in, of course) feature of Firefox 4. It makes your bookmarks, history, Awesome Bar intelligence, passwords, form-fill data and open tabs accessible from Firefox running on other computers and mobile phones. And unlike cloud services that use your data to track your travels throughout the Web for ad targeting or other purposes, Firefox Sync encrypts all of your data before sending it to the server. This means you do not have to sacrifice any privacy or control while still getting the convenience of ubiquitous access to your data using Firefox Sync.

Firefox Home for iPhone – For users of Firefox Sync (don’t forget to install it on your computer today, so that you’re ready to go when Firefox Home for the iPhone arrives!), Firefox Home gives iPhone owners instant, secure access to the bookmarks and open tabs from Firefox on their computers, as well as a version of the Awesome Bar that quickly gets them to the right website. Firefox Home provides the comfort that comes from knowing you can quickly get to the information you need wherever you are. You’ve already done the work to find what you need on the Web. Why start all over again on your iPhone?

Developer API – Firefox Sync and Firefox Home are built upon open, simple and powerful REST APIs that you can use for your own applications. The User API enables account creation, authentication and other account-related actions. The Sync API handles data storage and retrieval. These APIs work hand-in-hand to provide a complete end-to-end synchronization service. All of our code is open source, including that for the server, which means you can even run your own servers if you want.

We’re building services that make the user experience more personal, portable and privacy-protected while providing developers with a platform and tools that are easy, effective and extensible. Join us by trying Firefox Sync today and by learning more about how to build upon our platform. For more information about Firefox Home, check out our progress, updates and FAQ here.

We have been working on an application for the iPhone based on the Firefox Sync (formerly Weave Sync) technology. The app is called Firefox Home, and it gives iPhone users instant access to their Firefox browsing history, bookmarks and the set of tabs from their most recent browser session. What’s more, it provides Firefox “Awesome Bar” capability that enables people to get to their favorite web sites with minimal typing.

Firefox Home provides an amazing “get up and go” experience. It’s encrypted end-to-end. It’s your home on the Web, wherever you are. And, of course, it’s free.

Firefox Home for iPhone is part of a broader Mozilla effort to provide a more personal Web experience with more user control. For devices or platforms where we’re unable to provide the “full” Firefox browser (either technically or due to policy), we aim to provide users with “on the go” instant access to their personal Firefox history, bookmarks and open tabs on their iPhones, giving them another reason to keep loving Firefox on their desktops.

Why is this useful?

1. Left work in a hurry? You can pick up where you left off with access to the list of tabs you just had open on your desktop.
2. Need those directions to that restaurant you were just reading about on your desktop? The confirmation code for your flight? Just start typing in the Awesome Bar and those pages will be right at your fingertips.
3. Does it drive you crazy to have  to enter the full URL on your iPhone that you’ve visited several times from your desktop? You won’t need to anymore with this app.

Check out a preliminary, non-branded sneak peek of Firefox Home in action.

There will be more to come as we polish this off and submit it to the App Store.

If you want more information, or want to help out, the project  information is here: https://wiki.mozilla.org/Mobile/firefoxhome

Stay connected with what we’re up to:

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2. Join us on Facebook
3. Follow us on Twitter

Community member Martha Ruszkowski has translated this post to Belorussian.

Web developers are expressing interest in an app store model for the Web that would enable them to get paid for their efforts without having to abandon Web development in exchange for proprietary silos, each with their own programming language and SDK, variable and sometimes opaque review processes, and limited reach.

Supporting the needs of Web developers in their efforts to develop websites and apps that aren’t bound to a specific browser and work across the Web is core to Mozilla’s public benefit mission.

And so we’ve been actively exploring what an Open Web App Store would need to look like to ensure the long-term health and vitality of the Web as an incredibly open and accessible platform for innovation.

What does it mean to be an Open Web App Store? As a starting point, we are proposing a set of high-level principles.

Let’s start the discussion.  What do you think is important?

Today, the Mozilla metrics team released the first ever State of the Internet report. With more than 350 million people around the world using the Firefox Web browser, we are careful to ensure the data we collect is fairly limited and feel compelled to share what we’re able to extract from that data.

Some interesting findings from this report:

• Looking across several sources of market share data, Firefox’s worldwide share appears close to 30%.
• Usage/Adoption of Firefox this quarter grew most dramatically in Russia.
• Where do people get the earliest start to their day?  Hawaii, Wyoming, and Maine.  And the latest start?  New York.
• People in South America and Antarctica are passionate about personalizing their browser.
• In one usage study, we found one person having more than 600 tabs open at one time.  (This last insight comes from Test Pilot, Mozilla Labs’ platform for opt-in participation in studies and experiments.)

See the full report from Ken Kovash on the Mozilla Metrics Blog.

This week, Mozilla launches the Open To Choice campaign. Aimed at raising awareness among web users in Europe on the importance of making an informed choice when selecting the software and services used to access the Internet. The campaign launches at a time when almost 200 million Europeans in 32 countries will be asked to make an active choice about which Web browser will act on their behalf to broker their online experiences.

Open To Choice begins with an open letter written by Mozilla CEO John Lilly, and Mozilla Chair Mitchell Baker, addressing the European Commission and Microsoft’s landmark Browser Choice screen settlement as “… an important milestone towards helping more people take control of their online lives”. Explaining the critical importance of the browser today, the open letter calls for greater understanding, and education on why choice not only matters, but also that of an informed choice.

Watch John Lilly, Mozilla CEO talk about the open letter, and why browser choice is so important.

Over the coming weeks Opentochoice.org will go on to provide further information about browser basics, and become a hub for conversations on the importance of Web choice.

Please read the open letter and join the conversation at http://www.opentochoice.org.

It’s been a week since Firefox 3.6 release day and after more than 21 million downloads we are still going strong!  We spent some time last Thursday capturing the magic of the release and have put together a behind the scenes video.  Enjoy!