Today, we’re proud to launch “Mozilla Webmaker,” a new program to help people everywhere make, learn and play using the open building blocks 
of the web.

The goal: help millions of people move from using the web to making the web. With new tools to use, projects to create, and events to join, we want to help the world increase their understanding of the web and take greater control of their online lives.

And we’d like you to join us.

Building a generation of webmakers

Concretely, Mozilla Webmaker will offer:

• 1) Tools. Authoring tools and software, designed and built with our community. From supercharging web video with Popcorn, to remixing with Hackasaurus, to making your own web pages with Thimble.
• 2) Projects. Practical starter projects, how-tos and recipes, designed to help people at all levels make something amazing with the web. From tweaking your blog template to building apps that change the world.
• 3) Community. Bringing people with diverse skills and backgrounds together. Teachers, filmmakers, journalists, youth. From web ninjas to newbies. All making and learning together at events, meet-ups and hack jams everywhere.

A global invitation to make and learn this summer

We’re kicking off Mozilla Webmaker with something special: a massive summer learning campaign. It’s called the Summer Code Party, will run all summer long, and kicks off June 23.

We’re inviting everyone to join or volunteer at free local events and teach-ins around the world. With new Webmaker tools, event kits and starter projects designed to make it easy, social and fun. We’ll end with a big wrap-up September 23.

We’re not doing this alone. We want to build a big tent for everyone who shares our goal of a more web literate planet. Amazing partners are joining the party, from Tumblr, Creative Commons and Code for America to SoundCloud, the San Francisco Public Library, the London Zoo, and dozens of others. Plus special events with Boing Boing’s Cory Doctorow, OK GO’s Damian Kulash, and more.

What types of programs can participate? Summer camps, day camps, summer schools, public libraries, recreation centers, neighborhood groups, your kitchen table — anyone with a willingness to make, learn and engage using the open building blocks of the web.

Creating a web literate planet

Mozilla’s Executive Director, Mark Surman, says Webmaker is the product of Mozilla’s growing commitment to learning, and the culmination of experiments it began with the Mozilla Drumbeat project.

“The web is becoming the world’s second language, and a vital 21st century skill — as important as reading, writing and arithmetic,” says Surman. “It’s crucial that we give people the skills they need to understand, shape and actively participate in that world, instead of just passively consuming it. That maker spirit and open ethos is vital to Mozilla, our partners, and the web.”

The new Mozilla Webmaker web site launches June 6. In the mean time, check out the new Summer Code Party site to find an event near you, sign up for updates, and get a sneak peek at Mozilla Webmaker tools and projects.

Get involved:

• Learn more about Mozilla Webmaker.
• Find a Summer Code Party event near you.
• Create your own Summer Code Party event. This handy starter kit has everything you need to get started.
• Stay in touch. Sign up for Summer Code Party updates. Or tweet using the Summer Code Party hashtag: #mozparty.
• Help spread the word. Share the new Mozilla Webmaker video through You Tube or other formats. Find suggested copy for use in blog posts and tweets. Or download a poster and postcard kit to promote your event.

Gary Kovacs, CEO of Mozilla, speaking alongside Couper Samuelson, Edward Norton and Shauna Robertson

2012 Firefox Flicks winners posing with celebrity judges and Gary Kovacs, CEO of Mozilla

After calling on creatives, filmmakers and students to help us tell the story of Mozilla Firefox, we received more than 400 submissions from thousands of filmmakers worldwide. Please see the video reel here:

Today we are awarding 25 stellar entries. For a comprehensive list of winners and runners up, please visit www.firefoxflicks.org.

Six winning films were honored today amongst Mozilla team members, judges, stars and film industry insiders at the Firefox Flicks Wrap Party at the Cannes Film Festival. The videos and the winners’ names are below. Please join us in congratulating them on their wins and their awesome work!

Be a Hero
Bogata, Columbia — Andres Felipe Mesa Rincon

Fenwick & Candy
Balmain, Australia — Gavin Fenwick Christensen, Candice Thom

I’m Falling in Love with Firefox
Cheongju-si, South Korea — Lee Sang Woo

Paranoid
London, UK – Sean O’Riordan, Remy Bazerque, Andrew Alderslade, Eleonore Cremonese

Squares
Toronto, Canada – Eric Perella, Andre Arevalo, Mark Galloway

Where the Weird Things Are Not
Alarzia, Spain –– Ferran Brooks and Ivan Cordero Raiminguez

We will now be working with the winners on plans to incorporate their work into our global marketing campaigns.

Mozilla introduced the Do Not Track header last year to give users more control over online tracking by third parties. Since launching Do Not Track, we have seen increased industry support and user adoption of the feature. Today, we are hosting a Do Not Track event at Internet Week New York and are happy to announce new adoption statistics and industry support.

We’re excited that Twitter now supports Do Not Track and global user adoption rates continue to increase, which signifies a big step forward for Do Not Track and the Web.

Current adoption rates of Do Not Track are 8.6% for desktop users and 19% for mobile users and we see the biggest adoption rates in The Netherlands, France and the United States.*

We conducted a survey of more than 10,000 Firefox users representing 140 countries and we found some interesting results. The survey showed that 49% of users surveyed believe their privacy is respected more when Do Not Track is enabled, as opposed to only 12% who feel that way without the setting. We will share more details and specific survey results soon.

It’s reported that Windows RT (the name Microsoft has given to Windows running on the ARM processor)  will have two environments, a Windows Classic environment and a Metro environment for apps. However, Windows on ARM prohibits any browser except for Internet Explorer from running in the privileged “Windows Classic” environment. In practice, this means that only Internet Explorer will be able to perform many of the advanced computing functions vital to modern browsers in terms of speed, stability, and security to which users have grown accustomed. Given that IE can run in Windows on ARM, there is no technical reason to conclude other browsers can’t do the same.

Why does this matter to users? Quite simply because Windows on ARM -as currently designed- restricts user choice, reduces competition and chills innovation.  By allowing only IE to perform the advanced functions of a modern Web browser, third-party browsers are effectively excluded from the platform. This matters for users of today’s tablets and tomorrow’s PCs. While ARM chipsets may be primarily built into phones and tablets today, in the future ARM will be significant on the PC hardware platform as well. These environments currently have intense browser competition that benefits both users and developers. When you expand the view of the PC to cover a much wider range of form factors and designs as Microsoft and others forecast, it’s easy to imagine Windows running on ARM in laptops, tablets, phones, and a whole range of devices. That means users will only have one browser choice whenever there’s a Windows ARM environment.

We encourage Microsoft to remain firm on its user choice principles. Excluding 3rd party browsers contradicts Microsoft’s own published Principles that users and developers have relied upon for years. These principles represented a Microsoft market approach that was both notable and went above and beyond their DOJ antitrust settlement obligations.

Because Windows on ARM relies upon so many traditional Windows assets, including brand, code, footprint, and experience, the decision to exclude other browsers may also have antitrust implications. If Windows on ARM is simply another version of Windows on new hardware, it also runs afoul of the EC browser choice commitments and seems to represent the very behavior the DOJ-Microsoft settlement sought to prohibit.

The prospect that the next generation of Windows on ARM devices would limit users to one browser is untenable and represents a first step toward a new platform lock-in. It doesn’t have to be this way.  In announcing the Windows Principles, Microsoft’s General Counsel, Brad Smith, stated “As creators of an operating system used so widely around the world, we recognize that we have a special responsibility, both to advance innovation and to help preserve competition in the information technology industry.”  We encourage Microsoft to remain firm on its user choice principles and reject the temptation to pursue a closed path. The world doesn’t need another closed proprietary environment and Microsoft has the chance to be so much more.

- Harvey Anderson, Mozilla General Counsel

Today I have the honor of delivering the opening keynote at CTIA Wireless 2012 with a presentation titled “The Web Will Connect our Future.” Alongside speakers that range from the CEOs of the top US mobile operators to President Bill Clinton, I was humbled to be asked to represent Mozilla and present on an inspirational topic I am passionate about. What I am most motivated and inspired by is the open Web and in my speech I shared with the audience that not only has the Web changed our lives once, but in mobile, the open Web is about to do it again.

At a show like CTIA, it’s really easy to get caught up in the excitement of new devices, or fun applications or services just launched. Most people don’t realize it, but the devices available today not only define our expectations of our Web experience, but they also constrain it, not unlike AOL did back in the days of “you’ve got mail.” As we increasingly expect to access more of the full Web on mobile devices, our passion will take us to a place where today’s devices can’t reach. That’s why we need to move beyond the silos of native operating systems, and hybrid apps on proprietary platforms, to device-agnostic platforms that run the full, standards-compliant, and open Web.

My call to action is for the mobile ecosystem participants to stop developing proprietary platforms, requiring proprietary tools, and to start to focus on developing the open environment. Innovation needs to happen beyond the language of the web. We all need to work together to stress the Web as a platform, to push over a few remaining hurdles like graphics and video and native device API access, and work together on the common language – HTML5. Web technology doesn’t lock you into a specific development environment. It’s egalitarian and open. It enables people to create as well as consume information, to share, and the technology is standardized, free to implement, and easy to learn. It’s time for us all to collaborate to create the Web of the future. It is exciting to share this message, on behalf of the open world, with the mobile ecosystem players at CTIA.

You can watch the live stream of my talk here: http://daily.ctia.org/WIRELESS2012/ beginning at 9:30am CT.

TED is a nonprofit devoted to “Ideas Worth Spreading” from the technology, entertainment and design worlds. On TED.com, they make the best talks and performances available to the world, for free.

“Tracking the trackers” is now posted on TED.com. Check it out!

We put a lot of work into making the Firefox update experience easier. Firefox simplifies the update process for Windows users by removing the user account control dialog (UAC) pop-up while maintaining the security of your system. Once a user gives explicit permission to Firefox on their first installation, they will not be prompted again for subsequent releases.

Firefox also includes more than 85 improvements to built-in developer tools. For example, developers no longer need to reload the page to see messages in the Web Console, and Scratchpad adds Find and Jump to Line commands to the editor. Our improvements touched on every one of the built-in tools.

For more information:

• Download Firefox for Windows, Mac and Linux
• Firefox for Windows, Mac and Linux technical release notes

Adding skills and achievements to your online identity

When Mozilla’s Open Badges project began in late 2010, it was little more than a demo and an audaciously big idea: what if we could use the web to create whole new ways to “show what you know?”

Today, that big idea is becoming reality, with impressive partners and new Mozilla Open Badges Beta software coming together to test how digital badges can supercharge learning and identity.

Collaborators building badges on Mozilla software

Mozilla’s Open Badges project now includes leading partners like the MacArthur Foundation, impressive collaborators (including NASA, Intel, Disney-Pixar, 4H and dozens of others now building badge programs using Mozilla tools) and — thanks to today’s new Beta release of Mozilla’s Open Badges Infrastructure — publicly available software for badge issuers and developers to get on board and build with.

Integration with Mozilla Persona = adding skills and achievements to your online identity

The new Beta release includes integration with Mozilla Persona (formerly BrowserID). This opens the door for users to create a single user-centric identity across the web, with tools like Mozilla Open Badges adding a “reputation layer” that provides a complete story about what they know and have achieved. All through an open, standards-based infrastructure that puts user sovereignty, privacy and security first.

Open Badges Beta: what’s new?

Today’s Beta release includes:

• New tools for badge issuers. A new and improved badge issuer API makes it easier for any organization to award their own digital badges for learning, skills or achievements.
• New ways for users to manage their badges. Improvements to Mozilla’s “Badge Backpack” make it easier for users to store, manage, import and group badges earned from multiple sites through a single location.
• New tools for badge displayers. A new displayer API will make it easier to display digital badges across the web, from personal web sites to social networking platforms.
• New documentation and privacy features. Including an updated privacy policy, terms of use and FAQs for developers.

Learn more and get involved:

• Learn more about Mozilla Open Badges — and earn your first badge
• Learn more about becoming a badge issuer or displayer
• Read more about the Beta release from Mozilla’s Senior Director of Learning, Erin Knight
• Developers: access the source code and technical documentation
• Join Mozilla Open Badges community calls

On March 27, we will close the the Firefox Live site after more than 250,000 hours of cuteness. While it’s been a lot of fun to watch Dolly, Bernadette, and Winston gain Internet fame, they are now reaching eight months of age (adulthood) and it’s time for them to continue onto bigger and better things.

Bernadette, Dolly and Winston are kind of a big deal in the red panda world. They are the three most important red pandas held in zoos currently, since they bring a new gene pool to the current parents-to-be. It is now time for them to leave the Knoxville Zoo and start families of their own. Bernadette will be heading to Virginia Zoo in Norfolk, Virginia, to meet a very eligible bachelor named Oscar. Her sister Dolly will be traveling along with Winston to Zoo Boise in Boise, Idaho.

Tremendous thanks to Sarah Glass and the rest of the Knoxville Zoo for their help and great work, and to everyone who participated in Firefox Live. If you’d like to continue to support Dolly, Bernadette, Winston and red pandas in general, we recommend any of the following:

* Knoxville Zoo
* Red Panda Network
* Virginia Zoo (Dolly and Bernadette)
* Zoo Boise (Winston)

One key value at Mozilla is giving our users a great experience.  We want to build products that people love and that build openness and user sovereignty into the Web.  “Products that people love”  is a key part of this sentence.  It’s not a throw away phrase.  It has meaning.  It is a demanding goal and it must drive us — just as the latter part about openness and user sovereignty drive us.

For the past few years we have focused our codec efforts on the latter part of this sentence.  We’ve declined to adopt a technology that improves user experience in the hopes this will bring greater user sovereignty.  Not many would try this strategy, but we did.  Brendan’s piece details why our current approach of not supporting encumbered codec formats hasn’t worked, and why today’s approach regarding existing encumbered formats is even less likely to work in the future.

Given this, it’s time to shift our weighting.  It’s time to focus on shipping products people can love now, and to work on developing a new tactic for bringing unencumbered technology to the world of audio and video codecs.  It always feels better when we can build exactly the product we want and people love it.  It’s possible to fall into the view that the only way to live up to Mozilla values is to ship the product we think people should want.  This aspect is one element, but it’s not the only one.  Another critical element is shipping products that work for people now so they can love them.  This makes our values something people can want, not medicine that one takes because one should.  This element is a key part of Mozilla’s mission.