Earlier this month, Mozilla’s Developer Tools Lab released its first project, Bespin. Bespin proposes an open extensible Web-based framework for code editing that aims to increase developer productivity, enable compelling user experiences, and promote the use of open standards.

There has been much excitement around the project, particularly in the developer community and technology press. As Ryan Paul from Ars Technica states, “The creative way that Bespin uses the canvas element demonstrates the power of open Web standards and the creative things that other developers are doing with Bespin validates the usefulness of the project.”

The project is already acting as a catalyst for innovation in the open source community. Alex Handy from the SD Times reports, “One open-source developer has already tied Bespin to a headless Eclipse server. This IDE mashup provided Bespin as the editor, while the Eclipse engine crunched and examined the code dynamically on the back end.”

Highlights of coverage include:

US:

Ars Technica, CNET, Internet News, Lifehacker, eWeek, SD Times

UK:

TechWorld, ZDNetUK, ComputerWorld UK, The Register

Germany:

Chip, PC-Welt, silicon.de, ORF, t3n, magnus.de, Heise

The Anita Borg Institute for Women and Technology (ABI) announced that Mitchell Baker is a winner of this year’s Women of Vision Awards in the Leadership category. Mitchell, along with Yuqing Gao, IBM Research, and Jan Cuny, National Science Foundation, will be honored for her accomplishments and contributions as a woman in technology at ABI’s fourth annual Women of Vision Awards Banquet at the Fairmont Hotel in San Jose on April 30th, 2009.

The news was announced in a press release issued by The Anita Borg Institute for Women and Technology, excerpted below:

The Women of Vision (WOV) Awards honor women making significant contributions to technology in three categories: Innovation, Leadership, and Social Impact. The three winners were selected from a field of highly qualified women all of whom are engaged in technology professions in industry, academia, NGO’s or government. Candidates for the awards are considered based on their records of (1) consistent, significant contributions to technology invention and application; (2) effecting positive changes in the ways in which technology impacts society; and (3) demonstrated leadership in the technology industry that extends beyond their place of work.

Please join us in congratulating Mitchell in this achievement!

Last week Mozilla’s VP of Engineering Mike Shaver spoke at the Churchill Club on a panel entitled, “Browsers are Hot Again!”, moderated by Businessweek columnist Steve Wildstrom. Joining him on the panel were representatives from Microsoft (Dean Hachamovitch), Opera (Christen Krogh) and Google (Sundar Pichal).

Below is coverage from the event, including articles in CNET, InfoWorld, and TechCrunch. The overall theme through the coverage was the feeling of increased competition.  Paul Krill writes, “While it appeared Microsoft’s Internet Explorer had won the browser battle five years ago, things have changed with the advent of mobile browsers, Firefox and Safari, Wildstrom said”.

Mike Arrington highlighted the importance of the Mozilla community, “Mozilla’s Shaver said Firefox was about ‘putting the web first’ and creating a standards-compliant browser in as many languages as possible to ensure that no one was left out of the Internet”.

Earlier this week Mozilla Labs announced updates to two of its recent projects – Snowl and Ubiquity. Both projects have demonstrated impressive momentum and are being well received in both the Mozilla community and the press.

Snowl 0.2, a messaging-in-the-browser experiment, builds on the first release with an updated river view, a new stream view for keeping track of messages in a sidebar while you do other things, the ability to send tweets, and support for multiple Twitter accounts. Sean Michael Kerner from Internet News notes, “For Mozilla, a close embrace of Web 2.0 with Snowl may have an impact beyond simply making it easier for users to access Twitter and similar services: It may actually represent the future of the popular browser.”

Highlights of Snowl in the news include Internet News, ReadWriteWeb, WIRED, ComputerWorldUK.

On Wednesday, Mozilla Labs released Ubiquity 0.1.5. With it, Ubiquity gains a sleeker look, a smarter core and the ability to be skinned – anyone who knows how to write standards-complaint CSS can now create and share a custom Ubiquity skin. Scott Gilbertson from WIRED writes, “Think of Ubiquity as an on-the-fly mashup creator, taking information and reorganizing it to make it more useful.”

Ubiquity was featured in InformationWeek, WIRED, Internet News, and Lifehacker.

As 2008 comes to a close, the industry reflects back on the past year and highlights the best and brightest technologies and news stories that came our way. This month Mozilla and Firefox received the following honors:

*eWeek Top 10 News Stories of the Year

*Mozilla and Racepoint Group UK won Best Technology and Consumer Electronics PR Campaign for Mozilla Firefox 3 launch at the European Excellence Awards 2008

*Firefox wins ReadWriteWeb Top 10 Consumer Web Apps of 2008

*Mozilla Weave wins ReadWriteWeb Top 10 Web Platforms of 2008

*Firefox included in BusinessWeek’s Best Tech Products of 2008

*CrunchGear fans name Firefox 3 Best Browser, Peoples Choice Award

This morning an exciting article was published in the BBC News that profiles Mitchell Baker and her role as one of the most influential women leaders in Silicon Valley. Valley Girls: Mitchell Baker looks at the history of the Mozilla Project and Mitchell’s role in founding and shaping its success.

She reflects on the start of her role at Mozilla. “At that point I knew that the building of the browser was a necessary step to have an internet that was worth living in,” she said. “I also knew [Mozilla] was not the obvious path to build a career but it was the obvious path to do something interesting.”

Yesterday Mozilla launched Fashion Your Firefox, a simple Web application that customizes your Firefox browser based on your interests and online activities. The launch coincided with an event in New York City, which featured Mozilla and a handful of add-ons included in Fashion Your Firefox presenting their capabilities.

Fashion Your Firefox has been well received in the press, with more than 20 articles in the past 24 hours. Reporters have commented on how Fashion Your Firefox has simplified the add-on market overall, as well as included how Firefox just reached the 1 billion mark for add-on downloads.  

Messaging has been strong around how add-ons are now more accessible to the “average” user. As VentureBeat’s Anthony Ha states, “Fashion Your Firefox could be a good introduction for users who want to dip their toes into the add-on world. They can find and download some of the best offerings, then if they like their improved improved browsers, they can go elsewhere to dig deeper.”

U.S. coverage highlights include: CNet, ComputerWorld, Lifehacker, PC Magazine, VentureBeat, Wall Street Journal Blog and Wired.

International coverage highlights include:

Spain: VnuNet, LaFlecha, Gen Beta, Visual Beta

Poland: PC Format, PC World, VBeta, NextMag, ZioBudda

UK: Stuff.tv, Pocket-Lint, Webuser, Digital Trends, Mobile Whack

Italy: HWGadget.com, VitaDigitale, Il Bloggatore, MyTech

Today, Mike Beltzner and the Firefox 2 team were announced as finalists in the 2008 ISDA International Design Excellence Awards in the Interactive Product Experiences category. The ISDA is the voice of the industrial design profession, advancing the quality and positive impact of design.

This is a great honor in the design industry. Congrats to the team on their recognition!

Yesterday we announced the release of Firefox 3.1 Beta 1.  To date there has been more than 25 pieces of coverage, despite the buzz around the Apple Notebook announcement.  Coverage is neutral with a strong focus on enhancements under the hood, and portrays the release as a testing ground for developers and Web designers. Those who have turned on Tracemonkey have been largely impressed by the performance enhancements. Generally, we’re seeing excitement in the industry around how the revitalization of the “browser wars” is fostering competition to produce the best possible browser.

Highlights include coverage in Ars Technica, CNet, InternetNews.com, BetaNews, CIO, Technologizer, ComputerWorld, LifeHacker and CRN.

Yesterday we announced Geode, an experimental add-on designed to explore geolocation in Firefox 3 right now, ahead of the planned implementation of geolocation in Firefox 3.1. Future versions of Firefox (and Fennec) will support the new W3C Geolocation Specification, which adds the native ability for Web sites to request, and you to optionally grant access to, your location.

As of this morning there were more than 50 total articles posted on Geode, with the majority of the coverage in the technology, consumer technology press and blogsphere. Coverage has been primarily neutral with many reporters comparing Geode to Yahoo!s Fire Eagle and Google Gears.

We accompanied this announcement with a few use cases to illustrate the benefits of the technology, which helped provide a more thorough understanding of Geode as everyone was able to see the immediate benefit, making the exploration of the technology very “real”.  However, we saw some confusion about whether geolocation would make it into Firefox 3.1 or Fennec, and difficulty understanding that when the beta comes out next week, users and developers could experiment with geolocation in that result.

Some highlights from the coverage include CNet, PC Magazine, Mashable, and New England Cable News.