Firefox for Android Included on New Devices to Bring an Amazing Web Experience to Users

Mozilla

We are excited to announce that Firefox for Android will be preinstalled on new mobile devices this year. Firefox for Android will be included on the new Kobo Arc Tablets and the GIGABYTE GSmart Simba SX1 smartphone.

Firefox is the fun, safe and fast browser that puts the power of the Web in your hands. Firefox for Android makes mobile browsing easy and has an intuitive design, the most powerful customization support of any mobile browser and leads the industry in pioneering privacy and security features like Do Not Track, Private Browsing and Guest Browsing. Firefox puts you in control of your Web experience with the ability to synchronize your browsing history, open tabs and passwords across devices.

Kobo Arc Tablets:
Firefox for Android will be preinstalled on the new Kobo Arc 7, Kobo Arc 7HD and Kobo Arc 10HD tablets from Kobo, a global leader in eReading. The devices, designed for the most passionate readers, are hitting stores across North America.

Together, Kobo tablets and Firefox for Android ensure readers have a beautiful experience – whether you’re reading a book or surfing the Web. Like Kobo’s Readability features, Firefox has a Reader feature to offer another way for Kobo customers to view and read Web content by removing advertisements, adjusting pictures and increasing font size to show a more clear view of the page. Everything in your Firefox Reading List is available offline, so you can catch up on reading when Internet access is unavailable, like on an airplane or subway.

The Kobo Arc  tablets are now available at Kobo.com in the US and Canada with additional markets coming soon.

GIGABYTE GSmart Simba SX1 Smartphones
Firefox for Android is preinstalled on the GSmart Simba SX1, a dual SIM smartphone that supports three-way calling across both SIMs.

This will bring an amazing Web experience to GSmart Simba SX1 users and, combined with the 21Mbps high speed connection available, gives users the security, privacy and personalization they want right out of the box and in the palm of their hand.

The GSmart Simba SX1 will be available in Russia, Ukraine, EEU, Belarus and Taiwan from November, and rolled out globally from December 2013.

“We are pleased to partner with Kobo and GIGABYTE to offer Firefox as a pre-installed Web browser on Kobo Arc tablets and the GSmart Simba SX1 smartphone.” said Karen Rudnitski, Senior Product Manager for Firefox for Android. “Firefox is dedicated to offering users the best and most personal mobile browsing experience and we are happy to be able to bring that experience directly to users, globally.”

For more information:

Mozilla, OTOY and Autodesk Work to Deliver High Performance Games and Applications on the Web

Mozilla

At Mozilla, we work to move the Web forward as the platform for creating and consuming great experiences. Recently, we’ve focused on making the Web capable to deliver the most powerful desktop applications possible and awesome gaming experiences to as many people as possible.

Today, the Web received a major boost with this announcement from Amazon and OTOY. As part of this, Mozilla, OTOY and Autodesk, worked to develop ORBX.js, a pure JavaScript framework to make the Web the standard for consuming high-performance cloud graphics.

Combining all these technology advances means that for the first time, Amazon Web Services (AWS) customers will be able to use the power of graphics processing in the Cloud and OTOY’s ORBX.js streaming technology to deliver high performance games and desktop applications to the Web – using only HTML5 and JavaScript.

Graphic design engineers and gamers can now enjoy the flexibility of picking up their work or games anywhere they have access to any HTML5-enabled browser without having to worry about performance or plugins. This video demo shows what great Web-based gaming experiences look like in Firefox:

Autodesk will also leverage this technology to make sophisticated 3D design and engineering applications such as 3DS Max, Autodesk Maya, Autodesk Revit and Autodesk Inventor software available through any HTLM5-enabled Web browser.

This is what executives from Mozilla, Amazon, Autodesk and NVIDIA had to say about the announcement:

“Mozilla’s mission of making the Web the leading platform for the greatest number of users and developers today hit a major milestone,” said Brendan Eich, Mozilla Chief Technology Officer and creator of JavaScript. “With JavaScript performance now rivaling that of safe native code, thanks to Mozilla-pioneered technology such as asm.js and WebGL, the innovative approach used in OTOY’s ORBX.js now makes it possible to run powerful native apps from any popular OS through a modern browser. This robust commercial solution for running high performance games and desktop applications on the Web without plugins, demonstrates the power of the Web as a platform for software development and distribution.”

“As we launched our latest Amazon EC2 instance type to bring further capabilities to our customers today, we are excited to collaborate with OTOY to extend the reach of this powerful and disruptive technology,” said Matt Wood, General Manager, Data Science at AWS. “The combination of OTOY and Amazon EC2 G2 instances provides an immediate and compelling solution for customers looking to build graphics-intensive applications on top of these instances.”

“Designers and engineers have an increasing need to be mobile, accessing the tools they need anytime, anywhere and from any device. Simple viewing and mark-up of documents is no longer sufficient – they need to be able to access powerful 3D design applications, be able to do real design work and not worry about sacrificing performance,” said Jeff Kowalski, Chief Technology Officer at Autodesk. “This is now possible with technology made possible by Autodesk, Amazon and OTOY.”

“With this news, AWS infrastructure can be leveraged to deploy high-performance NVIDIA GRID GPU graphics on-demand, not only to thin-clients, but also to any HTML5 webpage using ORBX.js. “The OTOY ORBX AMI is the easiest way for Software-as-a-Service companies to immediately access the video streaming capabilities in NVIDIA GRID instances,” said Steven Parker, GM of Professional Design and Visualization, NVIDIA. “Many graphics-intensive applications, from Autodesk 3D design software to games, can be hosted by AWS on NVIDIA GRID GPUs and streamed using OTOY software to a browser on any device.”

Telefonica Launches Firefox OS Smartphones in Mexico, Peru and Uruguay

Mozilla

Telefonica is launching Firefox OS phones this week in Mexico, Peru and Uruguay. Both the ZTE Open and ALCATEL ONE TOUCH Fire will be available in Mexico starting today, while the ZTE Open is available in Peru, and the ALCATEL ONE TOUCH Fire is available in Uruguay. Just last week, Telefonica also launched a new Firefox OS device – the LG Fireweb in Brazil. Firefox OS is now available in nine countries with more coming soon.

Firefox OS smartphones are the first devices powered completely by Web technologies to deliver the performance, personalization and price you want in a smartphone with a beautiful, intuitive and easy-to-use experience that is unmatched by any other phone. Firefox OS has all the things you need from a smartphone as well as the things you want like built-in social integration with Facebook and Twitter, HERE Maps with offline capabilities, much-loved features like the Firefox Web browser, the Firefox Marketplace and much more.

Firefox OS features a brand new concept for smartphones – an adaptive app search that literally transforms the phone to meet your needs and interests at any moment. Simply start to type what you are interested in and instantly get a whole new customized phone experience based on your needs. You can discover apps to use once or download to keep, giving you a completely customized experience with the exact content you want, when you want it.

You can also find apps in the Firefox Marketplace, which already has popular global apps like Badoo, Box, EA games like Poppit, Facebook, KAYAK, SoundCloud, The Weather Channel, TimeOut, TMZ, Tuenti and Twitter.

New Firefox OS phones will have the latest version of Firefox OS (1.1), which includes many performance improvements and new features like MMS messaging. Existing Firefox OS users will be upgraded to the latest version soon.

For More Information:

Video Interoperability on the Web Gets a Boost From Cisco’s H.264 Codec

Mozilla

Editor’s Note: Brendan Eich, Mozilla CTO, posted on his blog about Mozilla and the recent Cisco announcement about H.264. This is reposted below:

As I noted last year, one of the biggest challenges to open source software has been the patent status of video codecs. The most popular codec, H.264, is patent-encumbered and licensed by MPEG LA, under terms that prevent distributing it with open source products including Firefox. Cisco has announced today that they are going to release a gratis, high quality, open source H.264 implementation — along with gratis binary modules compiled from that source and hosted by Cisco for download. This move enables any open source project to incorporate Cisco’s H.264 module without paying MPEG LA license fees.

We are grateful for Cisco’s contribution, and we will add support for Cisco’s OpenH.264 binary modules to Firefox soon. These modules will be usable by downstream distributions of Firefox, as well as by any other project. In addition, we will work with Cisco to put the OpenH264 project on a sound footing and to ensure that it is governed well. We have already been collaborating very closely with Cisco on our WebRTC implementation, and we are excited to see Cisco deepening their commitment to the Open Web. Or, as Jonathan Rosenberg, Cisco CTO for Collaboration puts it,

Cisco has a long-standing history of supporting and integrating open standards, open formats and open source technologies as a model for delivering greater flexibility and interoperability to users. We look forward to collaborating with Mozilla to help bring H.264
to the Web and to the Internet.

Here’s a little more detail about how things are going to work: Cisco is going to release, under the BSD license, an H.264 stack, and build it into binary modules compiled for all popular or feasibly supportable platforms, which can be loaded into any application (including Firefox). The binary modules will be available for download from Cisco, and Cisco will pay for the patent license from the MPEG LA. Firefox will automatically download and install the appropriate binary module onto each user’s machine when needed, unless disabled in the user’s preferences.

Interoperability is critical on the Internet, and H.264 is the dominant video codec on the Web. The vast majority of HTML5 streaming video is encoded using H.264, and most softphones and videoconferencing systems use H.264. H.264 chipsets are widely available and can be found in most current smartphones, including many Firefox OS phones. Firefox already supports H.264 for the video element using platform codecs where they are available, but as noted in my last blog post on the topic, not all OSes ship with H.264 included. Provided we can get AAC audio decoders to match, using Cisco’s OpenH264 binary modules allows us to extend support to other platforms and uses of H.264.

While Cisco’s move helps add H.264 support to Firefox on all OSes, we will continue to support VP8, both for the HTML video element and for WebRTC. VP8 and H.264 are both good codecs for WebRTC, and we believe that at this point, users are best served by having both choices.

Of course, this is not a not a complete solution. In a perfect world, codecs, like other basic Internet technologies such as TCP/IP, HTTP, and HTML, would be fully open and free for anyone to modify, recompile, and redistribute without license agreements or fees. Mozilla is fully committed to working towards that better future. To that end, we are developing Daala, a fully open next generation codec. Daala is still under development, but our goal is to leapfrog H.265 and VP9, building a codec that will be both higher-quality and free of encumberances. Mozilla has assembled an engineering dream team to develop Daala, including Jean-Marc Valin, co-inventor of Opus, the new standard for audio encoding; Theora project lead Tim Terriberry; and recently Xiph co-founders Jack Moffitt, author of Icecast; and Monty Montgomery, the author of Ogg Vorbis.

Cullen Jennings, Cisco Fellow, Collaboration Group, says:

Cisco is very excited about the future of royalty free codecs. Daala is one of the most interesting ongoing technical developments in the codec space and we have been contributing to the project.

At Mozilla we always come back to the question of what’s good for the users and in this case that means interoperation of copious H.264 content across OSes and other browsers. We’ve already started looking at how to integrate the Cisco-hosted H.264 binary module, and we hope to have something ready for users in early 2014.

Watch this space for more exciting developments in WebRTC, Daala, and open web video.

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Share Your Firefox with Friends & Family While Keeping Your Web Information Private with Guest Browsing

Mozilla

Firefox for Android offers Guest Browsing to let you share your mobile device with friends and family without having to worry about them viewing your personal information like browsing history, bookmarks, passwords, form data or open tabs. Guest Browsing is designed to quickly and easily lock your personal data and provide your guest with a fresh new browsing experience. Once you enable Guest Browsing Firefox restarts with a fresh profile and deletes that guest’s information when the guest session is closed. This means you can let friends and family borrow your phone or tablet to surf the Web and make sure your own information is safe and secure.

To enable Guest Browsing, just tap on the Firefox Menu button, tap on “Tools” and tap “New Guest Session.” Friends can exit the guest browsing session by tapping on the Menu button and then selecting “Exit Guest Session.”

English

Firefox for Android also helps you easily customize your Android device with your favorite photos. You can set an image as your device’s wallpaper or add a photo to a contact right from your current Web page. Simply press and hold the desired image to bring up the Context Menu and select “Set Image As” to customize your device with an image from the Web.

Firefox for Android adds support Ukrainian, Irish and Romanian locales and is is now available in 27 languages worldwide.

For More Information:

 

Listen Up! Web Audio API now in Firefox – Completes Web as a Platform for Gaming

Mozilla

The Web has been evolving at a fantastic rate over the last few years with the help of Mozilla pioneered technologies such as WebGL, asm.js and Emscripten.  With all these improvements to speed and capability, more potential has been added to HTML5 that allows the Web to include amazing experiences previously only possible with the help of plug-ins.  As impressive as these advancements have been up until now, HTML5 was missing a vital component for games developers, advanced audio capabilities supported across multiple browsers.

Today, Mozilla introduces Web Audio API as part of the update to Firefox for Windows, Mac, and Linux.  This represents a substantial upgrade to the Web’s ability to process audio.  Although the Web has had some audio support, this new Web Audio API brings some powerful new capabilities not possible with Audio Data API.  Audio engineers can now build robust audio engines capable of outputting amazing soundscapes for people to enjoy.  A few new features to highlight include positional audio and support for effects such as reverb, which can create immersive audio experiences on the Web, like never before.

The release of the Web Audio API provides the final building block needed to run advanced games on the Web. Games like the recently released Epic Games demo, Citadel which offers a great demonstration of what is now possible. Try it out on Firefox and you’ll notice an immersive surround sound experience when walking down a street or past waterfalls.

We’ve received a lot of feedback about Web Audio API and believe we now have an offering games developers will love. To help showcase exactly what it can do, we have been collaborating with Goo Technologies who have built an open source demo to show some of these capabilities in action.  This demo was built using their suite of game development tools which they will be releasing next week.

For a developer overview of how Goo Technologies implemented the Web Audio API, take a look at this Hacks post, which includes a link to the interactive demo.

Firefox supports Ogg (both vorbis and Opus) and includes conditional support for MPEG 4, H.264, MP3 and AAC.  The support for this later group is not built directly into Firefox, instead it relies on support from the OS or hardware.

Firefox has implemented the Web Audio API as described in this W3C standard. It has been largely agreed on by the browser community and is very similar to the prototype Webkit Web Audio API, but with a number of improvements. Until other browsers upgrade their implementations, we need to make sure that these differences are clear.  To make supporting the legacy and the standard version as easy as possible, we have written an article that covers the differences and how to write code that will work for both.

The Firefox team is excited to be the first browser to bring the standards compliant version of Web Audio API to the Web.  Now the Web offers a truly competitive platform for games developers, we can’t wait to see what people do with it!

- Martin Best, Game Platform Strategist, Mozilla

The Freedom Act will Help Rebuild User Trust in the Internet

handerson

Recent revelations of the NSA’s expansive surveillance programs harm user trust in the digital ecosystem, stifle innovation, and lead to a harmful balkanization of the Internet. Internet users around the world must be able to trust that their information, communications and documents are safe and secure. The alternative is a race to the bottom where only those users who seek out complex, bolt-on security tools get protected communications, or worse yet become reluctant to use digital communications and avoid services that both improve their lives and drive commerce. Those of us in the technology sector, citizens at home, and constituents globally are asking what can be done to regain user trust.

One obvious answer is to change U.S. law to limit the ability of the NSA to conduct such mass surveillance. The Freedom Act, introduced today in the U.S. House of Representatives by Congressman Sensenbrenner and in the U.S. Senate by Senator Leahy, does just that. The Freedom Act takes an important step toward rebuilding user trust by adding limitations on government collection of data in the name of national security.

The idea is simple. The NSA should not have a blank check to access user data from technology companies. Today, gaps in oversight and legal review permit the NSA to collect and use massive amounts of data about foreigners AND Americans. This infringes fundamental notions of privacy for many and undermines safeguards against unreasonable search afforded under the Constitution. If adopted and passed into law, the Freedom Act would end bulk collection of Americans’ communications records. It also requires the government to aggressively filter and discard information about Americans collected through PRISM and other programs. Other changes proposed by the Freedom Act can be found here.

Certainly, more is required to address this issue as each day we learn of new and disturbing aspects of global surveillance on citizens around the world. The Freedom Act is not a wholesale fix to the myriad of issues exposed by the NSA’s surveillance programs, but it is a step in the right direction. We support Congressman Sensenbrenner and Senator Leahy’s leadership on this crucial issue.

This post is related to our broader work on public policy issues and the Open Internet. To learn more about how you can get involved, check out the Mozilla Netpolicy Module wiki.

Webmaker: How the Mozilla Community is teaching the World the Web

Mozilla

Mozilla is dedicated to keeping the web open, accessible and free. To accomplish this, we need more than technology: we need people who are empowered to build and take control of their own online lives.

Enter Webmaker, Mozilla’s project to teach the world web skills. Launched in May 2012, Webmaker had an ambitious goal: help millions of people move from using the web to making the web.

screenshotFast forward to the present: our site, webmaker.org, is a vibrant hub of creative activity that attracts thousands of people every day to teach and learn web skills. Our free, open source tools Thimble, Popcorn Maker and X-Ray Goggles have evolved to meet the needs of a growing community that cares deeply about teaching the web. We have a global community helping us improve our tools and build a curriculum. And we just wrapped up a hugely successful global Maker Party, which saw more than 1600 webmaking events in 330 cities across the globe.

Today, we’re excited to present the current incarnation of Mozilla Webmaker: a project dedicated to helping our growing community to teach and learn the web. We’ve introduced new features and content to help us best meet our goal: teach millions of people the web, and ensure they have fun while doing it.

A growing community

Since we began this project, our community has grown exponentially. We now have more than 10,000 Mentors—people who are passionate about teaching the web and teaching others to teach—signed up as a part of Webmaker. This spring we held an Open Online Course on how to teach the web and saw more than 2,300 people across the world participate, share, teach and learn from each other on the best techniques to teach the web. And the community is diving into helping us make the site better as well: thanks to our all-volunteer community, the site has already been translated into eight languages, and will soon be available in 40.

webmaker

A new site

Because the Maker Party saw more than 50,000 projects created on our site by people from across the globe, it acted as a giant testing lab, revealing the strengths of our platform as well as surfacing challenges we could help our community solve. Inspired by feedback from some of the thousands of party participants, we conducted focused user testing and we learned how to meet the needs of our most enthusiastic adopters.

Along with our community, we’ve introduced some great new features:

  • International language support. Many of our users are from outside of North America, and we know that presenting Webmaker in people’s native language is key. As of today, the site is available in French, Spanish, Portuguese, Russian, Thai and Bengali. Volunteers have begun translation efforts in 41 other languages.
  • Great starter content. We now offer remixable templates as a fast and easy way to get going.
  • Upgrades to Thimble, our simple code editing tool. We added support for JavaScript, a collaborative editing feature (Together.js) that can be used by remote participants, guided tutorials, and a host of user interface improvements.
  • Hackable profiles. New and existing users can curate their makes and add make their own animated GIFS using their webcams.
  • Curated content. Our editorial staff comb through the community makes to create “Webmaker’s Hottest” a digital zine of the best projects from the community.
  • Upgrades to Popcorn Maker, our multimedia editor. Users can now combine audio, video and images from YouTube, Soundcloud, Giphy, Flickr and more, and search from within the app.
  • Remixable teaching kits. Designed for educators to create lessons and activities that teach the web, the kits can be remixed by fellow mentors, creating remixable Open Education Resources.
  • An upgraded events platform. Webmakers can use our site to organize virtual and in-person meet-ups.

Creating a standard

In order to teach the web, we realized we need a framework for what we’re teaching. The Webmaker site is also launching with a Web Literacy Standard, a framework that’s underpinning our work going forward. Developed alongside our community of education-minded Mozillians, the Web Literacy Standard is a map of competencies and skills covering everything from basic coding to knowledge about privacy and safety. These are competencies that Mozilla and our community of stakeholders believe are important to pay attention to when getting better at reading, writing and participating on the web.

Watch the video of our launch at MozFest, or sign up at webmaker.org to get more involved. As an open-source community, we have the power to create and ship the web we want, and this latest version of Webmaker is designed to do exactly that. We hope you enjoy it.

Get Involved:

• Sign up for webmaker.org and claim your personalized domain
• Teach the web: sign up, create teaching kits and starter content, and connect with learners across the globe
• Watch the MozFest launch

Lightbeam for Firefox: Privacy Education for Users & Open Data for Publishers

Alex Fowler

Shining a spotlight on online data tracking to help people understand the Web around them. That’s what we set out to accomplish a little more than a year ago as we began building on a popular, experimental add-on for Firefox called Collusion.

While revelations about government surveillance continue to stun people around the world, there’s another area of online data collection with its own complicated transparency challenges that remains important to users. And that’s the diverse range of third party companies that shape so much of our online experiences today from advertising to social sharing to personalization. Third parties are an integral part of the way the Internet works today. However, when we’re unable to understand the value these companies provide and make informed choices about their data collection practices, the result is a steady erosion of trust for all stakeholders.

Today, we’re proud to announce the release of the next iteration of Collusion, which we’re now calling Lightbeam for Firefox. The release happened at at this year’s MozFest.

lightbeam_logo-wordmark_800x250Lightbeam is an add-on for Firefox that brings to light the array of first and third party companies people interact with everyday across the Web. Development of Lightbeam for Firefox is developed with support from the Ford Foundation and the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council, and aided by faculty and students of the Emily Carr University of Art and Design.

How Lightbeam for Firefox works:

  • Visualize the Web: After you download and install the Lightbeam add-on to Firefox, it will begin to create a real time visualization of the websites you visit and all the third parties that are also active on those pages.
  • Analyze your connections: As your visualization grows, you can take a closer look into the  relationships between the various first and third party sites that are stored in your data. You can also reset or save your data.
  • Lightbeam - AMOScreenshot1_anonContribute open data: As a part of Lightbeam, we’re creating a big-picture view of Web tracking and of how first and third party sites are connected to each other. To help us, you can contribute your data to our Lightbeam database. Call it a Wizard of Oz moment for the Web, where users can collectively pull back the curtain see its inner-workings.
  • Support for publishers: During development of Lightbeam for Firefox, we worked with a number of leading online publishers about the value of the crowdsourced data. More work is needed, though. Once the open data set has time to mature, we’ll continue to explore how publishers can benefit from additional insights into the interaction of third parties on their sites.

At Mozilla, we believe that everyone should be in control of their user data and privacy, and we want to help you have the ability to make informed decisions about your Web experience. With the Lightbeam for Firefox add-on and open data, we’re providing a valuable community research platform to raise awareness, promote analysis and, ultimately, affect change in the area of privacy.

Lightbeam for Firefox is still in an early stage of development, this being only the second release of the add-on. All of the code is posted to Github and available for the Mozilla community to hack, expand and improve. Lightbeam is now live, and the add-on is available to download.

Lightbeam is being released at this year’s MozFest, Mozilla’s largest public-facing event. All throughout the weekend participants will be brainstorming and prototyping both technology and curriculum to help better educate web users about privacy.

3… 2… 1… MozFest!

Matt Thompson

1,300 hackers, media-makers and educators gather in London to invent the web’s future

Mozilla Festival

The 4th annual Mozilla Festival kicks off tomorrow in London. The three-day festival of making and learning is Mozilla’s biggest public event of the year, with more than 1,300 technologists, educators and thought leaders coming together from around the world to learn, make and teach the web.

This year we’re focused on teaching and learning. MozFest is always about shaping the web’s future together. This year’s theme will dig into how we can teach and empower web users, providing the skills they need to transform from passive consumers into active makers and creators.

We’ll gather at Ravensbourne in East London for three days of hacking and inventing together, building prototypes and curriculum for teaching everything from basic coding, to protecting online privacy, to integrating the open web into fields like journalism and science.

Shaping the web’s future together

“Technology alone cannot build the web the world needs,” says Mozilla’s Executive Director, Mark Surman. “For the web to stay open, accessible and free, we need people who understand the web’s basic building blocks, are able to create with them, and empowered to take control of their online lives. This year’s MozFest brings together brilliant people to tackle that challenge – through hands-on hacking, open collaboration, and imagining how the web can do more and do better.”

Mozilla Festival

What are we making at MozFest?

The Festival has 10 key tracks where participants will work together on sprints and workshops with themes like…

  • Teach the Web. New approaches for teaching digital skills, coding and webmaking.
  • Connect Your City. Building local digital learning networks around the world.
  • Skills and Badges. New ways to recognize skills and learning that happen anywhere.
  • Look Who’s Watching. Privacy, surveillance and tracking. How do we protect transparency and user sovereignty online?
  • Open Games. The web as an open gaming console for the world. Play and create next-generation web-based games.
  • Source Code for Journalism. Creating the tools news organizations needs to thrive on the open web.
  • Science and the Web. Redefining how we experiment, analyze and share scientific knowledge.
  • Open Data for the Open Web. Uncovering and building with data from the web and everyday world.
  • Making the Web Physical. Hacking on physcial devices and gizmos connected to the web in exciting new ways.
  • Webmaking for Mobile. Making apps and tinkering with your own phone. The web as platform.

Mozfest_10Nov_035

Launches and Announcements

Over the next three days, look for key announcements and launches here on the Mozilla blog around…

  • a host of new features on Webmaker.org, including an exciting new tool to teach, learn and collaborate with others on the web
  • a major update to Collusion, our popular tool for unveiling the way tracking and data sharing works online
  • the announcement of the 2014 Open News fellows.

Keynotes

The Festival will also feature keynote addresses from Anil Dash, Aaron Pilhofer and Camile Francois, plus Mozilla’s own Mark Surman and Mitchell Baker. Others speakers include Aniwey, the 19-year old developer behind the smash hit game Candy Box; Andy Forrest, the founder of MakerKids, a project to bring science and technology into American classrooms through “hands-on innovation”; and MIT Labs’ Daniel Smilkov and Deepak Jagdish, who will share insights from Immersion, a tool they built to make sense of email metadata.

MozFest Badges

For the first time ever, this year’s participants will also be able to earn Open Badges, as part of Mozilla’s open source project to reimagine credentialing on the web. Participants can receive an official “MozFest Reveler” badge for attending, plus earn badges across the different Festival tracks. Participants can also issue their own Open Badges on-site using community-created tools like Makebadg.es and Achievery.com.

“MozFest is our biggest Maker Party of the year. It’s where many of Mozilla’s most innovative ideas have sprung to life in the past,” adds Surman. “Mozilla’s mission is to ensure the web remains a resource open to everyone. MozFest strengthens that global braintrust of bright people dedicated to championing a user-built web.”

Mozilla Festival

Get involved