For those of us who have been touched by this process, this project, this product and these wonderful people – it has been a defining experience. One that we will tell our children about. And one that has left a positive mark on our small planet. I say this without a trace of skepticism or sarcasm.

We have managed to create change in the world and we should be pleased. And we should thank the thousands of contributors and millions of people who have explicitly made the choice to be part of something larger than themselves.

But today is also a day when we should look outward and to the future.

Imagine today as a midpoint. Halfway from the past to the future. We have our foot in the door and enjoy some small measure of leverage. We know his. And we should understand it for what it is – an opportunity. But each opportunity requires those who would rise up to meet it. I believe that we should use this date as a point in time to recommit ourselves to our larger goals and understand the struggle that it will take to meet them.

We end our first ten years at a high point. We are about ready to release the best web browser the world has ever seen. Innovation and competition are alive and well and the web continues to move forward. We are giving users the chance to define their own experience and how they interact with the Internet. We continue to learn from being one of the largest open source projects on the planet. And we continue to push the bounds of how a public benefit organization can compete, organize, operate and drive change in the world.

What will our next decade look like? I have no idea, but I’m sure that our little project will play some part. And I can only hope that the second decade ends as well as the first.

To each of you who has taken part over the last ten years, I hope that you will find the strength and passion to take part in the next ten. We have much work left to do.

You should care about Miro. For me, it’s become the mainstay of my video playing experience, be it to play TED talks (there’s a whole set of channels for that) Wired Science (yep, a channel for that too) or Timo’s HD Movie Trailers, The Onion News Network or Google Tech Talks they have a lot of great free and fun content. And they make it easy to get.

But even more important to me personally, there are two specific things that make them great. First, they are a non-profit foundation much in the same was as the Mozilla Foundation is. They believe strongly that video on the Internet should be made easily available without false scarcity, and everyone should be able to publish and distribute video.

And second – and even more important in many ways – is the mechanism that they choose to use to do it. They are doing it through direct action. They aren’t lobbying congress or staging protests or talking to the press. Instead they choose to be the change they want to see in the world and build real things that normal people can use. By building a base of users, by encouraging legitimate use of bittorrent to lower the costs of distribution, by helping to organize content and allow normal people to publish, they are changing the way that video on the Internet will work. And they are doing it in a competitive marketplace.

The technology is based on Mozilla’s XULRunner platform and is available on OSX, Windows and Linux

I just donated $100 to Miro to help get them bridge the gap to sustainability. You don’t have to donate that much, of course. They will take donations as low as $10. But you should do your part and help them out. Especially if you heart Miro like I do.

Here’s a rundown of the agenda:

• Mitchell Baker will be giving a talk about the Mozilla Project

Mitchell always has something interesting to say. From the global impact and reach of our little project to the importance of creating an area for people to work together openly to mixing non-profit goals with good business sense. Her talk is on Saturday April 19th at 3:00pm. Be there!

• Felipe Tassario Gomes will be talking about XULRunner, JavaScript and SQLite

He’s going to be talking about XUL which means a good combination of how to extend Firefox and possibly also writing your own XUL application. For people who are local in Brazil this is likely to be a great technical talk. There’s a huge amount of power locked up in our platform and it’s great to see another way for people to express it. He’s speaking at 2pm on Friday, April 18th.

• Chris Hofmann, Marcio Galli and myself will hold a panel on Firefox in Brazil

This should be an interesting panel. Chris and I have been with the project for a long time and will talk about what’s going on in the Mozilla project today, how we can bring Mozilla and Firefox to Brazil in a way that’s appropriate for the local culture and Marcio will talk about what’s he’s been learning about our project in Brazil from localization to customization. Lots of Q&A, lots of discussion. If you really want to have the chance to ask your own questions and learn about our project, this is the place to do it.

• There will be Mozilla table on the floor at FISL

Manned by the totally awesome Clauber Stipkovic Halic and Mário Rinaldi, they will be available to answer questions and will also be handing out neat Mozilla and Firefox merchandise.

• Mozilla room and workshop

Come hang out with cool Mozilla people! [ Note: I don't know the date for this yet. ] We’ll be having short sessions and we can do some cool stuff together. Here’s some of the things that we’re thinking of doing:

• Mobile: I will talk about Mobile and how we’re going to get Firefox on your next phone.
• Automated code rewrite and analysis tools: Taras Glek will talk about our new awesome tools that we’re using to analyze and change our codebase for Mozilla 2. I will make a separate post about this. It’s that awesome.
• Testing & QA: Chris knows this community really well and will talk about how to get involved in our testing efforts.
• Offline & New features in Firefox: Marcio will spend time talking about our new features and how to take advantage of them.
• Localization: Fernando Silveira will talk about how to get involved in our localization efforts and how to use our tools.

But that’s just a short list. We hope that people will suggest new things and join us. There’s an open wiki page for the workshop – edit away with suggestions!

But mostly this is the first step to bringing all that Firefox 3 size and speed hotness to one of our first mobile platforms. Enjoy!

Mozilla speeds up Firefox: Users say it’s twice as fast as Safari, three times faster than IE

Gregg Keizer talks about the improvements we’ve made in Firefox 3, as well as how we compare to other browsers and browser engines. It’s easy to talk about simple benchmarks but Mike Schroepfer states our goal pretty clearly:

“There are lots of ways to ‘game’ the system [in benchmarks], but what we’re trying to do is speed up the things that enable people to run the really heavy-duty applications on the Web.”

Forget Facebook. The Web’s platform is Firefox

Matt Asay interviews John Lilly and discovers how large our ambitions really are. An important quote here that goes to the heart of how we develop and deliver software:

Our question is always, how do we grow in a way that is leveraged? We always lead with the user experience and think about the money secondarily.

Cairo 1.6, Quartz, and Gecko

Vlad talks about the work that he’s been putting into Cairo to make Quartz a first class citizen, including support for the iPhone. Vlad seems to feel that Cairo is really starting to come into its own after being in development for so long. (Mozilla has been working with cairo for so long that it’s important to remember where it was when we started.) There’s some good stuff in here for Linux folks too. Soren has been doing a lot of good work on pixman and Mozilla has been investing in improving upstream cairo performance (some of the MMX work is funded by us) in order to help Linux and our mobile efforts. All good stuff.

ARIA on Webkit’s R(a)dar?

With the beta release of IE8, WebKit is the last major browser engine that doesn’t have support for ARIA. The upstream WebKit bug picked up a tag that points to Apple’s internal bug tracking system. Which means that Apple may or may not be working on it. If this were fixed, it would be a pretty big step forward for the web.

Year of the Gecko

Mike Shaver reflects on where we are today. I liked this quote in particular:

Other people are excited too, from users and journalists to extension developers and companies looking to add web tech to their products. In the mobile arena especially we’re seeing a ton of excitement about the gains in speed and size. A lot of people aren’t yet used to thinking of Mozilla as a source of mobile-grade technology, but they weren’t used to thinking of us as a major browser force either. It’s fun to break the model.

Fast, small, cross-platform, industry-leading stability, solid OS integration, excellent standards support, excellent web compatibility, great security, ridiculously extensible, a productive app platform, accessible, localized to heck and back, open source from top to bottom: it’s a great time to be building on top of Gecko, and Firefox 3 is just the beginning. Wait until you see what we have in store for the next release…

With mobile browser, Mozilla hopes to shake up market

Washington Post article on our entry into the Mobile browser market. They note that Samsung has been working with us, submitting UI ideas and also working on bits of the underlying platform and that the N800/N810 OS includes a Mozilla-based browser. (Sadly, the MicroB that’s on the N800 is a tad old and hasn’t benefitted from all the recent performance and size we’ve been doing at the end of this release cycle.)

Mobile applications, RIP

Long essay on the decline of native mobile apps and the trend of moving mobile apps to mobile web apps. The web app deployment model (unencumbered by greedy operators) mixed with the fact that a vendor can often leverage huge amounts of existing work and the testing matrix gets much smaller means that the web as a delivery mechanism for mobile apps is becoming a reality. (Expect to see more on this topic from Mozilla in the near future – we’ve got some great stuff coming down the pipe.)

Andy Rubin on Android (quoted by Robert Love)

We’re building an open-source platform for mobile phones called Android. The strategy is to provide Web-style innovation and rapid development on the cell phone, which we think is still in prehistoric times. If you have people developing applications at home, one of them will create the next Facebook. That’s the idea behind our mobile mashups. Third-party developers get data from one site and overlay it on something like a Google map. We want to deliver thousands of applications to your phone.

Of course, I’m not sure you need Android to do that, but I agree 1000% with the goal. A decent web browser is the first place to start, which is one of the main reasons why we’re investing in Mobile.

In terms of performance, people have really started to notice how our changes in the run-up to Firefox 3 have really been making a huge difference on a lot of benchmarks. You can really feel the difference this makes. For someone like me who lives on the Firefox 3 nightlies I’ve become somewhat immune to the changes. But every once in a while I’ll go back to using Firefox 2 and I’m suddenly reminded of how much better we’ve gotten over the last couple of months. The effects are subtle, but important. Pages load instantly, zimbra and gmail respond like desktop apps, the UI is much more responsive – just about everything has improved. People used to complain that our UI felt sluggish because a lot of it is rendered through Gecko, but I think that this release will change that perception. Our new native look has a native feel as well.

Memory usage is one of the most difficult things in computing to deal with. Complex systems like Mozilla resist accurate measurement. End user perception is often skewed by poor tools on the operating systems. Browsers have such different usage patterns from user to user that it’s hard to come up with accurate test cases. And in the end the solutions to problems are not often found where you would expect. In the run-up to Firefox 3, we’ve been investing heavily in improving both our top line size but also how predictable our memory usage is. Stuart has an absolutely fantastic post that covers all of the work that we’ve done in this release cycle to the browser. (And it has graphs if you’re in a hurry – so just go look at it.) Everything from allocator changes to platform changes to focused changes where we’ve found hotspots, etc. There is no one solution to memory usage. It requires a commitment across the project to make it a priority. And it must be measured constantly. We’ve made that commitment.

So what does this mean in a mobile context? It’s pretty simple, really. What it shows to anyone who looks is that we’re able to hit the kinds of memory and performance requirements that mobile platforms demand. Along with that we’re able to bring our full platform, excellent web compatibility, a single source code base, a committed organization and a strong brand and identity and make that available to partners and users. Users who use our software on mobile devices can expect web sites that just work, access to add-ons all balanced against the hardware limits imposed by mobile devices. In essence, we can bring that no compromises approach to mobile, just as we’ve done it with the desktop. And Beta 4 is the proof of that.