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MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif.–John Lilly wants it both ways.

Working at Mozilla Corporation since 2005 and as chief executive since early 2008, he helped oversee a remarkable achievement. Mozilla has built the Firefox browser from a largely unsuccessful remnant of the Netscape era of the 1990s into the browser that nearly a quarter of people on the Web use. Now the challenges are different.

Mozilla Corp. CEO John Lilly

(Credit:
Stephen Shankland/CNET)

First, for new growth, Mozilla must make its open-source browser appeal to an even more mainstream crowd, one that’s more interested in working and playing online than in sticking it to Microsoft or being part of a cause. Second, it’s got to keep the loyalty of the technically savvy early adopters and Web developers that Google now has been courting with its Chrome browser.

“We have to do both,” Lilly said in an interview at Mozilla headquarters here. “We have to be a better browser for your standard everyday user of the Web who uses IE now, but I think we have to redouble our efforts to be good for Web developers.”

The world changed for Mozilla when Chrome burst onto the scene in 2008. Mozilla didn’t see itself as complacent, but Chrome was a wake-up call that “clarified some of our priorities,” Lilly said, including snappy performance.

“It made some things real crisp,” Lilly said.

Indeed, in the months after Chrome’s arrival, these priorities appeared in Mozilla’s Firefox planning: “Observable improvements in user-perceptible performance metrics such as start-up, time to open a new tab, and responsiveness when interacting with the user interface. Common user tasks should feel faster and more responsive.” And future versions of Firefox likely will look more like Chrome embracing some of its less obtrusive framing of Web content and applications.

‘Web-native’ Google
Mozilla’s biggest rivals before, Microsoft’s Internet Explorer and Apple’s Safari, came from companies firmly rooted in the era of desktop computers and operating systems. Not so Google, which not only has Web-based applications such as Google Docs and Gmail to support, but also a browser-based operating system called Chrome OS.

“Competing was hard but at some level simple. Google is much more Web-native,” Lilly said.

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Google is an unusual rival. Even as Google and Mozilla vie for popularity, they’re tight allies in the “Open Web” movement to augment Web standards to today’s static pages into tomorrow’s applications. And Google almost singlehandedly funds Mozilla by sending back a portion of search-ad revenue that originates from Google searches within Firefox.

In 2007, the last year for which Mozilla has released figures, Google supplied 89 percent of Mozilla’s $75 million in revenue. Although the Mozilla-Google revenue-sharing deal is set to expire in 2011, realistically, it’s probably safe.

For one thing, Firefox sends a large amount of search traffic to Google–traffic it could easily send to another search engine with the flip of a default setting switch. Second, Google’s browser enemy is Internet Explorer, especially the slow and limited IE 6 that’s still in widespread use eight years after its release. If Google wanted to cripple Mozilla, the time to do it would have been 2008, when the search-ad deal was up for renewal, but Google renewed it.

New standards
One big part of Mozilla’s effort to remain in the vanguard is support for new Web standards.

Mozilla is among those trying to renovate Hypertext Markup Language (HTML) to make it a richer, more capable foundation for programming as well as display. And its significant if not dominant share of usage makes it a major force bringing those “Open Web” technologies to fruition.

“There are still a lot people who think the Web is done–there’s this big mission accomplished banner. It’s not true,” Lilly said. “There are many proprietary technologies, many walled gardens with respect to video and offline technology. There is still is a lot of the Open Web fight to fight,” Lilly said. “Getting to Firefox–a quarter of the Web–shows these technologies are real.”

One thorny one is Web-based video. Today most online video is sent using Adobe Systems’ Flash browser plug-in, which is free; video is encoded with the H.264 standard, which must be licensed. But fees could increase in 2011 with the possibility of new royalties for streaming H.264 video over the Internet.

Mozilla headquarters in Mountain View, Calif.

(Credit:
Stephen Shankland/CNET)

Perhaps not coincidentally, Google announced plans to acquire On2 Technologies, which has other video encoding and decoding software–or codec–including a new version under development called VP8.

“If VP8 is an open codec and unencumbered (by patent licensing considerations), it’s something we’d implement. That changes the whole landscape,” Lilly said.

The first update in a decade to the HTML standard used to describe Web pages is under way, and one major feature is a video tag that builds video directly into the Web rather than relying on a plug-in such as Flash, Microsoft’s Silverlight, or Apple’s QuickTime. Though Mozilla, Google, Apple, and Opera all like the tag, they don’t see eye to eye about what format video should be encoded in, which complicates how well the technology works in practice.

Mozilla and Opera urge use of the Ogg Theora video format, which may be implemented in open-source software without licensing complications, and Firefox has had Ogg support since version 3.5 of the browser arrived earlier this year.

But Apple’s Safari has H.264 support built in. Google’s Chrome supports both standards, but YouTube supports only H.264. Microsoft hasn’t said what it plans to do. So for now, video plug-ins appear unthreatened.

Microsoft in the wings
At the other end of the competitive spectrum is the incumbent. Although Microsoft’s browser development crept nearly to a standstill after IE won the first browser wars of the 1990s, there’s evidence the sleeping giant is awakening.

IE 8, released earlier this year, attempts to conform to existing Web standards rather than setting its own. And though IE still doesn’t support many of the latest technologies to make the Web into an application foundation, Microsoft now is actively engaged in discussions over those technologies and their standardization. Finally, Microsoft is working on Web applications of its own in the form of an online version of Office 2010, giving the company a strong new incentive to improve its technology.

So far, though, Microsoft’s effect is more theoretical than actual.

“They’ve given notice they will engage. We haven’t seen them influence it a lot,” said Mike Shaver, Mozilla’s vice president of engineering. He’s eager about the possibility that Microsoft will embrace new Web standards. “They represent a large user base–some by choice, some not. Those technologies mean a lot more when they make it to more people.”

Something of a wild card factor in today’s browser wars is Apple, which has released a Windows version of its browser. The company rarely ventures out of its home turf of Mac OS X unless there’s a strong incentive–releasing iTunes for Windows to boost the iPod business, for example–but evidently deemed Safari for Windows a high enough priority to fund development and support efforts if not much in the way of marketing.

Going mobile
Apple, though, has a big head start when it comes to the new era of mobile browsing that’s just beginning to mature with high-powered devices such as the iPhone. Like it, Palm’s Pre handset and Google’s Android operating system for mobile phones use a browser based on the open-source WebKit project.

Firefox is moving more slowly into mobile, though. Its mobile browser project, called Fennec, is slated to emerge later this year under the Firefox brand name for Nokia’s Maemo mobile operating system, and Lilly has said Firefox will be available for Google’s Android operating system as well.

“I do more browsing than ever in mobile. The boundaries between desktop and mobile are going to blur,” Lilly said. “We will release (Fennec) as a product called Firefox later this year.”

Lilly likes to look at the bright side of this fluid landscape. “In most ways the world as a Web user is better than it’s ever been. There’s real choice, not just from Apple and Microsoft but from Google and Opera,” he said.

“We’re a unique organization. Compared to open-source projects, we look rather wealthy. Compared to the people we’re competing with–Apple, Microsoft, Google–$50 million, $60 million, $100 million in revenue that to them isn’t really meaningful,” Lilly said. “We’re competing in a low-expense, scrappy way.”

Originally posted at Deep Tech

Excerpted from:
Firefox’s crossroads: Cutting-edge or mainstream?

MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif.–Some new fruits of Mozilla’s effort to speed Firefox development are about to arrive.

Mozilla plans to release the first beta version of 3.6 this weekend or early next week. But what exactly is coming in the new version and its successors?

Mike Shaver, Mozilla’s vice president of product development, and John Lilly, Mozilla’s chief executive, detailed some of the browser’s future in an interview at the corporation’s headquarters here. And the company has an aggressive schedule, with three releases due within about a year.

Mike Shaver, vice president of engineering at Mozilla

(Credit:
Stephen Shankland/CNET)

The present version of Firefox was to have been called 3.1, but with significant new features, it became Firefox 3.5–and arrived later than 3.1 had been planned. Version 3.6 is slated for release in final form this year, with 3.7 in the first half of next year and 4.0 about a year from now, Lilly said.

“We’re trying to shrink these development cycles down,” Shaver said.

Getting personal
One of the big changes with 3.6 is building in the Personas add-on that lets people customize the appearance of the browser. It’s about as cosmetic as a change can be, but reskinning software often is popular among users who want to personalize their computers.

Under the covers but more noticeable is prioritized networking that gives the active tab the lion’s share of network capacity to speed its loading. The goal is to speed up multipage restarts of the browser.

Tabs behavior will get a significant change that could throw some people off. New tabs generally will appear immediately to the right of the active tab when opened from a link, rather than at the far right of the tab strip.

Finally, Firefox 3.6 will support Open Web Font, a font format that supports compression and metadata to let the origins of a typeface be tracked down.

Support for new Windows 7 interface features, though, mostly will have to wait. “Aero Peek has landed in 3.6, but Jump Lists and download status in the Windows 7 task bar will have to wait for 3.7,” according to this week’s update. Aero Peek lets people see miniature versions of applications from the Windows task bar; Jump Lists spring up from applications on the task bar to let people take quick actions such as opening a recently used document or Web page.

A mock-up of Firefox 3.7 shows merged reload-stop button, the home tab, and the missing menu bar option.

(Credit:
Mozilla)

Firefox 3.7
For 3.7, the big change will be under the covers: plug-ins such as Flash will be moved to computing processes that are separate from the main browser operation, protecting the latter from problems with the former.

“We’ve seen more crashing since 3.5 came out, especially in last month or so,” Lilly said, pointing to problems from Web-based malware attacks and from issues with Flash. The new design also should help split Firefox up into separate tasks that can take better advantage of all the computing threads offered by multicore processors.

Also coming in 3.7 will be new graphical animation work using Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG) and Cascading Style Sheets (CSS), two Web standards. And pushing the direction in which Chrome and Safari have been so aggressive, there will be new JavaScript work.

With version 3.0, Mozilla introduced Firefox’s “awesomebar,” officially but infrequently called the Smart Location Bar, which can be used not only to type addresses but also to retrieve the URLs of previously visited sites. With 3.7, expect an upgrade that lets people switch among active tabs by typing in the bar.

Firefox 3.7 also will mark the arrival of some significant changes to the user interface, though final details remain under discussion. Among the likely changes: a combined stop and reload button, a home tab instead of a home button, and the ability to run with the menu bar hidden.

One superficial change Mozilla hopes will make Firefox look less “dated” is work to make the browser fit in better with Windows Vista and Windows 7. There will be some corresponding changes to Firefox’s Mac OS X interface, too.

This mock-up of Firefox 4.0 shows the 'tabs-on-top' option, the side-mounted menu buttons, combined address-search bar–all Google Chrome-like features.

(Credit:
Mozilla)

Firefox 4.0
Bigger changes come with version 4.0. There each browser tab will get its own process. “In Firefox 4 we’ll have a more fully multiprocess architecture for stability and increasingly to take advantage of multiple cores,” Lilly said.

Another big change will be with add-ons. One of Firefox’s biggest assets is the rich array of these customization options–but a corresponding frustration is how those add-ons often break with each update to the browser.

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Firefox 4 will introduce a new add-on framework under development today called Jetpack that, like Chrome’s, uses Web-based technologies for add-on construction. Today’s Firefox uses a foundation called XUL.

Among the other perks besides compatibility, as Mozilla sees it, Jetpack extensions are easier to write and share, and they can be updated as the browser runs without a restart. Still, it will mean a big discontinuity for programmers.

“We want for developers to want to get onto Jetpack and the Jetpack application programming interface,” Shaver said, and the current plan is to drop the older add-on technology with Firefox 4.

Finally, there will be more changes to the browser’s appearance. Some have called it a Chrome copy–features include a merged location bar and search bar, removing the status bar across the bottom, and adding an option to put the tabs at the very top of the browser, all features introduced with Chrome. Lilly, though, bridles at the Chrome-copy idea.

“We’re trying to get as much window space as possible for content,” he said. “I don’t think it’s a move toward Chrome. We’re trying to give space to the content.”

Originally posted at Deep Tech

Read more here:
Firefox’s future features: 3.6, 3.7, and 4.0

Meez, a start-up that expanded last year from an avatar creation service into a full-out virtual world for teens, is touting some good news: it’s been profitable since April and “every month is better than the last month,” CEO John Cahill told CNET News.

Right now, Meez has about 13 million registered users, 3 million unique hits per month, and only 20 full-time employees plus about 10 contractors.

Where’s the money coming from? Premium subscriptions, ads on the free version of the site, and virtual goods bought and sold with its internal “Coinz” currency–which includes a mobile virtual-gift deal with Verizon.

The company is making this announcement in conjunction with the debut of its MySpace application, which should be live on the News Corp.-owned social network shortly. It’s Meez’s first integration with a big social network.

“The MySpace app is designed to allow people from MySpace to use the Meez virtual world, and people using the virtual world on Meez.com will be able to integrate with the MySpace users,” Cahill explained.

So why is the company’s first social-network platform product built on MySpace, which has had well-documented drops in traffic? The demographic and culture are a better fit, Cahill said, pointing to MySpace’s younger-skewing user base as well as a culture that encourages meeting new people online.

“We are working on a Facebook app as well, but every time we surveyed our audience, our audience was very much more MySpace-based than Facebook,” Cahill said. “It’s about discovery. It’s about finding new friends. On Facebook, your friends actually tend to be your (real-life) friends.”

Getting onto social platforms will mean that Meez is starting to compete for attention (and that other buzzword, “engagement”) with social gaming behemoths like Zynga and Playfish. Brushing elbows with the companies that already have come to dominate entertainment on social networks is par for the course, Cahill insisted.

“We’re all competing for Internet time,” he said.

Originally posted at The Social

Here is the original post:
Teen virtual world Meez sees profit

The guy who posted Twitter's 5 billionth tweet.

(Credit:
Robin Sloan's Facebook profile)

Former Current Media executive Robin Sloan appears to have posted Twitter’s 5 billionth tweet, in the form of a reply to another user that otherwise read only “Oh lord.”

The landmark status of Sloan’s tweet, which he has nicknamed “The Pentagigatweet,” appears to have been derived from the fact that the number at the end of a tweet’s URL is apparently the total count of tweets that have been posted until that point. We’ve e-mailed Twitter co-founder Biz Stone to verify and will update if and when we hear back.

It’s sort of fitting that Twitter’s 5 billionth tweet came not from one of the celebrities or marketers who have flooded the service in recent months, but from one of the quirky Bay Area dot-com nerds who formed its first loyal pack of users.

Sloan, who lives in San Francisco, recently departed his gig at Current–which is headquartered only a few blocks away from Twitter’s own home base in the South of Market neighborhood–to write a novel, “Mr. Penumbra’s Twenty-Four-Hour Book Store,” which he is funding through creative-microfinance site Kickstarter.

He may have just gotten a convenient leg up in publicity.

Meanwhile, some third-party observers have been remarking that Twitter’s rapid growth may be slowing down. The company recently raised another round of funding at a valuation somewhere in the neighborhood of $1 billion.

Originally posted at The Social

Read more:
Twitter hits 5 billion tweets

An advertising industry association–backed by four of the world’s largest ad agencies–sent a letter to the Department of Justice Monday endorsing the Microsoft-Yahoo search deal, saying it “enhances competition.”

Four major ad agencies would like to see the search deal signed by Yahoo CEO Carol Bartz and Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer come to pass.

(Credit:
Yahoo/Microsoft)

American Association of Advertising Agencies President and CEO Nancy Hill posted the open letter Monday, which was also signed by Maurice Levy, chairman and CEO of Publicis Groupe; Martin Sorrell, CEO of WPP; Michael I. Roth, chairman and CEO of Interpublic Group of Companies; and John Wren, president and CEO of Omnicom Group. “We believe that Yahoo and Microsoft’s proposal to combine their technologies and search platforms is good for advertisers, marketing services agencies, website publishers and consumers,” they said in the letter.

The pending deal between Microsoft and Yahoo that would see Microsoft become the exclusive provider of search technology on Yahoo’s Web sites will require regulatory approval to move forward, because the government tends to take a closer look at any deal that involves two of three major players in a given industry joining forces. Some have argued that the high barriers of entry in the search market might lead the DOJ to consider restrictions on the deal, such as the sale of Yahoo’s search technology to a third party.

Advertisers, however, like the deal because a combined Microsoft-Yahoo search product has the potential to serve as a powerful check on Google’s dominance of that market. More money is spent on search advertising than on any other form of Internet advertising.

“A healthy, competitive market for search and search advertising is crucial to the Internet’s future,” the advertisers said in the letter. “As leading members of the advertising and marketing services industry, we urge the Department of Justice to bring its antitrust review to a speedy conclusion. This proposal enhances competition, and should be allowed to take effect as soon as possible.”

Originally posted at Relevant Results

Original post:
Ad agencies stump for Microsoft-Yahoo search deal