about:mozilla - Firefox marketing, Guinness record, Colbert bump, Fx3 features, community calendar, and more…
In this issue…
- Firefox marketing and community
- Mozilla’s Guinness World Record certificate
- Colbert Bump - Firefox 3 proves its existence
- Firefox 3 features you may not know
- Video and Audio element patch has landed
- Mozilla Community Calendar
- Party in Taiwan - July 19
- Developer calendar
- Subscribe to the email newsletter
Firefox marketing and community
“Mozilla is currently deep in the heart of its celebration over officially setting a new Guinness World Record for the largest number of software downloads in 24 hours for its Firefox 3 browser. But the company isn’t cheering alone — it’s enjoying this victory with the community it rightfully credits for helping it succeed.” Jennifer Leggio’s ZDNet article is an interesting examination of Mozilla’s non-traditional marketing strategies, where social networking and word-of-mouth engagement has generally ruled the day. Interviewing Paul Kim, Mozilla’s VP of Marketing, Jennifer digs into the methods used to promote the recent Firefox 3 Download Day activities which include: Spread Firefox, Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube among others. The full article is available at ZDNet.
Mozilla’s Guinness World Record certificate
Mozilla received the official Guinness World Record certificate for the “largest number of software downloads in 24 hours” on July 9th, 2008. The final and official number that appears on the certificate is 8,002,530, which is an incredible achievement and one of which our entire community should be proud. Tristan Nitot accepted the certificate on behalf of the Firefox Community, receiving it from Gareth Deaves, Records Manager for Internet and Technology at Guinness World Records. The certificate was awarded in front of a 300-strong community gathering in central London to celebrate the release of Firefox 3 and the World Record achievement. A photo from the ceremony and further details are available at the Mozilla Blog.
Colbert Bump - Firefox 3 proves its existence
On the evening of Firefox 3 Download Day, Stephen Colbert of “The Colbert Report” gave Firefox 3 his “Colbert Bump”, further buoying the already giddy and exhausted crowd of folks involved with the launch efforts. The Mozilla Metrics team has since combed through the download logs looking to see if the “Colbert Bump” actually had any effect on the traffic to the website. “Download Day was a wild success, and we were happy to share some thanks and credit with Stephen. However, a few questions naturally arose, e.g., what was the direct impact of the Colbert Bump? and could the effect be precisely measured?” It turns out that there was a significant spike in the downloads exactly one and two minutes after “the Bump”. For the details, read the full post at the Blog of Metrics.
Firefox 3 features you may not know
Percy Cabello has published an article at Mozilla Links that outlines some of the lesser-known features you can find in Firefox 3. “While the awesome bar, download pause and resume, malware protection, the new themes, and serious performance improvements are perhaps the most representative features introduced with Firefox 3, here are some other useful ones…” Percy’s list includes how to duplicate a tab, move tabs between windows, resize the search bar, add a keyword search, and several others. Read the full article over at the MozillaLinks weblog.
Video and Audio element patch has landed
Chris Double writes, “The patches to add support for the WHATWG video and audio elements has been applied to the Firefox mozilla-central repository. This means you can get the source for Firefox and build it with support for “video” and “audio” by using the configure flag ‘-enable-media’. The patch that landed does not yet include a backend decoder. It won’t play any videos as a result. That will be fixed as various backends are landed.” For more information, see Chris’ weblog post.
Deb Richardson is putting together a comprehensive list of weekly/regular public project meetings and other events. The wiki page for it is here: Community Calendar. The plan is to eventually publish a consolidated version as a shared public calendar that everyone can subscribe to. Please check the wiki page and make any changes or additions necessary.
MozillaTW.org, the wonderful Mozilla community in Taiwan, is hosting a “Firefox Party 3.0” on July 19th in Taipei. If you are in Taiwan, don’t miss it! Gen Kenai’s blog post includes some cute Firefox party banners.
For an up-to-date list of the coming week’s Mozilla project meetings and events, please see the Mozilla Community Calendar wiki page.
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