Web developers are expressing interest in an app store model for the Web that would enable them to get paid for their efforts without having to abandon Web development in exchange for proprietary silos, each with their own programming language and SDK, variable and sometimes opaque review processes, and limited reach.

Supporting the needs of Web developers in their efforts to develop websites and apps that aren’t bound to a specific browser and work across the Web is core to Mozilla’s public benefit mission.

And so we’ve been actively exploring what an Open Web App Store would need to look like to ensure the long-term health and vitality of the Web as an incredibly open and accessible platform for innovation.

What does it mean to be an Open Web App Store? As a starting point, we are proposing a set of high-level principles.

Let’s start the discussion.  What do you think is important?

Video is an integral part of the modern web experience, which is why Mozilla has been working for the past few years to make sure that video can be used in the ways necessary to sustain the web’s incredible growth and generativity. Today we’re excited to join Google in announcing the WebM project to advance web video, including Google’s release of the VP8 codec under open source and royalty-free terms.

Since Mozilla first announced support for HTML5 video, we have worked to improve the performance, usability and capabilities of open video on the web. We’ve been grateful for the opportunity to support the visionary work of the Ogg Theora project, and in collaboration with them we’ve brought royalty-free web video to hundreds of millions of users around the world. Most recently, Mozilla commissioned work to provide hardware acceleration for Theora, making it dramatically more efficient on today’s mobile devices.

Until today, Theora was the only production-quality codec that was usable under terms appropriate for the open web. Now we can add another, in the form of VP8: providing better bandwidth efficiency than H.264, and designed to take advantage of hardware from mobile devices to powerful multicore desktop machines, it is a tremendous technology to have on the side of the open web. VP8 and WebM promise not only to commoditize state-of-the-art video quality, but also to form the basis of further advances in video for the web.

It is a great time to be a web developer, and there has never been a better time to be a supporter of open video on the web. Mozilla is very excited to be part of the WebM project, and to join with an impressive list of industry partners in advancing unencumbered, high-performance multimedia on the web. And, of course, we’re working to get this capability into the hands of 400M Firefox users on desktops and mobile devices alike.

Preview builds of Firefox with WebM support are available at http//nightly.mozilla.org/webm.

Firefox 3.6 has been nominated for the People’s Choice Stevie Awards as the Favorite New Product (Software – New Version). Voting ends June 4^th. You can go here to cast your vote in one of two ways:

• Input the special Firefox 3.6 short code: M696H
• Under the Award Categories menu select “Favorite Software – New Version” and then click “Firefox 3.6”

After you vote, please complete the registration form with your name, e-mail address and telephone number. The Stevie Awards has a strict privacy policy and will not share your information.

Thanks to the amazing Mozilla community support, Firefox 3 won the People’s Choice Stevie Award in 2009. Please vote and help spread the word so we can try to win again in 2010!

Editor’s Note: Today, Mozilla announced the availability of Plugin Check for all browsers. For more details, check out Johnathan Nightingale’s blog post, reposted below.

It’s been a few months since I wrote about the work our plugin check team has been doing, but there are a couple of pretty excellent pieces of news I’d like to share, most notably: the Mozilla plugin check now works for users of other browsers as well.

Plugin Check: A Refresher

Last fall, we started a program to help our users keep their plugins up to date. Outdated plugins are a major source of security and stability risk for web users, and some studies have put the proportion of users with older versions as high as 80%.

In the months since we’ve deployed the page, we’ve seen some great success. These days, over 60% of the users we see on the plugin check page with Adobe’s Macromedia Flash plugin installed are running the most recent version, and the number grows to more than 75% if we include the second most recent. That’s much higher than the web as a whole, and there is still a lot of work to do to get that number up, but we’re confident that the integrated checks for outdated plugins in Firefox 3.6 will improve things even further.

What’s New

We believe that plugin safety is an issue for the web as a whole, so while our initial efforts focused on building a page that would work for Firefox users, the team has since expanded plugin check coverage to work with Safari 4, Chrome 4, and Opera 10.5. We have added support for Internet Explorer 7 and 8 for the most popular plugins, as well, but since IE requires specific code to be written for each plugin it will take us a little longer to get to full coverage. You can see the updated page for yourself here.

This has been a phenomenal amount of work to develop and test, and the matrix of browser, plugin and OS grows very quickly. Our web team is remarkable, but they couldn’t have done it without the continuing support of Mozilla community members like Lloyd Hilaiel who helped write some of the plugin-specific logic.

Plugin Check Badges

Finally, now that we have delivered a more universal plugin check page, I wanted to call your attention to the plugin check site badges our team developed a little while ago. Adding these banners to your site will help your readers stay current regardless of which browser they use, and make the internet a safer place for everyone.

One More Request

Our Plugin Directory will eventually become the main way we keep our data about plugins up-to-date. If you’re a plugin vendor, we need your help! The directory is currently in alpha stages, and we need vendors to let us know as new versions come out, and old versions become dangerous. Please email plugindir @ mozilla . com for information about how you can get involved.

Johnathan Nightingale
Director of Firefox Development

Editor’s Note: On May 10, Mike Beltzner presented the vision for Firefox 4 (the next major release of Firefox) to the Mozilla community. For more details, check out Mike Beltzner’s blog post, reposted below.

Firefox 4: fast, powerful, and empowering

Today, I presented an early product plan for Firefox 4 to the Mozilla community (live, over the web!) to share our vision for the next version of Firefox, and what projects are underway to realize it. Then I invited everyone to get involved by joining our engineering or product development efforts.

The primary goals for Firefox 4 will be making a browser:

• Fast: making Firefox super-duper fast
• Powerful: enabling new open, standard Web technologies (HTML5 and beyond!),
• Empowering: putting users in full control of their browser, data, and Web experience.

Usually software producers don’t present these sorts of plans in public until they’re finalized, but Mozilla is a little different. We work in the open, socializing our plans early and often to gather feedback and build excitement in our worldwide community. Not everyone could attend the presentation today, though, so I’m sharing the slides and video here as well.

That said: please understand that these plans are fluid and are likely to change. As with past releases, we use dates to set targets for milestones, and then we work together to track to those targets. We always judge each milestone release against our basic criteria of quality, performance, and usability, and we only ship when it’s ready.

If you have Firefox or a modern web browser that supports fully open HTML video, you can watch the presentation.

If you’d just like to thumb through the slides yourself, I’ve put them up on SlideShare:

As always we’re interested in your feedback. Use Rypple, or leave a comment here, or if you have specific thoughts about Firefox or our platform development you can join the discussion in:

• Firefox Developer’s Forum
• Mozilla Platform Developer’s Forum

Mozilla Planning Forum

Our latest challenge on the Creative Collective was to design the official Mozilla 2010 t-shirt, an exclusive item that will be printed and distributed to active contributors around the world. We received over 700 submissions from the community, which were reviewed carefully and narrowed down to the top 5 according to the following criteria: creativity in design concept, effectiveness at communicating key themes, and adherence to the stated creative brief.  Voting has already begun, and it’s up to you to decide the winner.

When reviewing the top 5 designs, please keep in mind that the Mozilla logo marks will be printed on the back by default.  So, it’s okay that the front of the t-shirt takes a more creative/abstract approach in conveying the key themes and values that Mozilla embodies – in fact, we encouraged it.

Please take a moment and help us select the official Mozilla 2010 t-shirt by voting for your favorite designs. Voting will end on Friday May 14th at 11:59 PM (PST). We’re excited to see which design wins!

Editor’s note: On April 20, Mozilla announced the release of Firefox 3.6.4 beta, which includes the “Lorentz” project to offer uninterrupted browsing for Windows and Linux users when a problem causes a crash in any Adobe Flash, Apple Quicktime or Microsoft Silverlight plugin instance. Firefox 3.6.4 beta is the newest release of Firefox 3.6, which has been downloaded more than 400 million times.

For more details, check out Mike Beltzner’s Mozilla Developer News announcement, reposted below.

Firefox 3.6.4 beta available for download and testing

A beta of Firefox 3.6.4 is now available for download and public testing. This version of Firefox will offer uninterrupted browsing for Windows and Linux users when there is a crash in the Adobe Flash, Apple Quicktime, or Microsoft Silverlight plugins. If a crash in one of these plugins happens, Firefox will continue to run and users will be able to submit a crash report before reloading the page to try again:

We encourage users to test this Firefox 3.6.4 beta on their favorite websites, and give us feedback by submitting their crash reports. If users find websites that repeatedly cause plugin crashes, we ask that they file a bug or fill out this feedback form. As always, we appreciate the help we get from the community in evaluating these beta releases.

Users who had installed the Firefox “Lorentz” beta release will be automatically updated to this beta release of Firefox 3.6.4, or can manually “Check for Updates” in the Help menu.

Today, the Bugzilla Project released Bugzilla 3.6, which brings some innovative new enhancements for Bugzilla over previous versions – most notably Extensions. Bugzilla Extensions allow developers to write their own customizable extensions similar to Firefox Add-ons, enabling modifications to Bugzilla’s behavior and user interface.

Other new features include:

• General usability improvements
• Improved Quicksearch
• Simple “browse” interface
• SUCExec support
• Ability to send attachments by email
• Migration from other bug trackers

For complete details on all the new features, check out the Release Notes.

Today, the Mozilla metrics team released the first ever State of the Internet report. With more than 350 million people around the world using the Firefox Web browser, we are careful to ensure the data we collect is fairly limited and feel compelled to share what we’re able to extract from that data.

Some interesting findings from this report:

• Looking across several sources of market share data, Firefox’s worldwide share appears close to 30%.
• Usage/Adoption of Firefox this quarter grew most dramatically in Russia.
• Where do people get the earliest start to their day?  Hawaii, Wyoming, and Maine.  And the latest start?  New York.
• People in South America and Antarctica are passionate about personalizing their browser.
• In one usage study, we found one person having more than 600 tabs open at one time.  (This last insight comes from Test Pilot, Mozilla Labs’ platform for opt-in participation in studies and experiments.)

See the full report from Ken Kovash on the Mozilla Metrics Blog.

Last week, the Mozilla Developer Network launched the second quarterly survey to obtain developer feedback. Also on hacks.mozilla.org are results from the first quarterly developer survey conducted in November. Thanks to the feedback from more than 5,000 developers last quarter, the Mozilla Developer Network was able to put in place a solid plan moving forward.

We would appreciate your feedback and help to get the word out about our new quarterly developer survey.

See Alix Franquet’s post on hacks.mozilla.org- results from last quarter’s survey as well as more details about Mozilla developer efforts.