President Obama helps kick off our new summer campaign

erica

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Hacking at the White House: introducing Maker Party 2013

We’re extremely excited to be participating in today’s White House Science Fair—and even more excited to have President Obama help us kick off our new summer-long Maker Party: thousands of community-led events around the world to celebrate the amazing things we can make and learn thanks to the Web.

Webmaking at the White House Science Fair 

Today, Mozilla joined President Obama at the annual White House Science Fair, celebrating the student winners of science, technology, engineering and math competitions across the United States.

Mozilla and Hive kids at the White House Science Fair

Cathy Lewis Long from Sprout joins Zainab Oni,   Senque Little-Poole, and Mark Surman at the White House Science Fair

A student member of Mozilla’s Hive Learning Network project—16-year old Zainab Oni from MOUSE in NYC—was honored for her contribution to a wrist-mounted Arduino circuit, which helps visually impaired diners find their food. 15-year-old Senqué A. Little-Poole, from the Sprout Fund‘s Hive Pittsburgh chapter, was also honored, for his research on how to use anti-virus cells to cure diseases.

Mozilla’s Executive Director Mark Surman also was there, to talk about our efforts to teach technology skills and, with the help of the White House, to kick off Mozilla’s big summer-long campaign: Maker Party 2013.

Introducing Maker Party 2013

This summer, from June 15 to September 15, Mozilla and the National Writing Project will host dozens of partners from around the world in a giant global Maker Party. Thousands of events will celebrate the amazing things we can make and share on the Web — from video remixes, to apps and webpages, to DIY robots.

Maker Party 2013 will be the second annual summer-long party Mozilla has thrown focused on Web education and digital literacy. Last year’s campaign, the Mozilla Summer Code Party, included more than 700 community-led events, with more than 10,000 participants across 80 countries. This year the party will be much bigger—with 40+ big-name partners currently signed-up, and more to come.

Who’s coming to the party?

Maker Party 2013 is a big tent affair. We’ll be joined by dynamic start-ups, non-profits, institutions, and tech companies, including Black Girls Code, California Academcy of Sciences, DIY.org, Girl Scouts of Greater Chicago and Northwest Indiana, Intel, NYC Department of Education, and the Sesame Workshop. Together, we’ll be engaging more than 500,000 people to learn and make things thanks to the web. A full and growing list of the organizations joining the Maker Party is available at webmaker.org/party.

“This is a global party — and you’re invited,” said Mozilla Executive Director, Mark Surman.  “Mozillians are people who make things, and we’re part of a growing global community of people who feel the same way. That’s why this year’s party isn’t just about learning to code, but celebrating the huge range of learning, making and creating the Web makes possible.”

How to get involved:

  • Get more involved. Take part in our new “Teach the Web” open online course, and connect with other like-minded people around the world.
  • Spread the word. We’ll be tweeting our announcement live from the White House using the #MakerParty hashtag. Join in!

Mozilla’s Maker Party is a part of the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation’s Summer of Connected Learning. 

Brazil’s groundbreaking Internet Civil Rights Bill needs support!

Denelle Dixon-Thayer

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Here at Mozilla, we believe the Internet is a global public resource that must remain open and accessible. We believe in the importance of balancing the commercial goals of the Internet against those for the public benefit. Brazil’s Internet Bill of Rights, the Marco Civil da Internet, seeks to maintain this balance by guaranteeing basic rights for Internet users.  We support this kind of effort to create a comprehensive, pro-Internet policy framework. If adopted, it could well serve as a reference model for future legislation.

The legislation is groundbreaking in its intent. It secures important rights to Internet users through a civil framework rather than a criminal code. These rights include the right to privacy, freedom of speech, and access to information. It defends communications over the Internet, protects the sanctity of the Internet connection itself, requires comprehensive information in service contracts (particularly with respect to the protection of personal data), and limits third party access to connection logs and Internet applications.

The Marco Civil has been percolating since 2009. Despite a high level of community engagement (a collaboration of over eight hundred contributors), the legislation stagnated when commercial interests got involved. Important components of the legislation, such as the safe harbor provision regarding copyright infringement, have already been excluded.  We don’t want to see the legislation further diluted.

The Marco Civil mandates net neutrality while outlawing the tracking of consumers through deep packet inspection (DPI). These are two hot-button provisos opposed by certain commercial entities. The prohibition against DPI protects privacy and choice by outlawing its use to track unaware Internet users. The mandate of net neutrality contains very limited exceptions – and particularly prohibits businesses from charging for different types of services depending on what is contained in a data packet.

The drafters of the Marco Civil and other interested parties are hosting a seminar in Brasilia on April 17. This Internet Bill of Rights sets valuable precedent for not only global net neutrality and privacy principles, but for the protection of intellectual property rights everywhere.

For more on the Marco Civil, see here and here.

Gearing up for the Next Chapter

Mozilla

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Looking towards the future of Firefox OS

Today we are announcing changes to our executive leadership team as we build up our pivot to mobile and build upon the foundation that’s now in place to accelerate into the opportunities in front of us.

Where we started

Mozilla has always believed that the Web needs to be a place where anyone can access information, communicate, create and collaborate without boundaries or restrictions.

Firefox was introduced for desktop computers in 2004 at a time when the Web was being held hostage to proprietary interests. Under the leadership of Mitchell Baker, Brendan Eich and others, Mozilla put individuals in control of their experience for the first time, and helped shape the future of the Web for the public good as an open standards-based platform for innovation.

Pivot to mobile

In 2010, it was clear that while the desktop was an important target platform, that the future is mobile. And there was an opportunity to move people to the center of their connected experience and unlock untapped potential for innovation by enabling the Web as the platform.

With a deep background in mobile, Gary Kovacs was enlisted as CEO in October 2010 to lead the organization and establish the framework to accomplish these goals. Over the past two and a half years, we’re incredibly proud of what we have accomplished:

Building mobile DNA deep into the organization, with the launch of Firefox OS, HTML5 apps and Firefox for Android, while also creating the global, operational structure to support market growth.

Delivering at the speed of the market and competition: Firefox desktop is faster, more secure, more stable, evolving faster; launched important services with Persona and Sync and Apps marketplace and added new partnerships.

Trusted consumer advocacy in public policy debates with SOPA/PIPA, DNT and more.

At Mobile World Congress 2013, we showed the world that Mozilla was now fully a mobile organization as we announced rollout plans for Firefox OS with broad industry support and commitments from 20+ partners to bring devices to market.

Aligning for the future

With a solid foundation now in place, Mozilla is entering an exciting phase – as we launch mobile devices with our partners around the globe – and a reinvigorated mission in protecting the Internet freedoms for the next 2 billion people coming online in the coming years.

To gear up for this next chapter, we are announcing the following Mozilla Corporation leadership changes:

  • Gary Kovacs, having accomplished the goals and objectives he and the team set out to achieve, will be stepping down as CEO later this year but will continue to provide vision and leadership as a member of our Board of Directors. An executive search will begin immediately for his replacement.
  • Mitchell Baker has expanded her role to become our Executive Chair as she returns to a deeper involvement in Mozilla’s daily activities. She will also focus on ensuring that organizations and individual contributors have the tools they need to make meaningful contributions to unlock the potential of the Web.
  • Brendan Eich will continue his recently expanded role as Chief Technology Officer & Senior Vice President of Engineering, managing the organization’s product and platform engineering teams.
  • Jay Sullivan, previously SVP of Products, has been appointed Chief Operating Officer. Jay will continue to drive Mozilla’s product strategy and roadmap, to lead the product and user experience teams, and to lead the Firefox OS program. He will also take a broader role in managing Mozilla’s continued evolution and growth.
  • Harvey Anderson has been appointed SVP Business and Legal Affairs. In this new role he will have oversight for the apps marketplace initiative and continue to lead mobile and strategic partnerships, public policy, and legal affairs. He will also continue to serves as Corporate Secretary.
  • Li Gong has been appointed Senior Vice President, Mobile Devices, and will be tasked with leading our global work advancing the adoption of Firefox OS on mobile devices, including engagement with our device partners, as well as delivery and support for our partners. Concurrently in the role of President, Asia Operations, he is tasked to broaden the presence of Mozilla within the mobile ecosystem in the region, outside of Japan. He remains CEO of our subsidiary companies in China and Taiwan.

Mozilla is uniquely positioned to bring the full power of the web to the next 2 billion people coming online, and our public benefit nature means that we can continue to invest in the Web as an open and neutral playing field for everyone, giving both commercial players and individuals around the world the opportunity to create and innovate. Our focus will continue to be embracing this uniqueness and expanding our efforts to be the catalyst of positive change in Web ecosystem.

For more information:

  • Quote from Gary Kovacs: “The past two and a half years have been pivotal in the evolution and rapid growth of Mozilla,” said Gary Kovacs, CEO. “I am very proud of our accomplishments as a team. In our mission to empower the next two billion Web users, we’ve made great advances in desktop and mobile and in our ability to lead at the pace of the market. With this solid foundation and a strong team in place, this is the right time for me to announce the transition plan and a vote of confidence in the abilities of the leadership team. I am grateful for the privilege of leading this organization during this period of rapid growth, and I look forward to helping guide Mozilla’s impact on the future of mobile.
  • Quote from Mitchell Baker: “Gary’s leadership has been hugely important in helping Mozilla develop deep mobile outlook and capabilities. I want to thank Gary for all the contributions that he has made to the project during this period of our evolution. I believe that we have an incredibly strong team and organization in place to lead us in writing this next chapter of Web history,” said Mitchell Baker, Executive Chair, Mozilla. “Together we will also strive to embrace our uniqueness and non-profit core, and grow with our partners and community in new ways.”

Mozilla and Samsung Collaborate on Next Generation Web Browser Engine

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Mozilla’s mission is about advancing the Web as a platform for all. At Mozilla Research, we’re supporting this mission by experimenting with what’s next when it comes to the core technology powering the Web browser. We need to be prepared to take advantage of tomorrow’s faster, multi-core, heterogeneous computing architectures. That’s why we’ve recently begun collaborating with Samsung on an advanced technology Web browser engine called Servo.

Servo is an attempt to rebuild the Web browser from the ground up on modern hardware, rethinking old assumptions along the way. This means addressing the causes of security vulnerabilities while designing a platform that can fully utilize the performance of tomorrow’s massively parallel hardware to enable new and richer experiences on the Web. To those ends, Servo is written in Rust, a new, safe systems language developed by Mozilla along with a growing community of enthusiasts.

We are now pleased to announce with Samsung that together we are bringing both the Rust programming language and Servo, the experimental web browser engine, to Android and ARM. This is an exciting step in the evolution of both projects that will allow us to start deeper research with Servo on mobile. Samsung has already contributed an ARM backend to Rust and the build infrastructure necessary to cross-compile to Android, along with many other improvements. You can try this now by downloading the code from Github, but it’s just the beginning.

Rust, which today reached v0.6, has been in development for several years and is rapidly approaching stability. It is intended to fill many of the same niches that C++ has over the past decades, with efficient high-level, multi-paradigm abstractions, and offers precise control over hardware resources. But beyond that, it is *safe by default*, preventing entire classes of memory management errors that lead to crashes and security vulnerabilities. Rust also features lightweight concurrency primitives that make it easy for programmers to leverage the power of the many CPU cores available on current and future computing platforms.

In the coming year, we are racing to complete the first major revision of Rust – cleaning up, expanding and documenting the libraries, building out our tools to improve the user experience, and beefing up performance. At the same time, we will be putting more resources into Servo, trying to prove that we can build a fast web browser with pervasive parallelism, and in a safe, fun language. We, along with our friends at Samsung will be increasingly looking at opportunities on mobile platforms. Both of these efforts are still early stage projects and there’s a lot to do yet, so now is a good time to get involved.

To take a look at what we’re doing and contribute to the projects you can download and try the recently-released Rust 0.6 or check out the source for Rust and Servo on GitHub. Then come participate in the development process on the Rust (https://mail.mozilla.org/listinfo/rust-dev) and Servo (https://lists.mozilla.org/listinfo/dev-servo) mailing lists.

- Brendan Eich, CTO, Mozilla

Firefox Gives You More Control Over Your Privacy

Mozilla

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Firefox includes a new enhancement to private browsing that allows you to open a new private browsing window without closing or changing your current browsing session. You can shop for a birthday gift in a private window with your existing browsing session uninterrupted. You can also use a private browsing window to check multiple email accounts simultaneously. We are also proud to announce that Firefox for Android also supports private browsing on a per tab basis. Firefox for Android allows you to open a new private browsing tab during your current browsing session, allowing you to switch between private and standard tabs within the same browsing session.

Firefox comes with a new Download Manager in the Firefox toolbar, so you can monitor, view and locate downloaded files without having to switch to another window. The new Download Manager makes downloading files with Firefox even easier. Firefox for Android allows you to customize the shortcuts on the home screen with your favorite or most frequently visited sites, so they are only a tap away.

Firefox for Android adds support for additional devices running on a less powerful processor architecture, ARMv6 processors. This includes popular phones like Samsung Galaxy Next, HTC Aria, HTC Legend, Samsung Dart, Samsung Galaxy Pop and the Samsung Galaxy Q. In September, Mozilla set to expand support for ARMv6 devices to bring an awesome Web experience to even more users. We are happy to say that now we are able to bring a better Web experience to close to 50 million  more phones.

For developers, Firefox includes getUserMedia, an important part of the WebRTC specification. It allows developers to quickly and easily write code that accesses the user’s camera or microphones.  Firefox also includes a developer toolbox that provides quick access to developer tools in one convenient window and gives developers easy-to-remember ways to switch between tools. Canvas Blend Modes allows developers to define how they want Canvas to draw over an existing image to create different visual effects.

For more information:

Here’s to 15 Years of a Better Web

Mozilla

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This week we’re celebrating Mozilla’s 15th anniversary.  How can you help us commemorate 15 years of a better Web?

Read about it
Check out www.mozilla.org/contribute to read 15 facts about Mozilla, our biggest milestones and how you can join the Mozilla project. You can also read Mitchell Baker’s own reflections on the past 15 years and a look ahead to what’s next for Mozilla. Go here for a more in-depth look at the history of Mozilla and our 1998 origin.

Tweet your #Webstory
Starting today, the @Firefox and @Mozilla Twitter accounts will be telling our #Webstory by posting 15 facts about Mozilla. We invite you to join in and tell your own #Webstory, too. Give us a tweet, an image or a video about how you’ve contributed to 15 years of Mozilla, what Mozilla and Firefox mean to you, or a memorable moment you’ve had on the Web. Be sure to post on Twitter with the hashtag #webstory. We’ll be retweeting and responding throughout the day.

Make your #Webstory
Tell your own #Webstory with one of our Webmaker projects. Make a list of your own 15 favorite things about the Web, or make a video telling us about your first experience with the Web, and what you want it to look like 15 years from now.

Thank you to everyone who’s helped us make the Web better along the way. The success of our mission depends on participation from people like you. Find out how you can get involved or support Mozilla to help make a difference in the lives of users everywhere for the next 15 years – and beyond.

Mozilla is Unlocking the Power of the Web as a Platform for Gaming

Mozilla

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Mozilla, a non-profit organization dedicated to promoting openness, innovation and opportunity on the Web, is advancing the Web as the platform for high-end game development. With Mozilla’s latest innovations in JavaScript, game developers and publishers can now take advantage of fast performance that rivals native while leveraging scale of the Web, without the additional costs associated with third-party plugins. This allows them to distribute visually stunning and performance intensive games to billions of people more easily and cost effectively than before.

To make these advancements, Mozilla developed a highly-optimized version of JavaScript that supercharges a developer’s gaming code in the browser to enable visually compelling, fast, 3D gaming experiences on the Web. With this technology we are also opening up the path for 3D Web-based games on mobile as JavaScript performance continues to close the gap with native.

Today, we are excited to unlock this technology for high-performance games, by teaming up with Epic Games. By leveraging this new JavaScript optimization technology, Mozilla has been able to bring Epic’s Unreal Engine 3 to the Web. With this port, developers will soon be able to explore limitless possibilities when it comes to porting their popular gaming titles to the Web.

Mozilla was able to recently prove the Web is capable of being a compelling gaming platform with its BananaBread game demo, which is built using Web technologies Mozilla pioneered, including WebGL, Emscripten and now asm.js. The demo shows how high-end games can easily be ported to JavaScript and WebGL while still maintaining a highly responsive, visually compelling 3D gaming experience.

Developers wishing to test this technology can check out the latest version of BananaBread with its peer-to-peer, multiplayer WebRTC technology and JavaScript performance improvements. BananaBread works in all browsers that support WebGL.

As high-performance games on the Web move to rival native performance, Mozilla is also
opening up the path to Web-based games on mobile. We are working with premium game
publishers such as Disney, EA and ZeptoLab who are using the same technology to bring
performance optimizations to their top-rated games.

Developers can submit fun games and apps to the Firefox Marketplace now. The Firefox
Marketplace is currently available as a preview on Firefox for Android and will come to Firefox OS later this year.

If you are at GDC this week, you can check out the Unreal Engine running on Firefox at the NVIDIA booth

Introducing Open Badges 1.0

Matt Thompson

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Get recognition for learning that happens anywhere.
Share it on the places that matter.

Mozilla Open Badges web site

Today we’re extremely proud to release Mozilla Open Badges 1.0, an exciting new online standard to recognize and verify learning. Open Badges makes it easy to…

  • earn badges for skills you learn online and offline
  • give recognition for things you teach
  • show your badges in the places that matter.

This is a project we’ve been developing for the past two years, in partnership with the MacArthur Foundation. Why is it important? These days, we all learn things in a wide variety of ways, but there are few opportunities to gain formal recognition for these skills. Traditional certifications, like degrees and diplomas, still lack the granularity to show the skills people have — like writing skills for an engineer, or project management for someone with an arts degree.

Not only that, but there’s no way to take all those skills and show them off in one place, regardless of where you’ve earned them. Open Badges changes that. It takes digital badges to a new level and makes them more powerful, networked and credible.

More than 600 leading organizations are now using Open Badges to issue badges that count toward education, careers and lifelong learning. Together we believe this can shape the future of learning, and help unlock the full educational potential of the web.

Girl Scouts can now earn digital badges for building apps as part of the “My Sash is an App” project

“We often talk about finding ways to make learning more accessible to more people,” says Erin Knight, Mozilla’s Senior Director of Learning and Badges. “Open Badges has the power to make that happen. We can legitimize learning of all kinds, and empower people to create their own custom pathways toward jobs, education and opportunity.”

Badges backpack with collections

What’s so great about Open Badges?

  • Knits skills together. Through the Open Badges shared standard, badges for the same skill-set can connect and build on one another — whether they’re issued by the same organization or many different ones. Individuals can earn badges that recognize learning and skills from multiple sources both online and offline — from learning HTML with Mozilla, to volunteering and leadership skills with Girl Scouts, to learning introductory robotics and engineering with NASA.
  • Full of information. With Open Badges, every badge has important data built in that links back to who issued it, how it was earned, and even the projects a user completed to earn it. Employers and others can dig into this rich data and see the full story of each user’s skills and achievements.
  • Can go anywhere on the web. The Open Badges backpack gives users an easy way to collect their badges, sort them by category, and display them across social networking profiles, job sites, websites and more.
  • Recognizes learning that matters. Open Badges’ free software allows any organization that meets the standard to begin issuing — and verifying — badges. Currently 600 organizations have issued 62,000 badges to 23,000 learners. A growing list of who is issuing badges is available here.
  • Free, open to anyone, and part of Mozilla’s non-profit mission. Open Badges is designed, built and backed by a broad community of contributors. The open source model means improvements made by one partner can benefit everyone, from bug fixes to new features.

current issuer badges

Get involved

And the Game On competition winners are…

Matt Thompson

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GameOn trophy

Pushing the frontiers of gaming on the web

Today we’re thrilled to announce the winners of this year’s “Game On” competition.

The competition invited game designers and developers around the world to submit their games. The goal: show how new open technologies are pushing the envelope of what’s possible on the web.

We received more than 165 great entries total, with competitors from Morocco to Russia to Canada. Games ranged from web-programmed robots, to massively multi-player “tweet wars,” to mobile-powered multipedes.

winning GameOn entries

Many took unique advantage of new open web innovations like WebRTC and WebGL to showcase new gaming potential on the web. Some used multiple devices, playing across desktops and phones. Other involved “hackable” web mechanics built right into the gameplay itself, teaching digital literacy and webmaking as players play.

The open web as gaming platform

“Any web-enabled device has become a potential gaming platform — on which developers aren’t just creating games, they’re discovering new ways to play,” said Chelsea Howe, Senior Designer at TinyCo and one of the competition’s judges.

“Web-native platforms mean everyone is a potential player — no proprietary software, no console publishing, no constant updates. If you can get on the internet, you can play a game.”

And the winners are…

These Game On winners will receive prizes that include red carpet treatment at this month’s Game Developers Conference in San Francisco, as well as the opportunity to have their games published with Chillingo and featured in the Firefox Marketplace.

Grand Champion & Best Multi-Device Game:
Zumbie: Blind Rage

by Jonatan Van Hove (@joonturbo), Mads Johansen, Jonas Maaloe Jespersen & Tommy Rousse (@ludist) from Copenhagen

Turn any real-world space into a virtual zombie attack. The player holds a mobile device while blindfolded as the other players guide them around using their own devices to eliminate virtual “zumbies.”

“Using web technologies allowed us to play games that are coached over video chat, or have several spotters look at the same shooter on different devices. All of these things were previously impossible due to our device-specific ad-hoc solution.”

Best Web-Only Game: Bombermine

by Mark Zubovsky, Ivan Popelyshev, Vladislav Kozulya, Stanislav Findeysen from Moscow

A Massive Multiplayer Online (MMO) game, Bombermine lets you blow stuff up with up to 1000 other players on a single map — including Deathmatch, Team Play in squads with your friends, chat and more.

“We released an English version a few weeks ago, and have started receiving huge attention world-wide. In the first three days we got around 800,000 guests.” — Mark Zubovsky

Best “Hackable Game:” Code Injection

by Nick Liow and Jason Church from Vancouver

Inject real code to move your character around. Hack other characters to steal your enemies’ abilities and share each others’ powers. Like hacking the Matrix — using real code that works on the web.

Runners Up: The quality of this year’s entries was very high, and we could only choose three winners. So please be sure to check out the runner ups and notable entries here.

Huge thanks to all who submitted to this year’s competition and joined the ten game jams we organized around the world. We’d also like to thank our stellar panel of judges, competition sponsors (NESTA & Nominet Trust) and partners (UKIE, IGDA,Github , Chillingo, Global Game Jam , NVIDIA). Game on!

Get involved

Mobilizing Mozilla: Blaze Your Own Path

Mozilla

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Mozilla has been a pioneer and advocate for the Web for nearly 15 years. We are dedicated to promoting open standards and creating new Web experiences that allow innovation and creativity to flourish.

We created choice and competition in the desktop browser market when we launched Firefox and we are becoming the same catalyst for change in mobile with Firefox OS, enabling developers, operators and consumers to blaze their own path.

Unleashing The Fox

Today, we are “unleashing the Fox” – our ambassador for Firefox OS.

The Fox, like Firefox OS, is fun and friendly, supportive and protective, and fast and powerful. Blazingly fast, the Fox doesn’t play by the rules. It is everywhere you need it to be—a force for good that powers your mobile world, ignites your imagination, protects you and your identity, and supercharges your life. Lively, swift, and agile, the Fox puts freedom in your hands.

At Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, attendees from the world’s largest mobile companies will experience first hand what Firefox OS brings to the world and spend time with The Fox. Last night, we made announcements at our press conference with more mobile partners from around the world regarding their commitment and plans to roll-out devices in 2013, as well as the first devices and content you will see in the market.

Firefox_Booth_MWC

We’re excited to see what happens when the fox unleashes the Web on mobile – stay tuned to see where the Fox blazes a path next.

For more information: