Keep the feedback coming in, they’ve been extremely helpful and we’re doing our best to incorporate your suggestions.

Please click on the image to see the large file.  In this version we have the different sizes.  The majority of people will view Thunderbird on a daily basis with the smaller sized icons.  The larger icons will be displayed more on the web site, posters, and other promotional items like t-shirts.

Changes in this version:

• Uppermost right wing feathers are rounded to match the other side.
• Second row of feathers on the left wing slightly pointed.

Based on feedback, we’re choosing the white envelope with no seal.

Background Information

• Thunderbird 3 Icon Refresh – Creative Brief
• Refreshing the Thunderbird Icon
• New Firefox Icon

Please provide feedback via the comments section through these blog posts.

Keep the feedback coming in, they’ve been extremely helpful and we’re doing our best to incorporate your suggestions.

Iteration 6. 20090729

Changes in this version:

• A third row of small feathers.  Small feathers are less defined, less bright.  No seal.  Slightly whiter envelope.

Iteration 5. 20090729

Changes in this version:

• Fewer feathers.  No seal.  Slightly whiter envelope.

Iteration 4. 20090729

Changes in this version:

• Logo with seal and example of small version of logo w/ seal.
• Lots of feathers.

Background Information

• Thunderbird 3 Icon Refresh – Creative Brief
• Refreshing the Thunderbird Icon
• New Firefox Icon

Please provide feedback via the comments section through these blog posts.

Iteration 3. 20090715

The icon is being rendered by Anthony Piraino at the Iconfactory.

Changes in this iteration:

• removed seal from previous iterations;
• added detail to the envelope;
• feathers shaped to be slightly more accurate

Current Icon

Background Information

• Thunderbird 3 Icon Refresh – Creative Brief
• Refreshing the Thunderbird Icon
• New Firefox Icon

Please provide feedback via the comments section through these blog posts.

Iteration 2. 20090708

The icon is being rendered by Anthony Piraino at the Iconfactory.

Changes in this iteration:

• rounder/smoother shape for the circle;
• modified the seal/”@” but this detail will be removed in the next iteration;
• warmed up the envelope color, corrected the “v” shape on the envelope;
• added more detail to the feathers;
• updated bottom shadow

Current Icon

Background Information

• Thunderbird 3 Icon Refresh – Creative Brief
• Refreshing the Thunderbird Icon
• New Firefox Icon

Please provide feedback via the comments section through these blog posts.

Iteration 1. 20090706

The icon is being rendered by Anthony Piraino at the Iconfactory.

Current Icon

Background Information

• Thunderbird 3 Icon Refresh – Creative Brief
• Refreshing the Thunderbird Icon
• New Firefox Icon

Please provide feedback via the comments section through these blog posts.

But what about Thunderbird icon? Will it be updated too? Please!

Short answer, yes.  You didn’t even need to say “pretty please”.

We’re beginning the work to update the Thunderbird icon.  We really like how the Firefox icon turned out, and we’ll be working with the folks at Icon Factory so we can be consistent.

I’ve been impressed with how Alex Faaborg has led the charge with the Firefox Icon refresh, his vision, and his ability to communicate and work with everybody.  We’re working with Alex as well, he’s got a great eye, and we’re lucky.

The Process

As I understand, it’s going to be fast and furious in terms of the design and feedback loop the next couple weeks.  I’ll be posting a final creative brief before we get started, and happy to take feedback on it now.  I’ll be posting the iterations and calling for feedback as soon as I get them.

It would be great if all feedback can be done as comments to these blog posts as opposed to direct emails to me.

The new design at www.mozillamessaging.com

First, go ahead and download Thunderbird 3 Beta 2 and check it out.

The Redesign

We started the redesign process last year with the following goals:

• Make it easy for users to download Thunderbird
• Make it easy for users to learn about Thunderbird and Mozilla Messaging
• Provide Mozilla Messaging with it’s own visual identity while maintaining the “mozilla” feel

We worked with Steven at silverorange and the team at The Royal Order — absolutely great fun to work with them.

We hope users and contributors will have a sense of familiarity with the site and also enjoy some of the imagery and illustrations. One of my favorites is the “totem pole”.  Totem poles can be found in Vancouver (where we have an office) and we wanted to see a different design treatment for Thunderbird.  I think it worked out well (the rocket ship and the cruise boat are fun too).

What’s Next

We have localization, more content to add, and we’re always looking to make improvements to make it easier for users to download Thunderbird.  We’ll be gearing the site for the final Thunderbird 3 release so we have lots more coming.

We are updating the MozillaMessaging.com web site and teaming up with our friends The Royal Order and silverorange.  We are updating the web site to get the majority if not all end-user facing Thunderbird related pages onto MozillaMessaging.com.  Right now, these pages are on mozilla.org and mozilla.com.

Here is the site map [pdf], it’s in its third revision and we would like feedback from you by Thursday.  Send me email at rebron@gmail.com or comment in the post.

Notes:

• support pod will be under mozillamessaging.com, urls tbd
• under additional pages will be start page and what’s new page

We’re starting the decision process next week, Sept 29 and will wrap up by October 17.  Please let me know if you have any questions.

Separately, we are working on SpreadThunderbird.com.  We meet up every Thursday and we’ll be hanging out at #marketing.  Come join us.

Thunderbird 2 page is here:

• http://en-us.www.mozilla.com/en-US/thunderbird/2.0.0.12/start/

Shredder nightlies page will live here:

• http://www.mozillamessaging.com/en-US/shredder/start/

Thunderbird 3.0 beta page is here:

• http://www.mozillamessaging.com/en-US/thunderbird/3.0b1/start/
• currently here: chrome://messenger/content/start.xhtml

Thunderbird 3.0 Start page will live here:

• http://www.mozillamessaging.com/en-US/thunderbird/3.0/start/

Default Start Page:

• http://live.mozillamessaging.com/%APP%/start?locale=%LOCALE%version=%VERSION%&os=%OS%&buildid=%APPBUILDID%

Welcome URL (aka first run):

• http://live.mozillamessaging.com/%APP%/firstrun?locale=%LOCALE%version=%VERSION%&os=%OS%&buildid=%APPBUILDID%

Override URL (aka whats new):

• http://live.mozillamessaging.com/%APP%/whatsnew?locale=%LOCALE%version=%VERSION%&os=%OS%&buildid=%APPBUILDID%

Bugs: 451238, 451247, (451236, 433630, 430762)

• What do you want to see when you first open up your email client?
• Follow-up.  If your answer was the last email in your inbox, what if you have no email in your inbox?

Some thoughts:

• A blank page is not acceptable
• A page that displays project information or product feature information is not the right answer
• Page must be simple, fluid (because of the different views), and easy to localize
• It’s unclear whether the measure of a good start page will be based on activity on that page or high clickthrough since the next step after seeing the Start page is to go to the inbox and check for new email/read email.  However, a user will go back to the Mail Start page and then may want to do something from that page after reading email.

Here’s the current Thunderbird start page vert view (above) and in classic view.  It’s actually more of a Welcome page versus a Start page where a Start page is something you see everyday and is (can be or should be) useful to you.  A Start page is something you *want* to see everyday.

Clients like Mac Mail and others [Zimbra] don’t have a Start page, you get a message or a blank message pane view.

Webmail:

• Gmail’s start page is your inbox and a try something else message if you have no emails in your inbox.
• Yahoo! Mail’s start page is another Front page with weather, news, other info.  It’s the “we’re going to try and give you some useful information” but “we’re really only doing this so we can monetize webmail.”
• AOL Mail and Hotmail have a variation of Yahoo!Mail’s start page.

Web Start pages:

• The Firefox Start page is done the way it is because: a) a blank page was not acceptable, b) a page that displayed project or product information was not the right answer, c) it was a simple page and easy to localize, d) high clickthrough rate or activity on the page makes it seem like it was/is the right choice.
• Google has two start pages: google.com and iGoogle or even Google Reader
  
• Yahoo’s two start pages:  yahoo.com and My Yahoo!
• PageFlakes and Netvibes – My Yahoo! and iGoogle-like
• Facebook’s style with info of friend’s activities/requests

Whistler Air is the float plane we took from Squamish to Vancouver last Friday on the way home from Whistler.  The way home included: a 10 mini van taxi ride to Green Lake, hour “limo” bus ride to Squamish, 20 minute float plane ride to Downtown Vancouver, 30 minute cab ride to the Airport, 2 1/2 hour plane trip to SFO, 5 minute Air Tram to BART in the airpot, 1 1/4 hour BART ride home, 8 minute car ride home.  I was tempted to put on some roller blades or hop on my bike and then go for a swim afterwards.

And while the Firefox Summit also included a rockslide, bear sightings, a day with no electricity, my MacBook hard drive dying on day 2, it also included over 400 Mozilla contributors from around the World — US, Japan, Korea, Singapore, Germany, France, South Africa, Brazil, India, and more.  Great event, great people, great time, lots of Rock Band.  It was a celebration for the launch of Firefox 3 and then discussion towards the future and some of the things that were demoed were very cool.

Whistler Canada is a beautiful place.  Would love to come back and try snowboarding.  The Bay Area Ski bus is doing a trip out there January 10 – 16, 2009.

computer history museum anyone?

I finally got around to scanning this photo, I guess being in the Computer History Museum this week for Mashup Camp kinda motivated me to get this up finally.

This is kinda the original Firefox and Thunderbird team with marcia and the whole several thousands of people in the Mozilla community and ex-Netscape people missing. No one person started Firefox you see (Thunderbird, on the other hand, is all mscott and bienvenu).

What makes this a classic Mozilla photo, is the stupid ethernet cable that’s running from the ceiling (and yes we did try to move it, that’s why we’re all smiling). It’s one of the reasons why this photo never got published. So classic.

Maybe this becomes one of those famous old school computer photos, with everyone in it getting all rich and famous. Let’s hope so, because I’m in there :-) (eh, I’m already “rich” and “famous”).

I have another photo that’s more representative of those involved in Firefox because there was quite a number of people involved in making it happen.Anyway, that’s Blake (looking at the Rock) and Joe standing next to him. They just sold their company Parakey to Facebook. Very cool. I forgot to ask for their autograph. eh, I’ll take a Facebook t-shirt (which will end up going to Dad) and a free lunch.

That’s Ben all the way to the right and he’s at Google now. dbaron, extraordinaire, fixing something I’m sure in front of his laptop.

I’m there on my computer with cbeard and we’re finalizing the press release announcing Firefox 1.0. I’m about to publish it (after about the umpteenth cbeard edit).

And then Asa actually cropped this image and just shows Jay’s hat because he’s drinking a margarita or something that brendan probably made for him.

That was fun…Ok, back in the garage.

—

*Update*. I take stuff down all the time. Sorry Blake.

Safari on Windows is not a surprise. It’s something that at Mozilla (actually even at Netscape) we were predicting. It was just a matter of when.

What people might not know is that the Safari team consists of a lot of ex-Netscape folks from the Netscape 6.x days. Once you get into the groove of building browsers, you just kind of do it and enjoy it because the software and the problems and opportunities that browser software development has is so diverse and it’s so interesting. The feedback is cool too, someone builds a web application, it works or it doesn’t work, what needs to be changed in the browser to make it work — in a nutshell.

Anyway, it’s good to see Safari on Windows. I think that the Safari team should also consider whatever hooks they might have that’s Safari-Apple-iPhone-whatever only should be ported to IE Windows and Firefox.

There’s definitely a danger that QuickTime and Videos work best in Safari and works moderately ok in IE or Firefox. Also, while the Apple team may know what the business opportunity is for having a browser, I don’t think they *really* know what that potential is.

Also, Apple better be careful with their marketing with Safari. If they’re going to call out that Safari is the fastest browser out there, they better be able to back that up.

I’m coming at this from a different perspective so what I’m thinking could be inaccurate.

Background 1

The evolution of XUL runner was based out of AOL being able to leverage the Netscape browser into the main AOL client. Basically one instance of the browsing engine should be on the machine and it could be leveraged by AOL, Netscape, CompuServe or whatever application that may need it. This kinda launched as GRE or Gecko Runtime Environment. One of the bigger reasons for this at the time was download size of the different applications. Of course that was in a still dial-up world in the year 2000.

In any case, AOL never embedded Netscape into their main client, it was tested and launched in the long defunct CompuServe client. It did work though.

Background 2

The modern thoughts on XULRunner came when the Mozilla Suite needed to be broken up into the separate applications. The thought was a Firefox or Thunderbird or Sunbird or whatever other applications that come up could leverage a single XULRunner instance and the download would be light, there would be shared components, and all would be happy.

Problems

There are three:

1) to do a XULRunner is hard, not easy building one of these and be able to predict what all the applications want, different versioning, etc.

2) The investment in XULRunner was minimal (just not a priority and if it’s not Firefox who cares) and didn’t get the chance to really get flushed out. Who was gathering the requirements? Who was talking to customers? Who was evangelizing the platform? Where were the white papers? It’s still a project and maybe it will get it flushed out more down the road.

3) Possibly the biggest issue, no one is building client software anymore, none that matter anyway. You have two extremes, little shareware type applications that do one or two things that can be done using platform specific code. The other extreme is like an Adobe Photoshop i.e. some wickedly complex piece of software and you’re not going to base Adobe Photoshop on XULRunner. Given #2, you’re not going to get #3.

The interesting thing is that XULRunner is in direct competition with offline apps. XUL versus AJAX type offline apps would be a neat exercise to see what’s good and bad about each. It’s funny because we’ve had “offline” apps for the longest times, it’s called n|VU and Thunderbird, and Songbird.

*I think this is what I said in the post deleted “XULRunner Pipe Dream” or something like that. I just whipped this up so I probably have more thoughts on this.

• If you need to do browser detection, detect for browser capability versus a specific browser so you’re not locking people out.
• If you need to detect for Firefox, consider using the Mozilla rv: number to capture all Mozilla-based browsers.
• If you’re going to list out “System Requirements”, or this “site/application was tested with” what I believe is preferred* is “Mozilla Firefox [version number]” e.g. Mozilla Firefox 1.0
  “and above” or “and higher”. Or it’s Mozilla Firefox 1.5 or Mozilla Firefox 2. Note that Mozilla is dropping the min version for Firefox 2 so it’s Firefox 2 and not Firefox 2.0 except in the user-agent string which is Firefox 2.0. Makes sense?

—
Here’s a really good article that all web developers should read (article needs to be updated though): http://developer.mozilla.org/en/docs/Browser_Detection_and_Cross_Browser_Support

The user agent string for Firefox 2 is:

• In general: Mozilla/5.0 (platform; security; OS or CPU; Locale; Mozilla Platform rv:) Gecko/yearmonthdate Vendor or product name/version
• Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; Intel Mac OS X; en-US; rv:1.8.1) Gecko/20061010 Firefox/2.0
• Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.8.1) Gecko/20061010 Firefox 2.0

The user agent string for Internet Explorer 7 is (per the IE blog):

• IE 7 Windows XP SP2: Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 7.0; Windows NT 5.1)
• IE 7 Windows Server 2003: Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 7.0; Windows NT 5.2)
• IE 7 Windows Vista: Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 7.0; Windows NT 6.0)

The user agent string for Safari is:

• Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; Intel Mac OS X; en) AppleWebKit/XX (KHTML, like Gecko) Safari/YY

What’s does the Mozilla part mean?

Mozilla version e.g. Mozilla/2.0 was the original convention for identifying the product. Microsoft borrowed the Mozilla/version part, added “compatible” and here’s more on that history. When we changed the user agent string to Mozilla 5.0 with Netscape 6, we broke a lot of web sites but we’re all ok now — that was 6 years ago. Mozilla/5.0 and Mozilla/4.0 are no longer meaningful though and we shouldn’t ever see that changed for legacy/site compatibility reasons.

When targeting the Firefox browser for your web site/application, it’s actually better not to and detect for standards and capability versus targeting a particular browser version as the article mentions. If you must detect for Firefox, you should detect by Mozilla platform rv: version or rv:1.8.1. This makes it so that you don’t block out Mozilla browsers like Seamonkey or Camino or other applications using that same engine.

What about Gecko?

Gecko isn’t very meaningful these days either, it was used to indicate the new or NGL next generation layout engine which was then branded Gecko. It’s also Netscape trademark, licensed by the Mozilla Foundation. The “Gecko” brand really should go away since “powered by Netscape Gecko” really doesn’t mean anything. It takes a lot of energy to build a brand and Gecko is not actively being marketed as a browser engine.

The platform is actually the “Mozilla platform” with “rv:1.8.1″ indicating the version of the “Mozilla Platform”. So “rv:mozilla platform version” trumps Gecko/date stamp. It’s not clear to me whether the Gecko date stamp is meaningful for web developers. I suspect that the Gecko portion of the user agent string can go away completely.

What about Firefox?

Hmm…So “Firefox/version” isn’t very useful either. Browser sniffing for “Firefox/version” in the UA string shouldn’t be used unless you’re really targeting for Firefox or a specific Firefox browser version (which you really shouldn’t be doing in the first place).
–

* need to verify w/ Moz Corp, but I’m guessing I’m right.

A few notes:

• It’s comparative versus competitive because we want to keep things friendly :).
• Extreme Tech’s article comparing Firefox 2, IE 7, and Opera 9 is a great read.
• Another review by Paul Thurrott
• I want to do a high level feature by feature comparison (from a marketing perspective) as well since that’s a nice way to look at these products. I’ll do that in a little while, there’s a bit of that in the Extreme Tech article.
• Feature versus feature can be blown out much further in the full on comparison between user interactions. That work should get done on some of the key features. (This means getting a UE and UI designer together and making those pretty interaction graphs that are huge and can get posted on to walls so people can see what the heck is actually going on.)

Enjoy (if you’re into this kind of stuff)!

BoingBoing is one of the sites I’ve been monitoring for a couple years now and I’m amazed that Firefox is at 48% market share up 2% from June. I remember when it was 20 – 25% and I thought it would stay there for quite some time. I wasn’t amazed when Firefox overtook Internet Explorer on this site. I am amazed by how much.
–
I’ve been promising to launch the Firefox Market Share project via SpreadFirefox. Essentially it’s a take on Om’s Broadband profile project. I talked to Sherman about this before I left and will need to re-engage there but also spoke a while back w/ Ross Mayfield about it. I’ve got some of it set up already, looking to launch by end of the month or so (and I’ll cross post this on SpreadFirefox).

I also have part 1 of a comparative review for IE 7 ready. I have a few minor tweaks like removing Internet Explorer 7+ references. Otherwise, it’s pretty good to go. I didn’t want to publish it too early and give the IE team a chance to actually read it and make changes accordingly :) I’ll put it up tomorrow.

Here’s what needs to be embedded in the head of your page:

link rel=“search” type=“application/opensearchdescription+xml” title=“Foo” href=“http://foo.com/bar.xml”

e.g.

link rel=“search” type=“application/opensearchdescription+xml” title=“Technorati Search” href=“http://technorati.com/osd.xml”

Then you need to create a similar document: http://technorati.com/osd.xml

• Mozilla documentation on this is located here: http://developer.mozilla.org/en/docs/Creating_OpenSearch_plugins
• All the OpenSearch documentation is here: http://opensearch.a9.com/
• All the “Mozilla-Search” plugin documentation is here (somewhat dated): http://mycroft.mozdev.org/deepdocs/deepdocs.html

I’d advise companies to have an “add search engine to browser” link/image as well using JavaScript as described here or here.

If you’re a search engine, get going on this. I’ve only seen this work on Technorati (works on Live.com too apparently) though I imagine I’ll see this incorporated with most sites — don’t need to be a search company to make this work.
–

Very well done. I’m assuming this is Gavin’s work. Nice!

**Updated w/ more documentation links.

(Note: I’m not leaving the mozilla.org project just taking some time off from that too. You’ll see me causing trouble again soon and my bugzilla account will still be the same it’s not tied to rebron@mozilla.com so you can still file bugs against me).

Here are my reasons:

• I’ve been at this for 7 years! since February 1999. Netscape->Mozilla Corp I count it all as the same thing since it’s all been browser work off of NGL. The most I’ve had off in those 7 years was 2 weeks off that I took last year. Time for a break. For real.*
• I’d like two hours of my day back. This is more or less my commute the last 7+ years. HQ is a little far. I have 23,000 miles on the car I bought just last year.
• I set out to help establish Mozilla Corp (done), to ship phoenix/Firefox, which I wanted to do all the way back in 2002 (done), help gain market share for Firefox and restore some balance on the Web (done/mostly done). I think I did an ok job.

What am I going to do next:

• Take some time off. Watch my wife argue in her first trial in front of her former Judge that she clerked for. She’s going after the big bad insurance companies.
• I’m going to garden and landscape our front yard, and coordinate getting the porch fixed.
• Hang out with family and friends. See my niece, call friends up.
• Train for my third Ironman in August and try and raise some more money for Leukemia/Lymphoma Society.

I’m not sure what I’m doing next work wise, e.g. I’m not going to Google, or Flock/Microsoft (please don’t insult me). One thing for sure, I’ll still be participating w/ mozilla.org down the road. Too much fun, too much invested, and too important not to be where all the action is. :)

*For the old timers…I never did get my sabbatical from way back when.

Full collection (more photos)

Materials cost me about $2-3,000, and I would value all of this stuff to be about $10-$15,000, but priceless really. I have sold some stuff before and gave away other beadwork (bags, jewelry, beaded turtles).

Top to bottom:

• beaded headband, via a loom
• beaded choker, w/ Thunderbird drop, lazy stitch
• matching beaded armbands, lazy stitch
• beaded belt, that still fits, lazy stitch
• beaded apron, lazy stitch, back is ribbon work stitched up by Mom (Mom was also in charge of sewing on all the fringe and backing, I did all the beadwork and design though)
• beaded side tabs?, lazy stitch
• in the middle is a 24″ roach that I wear on my head, it’s porcupine hair and deer hair
• beaded knee drops, via a loom
• angora goat leg coverings
• fully beaded mocassins, lazy stitched, latigo soles

What stories do we want to tell about Firefox/Mozilla this year? How about:

• How we will come together to build Firefox 2.0, our next generation browser
• How we’ll bring the world even closer with making Firefox available to more countries/languages, to even more people – in China, Japan, India, Brazil, Mexico, Israel, Iraq, etc.
• How we’ll continue to drive cool new Web 2.0 companies build next generation Web applications
• How we collaborate on such a complex product. We’re shipping software not just talking about it. And shipping software is hard.

The Firefox versus IE 7 is a bad story, we shouldn’t be part of that story at all. Doing so will take us away from telling other stories…like the time we were wrapping up localization for Firefox 1.5 for the China release. We were scrambling to get something translated, trying to find our contact in China and he was no where to be found. At the last minute, he popped up, translated the text for us and explained that he was away because his was wife had just “borned” a baby. There’s always difficulty in coordinating with China because of the time difference nevermind that the localization effort there is volunteer-based. There was such a time crunch, we were scrambling, and as soon as we heard what was going on, well clearly what our volunteer in China was doing was more important.

Anyway, there are more stories to tell. Perhaps a story on our localization team in China, what got them started, what their motivations are, and what the Internet climate is in China or in another part of the world where we have localization teams.

That’s great!

Since we’re talking grades…K’s nephew Gary, who we’re putting through school, has also gotten straight A’s at his school this last semester. We’re very proud of him.

Back to Yahoo! though.  In addition to releasing a browser matrix, they’ve also released a User Interface (UI) library and User Experience (UE) best practices. This is some good stuff, and about time.  I know some of the folks who worked on this stuff at Netscape and this is some good advice.

• Talkback
• Chatzilla
• Web Developer
• Alexa Sidebar Again
• Resize Search Box (this should be part of the browser by default)
• BugMeNot

I’ve been installing/uninstalling ones from the contest and I may soon add to this list.

With swimming, it’s a focus on balance and form. With cycling and running, it’s high cadence — 90 rpms. With work, it’s looking to create the most efficient products for interacting with the Web. With everyday life, it’s balancing all the different things I need to do in one day, week, month. I already see several areas that will be changing, including diet, communication tools (decrease IM usage), and better use of calendars (work, workout). And with Firefox and Thunderbird, there’s still plenty of room for improvement.