PKB

Alex F. took the big prize today at Mozilla’s Halloween costume contest. See if you can guess what he is.*

*Hint.

Firefox 2 is here. Go get it!

This year’s launch rolled, smooth. We’ve grown as an organization since last year, and I’m happy with the way Firefox 2 came into the world.

Lots more to do…and a great crew working all over the world in the Mozilla community to make it happen.

Driving into work this morning, I heard an ad for Internet Explorer 7 on the local San Francisco Bay Area news station, KCBS.

I’m reconstructing from memory, so this is semi-accurate:

SOUNDFX: DRIPPING WATER, TRAFFIC NOISE, HEELS CLICKING ON PAVEMENT.
MAN: Psssst, hey lady.

WOMAN: Uh, yeah?

MAN: Internet Explorer 7 is here.

That was it. No call to action. Just the above exchange.

Driving back from work this evening, I heard an interview with two of the writers for SFist on the local alternative station, Live 105. It went on, and on, and on. They both have day jobs but are loving the blogging gig a long time.

The fulcrum of Web Twenny is embedded here. Still it was novel to experience expressions and actors of the Web in a medium I associate almost entirely now with meatspace. To me it says: we’ve become mundane, at least in the Bay Area. I think that’s a great sign of how understandable and ubiquitous the online experience has become.

(And as I’m writing this I realize I still need to train the spellchecker in Firefox 2 on William Gibson’s contributions to the vernacular, as meatspace lingers forlornly, redlined, unrecognized. ;-)

l learned today that my daughter Isa’s school has a blog. Which was a great excuse to try out the new feed preview feature in Firefox 2 to subscribe - three clicks and I was done.

1. Click on the orange RSS icon in the location bar, which indicates a feed is available

2. Choose how I want to subscribe to the feed

3. Confirm subscription in Bloglines

(It’s fewer steps if you decide to set a preference to always use one service.)

It’s hard to be objective about something you’ve been working on, particularly when you’ve been close to it for a long while*, but Firefox 2 is a freaking great piece of software. Makes my job a whole lot easier when the product I’m marketing keeps on surprising me, in good ways.

*I really enjoyed this 37signals blog post on design fatigue. And yes, I’m probably going to hell for using an anecdote about my kid to pimp a Firefox 2 feature.