PKB

… everyone who’s going to be using Firefox 3 very soon now.

Lifehacker just posted their list of the top 10 Firefox 3 features. At number one:

Via Lifehacker

I learned about the Mozilla student club at Jordan University through Issa Mahasneh’s group on Spread Firefox, the online home of our Firefox marketing community.

Hey Issa: this is a really well-done design. Great combination of an overall visual metaphor (a student’s desk), professionally-executed graphic design, and balance overall between your copy and imagery. Thank you for sharing this!

* For those of you who are students or interested in general in helping out with grassroots marketing projects, check out Spread Firefox and The Mozilla Blog to participate or just keep up with our adventures bringing Firefox to the world.

We’re nearing the finish line for Firefox 3, so it’s a good time to share our plans for the launch marketing that will introduce Firefox 3 to the world.

As with every previous major version launch, we will be utilizing a combination of traditional marketing and PR programs with community and grassroots outreach. This combination has served us well over the past four years to drive adoption to over 160 million people worldwide, build the Firefox brand, and provide meaningful opportunities for participation at launch.

Core launch principles
It all starts with a great product.

Firefox 3 is the strongest version of Firefox we’ve ever built. It contains over 14,000 improvements from Firefox 2 and reflects three years of work by Mozilla project developers. Active use of Firefox 3 beta versions is roughly 4x what we saw at peak for Firefox 2 betas, and, most importantly, beta testers are sticking with Firefox 3, indicating it is already delivering a great daily experience.

Reflecting the strength of Firefox 3 across multiple dimensions - performance, user experience, security, customization, and web standards support - the theme for the Firefox 3 launch is: “A No Compromises Web Experience”. The core idea we will communicate in our launch marketing is that no other web browser matches Firefox 3 and the quality of the experience it delivers against these key measures.

The growth of Firefox is being supported by an active and vocal community of end users. We aim to give our community new tools and more importantly new reasons to continue the word of mouth referrals that have amplified awareness of Firefox.

Firefox is global. We will be shipping with over 40 language versions on launch day, and our launch will touch as many parts of the world as we can reach.

Our goals are simple: to accelerate the growth of Firefox and drive significant new user adoption beginning with the launch of Firefox 3 and continuing through the lifecycle of this release.

Driving awareness for Firefox 3
Press outreach: We will be conducting worldwide press tours for Firefox 3 in the US, UK, Germany, France, Spain, Italy, Poland, China, Japan and Brazil. We’ll meet with technology and business reporters in each country to present Firefox 3 and showcase new features that make their debut with this release.

Viral marketing: We have been working on a global, participatory marketing program that we will announce very soon. We wanted to give Firefox users all over the world a fun, easy way to join in on the launch and have developed a program that we think meets this objective well. More details when we unveil this program on spreadfirefox.com.

Search engine marketing: We will shift our ongoing search engine marketing program to focus exclusively on the launch in the weeks just prior to final release of Firefox 3. We’ll also be rolling out new search engine marketing campaigns in the UK, France and Germany (to complement our campaigns in the US and Japan).

Partner program: We are working with a group of add-on partners for the first time ever at launch to highlight the strength of the Firefox add-ons ecosystem. Partners will spread the word about Firefox 3 to users of their add-ons and will also work with us on press outreach.

Helping people get Firefox 3
All of our awareness generating activity is intended to drive visits to getfirefox.com, which serves over 85% of the cumulative downloads for Firefox. We’ve made major enhancements to the visual design and content on mozilla.com in preparation for the launch.

Website redesign: Mozilla.com has been completely overhauled for Firefox 3. New imagery and messaging evolves the Firefox brand while remaining true to the straightforward, human voice we’ve established.

Screencasts and tutorials: We are producing several screencasts and working on a project to invite community participation in creating more, to show people what’s new and useful in Firefox 3. We’ve also developed several quick and easy tutorials that will go live with the new site at launch.

But wait, there’s more!
Firefox 3 Parties: Continuing a hallowed tradition here at Mozilla, we are updating our Firefox Party Planner with the goal of topping the hundreds of parties held all over the world at the launch of Firefox 2. As usual, we will send party hosts a Firefox party kit upon registration.

Everyone on the extended Mozilla marketing team is excited about this launch, and we can’t wait to kick off what is shaping up to be the strongest Firefox release yet. Expect to hear more about the launch in the coming weeks on Planet Mozilla from the members of the team.

Seth Godin shares a perspective on Firefox users and why they’re disproportionately represented among those creating content for Squidoo. We see this split mirrored pretty consistently across many web services that enable content authoring and emergent online activities - the proportion of the most active users often overweights to Firefox.

25% of the visitors we track at Squidoo use Firefox, which is not surprising. But 50% of the people who actually build pages on the site are Firefox users. Twice as many.

This is true of bloggers, of Twitter users, of Flickr users… everywhere you look, if someone is using Firefox, they’re way more likely to be using other power tools online. The reasoning: In order to use Firefox, you need to be confident enough to download and use a browser that wasn’t the default when you first turned on your computer.

That’s an empowering thing to do. It isolates you as a different kind of web user.

Via Seth’s blog.

John Gruber at Daring Fireball delivers a typically direct, nuanced and fair comparison of the top browser contenders on Mac OS. As we’ve consistently said, healthy competition among browser developers improves the Web experience for everyone.

Most of my reasons for preferring Safari to Firefox are Mac-specific details. … For users new to the Mac, who aren’t aware of these details, Firefox 3 might be as good or better than Safari in nearly every way. (For anyone more used to Windows than the Mac, the text editing behavior in Firefox might feel right rather than wrong, as it does to me.)

In short, competition in the Mac web browser space is strong and getting stronger. Firefox isn’t just a great web browser, but it’s a pretty good Mac web browser, too.

I’ve been invited to give a talk this weekend on the marketing career path at Stanford University’s second annual “I Don’t Know to CEO” conference. It’s a student-run event to help undergraduates get exposure to a set of different business roles. I’ll be talking about community powered marketing with Alex Polvi, sharing Mozilla’s non-traditional approach towards marketing, and reviewing case studies of successful grassroots campaigns we’ve launched. Our workshop runs from 3:00 to 3:45 Saturday in Old Union. More details are on the idk2ceo site.