The section of the post about open source browser has now been corrected.

The Web browser is the lens through which we look at the virtual world, and the medium by which we connect, learn, share and collaborate. The browser you choose is responsible for providing you with the necessary tools to manage your online life, and to protect your privacy and security.

As of the beginning of this week Microsoft have unleashed, what will be for many, a confusing little screen that tells them to install something they don’t quite understand. The problem with this is that they don’t quite understand what they are being asked to choose, and there is nothing on that little screen to give them the information they need to know.

In this, admittedly long, blog post, I will attempt to help clear things up and explain to you, just what it is that you are being asked to choose and why it is important. As a Mozilla Community Volunteer it is obvious that I will have a certain bias towards a certain browser that you have / are going to be asked to choose from. So I will also do my best to keep bias out of this post as well.

So what is a web browser. Well it is for many, nothing! They simply don’t know what it is. When you ask someone to go to the internet, most of the time, many people will click on a blue “e” and that is it! That blue “e” is the internet to them. It may even be what you believe the internet is. This is not your fault. Until now there has not been this ease of choice and so many have had no need to know what a web browser. Nor have you.

What is this web browser… Really?

The web browser, as mentioned at the very beginning of this post, is the tool that you use to view the internet. The internet is not the blue “e” it is a complex and complicated series of cables circling the globe, and running around on these cables is information. This information, in whatever form it be, is what most of us know as “The Internet”. The blue “e” is the tool you use to make the Internet make sense, and make it easy to use. Without needing to know how all the complicated jiggery-pokery behind the scenes is working.

So, we now know what a browser is, but why is the choice so important?

This question is a little harder to answer, but here goes.

The choice on which browser you make has a big impact on how you will experience the web. With different browser having different leading strengths and features, it can get confusing. Don’t be scared by this though, when you boil it down, it turns out that this choice is easy.

The best way to make your choice is to visit the “Tell me more” button just beneath the options presented to you, and visit them all. Sum up the pros, and cons, the things you like and dislike, and go on your preferred option. Not only that but go with the people who make you feel more comfortable. Finally, don’t just choose Microsoft Internet Explorer because you know it, and it is made by the same people who make your operating system (find out more) or your office applications. Take serious note of the other options that are given to you.

What does this screen you talk of look like? I have not seen it yet!

If you haven’t seen it yet do not be alarmed, you will at some point soon. It will look like the following, however the choices may be in a different order. This is a good thing, as it means that no one company has an advantage over the others at this point in your decision making, allowing you to make a more informed choice.

Note that if you click on the above picture it will take you to the actual page.

Some advice (this bit will be a little bit bias)

Without telling you which to choose I have some further advice for you. On the whole, the open source options are safer, more up-to-date, faster, and more reliable. This is due to them being open. There are many people, all over the world working on these browsers to make them the best that they can be. This is not true with the closed source options as they don’t allow people other than a small group of individuals, to work on and contribute to the browser.

Which of the choices are open source then?

Out of the first 5 options you see only Mozilla Firefox is completely open source with Google Chrome and Safari both being partly open. Opera and Internet Explorer are the least open of them all, being completely locked down.

Note: This section was updated as soon as I realised that I had left it in complete disarray from the many changes I made to it. My apologies go out to all those that read this before the update as well as to those of you who received this in your feed readers.

Overview

The internet is not the blue “e”, it is the tool you use to see the internet. It is a vital tool in day to day life now and knows a lot about you. When making the choice about which browser to choose don’t just go with what you know, go with what seems the best based on the information you can gain from the internet and from the “Tell me more” buttons on the choice screen. Finally, if you need any more information, or a good place to send your friends and family to help them understand the choice that they also will be presented with, visit www.opentochoice.org.

FOSDEM like MozCampEu09, is something that is difficult to describe, there is nothing more… invigorating, than meeting up with a large number of people, many of whom you do not know, that all share a common interest.

I spent a large amount of my time in the Mozilla Dev Room and on the Mozilla Booth while I was at the event, and I have the format for both is completely different to what I expected, and it was nice. The whole thing was a lot more relaxed than I anticipated which in turn, made me more relaxed. There were a few times when things got a little more hectic such as lunch and trying to get into the Dev Room for the HTML5 talk (which I eventually gave up on due to the queue going all the way down the corridor) and at lunch times while at the booth.

Not only was the whole thing a lot more relaxed but there was a lot to talk about, even for someone who has less knowledge on the actual technological side of things at the moment (what with being a student still and not a master like some who were there).

Friday

The trip to Brussels was quick, so quick that by the time I had eaten my in flight snack and turned on my laptop it was time to turn it off for landing. I also noticed a certain Mitchell Baker on my flight as well as another Mozillian who’s name I am afraid to say I have forgotten (I suck at names) and we sat down on the train together and had a chat about where Mozilla is and what its competition is like.

From the train station it was a 3 minute walk to the hotel and after sorting out which room I was in I headed for the hotel bar where I meat a couple of guys from the Facebook development team and we had a short chat about their new HIP-HOP product. Which cleared a few things up for me.

Later that evening I meat some old friends from MozCampEu09 and then we headed for the Delirium Café! There was more in the way of conversation, there was some drinking, and on the whole a very, very, very crowded bar and street. It was while here that I meat a few more MozCampEu09 friends as well as some new people as well as met a man named David Baker who just so happened to be doing a piece on Mozilla and the open source community for Wired Magazine UK.

Saturday

An early start and quick breakfast with lots of coffee to wake me up and I was on my way to the Mozilla Drumbeat meeting. We discussed how to explain what Drumbeat is as well as how to summarize it in a single sentence, which turned out to be quite hard. We also spoke about a few of the currently proposed Drumbeats and what changes we would make to improve them.

From Drumbeat straight to the main event. There were many interesting talks, and, as I have said, there was also a lot of interesting people and some time spent on the booth.

Late afternoon there was a small issue with my laptop where it died. Well, wubi died and I had to ask the guys on the Ubuntu booth if they could help me recover the lost course work. They were very helpful and I had Ubuntu reinstalled by the end of the night ( around 3am :/ ). It did however push me the final step to completely installing Ubuntu properly in its own partition and since then, I have not had the slightest issue with it. Not even a crash of my own doing

The Mozilla Dinner

Just like in Prague, I got my hands dirty and did some organizing, I missed the starters for dinner, but the main meal was nice. I even managed (unwittingly) to have 2 portions of pudding. Then onto Laser Tag in which my team won, and overflowed the score counter. The red team (the one I was on) is actually 1357!

There was some bowling, then another game of Laser Tag, but this time on the blue team and we instantly realised why the blue team lost every game that night, the blue team equipment did not work properly. Never mind…

Sunday

A day similar to Saturday but with different talks, as well as a lightning talk from myself and my room-mate for the event Gorjan Jovanovski. I was also interviewed by David (the man I met at the beer event the night before) so keep your eyes peeled for that in the next issue of Wired UK.

The final part of the event was to say my goodbyes and head off to the airport, this was not as simple as it sounded as, for some unknown reason, the train that I was told to get by the ticket master, went not to the airport but out of Brussels in completely the wrong direction, this meant that when I did finally get to the airport I had to literally RUN to make it to the plane before it left. I had already missed check-in! I did make it though so on the whole not a bad day.

That concludes my post of the event, short, sweet and to the point, if you can find one that is

I think… infact I know… I procrastinate, more than a little too much. However, after watching this video I know that I have the right to.

Aside
I know it has been a little while since FOSDEM ended however I am working on a post as we speak… well, at the time of this posting I am part way through my FOSDEM post. I have been waiting for others to post as I took few photos while there, so I will be… borrowing… some from others and quoting some as well.

To help us find out which Personas out there you love the most, we present you with a  challenge, to help celebrate the launch of Firefox 3.6 and its newest and possibly greatest feature. We want you to show off your Firefox with your favourite Personas installed. We have even taken the time out to do it have already done our own Perosna-portraits ourselves, as well as and provided you with some great tools to help you get started.

So what are you waiting for? Head to www.spreadfirefox.com/get-personas and share your style with the world!

Oh, and the picture you see here? That is Gorjan from Mozilla Macedonia showing off just one of the ways you can join in!

^[1] For those of you that are new to the Personas feature, they are lightweight themes for Firefox that are easy to install and chage without the need to restart your browser.

With a new theme system known as Personas you can now change the look of the browser in seconds, with a choice that just boggles the mind. How often are you going to want to choose from over 30,000 different themes? Fashion is not all that Firefox is about however an there have been many changes under the hood that you may not notice. So let us fill in some of the details for you.

For Designers there is now support for CSS gradients as well as WOFF (these are small fonts that you can integrate into a website). This means that not only will you be able to make your sites look good, but they will load faster than ever before.

Oh and did we mention that Firefox 3.6 is fast? Firefox 3.6 is 20% faster than 3.5, and, if you remember, 3.5 was 3 times faster than Firefox 3. So on the whole, you cant get much faster without the safety that Firefox provides. This safety comes to you in the from of the new plug-in check feature that will allow you to see if your plug-ins are up-to-date, or if they need a little bit of an upgrade.

Programmers of the world. We did not forget you in the slightest. You can now add page orientation to your web apps thanks to the new orientation API. You can also use drag and drop functions as well as use the new FILE API to make your web apps more like desktop apps.

For all those out there that love to customize your browsing experience (with over 6000 Add-ons and over 30,000 Personas), to those of you that love to make the web better. Firefox 3.6 is the browser for you.

So visit www.firefox.com and enjoy a faster, safer and more secure way to use the web.

The French government joined Germany today in advising to its citizens to stop using IE and migrate to another browser. Hopefully this will mean a large jump in the amount of Firefox users this month

The announcements come after a recent admission by Microsoft that there is a serious security problem that can be found not only one version but in numbers 6, 7, and 8!

Internet security company McAfee pointed out this security vulnerability in Internet Explorer, which allowed hackers in China to attack Google, Adobe and a large number of other companies, including Yahoo and Northrop Grumman.

While Microsoft is working on a fix for the problem, I believe that this is a big, and potentially critical blow to the company and will encourage a large number of people to migrate away from the browser permanently.

My next thought is this… How do we take advantage of this in the Mozilla Community and help people make the right choice when looking for another browser? Not only that, but how do we encourage other governments to follow the German lead and get them to advise people to steer clear of the browser?

I wonder… Is this how Mozilla got the idea for crash recovery in Firefox? What other features are they working on that come from this wonderful animal?!

Thanks to jX for the find.

19:12  * FuzzyFox is currently destroying a firefox logo O.O

I’m not proud of what I did, but it is done now, and nothing can change that. I do think that the sacrifice of this particular Firefox logo was for the greater good. I will let you make up your minds on that one however.

I do have some of my just desert from the creation of this effect. It consists of several small stab wounds on my hands and a blister on my thumb. So the logo didn’t go down without a fight… Which is nice to see.

I think the idea of doing this in part came from my recent post on the best Firefox 5 Year photos. It got me thinking about how, I myself failed to achieve anything worth posting, so, here is my late celebration of the 5th birthday of such a great browser, and not only that, but my 5th year with the Mozilla Community!

Drupal Theme: drupal.zip (1.7mb)
Presentaion Theme: presentation.otp (259.6kb)

My thanks go out to Gandalf for making the theme a reality in the first place. Without his work, well, this wouldn’t be here really would it

Licensing

• All images are covered by Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike except of trademark signs and logos.
• All code is covered by Mozilla Public License
• Use of the theme is covered by Licensing Guidelines

[NOTE: the drupal theme is still under work so there are likely to be quite a few bugs with it.]