An Upgraded Mozilla.com for an Upgraded Firefox
As you no doubt have heard by now, we launched Firefox 3.5 today…a triumphant and exciting moment made possible by a lot of hard work from a lot of very smart, talented and dedicated people around the world. The result is a shiny new Firefox that includes dramatically improved performance, support for open video and other web standards, and new features ranging from geolocation to private browsing. Great stuff all around.
A release that awesome demands that we also upgrade the website that serves up those millions of downloads, so mozilla.com received its own set of 3.5 enhancements today. Check out the project plan for the full overview (and that doesn’t include the dozens of bugs that were filed to tweak things here and there), but here’s a list of my personal favorite improvements:
* a “thank you for downloading” video on the First Run and What’s New pages starring members of the Mozilla community (in addition to showing off some of the people who volunteer so much time to make Firefox possible, it’s also most people’s first exposure to the magic of open video)
* a page detailing the immense amount of back-end work that went into the release that we’re calling Under the Hood (includes some nifty graphs and a demo by Chris Blizzard)
* lots and lots of updates to our Firefox Features page, plus call-outs for what’s new and what’s been improved
* refreshed information on the Firefox download page, with redirects in place to display different content depending on which browser you’re using
* new illustrations throughout the site, most notably the addition of dolphins & gears to our existing homepage menagerie (hit refresh if you don’t see them right away)
Like any major site update, this was a large and complex project that was only possible through a true team effort. Special shout outs (in no particular order) go to:
* Steven Garrity, Stephen DesRoches and Mike Gauthier from silverorange for their tireless design and development efforts
* our Web QA superstars – Stephen Donner, Krupa Raj and Raymond Etornam – for checking the site over and over and over until it was right
* Pascal Chevrel and our localization community for making sure the key pages were available in more than 70 languages…a feat that staggers me the more I think about it
* the folks at The Royal Order & the Delicious Design League for continuing the great visual design and illustration work they started with the 3.0 site
* our incredible IT crew, including Jeremy Orem, Matt Zeier, Reed Loden and Justin Fitzhugh, for making sure everything worked
* Alex Buchanan, Frederic Wenzel and Mike Morgamic from our WebDev team for lending their magic touch to a variety of key areas
* all the technical experts – especially Chris Blizzard, but also Mike Beltzner, Vlad Vukicevic, Damon Sicore and Eric Shepherd – who patiently walked me through concepts like Native JSON and Web Worker Threads until I had them reasonably figured out
* Alex Faaborg for leading the charge on the new logo/icon and lending his detail-oriented expertise to plenty of other areas as well
* Sylvain Barre, Sébastien Adgnot and Pierre-Yves Kerembellec from Dailymotion for supporting the open video demo on First Run/What’s New with their bandwidth and expertise
* Alix Franquet and Rainer Cvillink for making all the new videos
* Paul Kim, Tara Shahian and Dave Bottoms for their opinions and ideas throughout the process
June 30th, 2009 at 10:29 pm
I like the dolphins! Do we measure the different home page background against each other in terms of download rate and such?
June 30th, 2009 at 11:45 pm
Thumbs up from T !
July 1st, 2009 at 2:30 am
A “thankyou for downloading video” that crashes Firefox! Nice work there, including ignoring the month-old patch.
July 1st, 2009 at 4:11 am
[...] An Upgraded Mozilla.com for an Upgraded Firefox As you no doubt have heard by now, we launched Firefox 3.5 today…a triumphant and exciting moment made possible by a lot of hard work from a lot of very smart, talented and dedicated people around the world. The result is a shiny new Firefox that includes dramatically improved performance, support for open video and other web standards, and new features ranging from geolocation to private browsing. Great stuff all around. [...]
July 1st, 2009 at 5:26 pm
The dolphins look kind of depressed.
July 1st, 2009 at 9:35 pm
[...] lessons from a “100 percent full-blooded Korean” PlayStation emulator hits the Palm Pre John Slater: An Upgraded Mozilla.com for an Upgraded Firefox Chocolate Covered Grasshoppers Google fixes Outlook plugin for Google Apps Where Have All the [...]
July 2nd, 2009 at 1:21 pm
http://www.mozilla.com/firefox/ redirects to http://www.mozilla.com/en-US/firefox/upgrade.html even if I’m already running 3.5 . Might be nice not to redirect if running the most recent version, or if already running the most recent version experiment with with a http://www.mozilla.com/en-US/firefox/share.html
Hopefully, now with 3.5 out the door the poor tags can be fixed – https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=491985
Thanks for the incredible products and inspiration web sites!
July 2nd, 2009 at 1:24 pm
Oops, should read:
“the poor <title> tags can be fixed”
July 2nd, 2009 at 4:15 pm
@Jesse – glad you like the dolphins. As far as testing the different site backgrounds go, right now they’re all part of the same URL so we don’t have a way of tracking. Would be interesting to see if that makes a difference, I agree.
@Lloyd – great catch about the redirects. We did that on purpose to make sure that all Firefox users would see the upgrade page on launch day, but will add the http://www.mozilla.com/en-US/firefox/personal.html for 3.5 users very soon. And good call on bug 491985…am hoping to get that resolved soon as well.
August 3rd, 2009 at 8:56 pm
Thanks for mentioning us here.