July Spotlight: Firefox Day

FireFox Day Button Firefox Day celebrates the birthday of the Mozilla Foundation. In true Mozilla form, every event comes with some user participation, and this is no exception. Between July 15th, 2006 (the birthday itself), and September 15, when you get a friend to download Firefox, both of your names will be included in the source code for Firefox 2.0. You can sign up at worldfirefoxday.com.

firefox banner The Open Source Lab has been proud to be involved with the Mozilla Foundation and participate in various Firefox related activities. Spreadfirefox has been a shining example of viral marketing for Open Source applications (a site that has inspired other sites like Spreadkde and even Spreadbutter).

Other Spreadfirefox activities in the past have included a fundraiser to purchase a full page ad in the New York Times, a photo competition, and more recently the Firefox Flix video ad competition.

Another OSL supported site is one that isn't visible to the end-user, the Bouncer application. Bouncer is a mirror management tool that watches Mozilla's mirror network, knowing which mirrors have each version of Firefox at any given point in time. When a user visits sites like mozilla.com or getfirefox.com, a little javascript is employed to see what OS the user is running, and a single download link is presented. This link is where Bouncer comes in to play, picking a mirror for that user to get the file from, and then redirecting the request to that mirror. Systems in the mirror network are weighted as to provide balance and ensure that there is never a weak link in the network. The end user is assured the copy they are looking for without having to search for a mirror that is up to date and available.

Our own students have been quite fanatic about Firefox, spending an entire evening painting the quad on campus with the Firefox logo, then launching a weather balloon to celebrate a release.

firefox on campus