thoughts on mozilla

In a blog post yesterday, Jay Sullivan – Mozilla Corporation’s VP of Products – discussed Firefox Sync and Firefox Home, two products Mozilla hopes will get a fairly decent amount of adoption.

Firefox Sync, formerly known as Weave, is essentially a server product that will allow syncing of all your Firefox information, including bookmarks, history, open tabs, add-ons, etc. Firefox 4 will include Firefox Sync by default, though Mozilla says the feature will be turned off.

Firefox Home is an iPhone client for Firefox Sync, which allows you to view much of your stored information.

Sullivan’s blog post reads more like a marketing than a discussion on product direction and offers no ETA for Firefox Home.

Meanwhile, Tony Chung – a QA manager at the Mozilla Corporation – has a blog post discussing the QA focus for Firefox Sync and general comments on Firefox Home. The post also looks at statistics for Firefox Sync, but not in great detail. Of course, stats are publicly available on addons.mozilla.org for anyone to peruse.

More information on the less-known Firefox Home is available in a FAQ on the Mozilla wiki.

Yesterday, Ragavan Srinivasan – project manager of Weave – announced the graduation of Weave Sync from Mozilla Labs. As part of this graduation, Weave Sync becomes Firefox Sync and joins the Firefox team so it can become integrated for Firefox 4.

One of the questions that arose from this was brought up by Robert Kaiser of the SeaMonkey Project. With a purely marketing change of name that now specifically calls out Firefox, what should other projects call “Firefox Sync” when incorporating it into their applications? In his blog post, no Mozilla Corporation (MoCo) employee speaks up to answer. However, Gervase Markham – a Mozilla Foundation employee and longtime community member – notes that his desire was for “Weave Sync” to stick with a more general name, along the lines of “Mozilla Sync.” It’s evident that this option wasn’t chosen for marketing reasons by the MoCo team.