Asa Dotzler conference in Buenos Aires - Argentina

Last July 3rd I went to a conference by Asa Dotzler about Firefox.
The meeting took place in "La comedia" Theatre - Rodriguez Peña 1062 from 11:30am to 14hs It was organized by "Comunidad Mozilla Argentina" and "Comunidad de Software Libre de Argentina". It was very interesting to listen to Asa Dotzler.

For those who don't know who Asa Dotzler is, he is a co-founder and community coordinator for the Spread Firefox project, launched in October 2004, where he spearheads open source marketing projects.Dotzler has been an active member of the Mozilla community since 1998. After volunteering for more than a year, Dotzler joined the Mozilla organization, and has played a key role in delivering products including the release of Mozilla 1.0 and
the release of the Mozilla Firefox web browser and Mozilla Thunderbird e-mail and usenet client.

Asa started by explaining about mozilla, and the firefox numbers :

* 100+ Millon users worldwide
* 2.500+ community-contributed extensions
* 41 languages (and growing)
* 16% Worldwide market share
* 1,600+ contributors to code base
* thousands of volunteers & evangelist
* fewer than 100 employees

He explained the global usage of firefox and the security related issues in every browser. He remarked the importance of how much time the programmers needed to fix a bug. He said something that I completely agree with : that every software has bugs, and the problem is how long you take to fix them.

*In 2006 Firefox users were at risk for 9 days
*MSIE & MSIE-Based browser users at risk for 284 days.

Then he talked about the importance of the community that helps firefox, more than 1600 programmers, more than 10000 testers every night and more than 500000 beta testers around the world! and how they organized all these people.

At last he spoke about What's Next :

*JS2
*Offline
*uFormats
*Graphics - Cairo
*FUEL (Firefox User Extension Library)
*Malware protection
*Places

In the end of the conference he answered a few questions from the public.

My impression was that Asa is a very modest and smart guy. I was happy to meet him in such a geeky atmosphere.

I have to say that M$ Internet explorer 7 deliberatly copied the tab browsing of Firefox.Just like other Micro$oft "innovations", they unabashedly copy someone else's program and relaunch it, but of course in a Micro$oft-Way (Bugs, Unsecure, Privacy monitoring, etc) A good example are Vista's Gadgets being just a bad copy of "Yahoo Widgets" or the Xbox being a bad copy of Playstation... just to name a few...

I strongly recommend using Firefox. Even aliens use it!!!

See it usign Google Maps :
Firefox Field

And don't forget to check the Mozilla Foundation:

"The Mozilla project is a global community of people who believe that openness, innovation, and opportunity are key to the continued health of the Internet."


Thanks Asa for your visit!!!