Ever wanted to change the wallpapers in your room? 3 times a day? Well with Firefox 3.6 that is now possible for your browser thanks to its integrated Personas (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 more than 30.000 personas to choose from (and more every day), you can theme Firefox just the way you like it. It’s super easy as well to create your very own Personas and add them to the gallery, and be among thousands of other designers from all over the world!

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 favorite Personas installed. We have even taken the time out to do it have already done our own Persona-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!

Happy New Year to all Mozillians all over Europe. This year will be the year of participation. The term “user” does not exist any more, we are now all contributors, because the OpenWeb needs contributions and expects from everyone to be more active and full of passion.

The Quest So, here is the idea. Let every European country make here at Mozilla Europe blog system a blog post with an introduction of its Mozilla team members and their vision of development for 2010. This is an exciting task, isn't it?

If you don't have an account, please send me an email (b@bgzilla.org) and I will publish your post here and will link you back

Finally I have time to write here some more about all the events that took place during Firefox’s 5'th anniversary. Thanks to Mozilla Europe we had a very delicious cake with a unique design. Here it is:
 
Besides the cake, as you can see we had cookies, many kinds of sweets, balloons, whistles and of course some merchandise:

After the cake-part we had 2 special sessions with talks and demonstrations and a game: "Who creates the Bulgarian web?". Here you can see some more pictures:

Slides

Here are the slides from my first talk, during this event:

If you are planning something for Firefox's 5th birthday, please add your spot  here  by sending me location (city, country) and more details or link to contact(at)bgzilla.org or leave me a comment here.

Firefox’s fifth anniversary arrived. Looking at my SFX account, it is almost as old as the browser, but I started using this way of thinking much earlier, at the times of Mosaic and Netscape, but that’s another topic.

The presents are the most important thing in a birthday party. But if we are talking about Firefox’s birthday the most important topic would be the web-freedom. Most of the people I know use Firefox. I also know people, who have been using the browser before it was called that way, but so few of them understand the meaning of Open Web, which is really a pity.

It is true, that spirit, beer and cake are very important for a birthday, but it is even more important for this fifth anniversary that we could find many new people, understanding the open web and contributing to its development.

Who creates the Bulgarian web?

Years ago the answer to this question inevitably would have been “The web companies”; the companies, which first launched websites, made them popular and attracted many users; the ones, which developed the Bulgarian web through many new portals, services, discounts, advertisements, and so on and so forth. If you ask them now – “Who makes the Bulgarian web?” they would answer “We do”; if we ask the people on the streets, they would probably answer the same: “They do”.

But that’s not true. You, creating and sharing content every day, commenting, writing, blogging, uploading pictures and video, publishing articles in Wikipedia and anywhere else, YOU create the Bulgarian web, not the companies, remember that! Things are changing at a breakneck speed and while years ago the web companies created the web, now they are just a small part of the whole cloud of everyone, included in the task and taking part in it, willing or not. The web-evolution started a long time ago and YOU are a part of it. YOU CREATE THE BULGARIAN WEB.

I believe that’s the spirit for a Firefox birthday party; it must clarify and teach, not just to gather people, who know what Firefox is to drink beer and talk loudly. That’s why we launched a campaign to make this happen. From October 14th until November 9th the Mozilla Bulgaria Team will present about 6 lectures in different places around the country, telling of the open web, our freedom, the personal space of each of us and the way we can protect it in the Internet. We will be discussing open standards, explaining what Firefox is and why we should celebrate on November 9th not only an anniversary, but something bigger: the realized notion that web – this is you.

Hello Milos. First of all, how old are you and were do you come from?

I was born and raised in the city of Niš, Serbia, and I'm 24 years old.

You are a contributor for the Serbian Mozilla Community. What do you contribute to exactly?

Mozilla Srbija, Serbian Mozilla Community, is involved in many different Mozilla projects. The very first project of our community was the translation of the Mozilla.com website in Serbian.

More specifically, I helped translating some well known Mozilla websites, such as Mozilla.com, Firefox support website (SUMO), Mozilla add-ons website (AMO) and Mozilla Europe. Furthermore, I'm pretty active in SUMO developing area, having successfully completed some quite complex and important activities with the Mozilla WebQA team in the last couple of months. Besides the above mentioned activities, I occasionally write a patch or two for Mozilla add-ons site, trying to help developers.

So in the end, while translating, I came across many other Mozilla projects, and got interested in them. Which is why I'm now actively participating in several projects.

How long have you been contributing to Mozilla?

My first contact with the global Mozilla community was during the winter of 2008. I followed events on the #xul talkings on Mozilla IRC server, as well as tutorials on the MDC site. At the beginning I wasn't too active, but as time passed, I was more and more involved. A few months later I met Pascal Chevrel, who guided me during translations efforts of the Mozilla websites. From that time on, I've been an active member for the Mozilla community.

And what has made you want to contribute to Mozilla? Did you already have any contacts with Mozilla before you started to contribute?

The very first contact with Mozilla was Firefox. After having tried other well known Web browsers, I discovered Firefox and decided to use it for good. As a logical step after Firefox, I started to use using Thunderbird, and later Sunbird.

As I said before, I began by looking for some 'online' help with XUL. After the MDC website, I found the Mozilla IRC server and registered my nickname on it. Several days spent on the #xul channel led me to other channels on the server, where I noticed that many people volunteer in various Mozilla projects. After a few days well spent in getting to know the localization associates, I realized that the work of a contributor is very pricy and respected, and that really got me overjoyed. Furthermore, I saw that I could help, and that what I do will help other community members, so I decided that I would - to the possible extent - help the community, as I really value the time and effort other people have spent helping me.

While working on all these projects, I realized the value of all of this: the communities that work on these projects, as well as directly on the software, are simply invaluable. So I am very happy to have the opportunity to participate a bit in such great things.

While working on all above-mentioned projects, I got to know in more detail how the community works, breaths and creates great software, and I can tell you that I am really proud that I had the opportunity to contribute to its success.

I have heard that you have recently started translating the Mozilla Europe Website in Serbian. What can you tell us about this experience?

Yes. Few weeks ago, I began work on translating the Mozilla Europe website into Serbian language. As there are currently very few active members in our community, so far we have not had the time nor or the courage to initiate this project. However, we are now ready, and I hope that we will soon see the Mozilla Europe Serbian site on the way

Mozilla Europe, as part of the global Mozilla community, is really incredible. Although the goal of all our efforts is to promote and improve Mozilla products and websites, this community is very much responsible for the great success of our projects in Europe. In a world of information technology, much less attention is paid to spread awareness in smaller countries, and that is exactly what Mozilla Europe is trying to correct. All European Communities are equal, and all have the same privileges. What I find wonderful, is that a lot of attention is paid to countries from Southeastern Europe, and thus given a chance to local contributors to promote their country and language. It is very important that on these sites communities get a lot of the integrity to use their language and communities have equal opportunities to present themselves in the best possible way.

Is there anything you would like to add, a message that you would like to pass around?

I'd like to thank all contributors for making our world a place where this great community exists, as well as for honestly accepting new people that come in, and for trying to make things better... I would especially like to thank all Mozilla developers and all others involved in projects, for endless support and community promotion.

At the end, I would like to send a message to all reading this text that they should drop by, at least briefly, to feel the atmosphere among Mozillians, or even contact us. The goal of everything we do is to ease the work, dissemination of knowledge and friendship... and all are welcome!

Well everyone, the promotion has finished! The weather and the Macedonia - Scotland soccer match kept people in their houses, but we still got plenty of visitors. 3 hours of fun on the city square in Skopje and Kumanovo was great. People came, they got to know the Firefox browser, the +5000 addons, Mozilla and the Macedonian promotion team.

But words cannot do anything here, so thanks to Damjan Arsovski, we have a bunch of nicely shot pictures of the Skopje promotion.

Dig in to our Flickr gallery, here. For more info about the promotion itself and the group can be found in this blog post.

Hi everyone, I am very excited to be the first Macedonian author here on the Mozilla Europe Blog. I am also very happy to announce that the Republic of Macedonia now has it's very own Mozilla Promotion Team named Mozilla Macedonia! Because the so called "Internet Boom" just recently took over the Republic of Macedonia, things in the IT sphere are just starting up. So a few enthusiasts got the idea to create a Mozilla promotion team here. From the black-board, the idea grew into reality, forming Mozilla Macedonia in 2 cities around the Republic of Macedonia: Skopje (capital) & Kumanovo].

Although the Republic of Macedonia is young as an IT country, more than 58% of it's internet users use Firefox! As our first course of action, we will hold a Firefox promotion in our 3 cities on the 5th of September. Handing out Firefox 3.5 CD's (Macedonian & Albanian install, Macedonian & Albanian Menus, Firefox stickers, badges and neck-straps are part of the plan). Media attention will be big, so that's a big plus!

We welcome you all to attend in the city nearest you on the 5th of September, 17:00 o'clock on the city square. See you there and have a Mozilla-rific day!

UPDATE: The Bitola promotion has been postponed for sometime later this year.

On the 3rd and 4th of October we will hold Mozilla Camp Europe 2009. This year we will be in the beautiful city of Prague. We hold the event to give everyone in the community a chance to interact face-to-face (yes, we're all real people!) and to exchage ideas and information about the community and the Mozilla project.

This year, we will be holding an Advocacy track, covering all aspects of promoting the project and the Mozilla mission. We would especially like to hear your insights or stories about your local community, how it started, and how you recruited members, or what observations you would make about forming your community - all ideas are welcome.

If you want to make a proposal for a talk, or have any questions, please contact Patrick Finch at patrick at mozilla dot com or me, irina at mozilla-europe dot org.

Photo info: Marek (Aviary.pl) presenting the Polish community - by Gandalf

As far as Firefox 3.5 launch parties are concerned, Romania was not a country to be left behind. We had not one, but two events celebrating the launch of the world-acclaimed browser.

The first one, chronologically speaking, was organized in the beautiful city of Cluj, in the heart of Romania. Over 30 people gathered in the pub chosen for the event over beer, cake and Firefox swag. A special, big and yummy Firefox 3.5 cake was made for the ocassion. The first thing on the agenda was the viewing of the Meet Firefox 3.5 video, where Mike Beltzner gives "A quick overview of what makes Mozilla’s latest browser so great". Now that everybody was up-to-date, the feasting on the cake could begin.

In Bucharest, the party had a more academic feel, as it took place on the university campus, and had a similar format: presentations first and drinks and food later. This time there were two talks: the first was about the new features in Firefox 3.5 and the second, more designer-oriented, was focusing on the new HTML technologies Firefox supports. The second part of the celebration consisted of beer, pizza and ice cream at the nearby pub. More photos here.

Now, for the people who helped organize the parties, I want to give thanks to the wonderful enthuziasts who joined Mozilla in celebrating another successful launch and made sure the parties were a success. Among them there are Stas Sushkov, Tibi Turbureanu and Nicu Buculei. Thank you guys!

Photo credits: Stas Sushkov and Nicu Buculei