Proposed Changes to Mozilla Web Sites
Following on from the Foundation/Corporation split and in preparation for the Firefox 1.5 release, we’d like to significantly reorganize our web content over the next few weeks. The big picture is that we want to move to separate sites for the end user (mozilla.com), Foundation (mozillafoundation.org) and developer (mozilla.org) audiences.
Much of this plan is a continuation of what we’ve been doing to better organize our web site presence and to focus our content for specific users.
Addons, SpreadFirefox, and Devmo are good examples of where we’ve made progress in the last year in better targeting our various audiences. mozilla.com and mozillafoundation.org are next in line.
What follows is the current plan; comments are welcomed.
mozilla.com
With the launch of Firefox 1.5, Firefox and Thunderbird product content currently on mozilla.org will migrate to mozilla.com. We’ll also be doing a minor refresh of the site’s look and feel. mozilla.com will become the primary end user site for Firefox, Thunderbird and the Mozilla Corporation.
mozillafoundation.org
Information about the Mozilla Foundation will move to mozillafoundation.org. This will be where members of the community can get involved with and keep up to date with what the Foundation is doing, as well as learn about the Foundation’s history, mission and people.
developer.mozilla.org
The Mozilla Developer Center will continue to ramp up as the primary destination for developers who are building for and on top of the Firefox platform to find reference content, code and other resources.
mozilla.org
While we establish the new sites, mozilla.org will continue to act as a landing page and will help redirect people to the most appropriate sites for specific audiences. After we launch Firefox 1.5, mozilla.org will continue to be home to tools and resources for the various projects making up the overall Mozilla project.
spreadfirefox.com
spreadfirefox.com will continue as the hub for our community marketing efforts supporting Firefox. The site will be overhauled with a look and feel refresh as well as new project tools.
addons.mozilla.org
The Mozilla Add-Ons site will continue to be a primarily end user facing site for people looking to extend their Mozilla software with extensions, plugins and themes. It will also continue to feature tools for developers to submit their add-ons to the site.
Scott Thorne, 
Cameron 6:42 pm on October 31, 2005 Permalink
End users may still remain confused about mozilla.COM vs addons.mozilla.ORG …
Rishi 7:57 pm on October 31, 2005 Permalink
So the MoCo has the resources to do organizing that the end user may not, in fact, actually ever notice but not to make AMO/UMO, a very high visibility Mozilla website, stop sucking? Or even at least admit that it sucks?
pd 9:29 pm on October 31, 2005 Permalink
Please ensure all those links to http://mozilla.org/products/firefox/ are appropriately redirected.
David Naylor 1:58 am on November 1, 2005 Permalink
Sounds good to me!
David Illsley 2:02 am on November 1, 2005 Permalink
I second Camerons point about mozilla.com vs addons.mozilla.org
IMHO the end user bit of addons should be at mozilla.com (as end users are more easilly confused etc etc… and those people who do actually think about security like we all want them to do might not trust it… and I don’t want end users of addons to have to understand the corp/foundation split)
Gemal's Psyched Blog 2:30 am on November 1, 2005 Permalink
Changes to Mozilla web sites
Following on from the Foundation/Corporation split and in preparation for the Firefox 1.5 release, we’d like to significantly reorganize our web content over the next few weeks. The big picture is that we want to move to separate sites for…
Eric BE 3:10 am on November 1, 2005 Permalink
I think the above reorganisation is pretty USELESS (at least partially). What would be much clever to do, would be to include the international website is a common hierarchy.
I just want to illustrate my point by an example : in the extension manager, when I click to the link to look for a new extension, it redirect me to the English site addons.mozilla.org. Unfortunately, my version is a french version. To find a site with french version of extensions : i need to go to the site http://www.geckozone.org/ which is referred nowhere in the mozilla site. When I observe the french version installed in my friend computers they NEVER include ANY extension. Why ?
The reorganisation, you propose here should include the international dimension of mozilla.
Don’t forget, that the existence of
- http://www.geckozone.org/
- http://www.mozilla-europe.org/
- …
is mainly required by the POOR international support of the mozilla.org website.
Ben Basson 7:08 am on November 1, 2005 Permalink
I’d like to third the points raised about addons.mozilla.org – addons.mozilla.com would better fit, considering the end-user focus of mozilla.com
A possible problem with this idea however is the whitelist feature within Firefox.
Either way, if MoCo is splashing out on a website reorganisation, it’d be nice if they pumped more resources into AMO, which currently needs a lot of work, compared to the other single-focus sites which do their respective jobs much better.
beltzner 8:53 am on November 1, 2005 Permalink
I believe that we’ll be doing a cname redirect so that addons.mozilla.com and addons.mozilla.org point to the same place, but it’s a very valid point and exposes an interesting overlap: products are obviously the responsibility of the corporation, but where do extensions, plugins and themes fit in?
Andrew Jackson 9:48 am on November 1, 2005 Permalink
All throbber urls and debug menu urls may have to be changed in the codebase. E.g. firefox’s throbber url needs changing to mozilla.com, it’s start pages, mozilla related bookmarks, etc.
Greg 11:03 am on November 1, 2005 Permalink
While it may not be specifically on-topic:
The visual redesign of many Mozilla sites (devmo, AMO, wiki) inclues a yellow bar on the top. This looks too similar to the yellow info bar that Firefox pops up for blocked popups, missing plugins, etc. Every time I visit one of these sites, I think “whoa, what’s the error here… oh wait, nevermind.”
That visual design should be changed. Just a slightly different coloring of that yellow bar would be enough.
Paul Kim 9:35 pm on November 1, 2005 Permalink
Thanks for the comments everyone.
We’re planning on improvements to AMO that we’ll share soon.
Eric BE: We’ve been working closely with our international affiliates (Mozilla Europe, Mozilla China, and Mozilla Japan) to extend and improve our international reach. Easier navigation between locales is a long-term goal and we will continue to work on that going forward.
Herbert Eppel 4:43 am on December 2, 2005 Permalink
In my view, the shift towards mozilla.com is very unfortunate, because I feel it undermines Mozilla’s image/reputation as being exactly the opposite of what .com represents! Please reconsider!
Scott Thorne 7:03 am on December 8, 2005 Permalink
This is all very good info, but it was too hard to find. When I was confused to find mozilla.com pages coming up, I started looking around for an explanation and couldn’t find one on a mozilla.anything page. Goggle helped me find this very good page. mozilla.whatever needs to put better explanations about all this chaos on their sites.
Chris Ilias’ Blog » Blog Archive » Looking at FTP sites for Mozilla releases 10:10 pm on August 10, 2006 Permalink
[...] Dave gave a link to the Mozilla Application Suite, because that’s what was being discussed. Those quotes apply to all Mozilla product releases. The people jumping the gun may end up regretting it. There is supposed to be a re-organization of Mozilla web content happening soon, making Mozilla.com the end-user site. Mozilla contributers have eluded to this happening during the release of Firefox 1.5. [...]
PKB » Making Mozilla.com Better for International Users 12:52 pm on January 12, 2007 Permalink
[...] A few weeks ago we announced several planned changes to Mozilla Web sites. And on 29 Nov 2005, we launched the new Mozilla.com. At the time we launched the new site, we were planning to continue to update and improve Mozilla.com for our visitors. [...]