Comment by fhd2 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by fhd2 | Hacker News Reader

I love contributing to Mozilla. I contributed to a bunch of projects in the past years, including Chromium (a very friendly bunch BTW), but Mozilla makes me feel like I'm a real part of this, not just some guy sending a patch.

- Literally everything they do is in the open, volunteers can participate a lot if they want to, even start new projects. (~50% of their employees remote, I guess that helps a lot here.)

- They're mentoring people new to a project really well - I love this even though I prefer to just dive into the code myself.

- They call you a "Mozillian", send you foundation/company/product updates, invite you to Mozilla Summit (I was there this year, and it was amazing) etc.

- Mozilla is not profit oriented, they just care about their mission: Moving the web forward and keeping it open. Makes me feel like part of a good cause, as opposed to unpaid labour.

All in all, they really got this figured out. I can recommend them to anyone who wants to contribute to something big/important.

> Mozilla is not profit oriented, they just care about their mission: Moving the web forward and keeping it open.

This was my experience with them ever since Firefox 1.0 came out in 2004 to liberate us from Internet Explorer. They really care about open Internet, user rights and privacy. And they stayed true to those ideals all these years. Something you can't say about many big name companies on the net today. In fact, I consider them a fair replacement for the early Google that we've lost to the forces of evil :)

I cannot recommend the mentoring aspect enough. I contributed my first patch earlier this year and having contact with someone on the project to review my code and give me suggestions was a huge help to getting my patch accepted. It also helped me understand the code base better than if I had to make and test my own assumptions wrt design decisions and the like.

I highly recommend contributing to Firefox as well. It's a very cool system.

I've been running the Mozilla nightly(and Chrome Canary) for a few years now. If there are enough alpha/beta testers, it will help the developers move more quickly. Every 6 weeks half the Internet gets a browser upgrade. Helping out requires nothing more than surfing the web.

http://nightly.mozilla.org/

Maybe I should fire a Nightly channel up in the PortableApps.com Platform alongside Stable and Beta for Firefox like we do for Chrome (Stable, Beta, Dev). I'd need to write a custom installer to pull it down, but I still have a mostly functional one from the old process.

I'm going to look into it too.

End of the year I'm going to quit my day job and wanted to do some open source stuff, to improve my skills. After all I heared, Mozilla seems a good start :)

This comment is pushing me over to try firefox as my primary browser. I'd love to see Firefox stay slick like Chrome. It's the development curve of Chrome that has kept me attached to it. Some useful features like managed search engines with shortcut are really neat in Chrome. I'm sure Firefox has them too. Sooner than later I plan on switching to Firefox.

I'm not sure if this is what you're looking for, but Firefox keyword searches let you bookmark any website's search page and then invoke it from the address bar with a keyword:

http://kb.mozillazine.org/Using_keyword_searches

For example, if you bookmark "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Search?search=%s" with a keyword of "w", then enter "w whatever" will directly load "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Search?search=whatever".

If Firefox hasn't had this since its inception, it's at least been available for the vast majority of its lifespan. Don't remember a time when I haven't used this feature (and I've been using Firefox for a longggg time). Really interesting to see someone mention a feature in Chrome as a benefit over Firefox when Firefox had it first.

I hope more people switch (back), and in turn, more people contribute.

I was almost sure Firefox had it. It's just that I switched to chrome a few years back because it was way lighter than Firefox 'at that time'. However, right now it's just inertia that's keeping me with Chrome. Still waiting for a killer feature that'll make Firefox a must have.

do they have anything that an inexperienced person can contribute too? i'd love to get involved but don't know if i am experienced enough.

Jump in at #introductions at Mozilla channel on irc. There is always something that you can contribute with, and you will learn too!

It's actually #introduction (no plural), but yes, we are a friendly bunch!

"Bugs Ahoy" is a Bugzilla search page that lets you filter Firefox bugs that have mentor contact info by programming language and feature area:

http://www.joshmatthews.net/bugsahoy/

Out of all the "big" tech companies, Mozilla is really the only one I've ever wanted to work for!

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