I've updated the Firefox strategy and roadmap document with our plans for the Firefox Desktop in 2012. It's going to be an amazing year with lots of exciting projects and products from Mozilla.

I've been with the Mozilla project for almost 14 years and I can say with confidence that if we exit 2012 having executed on this plan, I have no doubt that Firefox and the other major Mozilla initiatives will have more impact than in any prior year of the Mozilla project.

If you're new to the project, take a look at the work ahead of us and if it interests you, let me or any of the other product leads know and we'll help you plug in. If you're a long-time contributor, I encourage you to keep these goals in the front of your mind and your work queue. 2012 is going to be a critical year for Mozilla and for the Open Web. Execution matters more than ever and there's no team I'd rather be working with than Mozilla's global community of contributors.

John Battelle has a very thoughtful and thought provoking article on the future of the Web that outlines a plan for ensuring that the Internet continues to be a commons and that it not devolve into a collection of walled gardens.

At Mozilla, we're working to build that "open" and "independent" Web platform and commons. We have a lot more to do to make the open Web the first choice for users and application developers -- especially for the mobile environment, but I have no doubt that we can do it and I believe we can do it *this year*.

Photo by Flickr user I dream of Nici, used under a creative commons license

Mozilla will be publishing a series of 2012 strategy and roadmap documents in the next few days that will describe how we get from where we are now to an experience for users and developers that can rival and in many cases beat, the walled gardens and proprietary mobile platforms. Stay tuned.

I know this isn't news, but it makes me happy every time I see it (Yes, I'm a web geek.) Those of you who use Bing or have looked at it more than once know that they put beautiful background images on their search page. Those images have little highlighted nodes with information and trivia about the image. But every once in a while Bing puts a video background in, like they did a few days ago with this one:

Sorry, your browser doesn't support embedded videos. Try Firefox

And what I love about that is that they serve WebM video to Firefox. A few years ago, this would have been Flash and today it's an open format that I can easily hotlink right here in my blog :D (You can click the video to view it full-sized.)

Hot on the heels of rumors of a Windows Phone NDK comes this nugget from The VergeSynergy between the phone and the PC / tablet is going to be a big one. Not only will Windows Phone 8 share the same Metro style user interface as Windows 8 for tablets and PCs, but developers can reuse the same code for both operating systems. Additionally, the Zune Desktop is being scrapped in favor of a sync relationship with a companion app and the Xbox companion app will have a partner client on both Windows 8 and Windows Phone 8. Similar to Windows 8, seamless SkyDrive integration will also play a big role with cloud syncing. And then there's NFC: in addition to providing that aforementioned "wallet experience" it will allow for tap-to-share capabilities between hardware-supported phones, tablets, and PCs.

I mentioned in an earlier post that I thought we'd start to see this kind of convergence that was more than the skin deep (Metro Style) bits we've seen so far. I hope it continues.

Why all the interest in Windows Phone you ask? Well, I'm hoping that Microsoft can pull off the pivot they're entering with an entirely new and fresh version of Windows. This is the biggest experience overhaul since Windows 95, in my opinion, and I want it to be successful because I don't want to look up in a few years and see that the only two viable operating systems are a locked down iOS and Android. I also think Metro is the most compelling new computer experience to arrive since Mac OS X and that kind of innovation isn't rewarded often enough in this industry.

update: And I was right, it seems, in speculating that Windows Phone would adopt the NT kernel. Paul Thurrot has more.

From Danny Sullivan at Marketing Land comes news of a surprisingly candid Microsoft explanation of why services on the Web give you things for free.Google is in the process of making some unpopular changes to some of their most popular products. Those changes, cloaked in language like "transparency," "simplicity" and "consistency," are really about one thing: making it easier for Google to connect the dots between everything you search, send, say or stream while using one of their services.

But, the way they're doing it is making it harder for you to maintain control of your personal information. Why are they so interested in doing this that they would risk this kind of backlash? One logical reason: Every data point they collect and connect to you increases how valuable you are to an advertiser.

To be clear, there's nothing inherently wrong with wanting to improve the quality of an advertising product. But, that effort needs to be balanced with continuing to meet the needs and interests of users. Every business finds its own balance and attracts users who share those priorities. Google's new changes have upset that balance, with users' priorities being de-prioritized. Thats why people are concerned and looking for alternatives.

If these changes rub you the wrong way, please consider using our portfolio of award-winning products and services....Now, Microsoft is basically right here. And they acknowledge that it's not "wrong" but that different services can make different bets and different trade-offs. I went to Bing Search more than two years ago because I liked their trade-offs better. They didn't connect the your Live Mail account information with your Bing Search information, for example. As Google connects more and more, I'm increasingly happy that I made the move.

Google likes to say that alternatives are just a click away but that's not really true. It takes a while to extricate yourself from Google's services and to learn and train new services. I took me a while to get used to Bing but once I learned how to talk to Bing (think about it, you've been learning what Google search wants to hear for years) I started getting really good results. I never used Gmail for anything but a throw-away account but I'm still stuck using their office apps because my colleagues do. Anyway, my plan was never to become invisible to Google, just to try to keep them from knowing everything about me. They still surveil me with their ad networks and their analytics probes and their various youtube and maps embeds and whatnot, but connecting that web-wide surveillance up to my daily interests is now a bit harder for them because I've distributed myself across several service providers instead of just one.

For a number of years we've held off on updating our Windows toolchain to a newer version of Visual Studio, and in so doing preserved support for Windows 2000 and Windows XP RTM and SP1. Firefox developers and the 99.6% of our Windows users have paid a price for this support, though. Our developers have not been able to take advantage of new compiler features and have had to struggle to keep valuable optimizations from breaking -- including having had to back out and ultimately delay some important new features like SPDY. Our users have have suffered a slower Firefox than would be possible as both direct and indirect results of moving to a more modern compiler.

So this week, after a few months of discussion and evaluation of the latest Firefox user numbers and the pros and cons of moving our tools forward, I've called for Mozilla to begin the process for ending support on those older Windows version. Next Tuesday or Wednesday, after Firefox 12 moves to Aurora, the Mozilla Release Engineering team will begin upgrading our Windows build systems to Visual Studio 2010. With VS2010, we will no longer be able to build a Firefox that runs on Windows 2000, Windows XP RTM, and Windows Service Pack 1.

It's always a difficult decision to leave some users behind. The number of Firefox users on those OS versions -- less than one half of one percent of our Windows Firefox users, and the benefits to our development process and the hundreds of millions of Firefox users on XP SP2 and above, however, compel us to look forward rather than back.

If you are a Windows 2000 user, Firefox 12, which will be supported until June 5th, will be the final supported Firefox release. After that, your options are limited. Switching to Opera is probably the best path forward.

If you're a Windows XP user still on RTM or Service Pack 1, I strongly urge you to install the free Windows Service Pack updates.

And finally, for Enterprises adopting the ESR, these older Windows versions will be supported for the length of the first ESR of Firefox. That works out to an extra 6 months or so before these Windows versions become unsupported.

The first public version of the browser called "Firefox" -- a 0.8 release, came out 8 years ago. With that release and the 1.0 release later that same year, we showed the world that browsers mattered.

Innovative new features like tabbed browsing, pop-up blocking, spell-checking, integrated search, and browser add-ons, re-invigorated not just the browser market, but the entire Web. We put users in control of that mess of windows, and the horrible pop-ups from advertisers and malware makers. We made it simple for users to customize their experience and to find what they were looking for without jumping through a bunch of hoops.

In addition to those awesome new user-facing features, Firefox delivered great performance, stability, compatibility, and security at a time when Internet Explorer was falling down on most of those fronts. It wasn't enough to offer great user features, the integrity and quality of the product had to be top notch and it was.

Today, there are more compelling browser choices than ever before and all of the major browser vendors are delivering high-quality products with innovative new features, even Microsoft :-) This is good for users and good for the Web.

But browsers are not all the same. Each of the major vendors, Microsoft, Google, Apple, and Mozilla are building Web browsers for very different reasons. They may resemble each other on the surface, but everything from the features they offer to users and to Web developers, to the myriad of user interface design considerations, to the distribution models, exist to serve very different interests.

Only Mozilla, a non-profit organization, produces a Web browser designed, first and foremost, to put users in control of their online experience.

The desktop browser is not the only part of the Web that impacts user control, security, and privacy, though, so in 2012 Mozilla is expanding its efforts and will be delivering a new standards-based Web Apps ecosystem, a user-centric identity system for the Web, and a cross-device strategy built around user empowerment.

Desktop Firefox in 2012 is going to do again what we did in 2004. We're going to deliver innovative features that put users in control. And we're going to give users the speed, stability, and compatibility that the modern Web demands. We're going further this year, though. We're going to help launch powerful new Mozilla products like Apps, Identity, and mobile.

There are a lot of pieces that will have to come together to make that vision a reality and in the coming days I'll be sharing more specifics here and in the Mozilla wiki. Stay tuned.

That's from EU Commissioner Viviane Reding, speaking at the DLD Conference in Munich.

I think the final sentence there takes an optimistic view on users' understanding of the issue, but I hope that we can build a Web where something like that will be obviously true to everyone.

Ms. Reding's proposal for new regulations on that front has three main components.First, people need to be informed about the processing of their data in simple and clear language. Internet users must be told which data is collected, for what purposes and how long it will be stored. They need to know how it might be used by third parties. They must know their rights and which authority to address if those rights are violated.

Second, whenever users give their agreement to the processing of their data, it has to be meaningful. In short, people's consent needs to be specific and given explicitly.

Thirdly, the reform will give individuals better control over their own data. I will include easier access to one's own data in the new rules. People must be able to easily take their data to another provider or have it deleted if they no longer want it to be used.The first bit, explaining to users that their data is being collected and for what purposes, does happen some today but not always "in simple and clear language" and very often not in a context the user is likely to understand or actively participate in. The second part, that it must be opt in, also may be in common use today with all the click-through TOS, though even I don't read those so I don't know if that's the case.

But it's the third part that I think is really novel and important. Users have a right to be forgotten. I should be able to pull my data back out of a system, and not only the data I actively submitted, but any additional data that's been collected as a result of my use of the system. For example, Google lets me kill my Docs account and pull that content, but they don't let me see, much less manage, the targeted advertising profile of me that they build based on my "use" of Google services like AdSense, DoubleClick, Analytics, and the various other Google surveillance tools I happen across when I'm surfing the Web.

How user data is managed is going to be one of the next big challenges we face on the Web. Europe may set the pace but it's up to all of us to be a part of any solutions.

Tim Taubert recently posted on how he got involved with Mozilla. I intend to post about my experience at some point in the not too distant future but for now I wanted to highlight something from Tim's post: I loved this feature but noticed that it was in an early stage and needed some fixes. I set up a Firefox build environment, went through Bugzilla to find open bugs, nagged people on IRC and was totally overwhelmed by the warm welcome and the appreciation of my work. This was something I did not at all experience when trying to contribute to other open source projects. Some areas are more or less difficult and some volunteers are more or less motivated, but if you love what we're doing with Firefox and want to be a part of it, there are a lot of us that would love to help you get onboard. If you're trying to get connected and don't have a starting point, please use me. I'm asa@mozilla.org and either "Asa" or "asadotzler" on IRC. Also, we're hiring.

Are you an add-on author that uses C++ in your add-on(s)? If so, can you take a look over this discussion and comment there if you think it would help you maintain your add-on(s)? We're trying to balance moving as quickly as we can to improve Firefox and Gecko with maintaining add-on and Web compatibility and this approach looks somewhat promising for at least some add-on authors. Please post comments to that thread and not here. Thanks.