Mozilla is not out to make money or to have a stake in whatever gets developed there.  All code that is written in the four week period must be open sourced. If you are able to really develop something cool and worth of investing money in, Mozilla may also add additional funding and resources to the project too. 

Overall, Web FWD looks like Mozilla’s offer to the Internet to just make it better – plain and simple.  They want innovative people with amazing ideas to step forward and work with them to bring their ideas to life.  To learn more about the project, be sure to check out webfwd.org.

Mozilla’s social sharing button has gotten a few new improvements. F1, from Mozilla Labs is proposed to be a future default feature in a later version of Firefox, so think we should learn as much about it as we can.

The big update this time around is that the add-on now supports LinkedIn – so you can share things with your friends there. The interface has gotten a ‘bit of a facelift too.  Rather than expanding it’s interface down from the top of the browser, it shows a pop-up window that is more in-line with the Firefox 4 interface.

You also get a thumbnail picture preview when you share things on your Facebook account too.  I wish they would include the ability to post on Facebook fan pages – however, the new ability to post to your Facebook groups is a nice addition.

F1 is an add-on you have to try out if you are using Firefox 4 and have any sort of Facebook or Twitter-like social existence.  It might be about the best add-on I’ve seen when it comes to sharing links you have run across with family, friends and fans.

Now that I have been using Firefox 4 (as a beta) I can take a look at some of the neat add-ons I might have missed because they were not updated to run with the current version of Firefox.  One of these neat additions to the browser is Instant Previews.  With this Mozilla Labs created add-on, your browser will start loading webpages found in the awesome bar – without the need of clicking on them.

The idea here is that when you are searching through the address bar (aka the awesome bar) the suggestions will automatically start loading.  So by the time you find the page you want, it should already be loaded up and ready to use. This is all about speeding up the surfing process.

Here is a little more information from the developers:

This restartless add-on makes it so results that get highlighted in the Awesome Bar suggestions will automatically start loading, so by the time you confirm that the first result is the one you want, the page might be all ready for you to use. To glance at pages to check up on some information, e.g., the weather, stocks, or comics, let the page load as a preview, and once you are done, hit <Esc> to get rid of the preview and return to where you left off.

This is definitely an interesting feature – and I am excited to see where the Mozilla Labs team takes it in the future.  You can pick up Instant Previews on the Firefox Add-ons website.

The Mozilla Labs Game On competition is over.  The web game development competition spawn a lot of creative and amazing games.  I can say one thing for sure, I sure am glad I didn’t have to decide who was the best of the best.  The best overall winner was Marble Run – but there were a lot of other awards handed out.

So who are the big winners? Here is a quick rundown:

• BEST OVERALL: MARBLE RUN
• BEST TECHNOLOGY: FAR 7
• BEST WEB-INESS: MARBLE RUN
• BEST AESTHETICS: SKETCHOUT
• MOST ORIGINAL: FAVIMON
• MOST POLISHED: WEBSNOOKER
• MOST FUN: ROBOTS ARE PEOPLE TOO
• COMMUNITY CHOICE: Z-TYPE

Go check out all the winners on the Mozilla Labs website, and let me know which one was your favorite.  For myself, I would have to say Favimon takes the cake for me.  It is simple, strange and very fun to play.

While Prism might be getting the boot though, the idea behind it still lives on.

The Chromeless Browser is one of those projects that might be the next best thing after Prism. The idea behind it is to remove the current browser interface we know and love and replace it with a flexible platform.  That, in turn, would allow for the creation of new browser interfaces using standard web technologies.

It would seem that Mozilla thinks the general conversation of the web has moved beyond wanting online apps as desktop apps. If you look at the big picture, this makes sense – because for something like Prism to be successful, the modern web browser must die.  With Mozilla facing more competition these days than they did back in 2007 when Prism was launched – I can understand the thoughts behind retiring the Prism project.

Go check out the Mozilla Labs post yourself, and let me know what you think.  Will you miss Prism, or had you forgotten it even existed?

Back in October I told you about the Mozilla Labs Game On competition. The guys at Mozilla now have selected 35 finalists in their game development competition and they are all online and ready for you to play. These games were the top qualified entries in the competition and are being evaluated for the prize awards. 

If you want to go check them out, you can do so on the Game On website. Here are a few of my favorites:

• A to B

  A physics based game where the goal is simply to get the ball from point A to B. Each level, you get a set of modifiers.

• Dave’s Galaxy

  4x MMO Strategy game on top of a google maps style interface. Instead of sending bitmap tiles, the map is built client side with Javascript and SVG.

• DrunkenWeb

  A game to test your mixology skills and help you learn how to bartend.

• Favimon

  Favimon is a web-based game in which you battle your favorite websites, building a collection of icons as you attempt to conquer the web.

• Grave Danger

  GraveDanger is an action puzzle game based on chaining color groups together to race against the clock. Created by two friends in about one month.

• Mad Tanks TD

  Tower Defense game. Mad tanks attacks your base, you have to defend it. Please read in-game help for keyboard shortcuts.

Go check out the rest of the submissions and let me know which ones you liked playing. The winners of the Mozilla Labs Game On competition will be announced on Thursday, February 3. 

Mozilla Labs has released a very interesting new browser interface you can try out in Firefox 4.  Home Dash for Firefox 4 removes a lot of the Firefox user interface and gives you what they call "Browse-Based Browsing".  It really does bring a radically different way to use Firefox right to your fingertips.  Is it worth using?

Once installed, you are left with what is really an almost empty Firefox window.  The only browser interface elements that remain are the title bar, the search box, the scroll bar and that is about it.  Here is a little more about the project from Mozilla Labs:

Home Dash is the newest Prospector experiment to improve search and content discovery in Firefox. It removes all the standard web browser interface like the location bar, search bar and tabs; and leaves behind just a Firefox logo that is used to bring up a dashboard. Here on the right-hand side, Home Dash has found my top 24 sites and organized them based on my browsing behavior. While still far from it’s end goal, this was the original idea of making a browse-based browser (as opposed to a search-based one).

Overall, I thought it was an interesting user interface to try out – but I am not ready to retire the current browser interface just yet.  I am excited to see what they do with it in the future.  Almost makes me think of Firefox as a operating system when you go full screen, rather than just a web browser.

If you are running Firefox 4, you can try out this add-on immediately without even having to restart Firefox. Go pick it up at the Mozilla Add-ons website and learn more about it over at the Mozilla Labs.

Want to make sure you keep up to date with the latest Mozilla Labs experiments?  You can with one simple plugin.  The Lab Kit plugin for Firefox will securely install add-ons that are being developed by the Mozilla Labs team.  This way, you can stay up to date with some of the neatest innovations without having to remember to update or to check back for new experiments to try.

The experiments currently included with Lab Kit are Test Pilot, Prospector – Speak Words and Contacts.

• Test Pilot is Firefox’s built in tool to collect feedback through Firefox.  By using it, you are helping Mozilla build a better browser.
• Prospector – Speak Words helps you easily get to sites that you frequently visit by typing just a few letters in the location bar and having Firefox fill in the rest of the word as well as selecting the first result.
• Contacts is an experimental add-on from Mozilla Labs, which enhances Firefox  by making it aware of your online contacts and friend lists.

When there are any major updates to the experiments added with Lab Kit, you get a notification in Firefox that allows you to learn more about the update in question.

You can pick up Lab Kit from the Firefox Add-ons website.  The only catch is you must be using Firefox 4.0 Beta 6 or higher.

Mozilla is getting into the world of social link sharing.  With F1, you can add the functionality of sharing a link on Twitter, Gmail or Facebook into the Firefox browser.  This neat add-on has a lot of potential, and is simple enough for anybody to pick up and use.

To share a link with F1, all you need to do is hit the share icon in the toolbar, choose the service you wish to share the link on and type out your short little message to your followers.  Once you then hit share, it will be sent out.  By default F1 works only with Twitter, Facebook and Gmail but I could see other services being included down the road.

Check out this short video to get more details on how F1 works:

Overall, I have to say I am pretty excited to see where F1 will go next.  Will Firefox having an add-on like this put services like AddThis.com out of business?

This early version of the add-on only exports into two open formats, Theora for video and Vorbis for audio, but for web developers and application builders, this exciting ‘bit of news means you may soon be able to to even more with the web browser of tomorrow.

It is not yet ready for prime time.  Here are a few more important notes from the developers:

This pre-alpha version of the add-on only works with the Firefox nightly builds on a Mac. We’re working hard to extend support to Windows, Linux and 64 bit platforms as soon as possible (there are currently no plans to support earlier versions of Firefox). We recommend going through the README, which lists known issues.

They do plan to allow live streaming of video feeds, build in support for Windows and Linux, plus a few more tweaks for performance and reliability too.  Head over to the Mozilla Labs if you want to try it out, or learn more about the Rainbow project.