He gave Mozilla a shout out and said we’re an inspiration for other companies trying to do things the right way and focus heavily on what people want and need. He also mentioned he’s an avid Firefox user and tries to install it on every machine he can get his hands on!

Another thing worth noting was his comments on crowdsourcing — that’s it’s not at all about getting a group to do a bunch of work for you. In many ways the textbook definition of crowdsourcing betrays the real value in it.

He said it should really be called co-creation because their community as well as potential customers for this car are a huge part of what the car will actually be and how it will evolve over time. It is a good way to look at things, and not very different from what Mozilla strives to do from day to day.

Overall, it was a great experience and the car is damn cool. Thanks to Jay and his team for visiting us. See more pictures here.

Well, you do. And here’s the thing:

• Only you have access to it
• It’s under-utilized
• You probably didn’t even know it existed

Browsing could be better. There’s no question about that. We have set conventions and preconceived notions about how browsing should be. That is, until the next big thing comes along and rocks our world.

It feels like using data to improve browsing is a no-brainer, and data-driven browsing is already the next big thing. You see this in search suggests, amazon suggested items, the iTunes store, and other sites. And that’s just all site-specific. Imagine if we used data the right way and made things just click?

On a limited scale, it’s all more than possible today. You have complete control over your own browsing history:

• Sites visited
• Bookmarks
• Awesome bar history
• Media viewed
• Favorite sites
• Search keywords
• Trending of all the above

Simple fact is that you’re not using as much as you could.

The Firefox awesome bar was heralded as a great step in browsing innovation. And it’s true, it really was. And that’s because a lot of browsing is really repeat browsing. How many times do you go back and view what you just looked at the other day?

But that’s the tip of the iceberg. There are a lot of things we can learn about the web and about how we use the web to make it better. And don’t think about person -> corporation -> other corporations. For starters, think about what you could do with just your own browsing data, or your family’s browsing data:

• Easy access to repeat searches – movies, facebook, maps, you name it
• An automated media catalog of images, videos and news articles you read over time
• A list of phone numbers you have looked up and who they belong to
• A list of all map directions you’ve ever done
• A list of people you read about over the last week

The awesome bar in Firefox already uses this, and it’s great to see some Firefox extensions are already tapping into the possibilities:

• about:me lets you read about your own browsing statistics
• Voyage is a very cool way to not only view the sites you’ve used but see how you got there over time and whether or not you Tweeted about it!

Those are just two examples of what we can do and where we can go. I’m pretty excited to see what happens next. Maybe you have the next great idea — go forth!

So much, in fact, that he’s working on bringing it to the masses.

I just wanted to blog quickly to show the difference CSS and JS compression can make on perceived load time. I encountered this when working on a new mozilla.com page for download stats.

First, let’s look at how we were at the beginning:

Next, let’s look at how we were after we concatenated and minified all our JS using YUI compressor:

Finally, after some prodding from Ryan, I concatenated and minified all CSS:

In summary, concatenating JS and CSS can make a huge difference, and I saw it today. Here was the progression:

• 13.086s – nothing
• 6.455s – JS minified
• 5.732s – CSS minified

We saved about 56% of our load times and reduced the overall number of HTTP requests by 31% (38 down from 51).

Took me about 30 minutes to figure it all out and fix some 404s and path issues caused by moving CSS around. 30 minutes for that kind of improvement is worth the investment.

Note, you’re going to want to automate using the compressor. It becomes a pain in the ass to manage over time unless you do. But it’s not hard to write a build script to run every time you make an update. It’s also not difficult to have production vs. development flags in your site config to flip which css and js files it uses so you don’t spend time trying to debug a minified bumble of JS or CSS. Even with minor maintenance and deployment hurdles, it’s still very worth the trouble.

And don’t forget, less HTTP requests and bytes transferred means a happier planet.

Update: after pushing to production, performance was even better:

So yes, it does help to have fast servers, good hardware load balancing, and a quick proxy cache too.