Hi. I sent you here because you were complaining on Twitter about how much you hate Firefox. I understand. There are times when a program will so totally piss me off that I find myself out on the lawn ranting to the neighborhood children. Let me try to help.

Try Firefox 4 with a new profile

This is my favorite way to upgrade to Firefox 4 which is super fast and has some great new features like App Tabs and Panorama that I’m already hooked on. If you’ve still got questions or you run into problems, just ask our community of volunteers who will help you figure it out.

There was a lot of talk this week about WebM video after Google announced that they were going to drop H.264 support from Chrome. This is huge news for video makers, especially since Firefox 4 (which supports WebM) is almost done. I figured it was time to look into WebM encoding tools again. There still aren’t many options at all but I found a way that works great for my workflow — Final Cut Pro & QuickTime 7 Pro.

Before I get to that though, the hands-down easiest way to make WebM video is get the Miro Video Converter. It’s a super simple, drag and drop app. Just export a good web-quality video from your editing program and then drop that in the Miro Video Converter. Select WebM from the dropdown and hit convert. It does a decent job (though the bit-rate/quality is a little too low for my taste) on most video.

To get more control over the process you can use ffmpeg, build the reference encoder from source (neither are my idea of fun) or install the WebM components for QuickTime (there are also DirectShow filters for Windows but I didn’t try those). So here’s what you need:

• Download and install the WebM Components for QuickTime
• Download and install the Xiph Components for QuickTime (I’m pretty sure you need this for Vorbis audio which I didn’t explain in the video)

Once you’ve got those installed, open your source video in QuickTime 7 Pro. The first thing you’ll have to do is to re-size it because there aren’t height and width controls in the export dialog. To do that:

1. Go to the Window menu and select Show Movie Properties.
2. In the Properties window, select the video track.
3. Then change the scaled size to 640 X 360.

Once we’ve got the video sized, we can set up the encode. Don’t worry. You don’t have to do this every time. Once you set it up, QuickTime will remember all of your settings. You’ll only need to change these if you want to change the bit-rate or make adjustments to the advanced settings.

1. Go to the File menu and select Export…
2. In the Save dialog you should now be able to select Movie to WebM from the Export dropdown menu.
3. Click Options… to continue configuring the export.
4. Now click Audio Settings… and make sure you’ve got Vorbis (required for WebM) and Stereo (if you want it) set. Then click OK.
5. Then click Video Settings…
6. Here you want to make the basic encoding settings. These are meant to be a good starting point for 640 x 360 video.
   • Set the frame rate (same as your source video).
   • Make sure the key frames is unchecked.
   • Limit the bit-rate to 1300 kbps.
   • Set Quality to Medium
   • Select Two Pass

Once you’ve finished making the basic settings, click Advanced to move on to the next bunch of settings. There are lot of things to set here. I’m not going to list them — just copy them from the image below. You can read about these settings in the WebM documentation. The most important part of these settings and the only one you’ll probably have to modify at some point is Min Quantizer. This setting controls how many bits get used on the most difficult to encode frames. The lower the number the more bits get used. If you set this too low the encode will overshoot your target bit-rate. I found that for many applications, setting this between 20 and 30 produced great results without overshooting your target. If you have really hard to to compress video (lots of fast motion, lots details) you’ll probably have to jack this number up. For this crazy concert video I had to set it to 47.

Once you’ve made all of these settings, click OK in all of your open dialogs to start your encode.

Here are some sample videos so you can compare quality and bit-rate:

• Kitty – WebM, 738kbps
• Kitty – iPod H.264, 1609kbps
• Kitty – WebM Miro Video Converter, 417kbps
• Mozilla Summit – WebM, 1059kbps
• h.264 and WebM side-by-side comparison (ironically it only works in Chrome — for the next few months)

Dylan and I went to see Girl Talk in Austin on Friday night. It was a completely insane dance party. What I really liked about the performance was that he didn’t just do a live recreation of “All Day”, he did 90 minutes of mostly new mashups built on the material in all of his work. And the thing that I loved about the show was that it was not at all about him. Except for the few times that he jumped up on the table, he was mostly invisible as just one of the 50 or so people dancing on stage. It was a blast.

This is a quick way to set up Firefox 4 without all of the baggage of past installs while keeping all of your bookmarks, history and passwords. I used this procedure on Rebecca’s computer about two weeks ago and then I saw Alexander Limi’s post about it and thought it would make a great screencast. The beautiful thing is that once you spend a few minutes setting this up, not only will you have a shiny new (and FAST) Firefox, you’ll also be able to take your settings with you to an Android device, iPhone or another computer.

Here are download links and support articles on the things I show you how to do in the video:

• Firefox 4 Beta
• How do I set up Firefox Sync?
• Start the Profile Manager
• Firefox 4 Beta for mobile
• Firefox Home

I screencaptured this animated gif, and exported it with Apple TV settings. Then I set it to loop on my PS3. I’ve literally wanted to be able to do this for 20 years. Now I’ve got to make my own videos for this. Something like these here – especially this one.

If you’re interested, here’s the 5 min loop ready for your TV.

On Tuesday morning I got to the office early and found this going on. It seemed like a video worthy moment, so here you go.

I got tickets to ACL for my birthday this year, specifically to see The Flaming Lips. Of course Dylan went with me. We had a great time and The Flaming Lips were inspiring. I think we’re going to need to do this a few more times.

Speaking of the mystery of daughters, here’s one. This is Lauren in the middle of cheering at the football game last week.

I’ve been working at Mozilla for nearly six months now and, as you can see, I’ve been having a great time. Last week the support team got together in Mountain View for the first time. Normally we all work from different places and in different time zones so it was really nice to spend the week together. We got a lot of things done – especially planning for 2011, Firefox 4 and the release of our new Knowledge Base software. On Friday we shot a video for our Taiwan community. Needless to say, we didn’t get it all in one take. These are a few that didn’t make the cut.

The Mozilla Summit was amazing and this video doesn’t do it justice. There were so many cool things – science fair, world expo, dozens of breakout sessions, lightning talks and demos – that I didn’t even attempt to capture because I wanted to experience them. Instead, what I’ve got here is a few moments from the beginning and the end. It doesn’t sum up the full experience but I think it does represent the spirit of sharing and celebration.