One Mozilla Domain Name Strategy

[davidwboswell]

At the web sites task force meeting yesterday we discussed a draft One
Mozilla Domain Name strategy and I wanted to circulate it to a wider
group to get more feedback. The proposal can be found at:

https://wiki.mozilla.org/Websites/Taskforce/Proposals/Domain_Name_Strategy

The short version is that we think we should move off of organization-
based domains (mozilla.com, mozillamessaging.com, etc.) and move to a
more coherent and unified system that uses the mozilla.org domain
(with some exceptions).

To get an idea of what this would mean in practice, scroll to the
bottom of the draft to the Proposed URL Changes section. Note that
this list is not meant to be a complete set of changes, but rather an
example of the types of changes that this proposal would make.

The current thinking is to discuss this further in relevant places for
the next few weeks and then make a decision about it at the next task
force meeting on October 21. Feel free to respond to this post or
come to the next meeting. Meeting details and more about the task
force are at:

https://wiki.mozilla.org/Websites/Taskforce

Thanks,
David

[Ludovic Hirlimann]

On 24/09/10 18:25, davidwboswell wrote:
> At the web sites task force meeting yesterday we discussed a draft One
> Mozilla Domain Name strategy and I wanted to circulate it to a wider
> group to get more feedback. The proposal can be found at:
>
> https://wiki.mozilla.org/Websites/Taskforce/Proposals/Domain_Name_Strategy
>
> The short version is that we think we should move off of organization-
> based domains (mozilla.com, mozillamessaging.com, etc.) and move to a
> more coherent and unified system that uses the mozilla.org domain
> (with some exceptions).

[snip]

> https://wiki.mozilla.org/Websites/Taskforce

How would this map with email addresses, shall we all have an
@mozilla.org , keep our current domains ?

Ludo
--
Ludovic Hirlimann MozillaMessaging QA lead
https://wiki.mozilla.org/Thunderbird:Testing
http://www.spreadthunderbird.com/aff/79/2

[davidwboswell]

> How would this map with email addresses, shall we all have an
> @mozilla.org , keep our current domains ?

I think we should handle these issues separately. Just because we
don't use organization-based domains to present ourselves publicly
through our websites, doesn't mean we couldn't use those domains for
emails since those are more logically tied to your employer. We may
want to also move off of organization-based domains for emails, but
tying the two issues together would make this much too complicated.

David

[Axel Hecht]

I'm totally illiterate in that domain, but how would moving everything
on to a single domain involve SEO, and ranking of our pages against
possibly malicious pages out there?

Like, we'd be that site talking about anything and their dogs, while
bad-firefox.com just talks about how they're going to use their Firefox
to get peoples credit card numbers (or something more attractive to end
users, actually).

Also, you left out the locale codes in your examples.

Axel

[Ludovic Hirlimann]

Well at some point it would make things a bit more difficult for some of
us. When we need private data from our users (eg their profile,
prefs.js) we'll usually will use our branded email addresses - the user
can easily check that the product we are talking about is related to the
domain of the email. If the product and domain names aren't related
we'll need to communicate this very well for the users to be able to
trust company related domains.

[davidwboswell]

> I'm totally illiterate in that domain, but how would moving everything
> on to a single domain involve SEO, and ranking of our pages against
> possibly malicious pages out there?

I know this issue has been looked into as part of the planning for the
www.mozilla.com site redesign, so I've asked someone more directly
involved with that to answer this question.

> Also, you left out the locale codes in your examples.

I'm happy to update the proposal as needed. Can you provide a
recommendation for what about locale codes we should include?

David

[davidwboswell]

> Well at some point it would make things a bit more difficult for some of
> us. When we need private data from our users (eg their profile,
> prefs.js) we'll usually will use our branded email addresses - the user
> can easily check that the product we are talking about is related to the
> domain of the email. If the product and domain names aren't related
> we'll need to communicate this very well for the users to be able to
> trust company related domains.

I agree that this is worth discussing. I'd encourage you to raise
this as a new topic on this list since I think they are separate
(although closely related) issues or we could revisit once the domain
name strategy for websites has been worked through more.

David

[Andrei Hajdukewycz]

On 9/24/2010 12:25 PM, davidwboswell wrote:
> The short version is that we think we should move off of organization-
> based domains (mozilla.com, mozillamessaging.com, etc.) and move to a
> more coherent and unified system that uses the mozilla.org domain
> (with some exceptions).

So, I think that there are a lot of questions and organizational issues
involved in this proposal, but a few things that immediately come
to mind, for me at least, are:

1) Mozilla.com is undergoing its own redesign, but this proposal
fundamentally includes a huge number of sites that have different
behaviours and designs. Is it implied that we're also going to redesign
sites that don't fit in to some extent(ie header/footer)? This seems
like it could be an absolutely massive amount of work, and not just in
terms of UI and site design, but also basic site functionality. If the
answer is "no, they'll keep their unique designs and/or functionality",
it seems like it might be confusing for users in that case to have
noticeably different looking sites as directories under the same domain.
It's not just a naming issue.

2) Is the autonomy of each of the involved organizations going to be
maintained in terms of being able to make changes to and host the sites
that they own? I think it's a significant strength that, right now,
Mozilla Europe and Mozilla Messaging(Mozilla Japan too - are they
included in this proposal?) can make changes to their sites
independently. They don't need to ask each other for approval except
with certain shared resources(such as product-details) and that the
pressure of design consistency from having everything on one domain
might reduce or eliminate this autonomy.

3) There are technical issues involved with using directories instead of
subdomains for sites that aren't hosted on the same server. It would be
difficult for something like support.mozilla.org/thunderbird to be
hosted on a different server from support.mozilla.org while maintaining
the directory address(a redirect to a subdomain is, of course, easy).
I'm also not really sure it's worth the trouble here vs just having
subdomains for every independent application, which is much simpler and
is equally as distinguishable.

4) Has any thought been given to how unaware of URLs many users are?
From my perspective as a web developer, this could be pretty
complicated and time consuming organizationally and technically and I'm
not sure whether having everything under the same domain even matters
that much to our users. Do we have any sort of data on this? Recalling
things like
http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/how_google_failed_internet_meme.php
reminds me that many people just don't pay any attention to URLs at all
and for them the internet is Search Engines/Major Social Sites + Links
to things.

--
Andrei Hajdukewycz
Mozilla Messaging Web Developer

[davidwboswell]

> I'm totally illiterate in that domain, but how would moving everything
> on to a single domain involve SEO, and ranking of our pages against
> possibly malicious pages out there?
>
> Like, we'd be that site talking about anything and their dogs, while
> bad-firefox.com just talks about how they're going to use their Firefox
> to get peoples credit card numbers (or something more attractive to end
> users, actually).

I talked to John Slater about the research he did and this was his
answer:

I talked to a couple of SEO experts and they both said that as long as
we tag the redirects properly (apparently there's a right way and a
wrong way you can encode them) it shouldn't really affect our search
results one way or the other. Companies update URLs all the time and
Google is usually smart enough to figure out where the traffic should
go (in the sense that they rarely point to old or broken
sites)...that's where coding it the right way comes in (which of
course we'll do).

For the matter of putting everything on one domain and potentially
losing SEO points to smaller sites that talk about more specific
aspects of Firefox, that's really not how search works...if we talk
about Firefox, people will find us via search. It doesn't matter what
the URL is...based on our history, existing size and current content
(all these things matter to Google) we're going to have the most
Firefox search juice no matter what. We won't just lose it to someone
else.

[Max Kanat-Alexander]

On 09/24/2010 09:25 AM, davidwboswell wrote:
> At the web sites task force meeting yesterday we discussed a draft One
> Mozilla Domain Name strategy and I wanted to circulate it to a wider
> group to get more feedback. The proposal can be found at:
>
> https://wiki.mozilla.org/Websites/Taskforce/Proposals/Domain_Name_Strategy

I certainly appreciate and understand the desire to simplify what seems
like such a fragmented system. However, I'm much more in favor of the
firefox.com, thunderbird.com, etc. strategy than the idea of putting
things in subdirectories or subdomains of mozilla.com.

In terms of branding and marketing, the basics of positioning tell us
that an organization should be presenting each product as its own, not
with one name for many products. The fact that each product is made by
Mozilla is certainly important to *us*, but it is probably not important
to the user. The classic example here is Proctor and Gamble:
http://www.pg.com/en_US/brands/index.shtml -- nobody knows that those
products are made by P&G, but everybody knows those products, because
they are positioned as being completely their own thing.

When somebody wants to get Firefox or find out about it, they're not
going to think, "mozilla.com/firefox", but they are very likely to think
"firefox.com". In fact, most people say to me, "Okay, so where do I go,
firefox.com?"

Also, I can say for certain that I want bugzilla.org to remain
bugzilla.org, and not mozilla.com/bugzilla/ or bugzilla.mozilla.com.

-Max

[Ben Bucksch]

One top-level domain is generally a good thing. Both for security
(phishing! I always thought getfirefox.com was a bad idea) and user
confusion - I found that most end-users cannot distinguish between
foo.org and foo.com.

I think it's still a good idea to clearly separate topics, though: The
Mozilla project, the Firefox end-user facing product, Thunderbird,
marketing efforts, personal pages.

How about using subdomains, e.g. firefox.mozilla.org?

I think the following makes a lot of sense:
www.mozilla.org/ - frontpage, leading to products, project, mission
www.mozilla.org/* (or maybe project.mozilla.org) - project pages, as now
firefox.mozilla.org = same as mozilla.com now
thunderbird.mozilla.org = same as mozillamessaging.com now

---

Technical note: Please leave live.mozillamessaging.com (the URLs and
services used directly in the Thunderbird product) alone. Speed is
important there, and redirects are new HTTP connections each time, they
would considerably slow down the UI, e.g. the account creation wizard,
esp. on the other side of the pond where we have most users.

Ben

[Ben Bucksch]

On 25.09.2010 02:09, Max Kanat-Alexander wrote:
> I'm much more in favor of the firefox.com, thunderbird.com, etc.
> strategy than the idea of putting things in subdirectories or
> subdomains of mozilla.com.

First, the plan is mozilla.org, not mozilla.com.
Second, "firefox.com", "getfirefox.com" and friends are really *begging*
for phishing, trojans and others to register their domains
"mozillafirefox.com" or "getmozillafirefox.com" or whatever and root
(enough) people. That's why each organization should have exactly one
domain, and the rest are subdomains.

> In terms of branding and marketing, the basics of positioning tell us
> that an organization should be presenting each product as its own, not
> with one name for many products.

Speaking of marketing: It also tells that you to strengthen your company
name. In fact, maybe 50% of the paid advertising is only about that
(brand recognition). Many company's success base solely on the
reputation for one product to launch another product type.
Mozilla has been very bad at that: Most people I speak to don't know
"Mozilla", but practically everybody knows "Firefox" - that's bad for
the other Mozilla projects like Thunderbird.

> The classic example here is Proctor and Gamble:
> http://www.pg.com/en_US/brands/index.shtml -- nobody knows that those
> products are made by P&G, but everybody knows those products, because
> they are positioned as being completely their own thing.

They may have chosen to do that because of their industry. Sony,
Samsung, Apple, Microsoft, Google do the exact opposite, with huge
success. I think they are more relevant examples ;-). (And they are also
bigger than P&G.)

I think firefox.mozilla.org conveys both brand names very well and makes
both the connection and distinction clear.

> they are very likely to think "firefox.com".

Yes, because we failed at "brand communication" of Mozilla so far.
Also, that they think ".com" means another failure in my book. In fact,
a recent survey from Mozilla found that most people are not aware of the
non-profit nature of Firefox!

Ben

[Robert Kaiser]

Max Kanat-Alexander schrieb:

> On 09/24/2010 09:25 AM, davidwboswell wrote:
>> At the web sites task force meeting yesterday we discussed a draft One
>> Mozilla Domain Name strategy and I wanted to circulate it to a wider
>> group to get more feedback. The proposal can be found at:
>>
>> https://wiki.mozilla.org/Websites/Taskforce/Proposals/Domain_Name_Strategy
>
> I certainly appreciate and understand the desire to simplify what seems
> like such a fragmented system. However, I'm much more in favor of the
> firefox.com, thunderbird.com, etc. strategy than the idea of putting
> things in subdirectories or subdomains of mozilla.com.

.org, not .com - that's a *very* important difference.

> he fact that each product is made by
> Mozilla is certainly important to *us*, but it is probably not important
> to the user.

True if our aim is to sell products. Wrong if we want to show we're a
non-profit mission-drive community. Even the ".org" in mozilla.org
delivers some of that message.

> The classic example here is Proctor and Gamble:

But they're not a mission-driven non-profit but a for-profit
product-selling company.

> In fact, most people say to me, "Okay, so where do I go,
> firefox.com?"

They'd still get redirected to mozilla.org/firefox.

All that said, even as a member of the task force, I'm not convinced of
this strategy of using subdirectories of mozilla.org yet, but I
understand the reasoning and am willing to see how it works out with one
example.

Robert Kaiser

[Max Kanat-Alexander]

On 09/25/2010 03:14 AM, Ben Bucksch wrote:
> Second, "firefox.com", "getfirefox.com" and friends are really *begging*
> for phishing, trojans and others to register their domains
> "mozillafirefox.com" or "getmozillafirefox.com" or whatever and root
> (enough) people.

I certainly see where you're coming from, but I don't think that's a
significant enough reason to make a decision like this. The same could
easily be done with "Mozilla", particularly if you start to more
strongly associate that word with the products. Phishers will phish no
matter what your domain name is, you can't stop them that way.

> Speaking of marketing: It also tells that you to strengthen your company
> name. In fact, maybe 50% of the paid advertising is only about that
> (brand recognition).

There's a difference between brand recognition and your company name.
I'd suggest that at least you consult with some marketing experts before
going ahead with a plan like this.

> They may have chosen to do that because of their industry. Sony,
> Samsung, Apple, Microsoft, Google do the exact opposite, with huge
> success. I think they are more relevant examples ;-).

Well, that's fair enough. And many of those are in a similar industry
to Mozilla.

However, the important thing there is that all of those are now words
that *mean* something. For example:

Sony means "electronics".
Apple means "user-friendly computer devices".
Google means "search" and secondarily "simple web apps".

So I suppose the question is, what do you want the word "Mozilla" to
mean? Long ago, it meant "a web browser", now it mostly means, "the
company that makes Firefox" or "the URL where I go to get Firefox".

I personally think that Firefox's marketing is currently very effective
and that it shouldn't be fixed if it isn't broken, so I'd be against any
significant changes there, but I'd be happy to be overruled by market
research.

> Yes, because we failed at "brand communication" of Mozilla so far.

But succeeded very well at brand communication of Firefox. Are you
saying that you want to stop that successful brand communication to
switch the focus to another brand?

I'm not against the technical simplification that all of this will
involve (as long as bugzilla.org is left out of it), I just want to be
sure that the marketing story around it is straight and sensible.

> Also, that they think ".com" means another failure in my book.

Well, you can chalk that failure up to about 1995, when every average
person using the Internet decided that ".com means the Internet." I
don't think that has anything to do with Mozilla.

> In fact,
> a recent survey from Mozilla found that most people are not aware of the
> non-profit nature of Firefox!

Okay. So perhaps the Foundation itself should have a marketing
strategy. Did market research also show that "Firefox is non-profit"
would have a significant benefit in the success and adoption of Firefox?

-Max

[Max Kanat-Alexander]

On 09/25/2010 06:26 AM, Robert Kaiser wrote:
>> he fact that each product is made by
>> Mozilla is certainly important to *us*, but it is probably not important
>> to the user.
>
> True if our aim is to sell products. Wrong if we want to show we're a
> non-profit mission-drive community.

Well, it's certainly a nice idea to show that the Foundation is a
non-profit mission-driven organization, and that "Mozilla" in general is
a mission-driven open-source community. But it sounds like you're saying
that your aim isn't to get more downloads--that in fact that aim is
unimportant and hasn't been taken into account in the plan. Is that true?

-Max

[Robert Kaiser]

Max Kanat-Alexander schrieb:

To be blunt, Firefox download numbers are not *my* primary focus on that
task force, a common story across Mozilla web assets is, and the Mozilla
mission is.
We have people from marketing on the task force, AFAIK, and those surely
have that focus on Firefox downloads more than me. And it seems those
people are going even stronger for the "subdirectory" idea I'm not such
a strong supporter of. You really need to ask them about their reasons.

Remember that I'm not even a Firefox user but just platform user and
proud community member. For me personally, the story behind Firefox is
Mozilla, and the story behind Mozilla is the mission. And that I'd like
to "sell" to as many users as possible. (And no doubt, Firefox is a
great vehicle to transport the mission, and it's a damn good browser for
the common masses, and it's a good test case for the platform, but then
that's mostly it to me when it comes to that one product.)

Robert Kaiser

--
Note that any statements of mine - no matter how passionate - are never
meant to be offensive but very often as food for thought or possible
arguments that we as a community needs answers to. And most of the time,
I even appreciate irony and fun! :)

[Mark Banner]

On 24/09/2010 17:25, davidwboswell wrote:
> At the web sites task force meeting yesterday we discussed a draft One
> Mozilla Domain Name strategy and I wanted to circulate it to a wider
> group to get more feedback. The proposal can be found at:
>
> https://wiki.mozilla.org/Websites/Taskforce/Proposals/Domain_Name_Strategy

I've got two comments, I've thought of so far:

1) Just reading through, the one thing that stands out for me is several
examples of non-changes of domain/sub-directory name:

support.mozilla.org
nightly.mozilla.org
addons.mozilla.org

Stating addons.mozilla.org is wrong - for Firefox it already uses
addons.mozilla.org/<locale>/firefox

For support and nightly, I see no reason not to have a Firefox
sub-directory with just like for the other apps. Indeed, from a
configuration perspective it would probably actually make more sense as
then you're doing everything 'firefox' in the root dir and trying to do
other things for different applications in sub-dirs.

2) I'm concerned about server configurations, probably because I don't
know enough about how these things can be set up to work.

My concern is that each team to have enough access to be able to
monitor, publish, and develop the pages that are going to be posted and
managed within the team so that they can be updated at any time. So for
example, the Thunderbird team can do everything on their servers to do a
release without interaction from others - including setting up
redirects, clearing caches (probably a bug, but sometimes necessary),
monitoring servers etc - at a time that suits them.

I'll agree this is more a technical requirement, however if you're
experimenting with sites inside the "Firefox hub", then you might not
notice that straight away.

Standard8

[Gervase Markham]

I am definitely in favour, in principle, of the idea of rationalizing
our domain names, and of using mozilla.org as the unifying domain.

However, I think we should have everything be foo.mozilla.org rather
than have some things be foo.mozilla.org and other things do
mozilla.org/bar. So we'd have firefox.mozilla.org, and
thunderbird.mozilla.org. (Of course, firefox.com would redirect.)

There are several reasons for this:

1) Simplicity.

- If there's no "two levels" of project-ness, there can be no arguments
about what fits where, and no need for "promotions" or "demotions";

- Subdomains also makes it easy to set up (or decommission) one without
treading on someone else's toes or seeking their permission or being
blocked by their process. It's more decentralised.

2) Administration.

Because the split is done by DNS and not the webserver, subdomains make
it administratively much easier for sites to have/use:

- Different SCMs for their code
- Different access permissions for checkin
- Different server-side technologies (PHP/Java/Ruby/Perl etc.)
- Different hardware and load-balancing characteristics

All of these things are very useful in our decentralized and
heterogeneous environment. Of course, the IT team would have the final
say on this, but it's my perception that subdomains would be easier.

3) Look.

- If there is a view that mozilla.org/foo is "more official", "more
connected" or "better" than foo.mozilla.org, I'd disagree. I think
most people don't notice the difference. I do, but I think
foo.mozilla.org is _more_ official than mozilla.org/foo, not less.

- Both, I think, convey an association with the Mozilla project, and
adequately support the One Mozilla strategy. So no difference there.

Gerv

[davidwboswell]

> However, I'm much more in favor of the
> firefox.com, thunderbird.com, etc. strategy than the idea of putting
> things in subdirectories or subdomains of mozilla.com.

This has been seriously considered (see below for more about why we're
thinking this isn't the best fit).

> The fact that each product is made by
> Mozilla is certainly important to *us*, but it is probably not important
> to the user.

We're doing some research and surveys to back up our decision and it
seems like the connection to Mozilla does matter and people do find it
relevant. I'll look into posting this data as soon as possible.

> The classic example here is Proctor and Gamble -- nobody knows that those

> products are made by P&G, but everybody knows those products, because
> they are positioned as being completely their own thing.

Perhaps the big difference here is that P&G is a bottom-line-driven
corporation and Mozilla is a mission-based non-profit? This might be
a bit of an apples and oranges comparison.

> When somebody wants to get Firefox or find out about it, they're not
> going to think, "mozilla.com/firefox", but they are very likely to think
> "firefox.com". In fact, most people say to me, "Okay, so where do I go,
> firefox.com?"

The firefox.com URL will continue to redirect to the Firefox site if
that's not the URL the site lives on. It can even be used as the
public URL that is given out in certain instances instead of
mozilla.org/firefox (if that's the URL we end up going with).

> Also, I can say for certain that I want bugzilla.org to remain
> bugzilla.org, and not mozilla.com/bugzilla/ or bugzilla.mozilla.com.

That's certainly fine. The proposal doesn't suggest moving everything
into the mozilla.org domain. There are certainly instances when that
wouldn't be the best thing to do and we're hoping to make the strategy
flexible enough to take these things into account.

David

[davidwboswell]

> However, I'm much more in favor of the
> firefox.com, thunderbird.com, etc. strategy than the idea of putting
> things in subdirectories or subdomains of mozilla.com.

This has been seriously considered (see below for more about why we're

thinking this isn't the best fit).

> The fact that each product is made by

> Mozilla is certainly important to *us*, but it is probably not important
> to the user.

We're doing some research and surveys to back up our decision and it

seems like the connection to Mozilla does matter and people do find it
relevant. I'll look into posting this data as soon as possible.

> The classic example here is Proctor and Gamble -- nobody knows that those

> products are made by P&G, but everybody knows those products, because
> they are positioned as being completely their own thing.

Perhaps the big difference here is that P&G is a bottom-line-driven

corporation and Mozilla is a mission-based non-profit? This might be
a bit of an apples and oranges comparison.

> When somebody wants to get Firefox or find out about it, they're not

> going to think, "mozilla.com/firefox", but they are very likely to think
> "firefox.com". In fact, most people say to me, "Okay, so where do I go,
> firefox.com?"

The firefox.com URL will continue to redirect to the Firefox site if

that's not the URL the site lives on. It can even be used as the
public URL that is given out in certain instances instead of
mozilla.org/firefox (if that's the URL we end up going with).

> Also, I can say for certain that I want bugzilla.org to remain

> bugzilla.org, and not mozilla.com/bugzilla/ or bugzilla.mozilla.com.

That's certainly fine. The proposal doesn't suggest moving everything

[davidwboswell]

> Well, it's certainly a nice idea to show that the Foundation is a
> non-profit mission-driven organization, and that "Mozilla" in general is
> a mission-driven open-source community. But it sounds like you're saying
> that your aim isn't to get more downloads--that in fact that aim is
> unimportant and hasn't been taken into account in the plan. Is that true?

These two things aren't mutually exclusive -- in fact it's the
opposite. We believe people are more interested in what we are doing
when they understand more about why we're doing it.

As Kairo has said, there are a range of people with different
perspectives participating in the task force who are bringing in
concerns from across the community, so I don't think any area has been
overlooked. If it feels like there is an area that is not being
accounted for, the goal should be to get the right stakeholders to
participate in the task force going forward.

David

[davidwboswell]

These technical points are certainly worth considering and webdev will
definitely be involved in any decision about this. I'm not sure if
the governance list is ideal to sort through these technical things
though. Unfortunately there didn't seem to be a great place to post
about community-wide website issues -- maybe we need to reconstitute
website-owners as a set of site owners from across the web universe
for discussions like this?

David

[davidwboswell]

These technical points are certainly worth considering and webdev will
definitely be involved in any decision about this. I'm not sure if
the governance list is ideal to sort through these technical things
though. Unfortunately there didn't seem to be a great place to post
about community-wide website issues -- maybe we need to reconstitute
website-owners as a set of site owners from across the web universe
for discussions like this?

David

[davidwboswell]

> 1) Mozilla.com is undergoing its own redesign, but this proposal
> fundamentally includes a huge number of sites that have different
> behaviours and designs. Is it implied that we're also going to redesign
> sites that don't fit in to some extent(ie header/footer)?

Personally, I think the goal is to have sites continue to have their
own identity but also have agreement on some common design elements
that give each site a Mozilla look. This could be a common font,
common footer or something else. Note that these are topics currently
being discussed in the task force, so come to the next meeting if this
interests you.

> 2) Is the autonomy of each of the involved organizations going to be
> maintained in terms of being able to make changes to and host the sites
> that they own?

Yes, this isn't trying to change any site's processes or remove their
ability to do things. The goal is to provide guidance that sites may
or may follow and that they may choose when and how to follow
according to their circumstances.

David

[Mike Connor]

Added technical point: I don't think we want everything as subdirectories, as that puts everything in the same origin from a security perspective. If everything is the same origin, that feels like a pretty large attack surface...

-- Mike

> _______________________________________________
> governance mailing list
> gover...@lists.mozilla.org
> https://lists.mozilla.org/listinfo/governance

[davidwboswell]

> However, I think we should have everything be foo.mozilla.org rather
> than have some things be foo.mozilla.org and other things do
> mozilla.org/bar. So we'd have firefox.mozilla.org, and
> thunderbird.mozilla.org. (Of course, firefox.com would redirect.)

We can certainly explore this option more, but I think there are a few
reasons why mozilla.org/firefox is a better model than
firefox.mozilla.org -- one of the biggest reasons is minimizing the
amount of things we need to change with the sites we have today.

For example, addons.mozilla.org works in this sub-domain and sub-
directory way (for example, Thunderbird add-ons live at
addons.mozilla.org/thunderbird) and nothing needs to be changed to fit
the proposal. As I understand it, making AMO work with
addons.firefox.mozilla.org wouldn't be trivial. The same with many
other existing sites (eg, nightly.m.o already exists and we'd just
need to add other directories to get nightly.mozilla.org/thunderbird,
etc.).

In your example above it also make it seem like there is no real
distinction about when something is a sub-directory vs. a sub-domain,
so perhaps the proposal isn't clear enough on this point. A sub-
domain exists when there is a site with a specific purpose (to serve
add-ons, to host nightly builds, etc) and the directories exist when
there are sub-divisions within that (add-ons for different apps,
nightly builds for different apps, etc). Perhaps that clarification
helps?

(BTW, Apologies for the double postings. I'm not intentionally
sending things twice so maybe this is a Google Groups weirdness
thing?)

David

[davidwboswell]

> Did market research also show that "Firefox is non-profit"
> would have a significant benefit in the success and adoption of Firefox?

We did two different tests recently about new URL options -- a paid
search test and a survey of existing Firefox users.

In the paid search test we measured click-through rates for the two
URLs mozilla.com and mozilla.org/firefox (apparently you couldn't test
a URL that redirects to a different URL so we didn't test
firefox.com). The results were divided according to people who were
searching for either branded (Firefox, Mozilla, Mozilla Firefox) or
non-branded (Browser, Web Browser) keywords.

The results showed that linking Mozilla and Firefox had little effect
for people looking for generic browser-related keywords (1.61% vs.
1.13%), but made a substantial positive difference for people
searching for branded keywords (12.11% vs. 15.86%). These results are
inline with the same sort of test run a couple of years ago and
blogged about at:

http://www.giantspatula.com/?p=37

For the survey of Firefox users we asked several questions about the
link between Firefox and Mozilla's non-profit status.

When current Firefox users are asked what they expect from a browser
that’s built by a non-profit “committed to making
the Internet better for everyone”:

* 92% Expect performance and functionality to be better than or just
as good as a browser made by for-profit corporations

* 93% Expect privacy to be better than or just as good as a browser
made by for-profit

* 83% Think it’s important to give this information when people visit
the site.

When asked: “Now knowing the non-profit organization Mozilla makes the
Firefox browser, what web address would
you expect to visit to do things like download, learn more and get
help?”

* 21% picked mozilla.com

* 30% picked mozilla.org/firefox

* 49% picked firefox.com

Considering this, we can have firefox.com as an intuitive redirect to
mozilla.org/firefox and also get the benefits of linking the two more
closely together.

David

[fantasai]

On 09/27/2010 10:17 AM, davidwboswell wrote:
>> However, I think we should have everything be foo.mozilla.org rather
>> than have some things be foo.mozilla.org and other things do
>> mozilla.org/bar. So we'd have firefox.mozilla.org, and
>> thunderbird.mozilla.org. (Of course, firefox.com would redirect.)
>
> We can certainly explore this option more, but I think there are a few
> reasons why mozilla.org/firefox is a better model than

> firefox.mozilla.org ...

>
> For example, addons.mozilla.org works in this sub-domain and sub-

> directory way ... As I understand it, making AMO work with

> addons.firefox.mozilla.org wouldn't be trivial. The same with many
> other existing sites (eg, nightly.m.o already exists and we'd just
> need to add other directories to get nightly.mozilla.org/thunderbird,
> etc.).

I agree with pretty much all of Gerv's points, but I also understand
your points about administration. Here's my perspective:

What I expect from a site with subdirectories is that everything on
that server is unified under a single design and navigation system.
We don't have that for our product sites, nor is that a goal of this
unification. But we do have that for certain systems like
addons.mozilla.org.

On a related point, the site administration requirements are different
for different parts of our web universe. In some cases, administering
multiple projects on a single server is more appropriate. In others,
it's not.

I suggest we give each product its own subdomain for the product
pages, e.g. firefox.mozilla.org, and to use subdirectories of a server
for its slice of a particular mozilla.org-wide service, e.g.
nightly.mozilla.org/firefox or addons.mozilla.org/firefox.

I think this is the least disturbing way to handle it, and still
allows us to pull the projects closer together.

~fantasai

[Robert Kaiser]

fantasai schrieb:

> I suggest we give each product its own subdomain for the product
> pages, e.g. firefox.mozilla.org, and to use subdirectories of a server
> for its slice of a particular mozilla.org-wide service, e.g.
> nightly.mozilla.org/firefox or addons.mozilla.org/firefox.

Actually, not wanting to affront those who created that helpful
site/page, I'd expect nightlies under that structure under
firefox.mozilla.org/nightly more than at nightly.mozilla.org. Just my 2c.

Else, I agree with you, fantasai.

[Gervase Markham]

On 28/09/10 15:22, fantasai wrote:
> I suggest we give each product its own subdomain for the product
> pages, e.g. firefox.mozilla.org, and to use subdirectories of a server
> for its slice of a particular mozilla.org-wide service, e.g.
> nightly.mozilla.org/firefox or addons.mozilla.org/firefox.

Yes, that sounds right to me.

The data (higher up the thread) about what URL people would "expect" is
interesting, but surely not that relevant, because we can just make all
of them redirect to wherever we choose?

Gerv

[davidwboswell]

Based on some questions and feedback I realize that the proposal
hasn't been clear about the status of the affiliate sites (mozilla.jp,
mozilla-europe.org and mozillaonline.com).

I think we should treat affiliate URLs more like local sites (such as
mozilla-mexico.org) than organizational sites like (mozilla.com).
Local sites have a range of URL types and that is a good thing so that
we can deal with issues that are unique to each locale. I think the
bigger issue is not changing the URLs of the affiliate sites, but
making sure they have the right content.

So based on that thinking, I updated the proposal with the following
note:

Affiliate URLs act as both an organization site and a local site, so
there is no need to move away from using those domains. The more
important issue with affiliate sites is making the content as relevant
as possible by de-emphasizing the organizational information and
highlighting the locale specific information.

David

[davidwboswell]

> What I expect from a site with subdirectories is that everything on
> that server is unified under a single design and navigation system.
> We don't have that for our product sites, nor is that a goal of this
> unification. But we do have that for certain systems like
> addons.mozilla.org.

I don't think this is an argument one way or the other for any of the
URL choices.

The general goal for the Mozilla universe is to add more cohesion than
there is today and the domain name strategy is just one of the first
issues we're working through. If our domain name strategy tells us
that there are some sites that should operate more closely together we
should look at redesigning them.

For example, the Firefox site redesign is dealing with mozilla.com,
support.mozilla.com and addons.mozilla.org together to bring more
cohesion to this group of sites that are all tied together by how
people download and use Firefox. Also note some of the other topics
at the most recent task force such as creating a common footer for all
Mozilla sites and establishing a common web font.

> On a related point, the site administration requirements are different
> for different parts of our web universe. In some cases, administering
> multiple projects on a single server is more appropriate. In others,
> it's not.

This is definitely something that needs to be considered and we'll
work with webdev before signing off on any domain name strategy.

David

[Axel Hecht]

On 24.09.10 19:56, davidwboswell wrote:
>> I'm totally illiterate in that domain, but how would moving everything
>> on to a single domain involve SEO, and ranking of our pages against
>> possibly malicious pages out there?
>

> I know this issue has been looked into as part of the planning for the
> www.mozilla.com site redesign, so I've asked someone more directly
> involved with that to answer this question.
>
>> Also, you left out the locale codes in your examples.
>
> I'm happy to update the proposal as needed. Can you provide a
> recommendation for what about locale codes we should include?
>

We use a scheme like http://www.mozilla-europe.org/de/firefox/ on
mozilla-europe.org.

Axel

[Axel Hecht]

On a more general note and l10n.

The experience in non-English languages will tend to be non-cohesive, I
guess. An idea on how to expose a partially localized site?

Also, we use "sites" to somewhat determine what can and what should be
localized. Such an argument is at least harder to make if it's all one
"site". An idea on whether we should policy page localizations, and if
so, how? Blends a bit with the first question, as that might include a
"you gotta me this tall to join the ride".

Axel

On 24.09.10 18:25, davidwboswell wrote:
> At the web sites task force meeting yesterday we discussed a draft One
> Mozilla Domain Name strategy and I wanted to circulate it to a wider
> group to get more feedback. The proposal can be found at:
>
> https://wiki.mozilla.org/Websites/Taskforce/Proposals/Domain_Name_Strategy
>

> The short version is that we think we should move off of organization-
> based domains (mozilla.com, mozillamessaging.com, etc.) and move to a
> more coherent and unified system that uses the mozilla.org domain
> (with some exceptions).
>
> To get an idea of what this would mean in practice, scroll to the
> bottom of the draft to the Proposed URL Changes section. Note that
> this list is not meant to be a complete set of changes, but rather an
> example of the types of changes that this proposal would make.
>
> The current thinking is to discuss this further in relevant places for
> the next few weeks and then make a decision about it at the next task
> force meeting on October 21. Feel free to respond to this post or
> come to the next meeting. Meeting details and more about the task
> force are at:
>
> https://wiki.mozilla.org/Websites/Taskforce
>
> Thanks,
> David

[davidwboswell]

> We use a scheme like http://www.mozilla-europe.org/de/firefox/ on mozilla-europe.org.

It seems to me that this scheme won't be effected by any of the
proposed changes since we could still add the locale code in the same
way on any of the new domains. Feel free to correct me if I'm wrong
about that.

> The experience in non-English languages will tend to be non-cohesive, I
> guess. An idea on how to expose a partially localized site?
>
> Also, we use "sites" to somewhat determine what can and what should be
> localized. Such an argument is at least harder to make if it's all one
> "site". An idea on whether we should policy page localizations, and if
> so, how? Blends a bit with the first question, as that might include a
> "you gotta me this tall to join the ride".

This seems to be the bigger issue around localization and the
proposal. Maybe the best place to discuss this specific issue further
is on mozilla.dev.l10n.web. I'll post there.

I'll add one comment here though for general discussion -- note that
this proposal doesn't suggest we have just one site. We'll have fewer
sites on fewer domains, but there will still be a lot of sites in the
community.

FYI, I added a new section about localization to the proposal where we
can fill in more details as we work through them.

https://wiki.mozilla.org/Websites/Taskforce/Proposals/Domain_Name_Strategy#Localization

David

[m...@mozilla.com]

On Sep 27, 9:13 am, Mike Connor <mcon...@mozilla.com> wrote:
> Added technical point: I don't think we want everything as subdirectories, as that puts everything in the same origin from a security perspective.  If everything is the same origin, that feels like a pretty large attack surface...
>

And, agreeing with mconnor, makes it more challenging to scale
infrastructure.

They way I build out for firefox.com is different than how i build out
for www.mozilla.org which is very different than www.mozilla.com. One
of those sites generates a considerable amount of traffic. Right now
I focus on scaling that site out differently than the others.

[Michael Coates]

Agreed, there are some significant security impacts to these changes.
We don't have to hash out all of the technical details here, but the
general idea is that as we move from /separate domains -> subdomains ->
subdirectories/ we are dramatically increasing the necessary trust
between the various sites. What this means is that if we are in the
most extreme state (subdirectories) then we need the security of every
site to be at least as high as the highest site in this group.

I'm not saying we can't do this, but this will be a dramatic change from
our current development/security process and will require much more
rigid security requirements to add a site to the "circle of trust".

-Michael Coates

On Sep 27, 9:13 am, Mike Connor <mcon...@mozilla.com> wrote:
> Added technical point: I don't think we want everything as
subdirectories, as that puts everything in the same origin from a
security perspective. If everything is the same origin, that feels like
a pretty large attack surface...
>

> > governa...@lists.mozilla.org
> >https://lists.mozilla.org/listinfo/governance

[Ben Bucksch]

On 30.09.2010 08:00, jslater wrote:
> 1. The product's name is "Mozilla Firefox", not "Firefox
> Mozilla"...having it reversed as firefox.mozilla.org is ... confusing

Yes, it's unfortunate that the most specific thing is on the left, but
that's just how the DNS works. It's just a minor aesthetic thing. It
does matter a lot technically, though.

Upside is that the most specific thing is first: "firefox". You're
saying "open source software" and not "software source open", right?
I.e. adjectives in English match DNS order: most specific comes first,
and people deal with it just fine.
I don't think people will be "confused", and those that are better learn
quickly by our good example or they are the next phishing victim. (This
is not elitist, but reality. See below for browser UI.)

Personally, I find "http://firefox.mozilla.org/foobar" much clearer and
stronger than "http://www.mozilla.org/firefox/foobar".

Anyway, none of this really matters much. The page title is for the
naive user to read, not the URL. If the user searches on Google, he'll
find us. If he types firefox.com, we'll redirect.
The only thing where it matters is advertising in print or TV, but we
don't do that much. For t-shirts, firefox.mozilla.org is fine. Or just
mzl.la/ff :)

BTW: Also because of phishing, Firefox, MSIE and others are gradually
moving away from showing the full URL, towards only the hostname or only
the top level domain. So, with "http://www.mozilla.org/firefox/foobar",
only "www.mozilla.org" or "mozilla.org" would be really visible, the
rest ("/firefox/...") dimmed. Reasons: see above, help those users who
can't read URLs properly.

> Great stuff.

Ditto.

[Ben Bucksch]

Forgot to mention: we're not foxnews.com. Several tech companies with
a clue use subdomains, and users have *not* been confused, but use it daily:
finance.yahoo.com
de.yahoo.com
de.finanzen.yahoo.com
maps.google.com
news.google.com

So, no problem or confusion, if we use it, too. Yes, the majority of
companies uses subdirectories, probably for exactly the reason you gave
(reading order), but I've always thought this is silly, and they often
indeed did have phishing and XSS problems.

[Asa Dotzler]

But Apple is www.apple.com/mac www.apple.com/itunes and
www.apple.com/support
I think the only one where they're using a subdomain is store.apple.com
and I suspect that's because they need to treat the security of that
page differently than the others.

[Asa Dotzler]

Oops. I misread what Ben said. He did indeed address this point. Sorry
'bout that.

- A

[Ben Bucksch]

On 01.10.2010 02:48, Asa Dotzler wrote:
> On 9/30/2010 5:20 PM, Asa Dotzler wrote:
>> On 9/30/2010 5:12 PM, Ben Bucksch wrote:
>>> Yes, the majority of companies uses subdirectories

> Oops. I misread what Ben said. He did indeed address this point. Sorry
> 'bout that.

You probably read "subdomains" instead of "subdirectories".

Thanks, Asa. The public correction wasn't necessary (wasn't a big
thing), but tells something about you. You raised in my view.

Wish you well,

Ben

[Boris Zbarsky]

On 9/30/10 8:12 PM, Ben Bucksch wrote:
> maps.google.com
> news.google.com

This one is interesting, because google.com/maps also works and loads
gmail. google.com/news loads google news. These are apparently just
hitting the same backend but NOT redirecting.

On the other hand, reader.google.com redirects to
http://www.google.com/reader/view

And google.com/mail redirects to mail.google.com

Perhaps the sane thing to do in our case is to use subdomains for the
safety aspect but make subdirectories redirect to the subdomain (so what
gmail does)?

-Boris

[m...@mozilla.com]

Going to clarify myself some here.

Current practice is to have difference "classes" of websites behind
different load balancers. We do this such that if there's some super
popular addon and AMO gets a super duper amount of traffic, it doesn't
adversely impact other sites on other load balancers.

(Some may recall that at one point every single site was behind a pair
of Netscalers and when there was a problem, every single site went
down.)

My point here was more that by unifying sites under one hostname, I'm
effectively putting all my eggs back into the same basket. That is
undesirable.

On Sep 29, 2:46 pm, "m...@mozilla.com" <m...@mozilla.com> wrote:
> On Sep 27, 9:13 am, Mike Connor <mcon...@mozilla.com> wrote:
>
> > Added technical point: I don't think we want everything as subdirectories, as that puts everything in the same origin from a security perspective.  If everything is the same origin, that feels like a pretty large attack surface...
>
> And, agreeing with mconnor, makes it more challenging to scale
> infrastructure.
>
> They way I build out for firefox.com is different than how i build out

> forwww.mozilla.orgwhich is very different thanwww.mozilla.com.  One

[Gervase Markham]

On 30/09/10 07:00, jslater wrote:
> 1. The product's name is "Mozilla Firefox", not "Firefox

> Mozilla"...having it reversed as firefox.mozilla.org is not only a
> little confusing it, it seems to get the brand structure all wrong.
> It's also quite a mouthful...not very consumer-friendly for a
> mainstream global product if you ask me.

Well...

"The site's name is 'BBC News', not 'News BBC'!
http://news.bbc.co.uk/

"The product's name is 'Apache SpamAssassin', not 'SpamAssassin Apache'!
http://spamassassin.apache.org/

"The site is called 'Mozilla Addons', not 'Addons Mozilla':
http://addons.mozilla.org/

And so on:

http://groups.google.com/ and many other Google examples
http://answers.yahoo.com/
http://bookshop.blackwell.co.uk/
http://direct.tesco.com/

But if what other sites do is a big factor, then most other companies do
their best to put their products "productname.tld" - i.e., in our case,
firefox.com.

Yes, domain names should have been the other way round
(org.mozilla.firefox), but that horse has long ago left the barn.

Significant counter-examples:
apple.com/safari
google.com/chrome

> 2. I don't have the final conclusions from the brand research we've
> been doing ready to share just yet, but the early results seem to show
> that people feel really positively about Firefox when they understand
> its non-profit connection, but the large majority of people don't
> understand that connection.

I'd entirely agree with that. It's the most common response I get:
"Firefox is a non-profit?"

> It also shows that Firefox, unlike our
> competitors, suffers a little bit by not having a strong parent brand
> to associate it with...i.e., Chrome benefits from residual good
> feelings about Google, and it's the same with Apple and even
> Microsoft. I went into this process thinking that firefox.com was the
> logical choice, but have been swayed to mozilla.org/firefox because I
> think it strikes the best balance between establishing the right
> relationship between Mozilla and Firefox, includes the .org as a non-
> profit reference, and is generally intuitive and easy to say/remember.
> And, like David said, we'll always have firefox.com so it's not like
> we're losing that no matter what we do.

I agree with all of that, but it would sway me towards firefox.mozilla.org.

Gerv

[davidwboswell]

To address some of the recent posts about security and scalability --
these seem to be the biggest open issues at this point. I'm meeting
with mrz and cslyon next week to talk about these issues in more
detail. I'll report back to this list after those meetings.

David

[davidwboswell]

I wanted to point out another addition to the draft domain name
proposal that covers mobile versions of sites.

https://wiki.mozilla.org/Websites/Taskforce/Proposals/Domain_Name_Strategy#Mobile_Sites

Short version: ideally there would be just one URL that would serve a
mobile version of a site as needed, but when that's not possible we
recommend going with the m.foo.mozilla.org naming scheme.

David

[davidwboswell]

I've talked with mrz, cslyon and mcoates about security and
scalability and we've addressed their concerns.

For scalability, by using sub-domains of mozilla.org we should be able
to handle the different traffic levels of different sites. This would
have been a problem if we wanted to have everything under www.mozilla.org
(instead of *.mozilla.org) but that isn't the goal. There may be
situations where there are difficulties merging sites (for instance,
if the Firefox support site is in one hosting facility and the
Thunderbird support site is in another). In that case we can consider
having a fallback where we have a public URL that redirects to a
different domain (for example, support.mozilla.org/thunderbird could
redirect to support.mozillamessaging.com).

For security, using sub-domains of mozilla.org will also allow us to
limit security concerns. The biggest issue is that anything that goes
live on a given site needs to meet the security requirements for that
given sub-domain. This will cause some changes to how people are
operating today with security review. If new security requirements
for a site cause an issue, we can do the same fallback as above --
have a public URL that redirects to another domain. To clarify the
security issues with the new plan, Chris and Michael are going to
update the wiki with a security section.

If I have any of these details wrong, mrz, cslyon or mcoates, please
correct me.

David

[davidwboswell]

> I suggest we give each product its own subdomain for the product
> pages, e.g. firefox.mozilla.org, and to use subdirectories of a server
> for its slice of a particular mozilla.org-wide service, e.g.
> nightly.mozilla.org/firefox or addons.mozilla.org/firefox.

We're proposing a domain name scheme that is service.mozilla.org and
the suggestion for firefox.mozilla.org doesn't make sense in that
model. The www.mozilla.org site offers a service (serving static web
pages) just the same way addons.mozilla.org or support.mozilla.org
offer a service.

If addons.mozilla.org/thunderbird is telling me that there are addons
for Thunderbird at that URL, then www.mozilla.org/thunderbird is
telling me that there are web pages for Thunderbird at that URL.

Having Firefox or Thunderbird be a sub-directory in most cases except
for one case where it is a sub-domain seems confusing and I don't
understand what it solves.

If there's a general agreement that nightly.mozilla.org/firefox or
addons.mozilla.org/firefox makes sense, then I think it follows that
www.mozilla.org/firefox makes sense too.

David

[Fred Wenzel]

On Sep 27, 6:13 pm, Mike Connor <mcon...@mozilla.com> wrote:
> Added technical point: I don't think we want everything as subdirectories, as that puts everything in the same origin from a security perspective.  If everything is the same origin, that feels like a pretty large attack surface...

Thanks for adding this. That was the first thought that came to my
mind when reading this proposal. We'd need to fix the session handlers
on every affected app in order to avoid leakage of cookies between
apps. Likewise, vulnerabilities in one app could easily have an impact
on all other apps hosted on the same domain, like you mentioned.

Therefore, I am opposed to hooking up completely unrelated apps as
subdirs onto the same domain. Other reasons include that while
achievable, making apps run with a path prefix instead of at the root
of their domain is usually quite tedious. Finally, while it's a matter
of taste, I don't like having apps with almost completely different
look&feels in adjacent directories on the same domain.

I okay with different subdomains under mozilla.org though -- we
already do that for addons, SUMO, etc., and changing domains on an app
is pretty easy from a coding point of view.

~F

[Fred Wenzel]

[Ben Bucksch]

On 07.10.2010 22:56, davidwboswell wrote:
> For security, using sub-domains of mozilla.org will also allow us to
> limit security concerns. The biggest issue is that anything that goes
> live on a given site needs to meet the security requirements for that
> given sub-domain. This will cause some changes to how people are
> operating today with security review.

Given that subdomains are clearly more secure, and most people here have
argued for subdomains, can you please justify why you want subdirectories?

Ben

[Ben Bucksch]

No, because addons. has the same code and logic for all products.
nightly. is just an FTP/download server.

The website can have many different things. spreadfirefox and similar
have very different requirements from e.g. the Mozilla project/dev website.

ben

[Gervase Markham]

On 07/10/10 21:56, davidwboswell wrote:
> For scalability, by using sub-domains of mozilla.org we should be able

> to handle the different traffic levels of different sites.This would

> have been a problem if we wanted to have everything under www.mozilla.org
> (instead of *.mozilla.org) but that isn't the goal.

This entire email seems to me to support and encourage the use of
subdomains. But the domain name strategy still says you are going to use
sub-directories (www.mozilla.org/foo) rather than subdomains
(foo.mozilla.org). Have I misunderstood either your message or the strategy?

Gerv

[davidwboswell]

> This entire email seems to me to support and encourage the use of
> subdomains. But the domain name strategy still says you are going to use
> sub-directories (www.mozilla.org/foo) rather than subdomains
> (foo.mozilla.org). Have I misunderstood either your message or the strategy?

I've tried to be very clear that the strategy is based on sub-domains
and there will be times when a given site also needs to have sub-
directories to further categorize things (for example,
addons.mozilla.org/thunderbird contains both a sub-domain and a sub-
directory). These two things aren't mutually exclusive, so saying
there are times when there will be sub-directories doesn't mean sub-
domains aren't going to be used.

Does that clear things up? If I'm providing confusing or
contradictory information either on the wiki page that lays out the
strategy or in my emails to this thread, feel free to point them out
so we can fix them.

David

[davidwboswell]

> This entire email seems to me to support and encourage the use of
> subdomains. But the domain name strategy still says you are going to use
> sub-directories (www.mozilla.org/foo) rather than subdomains
> (foo.mozilla.org). Have I misunderstood either your message or the strategy?

I followed up with Gerv on IRC and we were able to clarify the
confusion, so I wanted to summarize that discussion here in case this
has caused confusion for anyone else.

In this thread and in other places we have referred to moving
mozilla.com to mozilla.org/firefox. It doesn't look like there is a
sub-domain there, but this is just short-hand for the full URL of
www.mozilla.org/firefox. In this case 'www' is acting just the same
as 'addons' in addons.mozilla.org and from a security and scalability
stand point these would act as two different sites.

The plan is to use sub-domains, but it looks like there was an big
exception to this since the 'www' often gets dropped when we talk
about what to do with the Firefox site. Hopefully this explanation
clears things up.

David

[Ben Bucksch]

On 11.10.2010 19:43, davidwboswell wrote:
>> This entire email seems to me to support and encourage the use of
>> subdomains. But the domain name strategy still says you are going to use
>> sub-directories (www.mozilla.org/foo) rather than subdomains
>> (foo.mozilla.org). Have I misunderstood either your message or the strategy?
> I followed up with Gerv on IRC and we were able to clarify the
> confusion, so I wanted to summarize that discussion here in case this
> has caused confusion for anyone else.
>
> In this thread and in other places we have referred to moving
> mozilla.com to mozilla.org/firefox. It doesn't look like there is a
> sub-domain there, but this is just short-hand for the full URL of
> www.mozilla.org/firefox. In this case 'www' is acting just the same

When we speak of "subdomains" in this thread, we are talking about
firefox.mozilla.org, not www.mozilla.org. "www." is not a subdomain, but
a host. (firefox.mozilla.org also would be a host, but at the same time
a subdomain, e.g. spread.firefox.mozilla.org.)

> Hopefully this explanation clears things up.

No, it's only confusing matters. Almost everybody here asked to use
firefox.mozilla.org, not www.mozilla.org/firefox/ , and was explicit
about it. I hope *that* clears things up.

Ben

[Ben Bucksch]

On 12.10.2010 13:02, Ben Bucksch wrote:
> Almost everybody here asked to use firefox.mozilla.org, not
> www.mozilla.org/firefox/ , and was explicit about it.

Quotes:

fantasai wrote:
> I suggest we give each product its own subdomain for the product
> pages, e.g. firefox.mozilla.org, and to use subdirectories of a server
> for its slice of a particular mozilla.org-wide service, e.g.
> nightly.mozilla.org/firefox or addons.mozilla.org/firefox.

Robert Kaiser agreed with the first part.

Mike Conner wrote:
> I don't think we want everything as subdirectories, as that puts
> everything in the same origin from a security perspective. If
> everything is the same origin, that feels like a pretty large attack
> surface...

Mark Banner uttered concerns about independence of server administration.

bz wrote:
> And google.com/mail redirects to mail.google.com
> Perhaps the sane thing to do in our case is to use subdomains for the
> safety aspect but make subdirectories redirect to the subdomain (so
> what gmail does)?

Gerv wrote:
> we should have everything be foo.mozilla.org ... So we'd have
> firefox.mozilla.org, and thunderbird.mozilla.org. ... reasons: 1)
> Simplicity.... 2) Administration.... 3) Look.

So, everybody in these quotes clearly meant "firefox.mozilla.org", not
"www.mozilla.org/firefox/", and preferred the former.

Other people like mrz, Fred Wenzel also preferred using subdomains for
technical reasons.

One question: Where would you hang up sites like spreadfirefox.com
(there are many others)? My proposal would be spread.firefox.mozilla.org.

Ben

[davidwboswell]

> Other people like mrz, Fred Wenzel also preferred using subdomains for
> technical reasons.

Yes, and the general policy for sites is going to be sub-domain
based. Please read:

https://wiki.mozilla.org/Websites/Taskforce/Proposals/Domain_Name_Strategy

I've talked with mrz, cslyon and other people about this and no one
said this general approach will not work from a technical standpoint.
Anyone I talked to is welcome to correct me if I'm wrong.

> One question: Where would you hang up sites like spreadfirefox.com
> (there are many others)? My proposal would be spread.firefox.mozilla.org.

The domain name strategy lists a set of exceptions to the
*.mozilla.org scheme -- notably campaign sites should have the freedom
to have whatever URL works best. I think spreadfirefox.com as a URL
is fine -- much easier to say and type than something that fits into
the sub-domain scheme such as spread.firefox.mozilla.org.

> So, everybody in these quotes clearly meant "firefox.mozilla.org", not
> "www.mozilla.org/firefox/", and preferred the former.

Two things:

The confusion seems to be coming from extrapolating the plans for the
Firefox site to the plans for the web universe as a whole. Please
don't make assumptions about the general plan based on potentially
moving www.mozilla.com to a sub-directory of www.mozilla.org.

There have been several people on this thread who have suggested we
use firefox.mozilla.org, although others on this thread have expressed
a preference for www.mozilla.org/firefox. Please note that the
question of the Firefox site URL has also been discussed in other
places (three brown bags this year, a session at the Mozilla Summit,
many in person conversations, discussions over IRC...). Based on all
of the feedback, I'm comfortable saying that firefox.mozilla.org is
not something that everybody, or even a majority of people, prefer.

David

[Ben Bucksch]

On 12.10.2010 19:08, davidwboswell wrote:
> much easier to say and type than something that fits into
> the sub-domain scheme such as spread.firefox.mozilla.org.

The only addition is "mozilla", actually.

> I think spreadfirefox.com as a URL is fine

I do not, and I explained why. If you use that, you are *begging* for
phishing. It's trivial for me to set up a site spread-firefox.com (with
dash) and have people fall for it and download my malware.

All our sites should be underneath mozilla.org. It should always have
been like that. In fact, that's precisely what the topic says: one
domain name.

[Gervase Markham]

On 12/10/10 12:02, Ben Bucksch wrote:
>> Hopefully this explanation clears things up.
>
> No, it's only confusing matters. Almost everybody here asked to use
> firefox.mozilla.org, not www.mozilla.org/firefox/ , and was explicit
> about it. I hope *that* clears things up.

Let me try and explain it :-)

The idea is to use subdomains for _services_ and subdirectories for
_products_. So:

Product Website
www.mozilla.org/firefox
www.mozilla.org/thunderbird
www.mozilla.org/...

(Note that both Chrome and Safari do it this way too.)

Support
support.mozilla.org/firefox
support.mozilla.org/thunderbird
support.mozilla.org/...

Addons
addons.mozilla.org/firefox
addons.mozilla.org/thunderbird
addons.mozilla.org/...

Nightly Builds
nightly.mozilla.org/firefox
nightly.mozilla.org/thunderbird
nightly.mozilla.org/...

Etc.

Then we have project-wide sites:
air.mozilla.org
developer.mozilla.org
feeds.mozilla.org
blogs.mozilla.org

This, I believe, is at least consistent. I agree that the greatest point
of tension is in the Product Website category, where Firefox and
Thunderbird might want to do quite different things. But perhaps the
idea is that freedom is constrained a little bit in the name of
cross-Mozilla consistency.

Gerv

[Mark Banner]

On 13/10/2010 10:01, Gervase Markham wrote:
> The idea is to use subdomains for _services_ and subdirectories for
> _products_. So:

[re-ordered to support comments better]

> Addons
> addons.mozilla.org/firefox
> addons.mozilla.org/thunderbird
> addons.mozilla.org/...

This isn't what the wiki page shows (it doesn't have the firefox
subdirectory, even though it exists already on amo).

>
> Product Website
> www.mozilla.org/firefox
> www.mozilla.org/thunderbird
> www.mozilla.org/...
>

> This, I believe, is at least consistent. I agree that the greatest point
> of tension is in the Product Website category, where Firefox and
> Thunderbird might want to do quite different things. But perhaps the
> idea is that freedom is constrained a little bit in the name of
> cross-Mozilla consistency.

Given how much I think this affects, e.g. our ability to ship releases
in a timely fashion, the fact that MoCo's servers would be (presumably)
solely responsible for delivering content for all projects, one svn
repo... etc. - I think I would want to have some clear statements around
permissions, responsibilities, interactions etc before we went too far
into this (assuming this subdirectory naming isn't just a redirect to
firefox.mozilla.org and others).

Standard8

[Ben Bucksch]

On 13.10.2010 01:23, Mike Shaver wrote:

2) I don't think that us choosing our "real sites" to be all
mozilla.org-suffixed will materially alter the effectiveness of
spread-firefox.com as an impersonation site for phishing or
distribution of malware.

The logic goes:

• The only real protection against phishing is that people learn to check the domain to be one they know and only that and reject everything else.
• We need to educate people to do that. We are starting to do so with the more prominent display of the domain in FF.
• If we were ever telling banks or others not to use citibank-onlinebanking.com or similar, we'd look very silly, if we did that ourself
• With spreadfirefox.com, we're actively training users in the wrong direction.

[Ben Bucksch]

On 13.10.2010 11:01, Gervase Markham wrote:
> Product Website
> www.mozilla.org/firefox
> www.mozilla.org/thunderbird
> www.mozilla.org/...

OK

> I agree that the greatest point of tension is in the Product Website
> category, where Firefox and Thunderbird might want to do quite
> different things.

That depends what you include in "Produce Website".
- If it's just the download page and the description of the product, I
don't think they'll differ all that much.
- If that includes sites like spreadfirefox.com, the persona competition
and similar, then we'll have a problem putting them under
www.mozilla.org/firefox/persona/competition/, because they're all
different web apps and have different layouts. (See other subthread why
an entirely separate domain is a bad idea, I don't want to repeat that
here.)

[davidwboswell]

> That depends what you include in "Produce Website".
> - If it's just the download page and the description of the product, I
> don't think they'll differ all that much.

Yes. As mentioned earlier, the service offered by www.mozilla.org is
the delivery of web pages (not web apps). This would include download
pages and pages talking about the products.

> - If that includes sites like spreadfirefox.com, the persona competition
> and similar, then we'll have a problem putting them under www.mozilla.org/firefox/persona/competition/, because they're all
> different web apps and have different layouts.

As mentioned before in this thread and as explained in the wiki page,
different apps will live at different sub-domains --
addons.mozilla.org, feeds.mozilla.org, foo.mozilla.org...

David

[davidwboswell]

> This isn't what the wiki page shows (it doesn't have the firefox
> subdirectory, even though it exists already on amo).

I can update the page to make this clearer. There is currently a note
saying that the home page of addons.mozilla.org (for example) defaults
to the Firefox directory.

> Given how much I think this affects, e.g. our ability to ship releases
> in a timely fashion, the fact that MoCo's servers would be (presumably)
> solely responsible for delivering content for all projects, one svn
> repo... etc. - I think I would want to have some clear statements around
> permissions, responsibilities, interactions etc before we went too far
> into this (assuming this subdirectory naming isn't just a redirect to
> firefox.mozilla.org and others).

We'll definitely sort these issues out before making any changes.
Right now we're just working on getting a general framework together.
After that we'll start working with stakeholders for different sites
as we incrementally roll this out.

David

[Mike Shaver]

On Wed, Oct 13, 2010 at 3:26 AM, Mark Banner
<bugz...@invalid.standard8.plus.com> wrote:
> Given how much I think this affects, e.g. our ability to ship releases in a
> timely fashion, the fact that MoCo's servers would be (presumably) solely
> responsible for delivering content for all projects, one svn repo... etc. -
> I think I would want to have some clear statements around permissions,
> responsibilities, interactions etc before we went too far into this
> (assuming this subdirectory naming isn't just a redirect to
> firefox.mozilla.org and others).

There are many techniques for segregating such things, from forwarding
proxies to simply using a unified change-control system. If latency
on MoCo IT interactions becomes an issue for non-emergency product
releases and site updates, then that's just a bug we should fix when
we see it, rather than something that we should design our
architecture around. Both our IT practices and our server/site layout
are in *service* of our goals, and shouldn't be constraints on how
effectively we can pursue them.

I don't see any inherent reason that there needs to be anything but
authenticated, automated tools for updating web-site content for
different project groups. Maybe we haven't built them yet, but it's
not a research problem, and seems like something that we can get help
with if for some reason we can't just build them ourselves in a timely
manner.

Mike