The month of June has some particular milestones in my IBM career. June 29, 1989 was my first day as a co-op. June 7, 1993 was my first day as a full-time employee. And just about every promotion I’ve ever received was in June.

And now it’s time for another one.

Effective June 30, I will be taking a leave of absence from IBM to work on Firefox.

I know what you’re thinking. Isn’t that what I do at IBM? Actually, there is very little Firefox work left in IBM, and most of that is me. What I have determined about myself is that I really enjoying working in the Mozilla community and I want to figure out if there is enough interesting work out there in the Firefox space to keep myself gainfully employed.

So my plan is (with IBM’s approval) to offer consulting/contracting services around Firefox during my leave of absence.

So if you need help with enterprise deployment/customization of Firefox or developing custom Firefox extensions, you can drop me a line – consulting at kaply.com.

And for all you OS/2 users, don’t freak out; the OS/2 builds will continue. I’ll probably setup a tip jar for the extra bandwidth I’ll need at home.

Hey look – a review of IE8 Activities for Firefox I can’t read.

Oh wait. I can use Activities to translate it. Sweet.

GeekAustin hosted the Semantic Web Austin launch party last night. I was a speaker and got a chance to talk about Operator, Activities and the Microformats support in Firefox 3. I also took the opportunity to hand out some Firefox stickers. All in all, a very fun event, and a nice chance to meet Austin internet folks. If you want to learn more, Austin 3.0 has some interviews and other info about the event.

New version with fix for search engines not working.

FYI, I’m making a beta of the CCK Wizard available today for Firefox 3.

If you are deploying Firefox in your enterprise, educational institution, or even your household, you’ll want to check out the CCK Wizard (info at that link is a little dated right now).The CCK Wizard is an implementation of the old Netscape CCK that allows you to customize various aspects of Firefox and then contain all of those customizations in a single Firefox extension. Here are some of the things you can do

• Add an identifier to the user agent string
• Change the default home page and startup override home page
• Change the title bar text
• Change the animated logo
• Add a web page and tooltip used for the animated logo
• Add a help menu item that links to a web page
• Provide sites for which popups and XPInstalls are allowed by default
• Preinstall browser plug-ins
• Preinstall search engines
• Change the default search engine
• Add folders, bookmarks and live bookmarks to the personal toolbar
• Add folders, bookmarks and live bookmarks to the bookmarks folder
• Set default preferences
• Lock preferences
• Add registry keys (Windows only)
• Add certificates (See NOTE below)
• Set default proxy configurations
• Package other XPIs with your distribution
• Disable about:config

Note that if you customize Firefox using the CCK Wizard, there are certain restrictions on redistribution outside of your organization, especially if you add certificates. Read the Mozilla Foundation Trademark policies for more info, or contact licensing@mozilla.org.

And please let me know if you find any bugs.

Rob Crowther has an article on IBM developerworks about the new Microformats API in Firefox 3.

Thanks to microformatique for finding it.