Gerv, Pascal and I got together last night with some London Firefox and Mozilla fans to help celebrate the launch of Firefox 3.5 last Tuesday.

About 25 of us enjoyed a few beers and snacks, there were several familiar faces who joined us last year for the Firefox 3 launch. Gerv demoed some neat 3.5 new features – Location Aware Browsing, Open Video, Downloadable fonts and Performance. Pascal talked about the cool dev stuff which is going on at Mozilla Labs.

Some interesting people were there from:

Ubervue – A group of Romanian super smart guys who have built the next gen social media conversation tracker. They now have opened up their API for anyone to hack on. Check it out!

Open Rights Group - a campaigning organization aiming to raise awareness of digital rights and civil liberties issues.  They need your help and support in the UK!

Influence Crowd – Philip Sheldrake the guy behind this is one of the smartest and highest energy folks around in Social Media analytics – there’s nothing he doesn’t know! He’s working on some cool new stuff in social media and measuring true success and accountability:

Fun moments:
- We watched live on screen Firefox 3.5 downloads pass 16M – we are now at 17.5M – see where we are now here: http://downloadstats.mozilla.com/
- Gerv ran the original Firefox code on loop – apparently it takes 25 mins to cycle through and it was shown at the first release party. All pretty cool stuff.

T-shirt & Cause moment:
We actually had some t-shirts to share, and was delighted to see people donate. In a beer glass we raised 75 pounds (125 US$) for the Mozilla Foundation — helping to keep the openness of the Web. A big thank you to all who donated.

A great night was had by all. It was wonderful to join with people who deeply care about the future of the Web, and are so supportive of the Mozilla community and cause.

More pictures here — unfortunately they are a bit grainy, the light wasn’t so good.

Firefox 3.5 is now alive and kicking! Our fastest release ever, new personal security features and support for open video. Its a release in which once again Firefox is “Upgrading the Web”.

Help us celebrate this landmark achievement in London, on Monday July 6. We’ll have a few beers together, and there will be a big screen to demo Firefox 3.5 and what’s new at Mozilla Labs.

We’d love to see your demos too – so please come along and share what you have.

Sign up on Upcoming at : http://upcoming.yahoo.com/event/3013300/

Where: Shooting Star

125-129 Middlesex Street
London, England E1 8JF

See you there!

Jane moves to London

So there was a significant chaos this week whilst my husband and I moved to London. I’ve been living in Berlin since 2003, and believe me those four and a half years have simply flown by. But time had come for change and London was beckoning to me. My husband was hoping for somewhere warmer (Sydney or California), but finally accepted to trial the UK’s temperamental climate for a few years on the premise he gets to choose the next time. I’d lived in London for several years working firstly for Sotheby’s and then eBay UK – I had some great fun in this huge metropolis and we’re looking forward to rediscovering old haunts.

Here’s some pictures of the move out and in! We are getting settled bit by bit and will soon be out of boxes (hopefully!).

Last thing to do is bring our dog over the Channel, which we are hoping to do in a few weeks time – then all will be perfect.

Here’s to our first London weekend.