Mozilla, the creator of the popular web browser Firefox and the popular email client Thunderbird, has more tricks up its sleeves than most people know. In this post we will take a look at the 10 projects that are at the forefront of Mozilla’s efforts.

It’s important for me to note that Mozilla is a huge player in the Open Source world. It’s safe to say that without the efforts of Mozilla and the thousands of developers who contribute to it’s projects daily, that Open Source as we currently know it would fail to exist.

I expect a majority of these 10 projects to have a huge impact, just like their Firefox and Thunderbird predecessors. These projects can be a little confusing for most of us to understand. I will attempt to help better explain them to you.

New! Raindrop – Mozilla’s “One-Up” on Google Wave

Raindrop uses a mini web server to fetch your conversations from different sources (mail, twitter, RSS feeds), intelligently pulls out the important parts, and allows you to interact with them using your favorite modern web browser (Firefox, Safari or Chrome).

Prism – Web Apps on your Desktop

Basically this gives you the ability to run your favorite web applications separate from your browser, in a desktop like application. Google Chrome can do this. And it’s like what many Adobe Air apps try and accomplish. The beauty of Prism is that you are using the strong and stable Firefox technology so you know your app usage will be high performance.

Snowl – Messaging in the Browser

The idea behind Snowl is to help you track and participate in online discussions around the web. Currently it supports any type of Web Feeds and Twitter. Snowl looks very promising because of the ever increasing amount of social media providers, which make it difficult for people like us to keep up with the conversations going on across the web.

Personas – Lightweight Skins for Firefox

It’s amazing how customizable Firefox is. I still run into people who say they use Internet Explorer 7 or 8 because it looks better. Or Safari because it looks more visually appealing. Little do they know that they can customize Firefox with over 3,000 different skins through Personas, making their browser as “pretty” as they want.

Jetpack – Enhancing the Web Browser

Jetpack is basically an API for creating Firefox Add-on’s. Once again Mozilla does a great job of harnessing and controlling the efforts of developers around the web, to create add-ons and potential features for the Firefox Web Browser. It’s no wonder no browser can come close to Firefox!

Ubiquity – Simplify Your Web Browsing

Ubiquity is an extension for Firefox that let’s you create commands to simplify and quicken your browsing. It includes 80 pre-built commands right out of the box, and instructions on creating your own. Examples of common web activities that can benefit from this are searching, translating, mapping, and emailing.

Weave – Synchronizing your Firefox Goodies

Weave is an add-on to Firefox that helps you synchronize your bookmarks, browsing history, saved passwords, and saved tabs with all of your Firefox browsers. How does it do this? It basically encrypts your data and hosts it on Mozilla’s servers, so you can access that same information from anywhere. No matter who’s computer you are on. The “cloud” concept for browsing. Great stuff!

Bespin – Web Based Code Editing

Bespin promises to be a revolutionary project in the world of code editing and code collaboration. Bespin is still in it’s ‘alpha’ phase, but already you can see it’s potential in action. Basically it’s a Web Based Code Editor that also has collaboration concepts built into it. Almost like Google Docs but for Code, where you can have multiple people editing one file at the same time. I think this project will change web development forever, and will speed up the creation of code altogether.

Concept Series – Help innovate with Mozilla

This is a simple yet powerful project. The purpose of this project was to create dialogue on the specific directions in design and development for Mozilla’s web projects as a whole. Because it’s an open source environment, Mozilla isn’t going to steal your idea. They actually help you see it to fruition. If it’s good enough of course.

Test Pilot – A Platform for User Feedback for Firefox

Test Pilot is an add-on for the Firefox browser that allows you to participate in the “bleeding edge” not yet released features of Firefox. Your usage can provide extremely valuable feedback to Mozilla on what they need to do to fix and enhance certain things.