University of Michigan Design Jam
The University of Michigan’s School of Information held their third Design Jam as part of the Concept Series. This session took ideas generated at the two previous Design Jams and had students work together in small teams to develop and refine detailed mockups.

Campus Outreach
In early January we’ll be launching a Concept Series Design Challenge that will provide new opportunities for students to exercise and refine their skills in user interface and user experience design. As part of the Challenge, students will be invited to participate in a new tutoring and mentorship program that we’re developing to increase the effectiveness and scale of the Labs effort. More details on the Design Challenge will be posted soon, the first round will be focused on the question: “What would a windowless browser look like?”.

If your school is interested in participating, please contact us at conceptseries@mozilla.com.

Concepts of the Month
From Tony Farndon, an experimental addon that takes Auto Dial (i.e. add-on to view most visited bookmarks rather than a blank page whenever you open a new tab) and mashes it up with a 3D parallax effect.

From Chris Heilmann, a concept to improve Web accessibility of videos by moving their controls out of the Flash object and on to the Web page using Greasemonkey scripts.

Personas
We’ve released a beta version of Personas this week that fully supports Firefox 3.x and includes a new directory of designs along with a revamped server architecture that’s been designed to scale to millions of users.

We’re also working toward a 1.0 release with new content and capabilities in January, and a plan for potential inclusion of a Personas-like feature in a future Firefox release.

Snowl
We’ve released the third and final preview release of Snowl. It includes an updated “river of news” with many improvements suggested by Alex Faaborg and others.

It also supports sending Twitter updates in addition to receiving them via an interface built into the river and stream views. Just click on the “write a message” icon to expose it:

Ubiquity
We’ve released a release candidate for the next major update to Ubiquity. This release features significantly improved performance and adds skinning support.

Weave
We’ve released a release candidate for the next major update to Weave that includes significantly improved performance and bookmarks & history support for the new 0.3 server architecture.

We’re also introducing preliminary support for Fennec based upon Jono DiCarlo’s detailed proposal.

Prism
Based upon the success of the Prism experiment, we’re now working on a plan to uplift a Prism-like feature into a future version of Firefox. You can follow the early specification work on the Mozilla Wiki.

The Prism experiment and platform itself will continue in its exploration independent of this effort. If you’re new to the concept of site-specific browsers, be sure to check out the Prism for Firefox add-on.