I am now a big fan of soapy ham hocks.

Brian King recently wrote about a very significant change to the Firefox user interface which will be seen by all Windows Vista and Windows 7 users when they upgrade to Firefox 4. Designed by Alex Faaborg and the UX team based on community feedback from Test Pilot data, this new “Firefox Menu” will replace the Menu Bar. The goal is to put the most frequently used controls in a single menu, and return vertical space to the web content area by removing the pixels otherwise taken up by the Menu Bar:

(Image courtesy Brian King)

Alex filed a bug with the design, which included several new UI concepts that had not been previously implemented using XUL, such as a two-tiered Windows Vista-esque menu, and a menu that had buttons in it. At the time the bug was filed, we weren’t sure who would have time to experiment and implement the changes, and considered some of the design items to be at risk for Firefox 4.

This is where the soapy ham hocks come into the story.

Joshua M (who also goes by SoapyHamHocks on IRC) created a Bugzilla account on August 12th, and put up his first attempt at an implementation the next day. Working with the Firefox team in IRC and through Bugzilla, several iterations of his patch went by, and on August 20th, the patch landed in Mozilla’s codebase. There are some bugs and issues to work out, but thanks to Joshua’s contribution, our Windows Vista/7 users will all be able to look forward to a much more native, and better user experience – and of course, if Windows XP users want to try it out, they can customize their UI to do so! It should appear in a future beta revision, and of course users will be able to give us feedback about it at that time.

I’m always thrilled to see new contributors who want to make a difference for millions of users finding their way into our community, and similarly thrilled when our community can guide and help these new contributors towards successful implementations. Welcome to our motley crew, SoapyHamHocks – we all appreciate your work and effort.

Today, I presented an early product plan for Firefox 4 to the Mozilla community (live, over the web!) to share our vision for the next version of Firefox, and what projects are underway to realize it. Then I invited everyone to get involved by joining our engineering or product development efforts.

The primary goals for Firefox 4 will be making a browser:

• Fast: making Firefox super-duper fast
• Powerful: enabling new open, standard Web technologies (HTML5 and beyond!),
• Empowering: putting users in full control of their browser, data, and Web experience.

Usually software producers don’t present these sorts of plans in public until they’re finalized, but Mozilla is a little different. We work in the open, socializing our plans early and often to gather feedback and build excitement in our worldwide community. Not everyone could attend the presentation today, though, so I’m sharing the slides and video here as well.

That said: please understand that these plans are fluid and are likely to change. As with past releases, we use dates to set targets for milestones, and then we work together to track to those targets. We always judge each milestone release against our basic criteria of quality, performance, and usability, and we only ship when it’s ready.

If you have Firefox or a modern web browser that supports fully open HTML video, you can watch the presentation.

If you’d just like to thumb through the slides yourself, I’ve put them up on SlideShare:

As always we’re interested in your feedback. Use Rypple, or leave a comment here, or if you have specific thoughts about Firefox or our platform development you can join the discussion in:

• Firefox Developer’s Forum
• Mozilla Platform Developer’s Forum
• Mozilla Planning Forum

As many have heard, I’ve been working with various stakeholders in order to put together a product plan for the next version of Firefox. I’m happy to say that it’s at a point where I’d like to present it to the community in order to set expectations and focus, as well as in order to gather more feedback and thoughts.

I will be presenting the product plans on Monday, May 10th at 9pm CET / 3pm ET / 12pm PT / 7am NZT on Air Mozilla. The presentation will be recorded and available for anyone to watch afterwards. During the presentation I will have people watching the #airmozilla chat room on IRC in case people wish to ask questions – please do not hesitate to ask even despite the broadcast delay; I won’t mind going backwards.

The goal of the presentation it to help everyone understand the product vision for the next version of Firefox, and what projects are underway to realize it. I hope you can make it.

The best designers in the world all have one thing in common – a really full trash basket.

Design takes time, patience and iteration. It takes sketching the same ideas out over and over again on a whiteboard, figuring out which bits work and which bits just seemed like good ideas at the time. It takes staring at other people’s ideas and jealously wishing that you’d thought of that, too, and wondering what bits you can take as inspiration without people accusing you of not being original. It takes many soul searching evenings of figuring out if being original is really the right goal.

Sharing those sketches can be hard to do, and often it’s done only in the context of the finished product. In the past when we’ve tried to share early sketches at Mozilla, the enthusiastic (yet often awfully harsh) feedback of the community ends up ending design explorations before they really get started. The result is that designers have waited until more fully fleshed out mockups and designs can be shared, but this comes at the cost of not being as transparent as we feel we should be, and not including our community in our design discussions.

So those of us working on User Experience at Mozilla are going to try something new: a virtual idea journal and sketchbook, which we’ve tentatively called “From the Bikeshed” (as you may imagine, picking a name proved tricky!) It’s a Tumblr microblog doohickey thinger that we’ll all be posting to throughout the days and weeks to come. It’s only been active for a few hours, and we’ve already started really filling it up.

The astute will quickly notice some things:

1. It’s really random. There’s really no rules to what type of content will get posted here. We’re sharing sketches, whiteboard diagrams, iterations of high fidelity mockups, half formed ideas, articles that we found interesting and relevant, even images or photographs that inspired us.
2. There is little context being offered. This is intentional. When we have more context to give, we’ll write a blog post, but for now, this is our design stream of consciousness. When we’re done with a meeting or sketching out something cool, we’ll post it right away without cleaning it up.
3. There is no place to leave comments. This is less intentional, but while we figure out how to enable comments on Tumblr, we’re also going to think about what sort of comments we want to enable. As always, people should feel free to give us feedback in the dev-usability group.
4. Some of the stuff has nothing to do with Mozilla. Yup, and that’s healthy. The best ideas often come from thinking about how to apply other solutions to your problems, so we often go around looking at other problems in order to figure out how to solve our own.

So far it’s been really freeing and enjoyable for us all to start sharing this stuff with you, and hopefully you like it, too. Thanks to Alex Limi for setting up the Tumblr and getting us rolling.

I’ve spent the past week speaking with community members at development and product management meetings, as well as speaking with members of the technical press about the upcoming release of Firefox 3.6, which I truly believe to be the best browser for users. Of course everyone wants to know what’s next for Mozilla, and what the future looks like. Despite doing my best to be as clear as possible, what gets written can be more or less accurate.

The rumours of Firefox 3.7’s demise have been greatly exaggerated. Nobody’s planning on “dumping” features or the hard work of our passionate and tireless community.

The shape of the Internet changes every day. Our mission is to develop the best open source implementations of web technologies and ship them in an excellent browser so that our users and the entire Web can benefit. That means always thinking about how we can deliver technology as efficiently and quickly as possible. Sometimes it means challenging our assumptions.

One assumption we’ve had for a long time is that the only way to ship new technology – such as improvements to downloadable web fonts or support for new standards like CSS, SVG and WebGL – was through a full Firefox version update. Until recently, our infrastructure prevented us from being able to be as agile as we would have needed to be in order to deliver something isolated like the “Lorentz” project (which aims to improve product stability and security by running plugins in their own process) to our users. Now that we have better test automation and the ability to develop on project branches, we can better isolate changes with continuous integration testing, nightly builds and the ability to deliver smaller pieces continuously through the regular maintenance cycle (“minor updates”) of a product. This means that we can, without the user being disrupted or disturbed, improve stability, security, and capability for the 25% of the Internet users who browse using Firefox. One day they’ll start up their web browser and it will be better. Maybe it will crash less, maybe it will be improve typography support on the web.

This is a powerful change, but we must also be careful to keep users in control of their software. Improving the open video engine is something we should feel comfortable doing, as it preserves (but improves!) the existing user functionality. Changing the way the browser looks or interacts with users is something we should avoid doing. I think of it this way: if I take my car in for service and it comes out with better fuel efficiency, that’s great. If my gearshift has changed location, I’d be pretty surprised and upset. We shouldn’t be doing anything in a maintenance release that could leave a user surprised and upset, period.

So instead of thinking of “Firefox 3.7″ and “Firefox 4.0″ and being rigid and proscriptive about what technology improvements will come in which specific months, I’m encouraging us all to think about what we’re trying to improve, and how those improvements can be most efficiently delivered to our users and the Internet. Improvements and support for new technology originally slated for Firefox 3.7 in a draft roadmap long ago may now find their way into users’ hands even earlier. Risky interactive changes that could benefit from multiple iterations and betas can safely do so without worrying about “missing the boat.”

Software development is chaotic, and due to the open nature of our community you (and the press) are getting to see exactly how the sausages are made. It may look like a bloody mess at the start, but once it starts to take shape it’s obvious that you’re making something delicious.