Going forward, the Firefox product development team will be making a stronger effort to communicate about the projects that we’re working on, what sort of progress we made over the past week, and what we’re thinking of doing over the next few weeks. We’ve got a template of sorts, and while I suspect it’ll vary from person to person, you should expect to hear about:

• Progress: the major goings-on within a project area for the past week; “not much” is a perfectly acceptable update here, and quite a valuable one as it helps us understand when projects are getting stuck or slowed down.
• Loose threads: patches can linger in review queues, projects can get stuck waiting on feedback, documentation can go unwritten, but all of those things should be listed as loose threads so that we can make sure we tie them up.
• Next target: this should list the next set of objectives (patches, designs, decisions) and an estimate of when they are to be completed.
• Next steps: a recommendation of whether work on the project should continue, or be shelved for now, or be killed outright, as well as any insights into future directions.

You can keep tabs on an overview of all the projects that the team is engaged on, and of course, come and chat with us about the projects and how to get involved.

I’ll likely give slightly different reports, focusing on an overview of the major Firefox product management happenings over the past week. For instance, this week would probably look something like this:

• Firefox 3.0.13 and Firefox 3.5.2 were shipped to users on Monday.
• At Tuesday’s Developer’s Meeting we discussed the upcoming Firefox 3.6 Alpha 1 release, as well as when infallable malloc should land in the tree and whether or not we should ship a subset of the jQuery libraries with the Mozilla platform.
• At Wednesday’s Delivery Meeting we talked about how the mozilla-1.9.2 branch would likely be cut early next week, and how we could help users running older, insecure versions of Adobe Flash update themselves to the latest version.
• I gathered some more input on the product roadmap, a deliverable that I am extremely behind in delivering
• A post-mortem was held on the Firefox 3.5.2 and 3.0.13 release
• Firefox 3.6 Alpha 1 is set to be released late Friday afternoon

I’m not as sure if my overviews will be as interesting, so please feel free to leave a comment if there’s more or less of a certain type of information you’d like to see from me in particular.

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