Firefox.next: moving faster

October 9, 2009
Posted by beltzner

Firefox.next: moving faster

Last weekend I was at MozCamp EU 2009 where I spoke with people there about the future of Firefox, and why I believe we need to accelerate our pace of delivery. This isn’t news to anyone who’s been on development or delivery calls for the past few months, or working on blocker bugs for the upcoming Firefox 3.6 release, but I wanted to add some context and structure around why I feel this to be increasingly important.

There’s the obvious challenge of competing with not one but three industry giants. This is the competition we wanted, the competition we created, and the competition that has benefited the Internet and all of its users. It’s what we set out to do as a community. The new challenge I see is ensuring that we don’t let the open web technology stack become turned into a commodity. The competition in the next 2 years will be about how the technology used to create exciting, rich, interactive experiences online is developed.

At the same time, Jay Sullivan, Chris Beard, Mike Shaver, myself, and many other people have been working on expressing a structure for understanding how to build a strong direction that can be used to draw a roadmap for the future of Mozilla products. The two topics are obviously related: in order to move as quickly and efficiently, we need to know where we’re going.

I’ve embedded (and linked to) my presentation below; I put it on SlideShare.net* yesterday and the editors there bumped it to the front page, which is exciting to me as it means that the messages we’re putting forward are resonating with people.

(view the presentation on SlideShare.net)

I expect that the roadmap will evolve over time, and will be working with many people in the Mozilla project to add more detail in the coming weeks and months.

(* yes, I realize that there’s an irony to these slides being shared through a Flash-based viewer; I put the slides together using Apple Keynote, and the export to HTML version really doesn’t work so well.)

(edited: Saturday, October 10th for clarity)

5 Comments

Posted Under mozilla

3 Comments

skierpage
October 10, 2009

I didn’t understand this sentence at all: “The new challenge I see is ensuring that we don’t let the open web technology stack become turned into a commodity, with open-like-the-web technologies delivering the promise of exciting, rich, interactive experiences.”
Even if you’re saying that alternative technologies to the web tech stack will be where the coolness is, what’s the harm if they are truly “open-like-the-web technologies”? Your slides suggest “open-like-the-web” is sarcasm, but it’s not clear how it falls short of the web.

The “exciting rich experience” in slide presentation is S5 (HTML + JS + CSS), not Keynote and dopey presentation sites separate from your blog. If only authoring slides in something like Mozilla Composer was a realistic alternative.

Good luck with 3.x 4.x! Firefox nighty builds are reliably functional, so all the branch/review/try server/testing infrastructure seems to be paying off.

Damian
October 11, 2009

I think it’s a good plan!

There’s a large ‘perception’ in the geek world that Chrome is now just more advanced and faster than Firefox. I personally don’t find it a mature enough browser to use, but as time goes on it’s clearly the browser you need to set your benchmarks by and either be on par or above it.

This level of competition should ensure you always keep ahead of everyone else.