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As sent to our Mozilla colleagues, and for the benefit of the wider community, from Madhava and me:

Hello everyone,

A friendly reminder that your Canadian colleagues (aka: “Team Elizabeth”) will not be at work on Thursday, July 1st in order to bring our annual tribute of maple-cured beaver pelts to Her Royal Highness, Elizabeth II (not the boat). In fact, Her Majesty Our Queen has graced us with her presence in the nation’s capital in honour of our 143rd year as a Nation-Of-Sorts; the symbolism of this particular anniversary of our embarrassing exit from the British Empire is, we hope, obvious.

National Contrition Day is much like the American July 4th, only smaller and too soon. Most of us will be spending the day, as is tradition, apologizing profusely for our national pseudo-independence as well as enjoying a smaller, humbler display of national pride. Instead of fireworks, we hold candles aloft and softly say “bang” – so as not to frighten any people or woodland animals – while repressing a smile.

We’re sorry for any imposition this might cause.

cheers and apologies,
Your Canadians

Many of us are taking the Friday, as well. See you all at the Summit!

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.

I’ve been brewing a blog post on the topic for a while, but have held off because, well, let’s face it: you’ve read enough opinions on the iPad to last you a lifetime, and the thing hasn’t even been available to touch for more than a week. I certainly haven’t touched one, as I’m currently sequestered in the technology backwater known as “Canada.”

I will confidently say this, though: I am 100% sure that it’s a fantastic experience. I know that when I touch one I will smile, and when I play with the carefully crafted interactions they will feel natural and physical in a way that computing only has when carefully composted into some science fiction movie. I will feel like I’m touching the future.

And while Alex Payne summarized what I’m about to say far more eloquently, I draw the same conclusion: Apple’s restrictions on the device will end up slowing the transition to this new future of interaction between man and machine. By restricting what people can do on this beautiful piece of hardware, they will limit their market to those who are willing to pay the required fees and hitch their digital destinies to Apple’s bandwagon. This is not the best way to move the technology world forward, and that’s my frustration with Apple and with this device.

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 found myself with 1-2lbs of fresh, local chicken wings and a desire to BBQ them. This super simple sweet and spicy marinade came from the masterminds at Weber:

• 1/2 cup ketchup
• 1/4 cup balsamic vinegar
• 2 tablespoons of dark brown sugar
• 4 teaspoons of granulated garlic
• 2 teaspoons chili powder
• 2 teaspoons paprika
• 2 teaspoons Dijon mustard
• 3 teaspoons Tabasco sauce
• 4 teaspoons Worcestershire sauce

Whisk all that stuff together in a mixing bowl. Smell and taste to make sure you get both “sweet” and “spicy” out of it, adjust as you see fit. Give your wings a cold water rinse, pat dry with paper towel, then toss into a big ziploc bag with the marinade. Press the air out of the bag, make sure the marinade coats all the wings, and let it all sit in the fridge for 3-6 hours.

Heat up the BBQ to medium (350F, give or take 25 degrees). Take the wings out of the bag and spray or brush on a little bit of oil to keep them from sticking to the grill; you can also oil the grill. First sear the wings (2-3 min per side) using direct heat – this gets nice grill marks on them, too. Then move them to indirect heat and roast for 8-10 minutes, making sure that they’re cooked before serving.

Update: I can now confirm that this results in delicious chicken wings.

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.

Several of my colleagues flew to the USA this morning on business, and were thusly made guinea pigs for the new TSA security rules. They reported longer than usual delays, and more invasive than usual complimentary massages from security workers, but thankfully reports of random beatings were highly overstated.

Discussion on IRC led me to the Air Canada page detailing the new travel restrictions whereupon I found this lovely gem:

When travelling from the U.S., normal allowance applies both for carry-on and checked baggage.

I have been (surprisingly, for those who know me) more patient than others with the latest spate of restrictions. Sure, I found it a little sad that passengers would be prevented from having anything on their laps (including blankets) during the final hour of flight only. Of course I thought it was ridiculous that someone thought that security could be served by prohibiting pilots from letting passengers know exactly where along their flight route they were at any given time. Carry-on baggage restrictions and mandatory pat-downs will cramp my usual swift transit through airports, but along with locks on cockpit doors they seem to be the only sensible and potentially preventative new security measures introduced since 9/11.

But to discover that these measures are only being applied to flights inbound to the USA and not those departing? It is by far the strongest proof that the TSA is not interested in preventing an attack, but rather interested in covering its ass. At best, it’s incompetence that makes a security agency believe that an attacker wouldn’t be happy to destroy an aircraft filled with Americans departing for a vacation as opposed to returning home, at worst, it’s an incredible arrogance to believe that all other nations’ borders are permeable and theirs is not. Especially in light of the intelligence failings that led to the completely preventable attempt of the “jockstrap jihadi.”

We all know that airport security in most countries is a farce. The TSA (and CATSA, it’s northern relative) are unwilling to throw out their handbooks and pay attention to what has been proven to work. Until they do, all we can do is laugh and dance along to this lovely tune that’s being fiddled for us at airports most of the world ’round.

As we get close to ship date, my calendar tends to fill up quite a bit as I meet with various team members to go over final checklists as well as my friends in the technical press to talk about what’s new and exciting in the world of Firefox. This has left me with a busier than usual week:

If I’m not as available as you’re used to, please accept my apologies in advance and send me an email, instead.

Oh, and if you haven’t already, do give the Firefox 3.6 Release Candidate a thorough try. Since I’ve been using this version since the alpha releases, it’s easy for me to forget how much of an improvement it is over what we were so proud to publish only 6 months ago. With built-in support for Personas, vastly improved stability and security, and new technology that improves the capabilities of the web as well as the speed with which we bring it to you, I’m pretty sure that Firefox 3.6 will be a big hit.

I have, several times before, made myself (and perhaps you) a promise to step up on my soapbox more frequently than recent history might suggest was common. A funny thing happens with those promises. The collective weight of their disappointment results in a self-imposed burden to – this time – reel you back in with witty prose, insightful comment, and let’s be honest, a caliber of writing to which I may never have been able to stake a claim. The result is that I start many essays which yield nothing but the modern equivalent of crumpled balls of paper at the bottom of the wastepaper basket.

If, as Eaves suggests, a web log is a gymnasium for writing, I make use of it even less than I do the local JCC to which I have a membership. This is astonishing, since I think I managed to visit that Semitic sweat  factory maybe 6 or 7 times last year.

The problem, of course, is that I don’t want to disappoint you. I assume that you’re a discerning audience (after all, you ended up here! heyooo!) and therefore I do not wish to waste your time. Halfway through writing a new missive I would seize up, convinced that your frustration with my poorly written self-indulgent bullshit would cause real damage to our relationship. In short: I would get stage fright and chicken right the hell out.

The solution: I’m not writing for you, anymore, for a while. I am writing for me. I will be doing it more often, and I assure you, the quality will suffer for that. I will spare aggregation utilities like Planet Firefox and Planet Mozilla from my mauvais mots but if you are still subscribed to this channel through an RSS reader (do people still use those in the age of Twitter and Facebook?) I apologize in advance for the increase in volume. I will not take it personally if you choose to withdraw.