Scott's posted a post-slashdotting update over at his blog. More good stuff. I have to excerpt part of it here but you should definitely head over there and read the rest of whta he's got to say, as well as the comments there.
On ui design. The mistake we�re all making, myself included, is focusing on designing for ourselves. Designing for ourselves isn�t a sin, but if the game you want to win is market share, you have to work very hard to make sure your needs and wants jive with people who�s needs are less sophisticated than ours (Which is most of the planet�s web browsing poulation). Lots of folks said �my mom can do X� or �my friends can do Y� as justifications of how their experience matches everyone elses, but I think we�d all agree how fragile and anecdotal those claims are. Your mom might be a rocket scientist, and your friend might have watched you do whatever it is before they tried to do it themselves. I�m not saying I�m right, you�re wrong, or that your pants are on fire. Instead I�m saying that design arguments, ui design arguments in particular, can and should stand on firmer ground. There should be an essay somewhere called �how to have a meaningful UI design argument� (finger on nose).I couldn't agree more.
One of the biggest challenges we've faced over the last few years in designing and building Firefox was to make a browser, not that we as developers would personally love to use, but that "regular people" would love to use. In the very early days, that decision seemed to mean that we'd sacrifice a lot of the power and heavy user audience who would cringe (and more) every time we trimmed or removed a feature or a preference.
Our big compromise, and one that's not only helped us hold on to our power users but grow that audience, was the extension model. It has allowed us to design and build a browser that meets the needs of the largest possible audience and still satisfy our more advanced audiences.
A wonderful side-effect of this is that we now have the largest and most innovating feature development and testing community in the world. The extension architecture first enabled the community to restore old Mozilla features and preferences, but I think more importantly, this Firefox platform provides the community with the opportunity to react very quickly to a changing web and to design powerful and innovative new features that couldn't have been imagined when Firefox was being initially designed -- we see this with extensions that help users deal with new kinds of content (think of adblock and greasemonkey,) and hook up to new and exciting web services (think about all the del.icio.us extensions, Gmail addons, and scores of other website integration extensions,) and much more.
