The Inside Track on Firefox Development.

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November 9, 2004

Firefox 1.0 - Signed, Sealed, Delivered

By the time you read this, Firefox 1.0 will be gold, and sitting on our web site waiting for you to download it. This is the culmination of over two years worth of herculean work by a great team of people, all dedicated to making the best browser around.

Some thanks are in order. I was going to write a big flowery piece thanking people individually but I know I would forget someone so my thanks instead go out to everyone involved - you all know who you are - from the shoestring team of engineers at the beginning for getting the show on the road, the folk who've come in later and contributed thousands of hours of testing, bug reporting, feature and extension development. Without you Firefox would be a lesser product. For a list of people who I and people around me could think of at the time of shipping, visit Help > About...; Credits.

Usability

Our goal for Firefox has always been to create a stylish, usable browser, making as few compromises has necessary - which was largely possible by being free from commercial constraint. When I design new features, I try to think about what people are trying to accomplish, and design the feature so that it helps them as best possible. This has not always been easy. I've been very demanding of myself and on others that I work with, trying to exact every last ounce of usability of a given scenario. Some tasks that we have worked on have taken a considerable amount of time, much of that time spent fussing over the tiniest of details, details that in the past (when working on the Netscape product line, for example), we would never have been allowed to fret so profusely over. The result is software that works for the most part exactly as you expect it. All your settings, favorites, passwords and other data are brought in from IE, downloading files is easy and free of superfluous prompting, your passwords are entered automatically and slickly managed, just to name a few. These things are not easy, but the quality bar has to be set high to be noticed, and in that department I think our focus on detail has paid dividends.

Identity

Part of the crawl out of the sludge of random-open-source-project-dom is crafting a strong self-image. After a period of uncertainty and shaky product names, we were finally able to secure and trademark Firefox, which upon reflection I think is really the best name we could have given the product. We have been blessed with the talents of a crew of highly skilled graphic designers, producing our official logo, creating a strong look and feel on all platforms, and a fantastic new website which makes it easier than ever before for people to get our software.

Not everyone has agreed with every decision that has been made with the design of the software - that is to be expected with any project, especially an open source one where things are a lot more transparent. I tend to take a big picture view of things, applying the ideaology that the project was created with in the first place to any given situation, trusting the team, and that usually results in something that pleases a lot of people.

Community

While direction, quality standards and overall architecture are generally set down by central leadership, a series of diverse communities have sprung up around Firefox, doing all manner of things including bug fixing, feature development, community marketing, documentation writing, localization and website management. The communities surrounding Mozilla and Firefox are one of the factors that give this software the energy that cause more and more people to want to use it and become involved. With help from community volunteers we have been able to meet deadlines, build in features and core functionality we may not otherwise have had, extend the reach of our software to new markets we would not have seen, and so on.

Wrap Up

This day has come a lot later than any of us originally planned, but that's the way software goes. I've learned a lot about a huge number of things in the process, have had the opportunity to talk to a lot of different people about their experiences with the software, etc. It's been a long road but we're finally here. No software is perfect, we did not fix every bug, implement every feature, but what we did do was create what we believe to be the best browser around. I want to thank you all again for the support over the past few years. In the not-too-distant future, I will be posting a technical postmortem of the 1.0 release process beginning February 2004, which may be of interest to the technical types. Now, for some beer, some sleep, and then onward to Firefox2!

— Ben Goodger, Lead Engineer.

Posted by ben at November 9, 2004 1:00 AM

©1997-2006 Ben Goodger. All Rights Reserved.
Opinions expressed here are my own, and not those of any organization that I may be affiliated with.
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