The Inside Track on Firefox Development.

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October 24, 2005

EuroOSCON

I spent this past week in Amsterdam, attending O'Reilly's European Open Source Convention at which I spoke about Firefox, and the process we took in bringing Open Source software to the mass market. I had a great time, met a bunch of interesting people who are doing great work across the Open Source world. From Mozilla, Gerv and Axel were there, Axel talking about developing on the Mozilla platform. From Google, Greg Stein, Brian Fitzpatrick and Alex Martelli talked about using Subversion and Python. Zaheda Bhorat participated in a panel discussing women in Open Source. I'm excited I got to meet Karl Fogel - who worked on network capabilities and anonymous checkout for CVS, which is one of the fundamental building blocks that many open source projects (including Mozilla) are based on and what allowed people like myself to get started.

My talk gave a little history to Mozilla, starting from the 3/31/98 source release, information about the development process for Firefox (with special emphasis on understanding users, establishing global overall design direction, and being resolute about sticking to the principles of the project), and insight into some of the non-traditional areas where we've had great community involvement including the visual identity and branding, community marketing and so on. It also briefly covered some of the improvements coming in Firefox 1.5. Once my slides are uploaded to developer.mozilla.org I'll post a link to them here.

Congrats to Nat and everyone else at O'Reilly for making this conference happen. I learned a lot.

I've decided British Airways isn't my favorite airline, and Heathrow isn't my favorite airport. The ground staff there were daft - choosing to board a 747 in one giant herd rather than by rows, rude, and the airport pretty much sucked. Service in the air wasn't all that great either - ignored by the flight attendants on our aisle who seemed more interested in flirting with one another than serving the customers. Next time I think I'll fly KLM - their service last time was pretty good.

Finally, I just want to say welcome back to the United States to Ian Hickson, who joined Google recently to continue his work on next generation web technologies; and again to Mike Pinkerton and Mark Mentovai, Mozilla contributors who are joining our team here to help make Mozilla software better.

Posted by ben at October 24, 2005 8:46 AM

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