‘Mozilla: For the Record’-A New Mozilla Blog
Posted by Kirk M on 12 Feb 2008 | Tagged as: Firefox/Thunderbird
Mozilla, whose I site I’ve always thought as being somewhat difficult to navigate around and finding information tailored toward the average user and other interested parties, has decided to start a portal of said information in the form of a new Wordpress blog called Mozilla: For the Record. In the opening post by Asa Dotzler, the Director of Community Development at Mozilla, he describe’s the site’s intent:
For the Record is a Mozilla community program for discovering, cataloging, and responding to what’s being said about Mozilla online.
We also want to make it easier for people to talk/report/blog about Mozilla by providing a collection of answers to frequently asked questions and responses to common misconceptions or mistakes.
As we go forward, this program will also help develop spokespeople who will be able to deliver the Mozilla story more effectively and in more places.
Apparently one of the main reasons for this new blog about Mozilla and how things work there stems from the plethora of articles and posts written about the upcoming release of Firefox 3, some accurate, some not so accurate (my latest post about Firefox 3 beta 3 was one of the links in the second post at the site but whether I’m considered one of the more accurate ones or not remains to be seen).
In the second post called When it’s Ready, the title of which reflects Mozilla’s commendable policy of releasing milestones of their popular software such as Firefox only "when it’s ready" and not before, Asa asked Mike Beltzner, the head developer behind Firefox 3, to explain the philosophy behind how Mozilla actually runs it’s release schedule and adjustments thereof for purposes of getting the best quality possible into any given release:
The first and most important thing to state is that we, as a project, are quality driven, not date driven. We use dates to set targets for milestones, and we strive to put out the best milestones possible, but due to the changing nature of the web, we always judge each milestone against our basic criteria of quality, performance and usability. The other factor how we rely on community use and testing of our betas to help us judge their quality. Without our close-to-million strong beta audience, we couldn’t get the usage and testing data required to provide us with the confidence to move into a shippable product.
In the context of adding a fourth beta, the decision was between holding beta 3 for some new work being done on performance, usability, and memory use, versus shipping the beta sooner to get testing on the improvements (based on community feedback) from the past month and a half. We decided that the best thing for our beta audience would be to release beta 3 and add another milestone as opposed to holding for the late-braking improvement opportunities. Those will be the basis for our fourth beta.
We all want to ship the best browser possible on the fastest timescale, and we meet weekly to evaluate our current product against the potential improvements we could continue to make. When our quality, usability and performance are solid enough to be called Firefox 3 (as judged by everyone involved in making it) we’ll ship it.
So there you have it. Finally a place to go where one might find accurate and detailed info on how the minds at Mozilla work, pose any questions one might have and find out what’s happening with the software they’re working on so we, the blogger’s of the world, can spread the word far and wide and the word might just have a truer ring to it from now on. Not a bad idea at all if you ask me.
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2 Comments »
on 12 Feb 2008 at 1:46 pm 1.Asa Dotzler said …
Thanks for the post and the comment at the FTR blog.
- A
on 12 Feb 2008 at 2:39 pm 2.KirkM said …
My pleasure, Asa. Glad you’ve taken the step to get the word out to the rest of us. Good deal all around!