Mike Beltzner: Firefox.next: moving faster

Last weekend I was at MozCamp EU 2009 where I spoke with people there about the future of Firefox, and why I believe we need to accelerate our pace of delivery. This isn?t news to anyone who?s been on development or delivery calls for the past few months, or working on blocker bugs for the upcoming Firefox 3.6 release, but I wanted to add some context and structure around why I feel this to be increasingly important.

There?s the obvious challenge of competing with not one but three industry giants. This is the competition we wanted, the competition we created, and the competition that has benefited the Internet and all of its users. It?s what we set out to do as a community. The new challenge I see is ensuring that we don?t let the open web technology stack become turned into a commodity. The competition in the next 2 years will be about how the technology used to create exciting, rich, interactive experiences online is developed.

At the same time, Jay Sullivan, Chris Beard, Mike Shaver, myself, and many other people have been working on expressing a structure for understanding how to build a strong direction that can be used to draw a roadmap for the future of Mozilla products. The two topics are obviously related: in order to move as quickly and efficiently, we need to know where we?re going.

I?ve embedded (and linked to) my presentation below; I put it on SlideShare.net* yesterday and the editors there bumped it to the front page, which is exciting to me as it means that the messages we?re putting forward are resonating with people.

I expect that the roadmap will evolve over time, and will be working with many people in the Mozilla project to add more detail in the coming weeks and months.

(* yes, I realize that there?s an irony to these slides being shared through a Flash-based viewer; I put the slides together using Apple Keynote, and the export to HTML version really doesn?t work so well.)

(edited: Saturday, October 10th for clarity)

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