Most of you have probably heard by now of the argument between Dave Winer (of Scripting News fame) and Blake Ross (of Firefox fame). If you haven’t, Winer got cross because he thought that Ross (and Firefox generally) were disregarding users. From Scripting News:
I would be happy to work with the Firefox people. But I will never support product developers talking to users the way Ross talked to us yesterday. I will always speak out against it. Their fight is not ours, and the fight is not even useful to them, it’s all a distraction.
Blake Ross answered:
During the discussion, Dave Winer stood up and asked caustically why I wasn’t discussing Firefox’s future and how it will help users. The answer is simple: I wasn’t leading a Q&A about Firefox. I didn’t sense that the other 399 people in the room wanted me to use our 30 minutes reciting a publicly available Firefox 2 roadmap, particularly given the three key principles for Gnomedex 6: engage the audience in a discussion; keep the discussion on track; and avoid product pitches.
They’ve made up now, and looking back I can’t help but think that Dave Winer was completely misguided. For all the great things he’s done for the Web, like RSS and pioneering blogging, he does make mistakes sometimes. A couple of main reasons;
Firefox adds innovations in every release. For example, live bookmarks. No-one else had ever put those in a product before. They represent completely new thinking, but better still, thinking which actually helps users. A completely streamlined proccess, in which Firefox discovers the feed, tells you about it, and lets you easily subscribe. Once Firefox had that innovation, its developers didn’t just sit there feeling smug. They developed it, so in Bon Echo (Firefox 2.0) that feed discovery engine not only lets you subscribe using live bookmarks, but the vast majority of feed readers, both online and offline. If that’s not developing for the user, I don’t know what is.
The other reason is that Firefox, as a massive open source project, is inherently transparent, as Blake Ross points out:
A Firefox 2.0 wiki has been available on the web for about a year now. The project has a public bug tracking database, video blogs, meeting notes, forums, newsgroups and chatrooms that are frequented by virtually every current Firefox developer (which I am not), most of whom have blogs.
So not only do the Firefox dev team innovate on behalf of the users, they also tell everyone about it.
That brings me on to the post title. Niall Kennedy has a great simple look at what is happening in Firefox over the next 9 months. Although you can find this all on the Mozilla website, it’s quite nice to have it all rounded into one concise blog post.
