Firefox 3 — The “End Game”

We’re getting very, very close to the release of Firefox 3. It’s an odd time around the Firefox part of the Mozilla project. Most of the Firefox and platform engineers are mostly done. The long, long push to get hundreds of issues triaged and resolved is over. Our first Release Candidate is out. Maybe we’ll do another release candidate, that depends on what we learn over the next short period. And if we do there will be a burst of activity. But the vast bulk of the engineering work is done. These engineers are already defining and working on the next projects, from Firefox to mobile. But there’s also a sense of waiting. Firefox 3 isn’t done until we’ve completed a massive test cycle, and there’s a constant and growing throbbing in the air as we work through the final stages.

Meanwhile, other groups of people are in high gear. The QA team is one. It’s a quiet storm of QA activity right now as we throw every test we’ve got at Firefox 3, looking for any cracks or stress points. It’s a quiet storm only because QA is a well-organized, experienced and highly effective team. Otherwise it would be a wild frenzy. Quite a contrast with the Firefox 1.0 release, where we hand-tested the localized versions up through the day of the launch itself, using an easel size pad of paper covered with a hand-written list of localizations and status updates.

Other engineering teams are hard at work as well. The web development team, for example, making sure sites like addons.mozilla.org are ready to go. The website content teams and localization teams are making sure that the many pages of content are available in the massive number of languages that are part of the Firefox 3 release. This includes both the websites themselves and the “product” pages which are part of Firefox. Build and release is the final stage of the release, so they are also in the thick of things right now.

The marketing team is extraordinarily busy, from community activities to press briefings to creating and distributing all the materials needed to explain Firefox: both new features and the overall pleasure of using Firefox to people who haven’t yet experienced what’s possible with Firefox. It’s a massive undertaking to launch a product with a userbase the size of Firefox. We couldn’t do it without the deep integration of the marketing team with the massive Mozilla community and we’re seeing that at work.

So we’re experiencing extreme levels of activity and performance in giant parts of the Firefox community. That’s combined with an intense sense of pressure building. It’s a little like seeing the first rays of sunshine appear on the horizon, and knowing that blazing ball of summer will appear soon.