Via Rob Sayre:

The Pencil Project is pretty awesome, and has a ton of potential.  This took me two minutes to build.

Quite some time ago we announced that we would be fully supporting distro Firefox packages, in conjunction with the distributions and their maintainers.  This continues to be the case, even though we’re still shipping official builds of our own to make sure everyone on Linux can experience the goodness that is Firefox 3.  We’re going to be working on web site changes to help users connect back to their distro package where appropriate.

Much has been made of the issues related to fsync, and this is where the distro connection comes in especially handy.  We’ve already received a firm committment from Red Hat/Fedora, Ubuntu, and Novell/OpenSUSE to ship the mitigation patch from the bug, if we do not otherwise need to do an RC2 and thus have a chance to take it in Firefox 3 proper.  We’re going to continue to reach out to the rest of the distros shipping Firefox to roll in the patch.  This means we can ship sooner, while still ensuring the vast majority of Linux users get the patch.  I’d like to thank Alexander Sack, Chris Aillon, and Michael Wolf for being highly responsive to our requests.

Five years ago, I had just left IBM, and was pretty unsure about what I really wanted to do next.  I didn’t know whether I wanted to switch my goals back to software development, or stay on the IT track I’d picked before the bubble blew.  Firebird 0.6 came out that day, and I found some bugs, so I started poking around Bugzilla.  Things sort of snowballed from there, as I got more involved with QA, and later fixing UI bugs.  I ended up hacking cookies with dwitte, and front end with Ben and Blake, and I found myself more and more involved and enmeshed with Mozilla.

Its pretty fantastic to look back at those five years, from the uncertainty of the Foundation startup, through the huge buzz around Firefox 1.0 and the launch, the growth and maturity of the organization through the challenges of shipping follow-on releases, all the way up until today, where we expect to ship the first release candidate for Firefox 3.  I can say honestly that its the best release we’ve ever done, and I’m excited about getting it to 170 million people as soon as possible.

What’s most interesting to me is that we’ve now grown enough that we’re no longer aiming for It Just Works.  We’ve done that already, so now we’re aiming for the holy grail of Does What I Mean.  Its a much higher bar, but that’s where we need to go next.  We need to do it on mobile, we need to do it on the desktop, and we need to figure out how help people do it everywhere.  And that is my new Five Year Plan.

I hope you’ll all come along for the ride.

Those marked as “yes” for active in Fx3 are going to be the indivuals in the credits for Firefox 3.  Please take a look and mail me with suggested changes ASAP.  Please don’t comment in the bug, I don’t want anyone put in an awkward position…

As a reminder, the criteria is anyone who made a substantial contribution to shipping Firefox 3, from design and engineering, to critical support people, and marketing/PR.  There isn’t a hard line, or a truly objective set of criteria, everything comes down to my discretion as the product owner.