Tomorrow the Mozilla Foundation is scheduled to release Firefox 1.0. If previous releases are any indication, it will be received with high praise from punters and pundits alike. Much of the credit belongs to Firefox's lead engineer, Aucklander Ben Goodger, who talked to Computerworld on a recent visit home.
Ben Goodger writes:
We're turning onto the final stretch now for QA, all of the blockers have been resolved. There may be remaining issues, and we're looking to identify them in the next 24-48 hours. Please hammer the nightly builds. We are conducting twice-daily Aviary meetings in the War Room at The Mozilla Foundation, and will be tracking nominations closely. We are not considering anything at this point that isn't a serious crash or dataloss issue, so don't bother nominating polish/non-blocker bugs. The criteria now is: "would this bug cause us to miss our 11/9 ship date?"
The good news is that 1.0 will try to update your extension from the update site automaticly.
Goodger says this approach is analagous to luxury car manaufacturers. “You think they could have saved a lot of money and made a cheaper car, but it won’t feel as nice and you wouldn’t recommend it to somebody else.”
In the computing world, Goodger uses Apple as inspiration.
“I have a huge amount of respect for what Apple does. Every product they make is so polished and so well thought-out. Their marketing is too, although you don’t see that so much in New Zealand.”
Read Computerworld Interview with Ben Goodger in Preparation for Mozilla Firefox 1.0
