Categories: Firefox

Rapidity

Last week we released a new version of Firefox. We shipped on time, 6 weeks after the last update, making it our first true rapid release milestone. There was cake. Now that we know that we’re capable of this velocity, I’d like to revisit the reasons why it’s important, and the lessons we’ve already learned.

Mission drives Mozilla. People sometimes forget that we’re a non-profit, that our only job is to make the Web a better place. Rapid release advances our mission in important ways. We get features and improvements to users faster. We get new APIs and standards out to web developers faster. We are delivering on the promise of the web at web speed.

Small, frequent releases improve quality, too. Engineers in the Mozilla community regularly say things now like “I don’t like not understanding this piece, let’s back it out and I’ll catch the next train.” We move deliberately. We don’t rush. And, even though it sounds like a contradiction, when we take our time we go faster.

There’s a great deal for us to be proud of, but we also need to be humble. This change was hard for us to make, and it’s been hard for some of our supporters, too. We have been glib or dismissive in the way we’ve communicated about parts of it. We live rapid release daily, and that makes it easier for us to see past the problems. We are also tenacious about the necessity of our new schedule, and tenacity can be mistaken for obstinacy.

We, everyone in the Mozilla community, all of us, need to communicate with clarity and sensitivity. We need to help the people who support our mission to understand why these changes are essential. We need to keep listening, and adjusting as we learn. We need to, and we will.

The push to ship faster isn’t some kind of software machismo. We push ourselves to ship faster because the web is under threat. Amazing and innovative people are doing amazing and innovative things and right now they have a choice: build for the web, or build for the walled gardens. The web can win that fight.

The open web is the most amazing, universal communication and distribution platform ever built. To win, the web needs to be agile and responsive. To help it, we need to be agile and responsive, too. That’s why rapid release matters.

Johnathan Nightingale
Director of Firefox Engineering