Mozilla Firefox Development Charter
Ben Goodger (11/28/2004)
Today, the goal of the Firefox project is to deliver the best possible
browsing experience to the widest possible set of people. We aim to do
this in part by:
- Delivering the right set of features - not too many
or too few (the goal is to create a useful browser, not a
minimal browser)
- Making as few compromises as possible where user experience is
concerned. We will not compromise the main line UI to placate
an element of the community. Usability is a large area consisting
not only of the things one typically considers related to the
user experience such as the design of dialog boxes and windows,
but also things such as interaction design (looking at how
users try and accomplish a task, noting the paths they take and
attempting to optimize those paths) and performance (reaction
speed from a piece of software is important so as not to annoy
the user - perceived speed is often more important than actual
speed).
- Develop and maintain an extension system to allow for research
into new areas without affecting the core and to allow for
techies, early adopters, web developers and other specific
communities to customize their browsers to suit their specific
needs without affecting usability or download size for the
mass market.
- Retaining a tight command and control hierarchy. UI design is
not a committee driven process. Application design must be
nimble and testing is better than discussion, so:
- Make changes quickly and then get them to people so that we
can refine them based on observation of user interactions.
- Deliver software for Windows, Mac OS X and Linux, with the goal
of integrating as slickly as possible into each of those
systems.
- Be, if possible, a vehicle for emerging Mozilla platform APIs
including XULRunner, which will allow application developers
a means to deploy useful software to people that is not
necessarily tied to a particular operating system.
- Keeping the download size down - to less than 5.0MB on Windows
for the installer.