Five years at Mozilla

As I write this I’m sitting on a Virgin flight to SFO from Boston. Strangely enough, exactly 5 years and a day ago I was also on a Virgin flight to SFO from London. Back then I was flying out to start my new job at Mozilla. Earlier that year I had started to get antsy in my previous job and when Doug T heard about it he asked if I’d be interested in coming to Mozilla. My first thought was “there’s no way I could hack it at Mozilla.” In the previous 2 years I had been working with Doug T on Minimo and was consistently impressed and humbled by by the abilities of everyone I had interacted with at Mozilla.

My second thought was that I really had no interest in working on Joey. About a year ago the MoCo had officially stopped working on Minimo, not believing it was worth investing limited time and energy into a mobile browser. But Schrep was pretty convincing in telling me that Mozilla had changed its mind and was now serious about investing in a mobile browser and building a team to do it.

So I flew out, interviewed, got the job and the rest is history. We’ve had 3 great 1.0-like Fennec releases since then (side note: the name Fennec came from a google search for “small fox”), plus one aborted release for Windows Mobile which got to Alpha before Microsoft pulled the plug on Windows Mobile.

First we released a single process XUL-based product in January 2010. Responsiveness was an one of the biggest complaints about that release, so we largely rewrote the product to be multiprocess, but still XUL based. We released that as Firefox 4.0 for Android and Maemo May 2011. That release also got us on the same shipping schedule as desktop Firefox. We stayed on the rapid release schedule for 6 more releases, but eventually it became obvious that our start up time and memory footprint (which was causing Android to kill us in the background) were preventing us from being a competitive product on Android. So we re-wrote the product once more. This time we went with a native UI, which could come up fast so the user can start interacting with the product right away. We also switched back from the multiprocess architecture to a single process architecture, but retained our responsiveness by making that one process more multithreaded.

Looking back at the last 5 years is pretty satisfying at this point. Its been a winding road, but we’ve wound up in a great place. Firefox for Android is a product that I feel great telling my friends about. Even still there are plenty of exciting things coming down the road and some great challenges we need to wrap our heads around.