Mozilla Labs

“Wow!” is all I can say. I didn’t quite expect this level of response to the recent Labs survey about areas for investigation but I’m really thrilled to have your feedback and participation. Here’s the survey summary.

As of August 30th, we received approximately 1800 completed surveys. Here are some of the stats:

• Almost 20% provided comments in the survey itself or as a blog comment
• About 4.2% felt that there was nothing from the listed browsers that was interesting (or simply provided comments but didn’t check any feature)
• In terms of browser interestingness, here’s how the browsers stacked up. Opera (80%), Safari (71%), Flock (38%), IE7 (70%). (Interesting being defined as one or more features from existing browsers was selected as “interesting”.)

For features, here is the top quartile of features ranked by percentage of total votes received:

Below is the full vote result:

We’ll be using all your survey and blog comments to help populate the Ideas area of Labs. Stay tuned. There were many comments essentially saying that people didn’t want to see Firefox bloated with extraneous features…I think that message came loud and clear.

Off the topic of Labs form and structure, I’d like to get your opinion on general directions and areas for investigation.

Sherman Dickman has initiated a fruitful discussion around Firefox themes and product strategy in the mozilla.dev.planning newsgroup. There is lots of interesting efforts going on in the browser space right now. What areas being showcased by other Internet client products today should Mozilla explore?

I understand that there is a rich set of functionality already implemented by the myriad of Firefox extensions. I want to try to examine broad areas of functionality rather than details of feature operations. Let’s see if this thought experiment proves to be informative.

It’s four questions only. If you find the survey too stifling or is missing something, please just add your comments at the end of the blog post.

Admin Note: I’ve added a new look to MozLabs Blog. Thanks go out to Deb Richardson for sharing with me her Wordpress theme from Mozilla Developer Center (MDC).

Thank you for the feedback on the categories and popularity system. I’ll try to incorporate many of your recommendations in the next iteration of those. For categories, it looks like we’ll need to create special ones for Labs since many of the ideas and tests will not fall neatly into the buckets that AddOns currently has. It was almost unanimous that a tag-based organizational system was the way to go. For popularity, I agree with many of the comment but especially with the sentiment that we need more than Yes/No/Bury/Digg around an idea, it needs to have discussion and reasoning. So, I’ll iterate more and present some alternatives as some of you have suggested.

Admin Note: Wordpress was configured so that first-time comment contributors would have to provide their email. I disabled that, so your comments show up automatically now.

One significant part of Mozilla Labs will be the Ideas Area where we will encourages contribution of great ideas from the community. Currently, there is a moderately active newsgroup (mozilla.wishlist) where ideas are flowing. For Labs, I was thinking of something a bit more structured. But how much structure?

Two aspects that I would like feedback on:

1) How to track and categorize the ideas?

A forum/newsgroup or linear list structure is hard to navigate, so I was thinking of creating browseable categories. Under each category would appear Idea items and discussion around each of those. Should the categories map identically to what’s currently on Add-ons (See “All Categories”) with a few more. Should we use tags instead so that items can appear in multiple categories?

2) How to have the best/most popular ideas rise to the top?

I know Mozilla is known for having a collaborative process that surfaces the best ideas. How does this work? Give me your thoughts. Shall we use voting? 1-10 rating for ideas? Use a process like digg/bury from digg.com? Give each community member 1000 points and have them allocate their points across their favorite ideas? Simply track the level of discussion and activity around a topic area? Other?

This web log presents updates from the new Mozilla Corporation effort, Mozilla Labs. Labs is a place for “exploring the future of the web experience.” The discussion around Labs started with the informed musing of Mitchell Baker, Chief Lizard Wrangler, and the need for prototypes in the Mozilla product development process.

To get the process started, some brainstorming sessions were held with various members of the Mozilla Community. The notes and ideas are being incorporated into the various Mozilla Labs resources. I have created a Wiki where the first order of business is to help clarify the goals and objective of Mozilla Labs. I have uploaded a short presentation that reviews the highlights.

I encourage you to provide me feedback through comments and editing of the Wiki pages with ideas that you think would be appropriate for Labs as well as companies that Mozilla Labs should encourage to participate. I also have a huge list of To Do’s for Mozilla Labs, feel free to add to my pile.

Finally, I expect Mozilla Labs to evolve drastically over time and you can help shape its direction. Thanks.