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).