Mozilla Prototypes

Goals

The goal of Mozilla "Prototypes" (MP) is to augment the existing product development process by offering a low-barrier-to-entry environment for discussion, creation and proof-of-concept testing for Mozilla technologies. MP will be operated as an advanced technology group with a heavy implementation and usability focus rather than a pure research laboratory. It will be a public showcase for some of the innovation emanating from Mozilla and the community.

MP will be mostly a web site and a brand of Mozilla where experimentation is valued.

hosting extensions, experimental builds, and potentially new packagings or new products, so that interested users can obtain and use them, and, just as important, a forum for collecting feedback, suggestions, etc. Mozilla Labs will be mostly virtual, in that there won't be a cadre of researchers here at Mozilla doing the work (at least not for now), and we'll be working with partners to do experiments that we think are relevant and warrant consideration for building into future product releases.

Background

The Mozilla Foundation and Corporation have established goals of promoting choice and innovation on the Internet. The current set of products and technologies that Mozilla offers are incredible feats of engineering but are often encumbered by schedules and deadlines, backwards compatibility, time to market, feature design inertia, project and product risk, etc...

MP will offer Mozilla employees, community members and interested startup/corporate partners the ability to experiment, innovate and try out new concepts in Internet technologies. This will be done "off" the current product development cycle and will not be tied to upcoming releases and their schedules.

Model

There are lots of different models for how R&D labs can be run. * Google has the 20% time for engineers and selected projects make it to Google Labs for external visibility and testing. Google presents the offerings in either alpha or beta state. * Yahoo! offers Yahoo! Next to showcase beta offerings and Hack (Yahoo-Internal access only) for internal experiments. * AOL has recently introduced Greenhouse for internally developed previews and prototypes.

There are the project sites such as MozDev and SourceForge and existing extensions sites such as Mozilla AddOns.

We expect the model for Mozilla "Prototypes" to evolve over time but the current thinking is that it will be a hybrid of Google Labs & SourceForge. A limited set of focused projects (determined by Mozilla) with associated discussion and source code (when appropriate) available for review.

It will mostly be mostly a virtual "organization" and hosted online.

Process

A set of tools will be introduced to facilitate the discussion of potential ideas and projects. Then, a small set of projects will be initiated and run simultaneously for a fixed durations. After the fixed duration, an evaluation is conducted to determine if the project should be continued for another run, be modified with new directions for investigation, graduated as a candidate feature for Firefox (or other product), or documented, archived and terminated.

The scope of the projects can include a wide variety of interest areas for Mozilla. For example:

• Core Firefox features (e.g. Yahoo Frecency experiments, social and remote bookmarking experiments, microformat display/parsing)
• Services Integration (e.g. What does a eBay/Amazon-enabled browser look like?)
• Mozilla Web Services (e.g. online storage for extensions)
• Local Storage (e.g. experiments with SQL Lite - local AJAX)
• Visual Identity (e.g. What should the next generation of Firefox browser look like?)
• Non-PC Devices (e.g. Minimo, Firefox on TV/10-foot UI)
• Presence (e.g. how should online presence be reflected in the browser?)
• Platform technologies (e.g. Should Mozilla offer an API to XYZ?)
• User Privacy & Identity (e.g. Should Mozilla promote initiatives such as AttentionRecorder? OpenID?)
• Media Integration (Is there a new UI we can introduce for sharing, discovering videos, phot