The Firefox Religion 10 Oct 2007

In a post entitled "The Firefox Religion", Blake Ross describes the ethos that guided the development of Firefox (Ross is one of Firefox's four main user interface designers, along with Dave Hyatt, Ben Goodger, and Asa Dotzler):

"Firefox has humble origins in a product that -- if everything went as planned -- was designed to be invisible to the person using it. I remember sitting on IRC with Dave, Ben and Asa painstakingly debating feature after feature, button after button, pixel after pixel, always trying to answer the same basic question: does this help mom use the web? If the answer was no, the next question was: does this help mom's teenage son use the web? If the answer was still no, the feature was either excised entirely or (occasionally) relegated to config file access only."

What we find especially interesting about this is that, unlike most open source projects, users were considered right from the outset in the development of FF. This has meant that, unlike most open source projects, FF has achieved mainstream success.

[via Humanized]