Mozilla

Millions of people use Firefox for Android every day. It’s amazing to work on a product used by so many people. Unsurprisingly, some of those people send us feedback. We even have a simple system built into the application to make it easy to do. We have various systems to scan the feedback and look for trends. Sometimes, we even manually dig through the feedback for a given day. It takes time. There is a lot.

One of the common types of feedback we get about Firefox for Android is that it’s slow. Other browsers get the same feedback and it’s an ongoing struggle. I mean, is anything ever really fast enough?

Firefox for Android is a great browser, bringing a modern HTML rendering engine to Android 2.2 and newer. One of the things we have been hoping to do for a long time now is make it possible for other Android applications to embed the Gecko rendering engine. Over the last few months we started a side project to make this possible. We call it GeckoView.

If Mozilla had secret weapons, I think our Interns would be included on the list. These hard working troops descend upon us during their school breaks and end up working on some of the hardest problems Mozilla has to offer. Our primary Intern “season” is wrapping up and I wanted to touch upon some of the work completed or in-progress.

Last week, the Firefox for Android team, and some friends, had a team meetup at the Mozilla Toronto office. As is typical for Mozilla, the team is quite distributed so getting together, face to face, is refreshing. The agenda for the week was fairly simple: Brainstorm new feature ideas, discuss ways to make our workflow better, and provide some time for fun hacking.

I have been lucky to build software products for a few different companies, each with a distinct culture. It’s help me form opinions about people, tools and processes that make teams effective at shipping software products.

If you want to stay up to date on any new developments in Firefox for Android (Fennec), check out the new Tumblr and Twitter stream. Lots of updates on what’s landing in Fennec Nightly, tips and tricks and summaries of the Mobile Engineering Team meetings.