I am talking about Firefox, and everything is in the title. We all want Firefox to be a great product (and it's already the case). But we want it to be shipping very soon, and we want its users to perceive its quality. Some features are too buggy to be fixed before the deadline. So what can we do?

  • Delay the release? Already done, and we don't want to do it again;
  • Leave the features as is, rough on the edges? That would be working against the quality perception;
  • Hide the features that are not perfect. I bet that people using these to-be-hidden features will complain loudly. Wait, what's that background noise?

Asa said, "Removing features after the PR could have negative PR impact around 1.0.". He was almost right. We are actually around 1.0, as millions people already use the product. And the bad news is that these users are as vocal (and fanatic) as Apple users (which means a lot for those of you who live under a rock)...

Among the features that are (or were) announced as removed for 1.0, we find:

  • Offline mode. (See bug 255654). In Europe, where more people are connected using a modem, this is probably a worse decision than in the US. In this case, I'd rather have a less-than-perfect-feature than nothing at all.
  • StyleSwitcher. I love this feature, but IMHO, nobody really uses it. Not that many sites have style alternate style sheets, and almost all of them have a form with a cookie to make it sticky. But this feature is kinda cool to show the efficiency of CSS. My advice: I don't have any, really. Ok, if you insist: leave it this way.
  • JS Console: I almost never use it. We can remove it from the menus as soon as a keyboard shortcut can be used to launch it.
  • View Source: I use it very often. The whole Web is immensely benefited from it. We should keep it. In the worst case, a keyboard shortcut would be enough.

Behind these limited list of features, there is another issue, which is actually the real thing that people want to discuss, sometimes without knowing it. It is the way the project is managed.

There is a lot of pressure on Ben's shoulders, as 1.0 approaches. So Ben and friends have many decisions to make. And these need to be made very quickly. This means that there is no material time to discuss this with the community. Then the community gets upset. I understand that, but I also understands Ben's position. Reaching consensus takes time, and for now, there is no time left. Maybe not all decisions made by Ben are perfect (heh, he's a human being after all!) but at least they are made, and the project moves on. The release is just around the corner, and it's not the right moment to discuss and hold meetings, and create commissions and sub-commissions and working groups and taks forces and stuff. It's time to deliver, and Ben has shown that his decisions are good most of the time. You know what they say: "A camel is a horse designed by a committee".

When 1.0 will be released, I certainly hope that we can reconsider how the community can work and communicate better with the Firefox team. For now, we have a killer browser to ship. Let's all support this effort rather than fight or discuss endlessly. The last time we did a browser with tons of buggy features and many decision makers, it was Netscape 6.0. And I am not sure we want to do that again.