We’ve had 3 major launches in my short time here, and each one was a milestone. Firefox 3 brought intelligence to the location bar and much improved memory management, 3.5: super-fast JavaScript and open video, and now 3.6 is bringing lightweight themes and plug-in checking to the masses. They all did a bunch of other things too, of course, but I think that what’s most impressive isn’t actually a feature that any particular version of Firefox introduced, but how far the bar has risen in that short period of time and how hard Mozilla itself has pushed to help raise it. Firefox 3, for instance, was actually really fast for its day — it’s still faster than any version of IE — but 3.6 is so much faster that when the two get compared you can only ever talk about the speed improvements in multiples. It’s so fast in fact that its performance can only really be likened to browsers like Chrome, or Safari, who’s primary focus is on speed at the expense of functionality.

That’s Firefox’s real killer feature, though. Not that it just keeps getting better, but that it gets better in ways that pressure everyone else to get better. Because it doesn’t just take a better Mozilla browser to bring about a better Web, it takes all the browsers getting better — if only to keep up.

- John Lilly

You know, I’d heard the above statement made in a bunch of different ways, but never quite in that order and so it never had the impact it did when put just so. Two hundred and fifty people, that’s it. That’s Mozilla Corporation. We might as well be Spartan’s with the kind of odds we’re up against, but the atmosphere here just never, ever portrays that. And I don’t mean that in some arrogant way, but it’s kind of crazy that we’re so brazen. I mean, we’re confident of course because we’re winning, and so that’s not too crazy, but I guess the crazy part is just that; how disparate the circumstances are from the odds. It’s crazy that we exist almost. It’s crazy that we’ve been able to leverage the efforts of 250 people and a few thousand volunteers against something that’s so big and dominant and has the resources it does — and win. That we made something, all of us, something good enough, something people care about enough to go out of their way to get. Think about that for a second. How often does anyone go out of their way for anything, really, let alone a web browser? And a lot of you reading this will be doing so from Internet Explorer, or Safari, and a few of you from Chrome or Opera, but that just illustrates my point so beautifully. You don’t need us to log in to your banking website, there isn’t a blog out there that works only with Firefox, and Google and Facebook work just fine in whatever browser came with your computer. There’s no reason to get and use Firefox other than the reason you, as an individual, come up with to do so. It’s a personal choice, and one that nearing 25% of Internet users have made in which they declared that, yes, actually, Firefox is worth the trouble. And that’s just amazing, to me.

1. I am annoyed at all the people who bad-mouthed Barack Obama now being such ardent supporters of his. You are fake, and I’m just petty enough to call you on it!

2. I think that a best friend is the most important relationship one has in their life. If friends are your chosen family, then, really, I feel like a best friend has no equivalent. Familial or otherwise. That said, I do not have a best friend, and haven’t had one for some years now.

3. PROFIT!

4. I have driven my car 145 miles an hour.

5. I watch movies all the time. I probably watch 4 or 5 movies a week on average.

6. I write very personal things in a very public blog because, honestly, who cares? Same with my social networking profiles, tons of data there. Stalk away!

7. If 7 isn’t enough, you can find another 100 here.

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justin, mrz, aravind, reed, oremj, justdave, laura

When you walk through the next door, though, the one which requires keycard access, life gets a lot better.

There’s a huge portion of the downstairs area devoted to a large screen and mounted projector. Encircling that is a crescent-shaped set of some very comfortable brown couches, with yet more comfortable couches behind them — one of which actually turns into a bed — and a giant table behind that. You know, for work. There’s a kitchen filled with free snacks and drinks, electric scooters to quickly travel between buildings, a pool table that’s been converted to a ping-pong table, and Nintendo Wii controllers scattered everywhere. There are Mozilla posters, and Firefox stickers, and awards we’ve won, and news articles about us decorating the walls. There are offices down there, too, but they seem almost like afterthoughts. The downstairs area is everything you imagine a dotcom workspace to be. A playground.

Upstairs, things get a little more serious. There are cubes, sure, but most of them are conjoined, and with the walls being so minimal and the ceiling being so high you never even feel like you’re in an office. Natural light permeates throughout the space — from the sun roof in the center, to the large windows all around the second story — and you could work most of a summer day without ever flipping a light switch on. Some people even got patio umbrellas for their desks for shade, they get so much sunlight. There are little, odd-shaped tables scattered about called collaboration stations, where people can sit together and bounce ideas off of each other, and office chairs which we have in about as many colors as we do configurations. There’s a kitchen up there, too, and if you look in the freezer you’ll probably find a couple different kinds of ice cream.

Across the complex is our other building, filled mostly with engineers. They have a kitchen, and scooters, and couches too, but it’s more quiet there. Disciplined even. I visit there every so often and the vibe is just so completely different. There are a lot of distractions in the main building, but in this one things are focused. They are serious cat, and that are serious thread. Still, I do enjoy my time there if only because I think the Building K (that’s the main building) people kind of take my being there for granted at this point, and the Building S people manage almost entirely without me, which is both refreshing and unsettling.

It makes me curious, though, about how the dynamic of the company might be if ever we were all under one roof. I should hope whatever brave new space we might someday end up in is as open, collaborative, and unique as the current one is. Because, really, at this point I couldn’t imagine anything less working for Mozilla.

The short of it is that I do desktop support here at Mozilla. All of it. Desktop support is an odd position because while the work invariably ends up being less technical than that of the other members in my department, I — and this isn’t immediately obvious — actually have a higher level of access than probably anyone else in the company. This includes my boss, his boss, all the way on up the chain. This is so, in part, because I actually have no-questions-asked physical access to everyone else’s computers, let alone the datacenter and all the requisite administration privileges of someone working in IT. That, along with the simple fact that my job requires I interface with literally everyone in the company, means I have a sort of backstage pass to all of Mozilla.

So, what does that mean? Well, I guess the hope there is that all this freedom makes me uniquely qualified to share a point of view with the world (or the PLANET. Ha!) at large, on Mozilla. One that’s both broadly sampled, and finely nuanced. A point of view that’s just about as close to the ground level as you can get.

The view from the bottom.

My aim here, in case the title isn’t obvious enough, is to write about what life here at Mozilla is like. I won’t be writing about some new technology I used, or fix I made, or service I launched. Nope. I don’t even do that stuff! It’s going to be entirely about my take on what it’s like at Mozilla. Working here, playing here, living here.

It’s going to be a work blog in that it will be work safe, but in every other aspect I have a feeling that it’s going to end up a much more personal account than work blogs generally end up being. We’ll see though. I mean, it could end up being total shit.

Wait, did I say work safe?