Welcome!
Well, we finally did it. After more than a year, we decided to bite the bullet and start a blog to better document the magical, chaotic ride that is Firefox Test Pilot.
Some background: Test Pilot is a process and a platform structured to let Firefox Design, Product, and Engineering teams research, prototype, test, and iterate on experimental features in the Firefox browser. Since launching, we’ve researched, sketched, prototyped, coded, surveyed, and analyzed data for a dozen experiments, and we’re still at it today. As a matter of fact, we’re gearing up for a new set of launches!
Next month, we’re hitting another major milestone. We’ll be taking our first experiment from the nurturing embrace of our Test Pilot incubator and launching it in Firefox 55. The Page Shot experiment will soon become Firefox Screenshots. In making this transition, we’re scaling our audience by many, many, many orders of magnitude. This is exciting and a little bit scary at the same time. By the way, for our sophomore album we’re putting Activity Stream in Firefox later this fall.
In a very short time, we’ve gone from conversations over beers to a team of more than 20 designers, researchers, and engineers spread across the globe building experiments to shape how Firefox works and what Firefox is. This blog represents our attempt to take stock of the things we’ve done in the last year: our successes, our failures, and what we’ve learned along the way. We’ll tackle design, research, and technical topics alike, but most of all we’ll just share the story of Test Pilot.
Ad astra!
