• Goals
  • Helpful
  • Fast
  • Secure
  • Extensible
• Accomplished by
  • Helpful: ease of use, shipping right set of features for majority audience, focus on task completion, leverage existing data and resources, infer and optimize based on user behaviour
  • Fast: rendering speed, responsive, quickpaths for common tasks
  • Secure: passive and active mechanisms, automatic update, block malicious actors
  • Extensible: open, user choice is paramount, add-on model
• clear command and control structure
• no compromises for vocal minorities
• frequent milestones
• testing framework

Text from Connor's email

Here's my first take on a v2 version, needs a fair bit of work before I'm happy with it, but I wanted to throw this out for a few people's reaction:

The goals of the Firefox Project are as follows:

• Firefox should be the easiest browser to use for all types of users.

We should strive for platform consistency, transparent optimization of tasks, and simple and powerful interactions. Firefox should be smart enough to do what the user intends, wherever it is possible to infer and optimize behaviours.

• Firefox should be the fastest browser possible.

Performance has many facets, from pure page loading performance, to responsiveness of the UI and web applications, to human factors like task completion and information processing. All of these are important, and we want to be the best in all of them.

• Firefox should be the most secure browser possible.

The Internet is no different than the rest of world, it can often be scary or dangerous. We should use all active and passive options at our disposal to protect users as much as possible.

We will achieve this through the following:

• Driving the project with a clear command and control hierarchy: product design is not a committee driven process, it should be nimble and should rely on testing and iteration instead of discussion.

• Maintaining our focus on delivering the right answer to problems, rather than the best compromises or most expedient fixes. We will not make compromises in the main user interface only to placate an element of the community.

• Making changes quickly and providing frequent milestones so that designs can be refined based on observation of user interactions.

• Continuing to drive the evolution and adoption of web standards that enable developers to move performance and user experience forward

• Providing a powerful capability to experiment and innovate on top of the browser in the form of addons.

• Developing a reliable and wide-ranging testing framework and maintaining a hard line on performance and security regressions.