Blue Sky On Mars

OK, we weren’t actually hiding, but we have been spending a lot of time learning, coding and figuring things out. We’ve been so busy creating things that we haven’t had much time to talk about the things we’ve been creating.

A little more than a month ago, I announced here that Mozilla officially has a Developer Tools group again, with tooling for both Firefox and the open web in general in our sights. Much of our group is new to Firefox development, and so the past few weeks have been quite an education in the processes used to ship a feature-filled, open source, stable browser to 400 million+ people. And that’s just the process. There’s the technology, too, and the Bespin team had to learn a lot there as well. The people who have been working on Firefox for a long time have been great mentors in getting us up to speed.

Now that we’re getting an idea of what the developer tools in Firefox 4 look like, the devtools team is going to be a lot more public about what we’re doing and invite the community to join in and help us make tools that make the web a better place. Keep on eye on Planet Mozilla or dev-apps-firefox (newsgroup/mailing list) in the coming weeks to learn more about what we’re up to and where we’re going next.

Also, one more word about Firefox 4 dev tools: Firebug 1.6b1 is out and is awesome. If you’re a web developer using Firefox 4 beta, you should definitely check it out.