Five years ago, I had just left IBM, and was pretty unsure about what I really wanted to do next.  I didn’t know whether I wanted to switch my goals back to software development, or stay on the IT track I’d picked before the bubble blew.  Firebird 0.6 came out that day, and I found some bugs, so I started poking around Bugzilla.  Things sort of snowballed from there, as I got more involved with QA, and later fixing UI bugs.  I ended up hacking cookies with dwitte, and front end with Ben and Blake, and I found myself more and more involved and enmeshed with Mozilla.

Its pretty fantastic to look back at those five years, from the uncertainty of the Foundation startup, through the huge buzz around Firefox 1.0 and the launch, the growth and maturity of the organization through the challenges of shipping follow-on releases, all the way up until today, where we expect to ship the first release candidate for Firefox 3.  I can say honestly that its the best release we’ve ever done, and I’m excited about getting it to 170 million people as soon as possible.

What’s most interesting to me is that we’ve now grown enough that we’re no longer aiming for It Just Works.  We’ve done that already, so now we’re aiming for the holy grail of Does What I Mean.  Its a much higher bar, but that’s where we need to go next.  We need to do it on mobile, we need to do it on the desktop, and we need to figure out how help people do it everywhere.  And that is my new Five Year Plan.

I hope you’ll all come along for the ride.