State of Mozilla: Johnathan Nightingale ''How Firefox is continuing to break new ground''

Jonathan Nightingale, VP of Mozilla Firefox, talks to the audience at the 2013 Mozilla Summit about how Firefox works as one and not as separate browsers for desktops and smartphones. The key is to think beyond any limits and continue creating an awesome universal browser.

We should stop pretending that there are discrete islands of Firefox that exist;

It's not actually useful to talk about Firefox Desktop and Firefox for phone

because if you look at the array of devices that are out there, that human beings

are buying, that are internet connected, that they want to get Firefox on,

it's a continuum.

We built Firefox and it succeeded, not beyond our dreams because our dreams

were pretty gigantic - certainly right to the edge of them and

I feel pretty good about that, and now hundreds of millions

of people trust us everyday, and I feel pretty good about that

and it's a responsibility that a lot of us take very seriously.

Our job is to get that Firefox means something broader than it's form factor;

that there's a set of things that make Firefox what it is;

and we need to start from that. We need to, to think globally

and then act locally. We need to think about what it is to be Firefox and

then apply it to each particular platform and both halves of that

are important. We shouldn't be designing features in isolation for

desktop or mobile or tablets, we should be thinking about what it is, what it means

across the entire Firefox spectrum and then, just as important,

we should understand how that applies to each form factor.

And this is not easy. Iteration is how we move the web forward day by day, right

like a lot of the time, the way to prove the platform is to fix the crappy little

bugs that get in the way of it being truly excellent.

And we've got to do that, by all means. Because every time we decide

one of those things is important, we do it.

When our products individually are great, we feel pretty good about that

and the PlayStore shows it; but when our products combine into a universe saving force

[audience laughter]

purely miraculous things happen.