The lesson that hits home every day is that while we should always think about the present when designing something, we should also keep an eye on the long view, and take the short-term costs where the long term savings warrant.  Software development timescales are not the same as subway lines and bridges, and it doesn’t always pay to take the long view, but we should always be conscious of what we’re trading off.  We especially need to be aware of this in Labs, as we have to balance the competing desires of going faster and getting features into products.  It’s not easy, and we won’t always make the right bets, but we should always try.

With the formation of Mozilla Labs, we’ve been better able to try things that we couldn’t really explore as part of our normal ship process.  That’s been great to see, especially as we have explored new and compelling features and interaction models, but now we need to figure out the right way of bringing the best pieces of these projects to all of our users.  Learning how to integrate R&D with the rest of our development process is going to take time and effort, but the goal is to establish a repeatable and transparent process that we can continue to use as we grow Mozilla Labs and the various Mozilla products.

This of course doesn’t mean we’ll take something from every project, or even that every project has to result in a core feature to be successful.  The primary goal of Labs is to explore and innovate and try things.  Sometimes that will be successful, other times it won’t.  Sometimes we will learn things that inspire a different approach entirely, and that is an important success state.  But when we create something compelling, we need to be prepared to learn lessons and adopt the best pieces in ways that make sense.

As our first pass, we have decided to focus on incorporating some aspects of three projects in particular: Prism, Personas, and Ubiquity.  The key defining characteristic of these three projects is that we’ve spent enough time exploring those spaces that we feel confident in identifying and uplifting the most useful pieces.  Users should expect to see these new features in the next Firefox release after 3.1.

Some preliminary work has been done on identifying key elements of all three projects, and we will continue to refine these plans in order to get a good jump on things as Firefox 3.1 finishes.  You can find these first passes here:

Personas
Ubiquity
Prism

We absolutely crave feedback, so please feel free comment here, send mail or comment on the Talk pages on the wiki if you have questions or concerns.  We hope to get to a crisper and more tightly-scoped set of plans over the next month or so, and we’ll continue to point out when there are more changes that we’d like feedback on.