Engineering Firefox
Robert O'Callahan
September 28, 2005

Web browsers are hard. Browsers are users' primary interface to the
Internet and must satisfy stringent performance, compatibility and
security requirements in an extremely complex, evolving and malicious
environment. As a researcher but also a project insider, I will
discuss how the Mozilla Firefox project tries to meet these challenges
in the development of the significantly successful Firefox browser. I
will give an overview of how we got here, the tools and processes we
use, the software we build on and that we create, our current and
future development activities and the strategic landscape that drives
them, and some technical challenges that we face now and in the
future. I will talk as much about failure as success, and as much
about open problems as solved ones.

BIO: 
Robert O'Callahan obtained a PhD in the area of software engineering
and programming languages from Carnegie Mellon University in 2001, and
worked at IBM Research's Programming Technologies Department from 2001
to the end of 2004. Since 1999 he worked as a volunteer contributor to
the Mozilla project, focusing on the Gecko core engine, and in 2005 he
returned home to New Zealand to work fulltime on Firefox/Gecko as an
employee of Novell.