I’m happy to announce that I’m moving to the Firefox team, where I’ll be taking the role of Creative Lead for Firefox to help in designing and guiding the future product path for Firefox. I’m excited by the new role, excited by the team, excited by the possibilities, and excited by the potential to make nearly 400 million people’s lives demonstrably more rad.

For the last two years I’ve been helping to build Mozilla Labs, working to launch projects like Ubiquity, the Concept Series, the Firefox Mobile interface, Geode, Privacy Icons, and Jetpack. Each one of those projects has only seen the light of release due to an amazing team: Atul Varma and Jono Xia for Ubiquity; Chris Beard and Pascal Finette for the Concept Series; Madhava Enros for Firefox Mobile; Justin Dolske and Doug Turner for Geode; Julie Martin and Mark Surman for Privacy Icons; Atul, Myk Melez, Drew Willcoxon and many more for Jetpack.

In my time here, Labs has grown from six people (up from three when my team from Humanized joined) to over twenty people. Both Weave and Jetpack have just been spun-off into their own groups, identity in the browser is taking off, and Test Pilot is gaining critical mass. It’s a heady time to be in Labs. So why the move?

The web continues to evolve in the search and social domains. We are a new breed of info-vore meets webapp-ian. The average web user spends more time with their browser than with their family. Firefox has become faster, cleaner, and way more powerful (HTML5, canvas, streamable fonts, open video,…), but has yet to have the user experience paradigm shifts that gives users the new tools they need to accommodate the new web’s work flows. My hope is to work with and within the Firefox team in defining next generation browsing. To move towards you-centric browsing.

App-tabs are a fantastic first foray into the browser supporting people’s new-web browsing habits. We can go further. While Mozilla Labs functions more like a new product development group than an R&D lab, the right place to affect direct change for 400 million people is from within the Firefox team.

My first project is to think about how to make the browser more social, spatial, and tabs more semantically meaningful. The project is called TabCandy and you can follow along here. There’s not much to see yet—it’s not even on proper infrastructure—but expect more soon, both from me as well as the Firefox UX team: Mike Beltzner, Alex Faaborg, Jenny Boriss, and Alex Limi.

While I’ll continue working on Jetpack, Privacy Icons, and puttering in Labs, the majority of my time will now be dedicated to Firefox proper. It’s been a good ride, Labs. Here’s to the most important renewable resource of them all. The future.

RT @azaaza Leaving Labs, Joining Firefox | Follow @azaaza on Twitter | All blog posts