14 DAY TRIAL // Mozilla has some very capable engineers working on its biggest project, the Firefox web browser, and thousands of volunteer contributors from around the world. But it still needs some info and data from the actual users to know on which areas and features to focus development. One way it has been acquiring this data is with the Test Pilot program, which was launched several months ago. Now, the developers of the Test Pilot add-on for Firefox are ready for their first major release and are pushing Test Pilot 1.0 alpha out the door to get some early testing done.
"Since we released the last version (v0.4) of Test Pilot last December, we have launched 3 studies on top of it. More and more participants joined the program, and the data submission has grown from 5000 per study to 9000 per study," Mozilla explained.
"In order to make Test Pilot a robust platform that is ready for massive participation, we have intensively worked on improving the quality of the Test Pilot extension in the past one and a half months. Today, we are proud to announce the first milestone release of the production quality Test Pilot: v1.0 alpha," it added in the announcement.
Test Pilot 1.0 alpha comes with quite a lot of changes and updates and should make running and managing tests easier and more fun. Detailed info on the studies undertaken is available inside the add-on. You can check out the tests that are currently running and the ones you've already completed.
The best part is that you can check out the results and analyses of previous studies after they are released by the Mozilla team. You can also save any of the graphs as an image. With Test Pilot 1.0, Mozilla wants to make the whole platform more robust, especially since more people are joining the tests. Based on user feedback, the final version of Test Pilot 1.0 should be coming soon. According to Mozilla, Test Pilot 1.0 alpha should be available in the Firefox add-on repository, but it looks like the older 0.4 version is the only one offered for now.