I was fortunately able to attend all the webinars and am grateful to Mozilla and the webinar presenters and their guests for allowing me the  opportunity to have insights into the Mozilla application design, production and shipping process.

Its a great move on Mozilla's part to start developing a more open contribution model. I see it as 21st century business move of not only allowing external parties access to source code and code contribution but also allowing third parties to contribute to the application design process as well.

While the Design Challenge invited students, I sent in my contribution since I am currently (early 2009) more of an interaction design enthusiast than a full time interaction designer.

The Design Challenge had a general focus that included extension building and product shipping in addition to general browser application design and mobile browser application design.

While the extension building webinars allowed me to be  knowledgeable of what firefox can do, I however had a pre-established idea (based on my previous knowledge of firefox's capabilities) for my design challenge proposal and so found it awkward during such webinars to discover that Firefox had untapped abilities which I had not known about at the time of submitting my initial design idea of the 'Browser Dock' and there was very little I could do to integrate the content of the webinar into my design idea since it was intentionally conceived within a limited set of parameters.  For webinars concerning the abilities of Firefox that are generally unknown (eg. scripting with canvas) it would be great for those webinars to be approached more as a bonus webinar that could be referenced for future design challenge submissions.

I am writing this post after attending the webinars and submitting my prototype and am currently waiting feedback from the panelists. While I'm not aware of how the final results would be published, I would find it valuable to have feedback from individual panelists or at least have noteworthy feedback from panelists as teasers to the official announcement.

After attending the Mozilla Design Challenge Spring 2009 edition, I can whole heartedly recommend application design enthusiasts to submit their design ideas to add to or improve on Mozilla's offerings and attend the webinars.

Most of the presentations from webinars of the design challenge can be viewed on vimeo:

http://vimeo.com/channels/designchallenge