Most web browsers offer beta releases and nightly builds for developers and early adopters. But for Mozilla Firefox, things were rather different.
Rather than requiring people to download a whole browser, participants of Firefox Test Pilot could simply choose which new feature they wanted to try from a list of selection, to then offer their suggestions based on their experience.
These participants can do that, before the beta features are integrated into the actual public release.
"Test Pilot was designed to harness the energy of our most passionate users," said Mozilla. "We gave them early prototypes and product explorations that weren’t ready for wide release. In return, they gave us feedback and patience as these projects evolved into the highly polished features within our products today."
"Through this program, we have been able to iterate quickly, try daring new things, and build products that our users have been excited to embrace."
And here, Mozilla is ending the program.
Closing its Test Pilot program doesn't mean the end of Firefox's user testing.
In fact, according to the non-profit Mozilla, the program is far from failure, and to a degree, it was actually a success one.
"Test Pilot being disbanded is more-or-less a symptom of our program's successes both in terms of products shipped and cultural impact within the Firefox organization," wrote John Gruen, the product manager of Firefox Test Pilot, in a Medium blog post.
Instead of using the Test Pilot program, the development of new add-ons for example, continues as part of the main development of the browser.
Existing add-ons will continue to work, but will be migrated away from their Test Pilot beta versions.
Firefox Send and Firefox Lockbox, which were part of this Test Pilot program, remain as standalone products, while others like Color, Side View, Price Wise and Email Tabs, are moved to the main add-on store, and remain available "for the foreseeable future" with some changes.
For its part, Mozilla has confirmed that nothing is changing, beyond the fact that these apps will be the responsibility of the entire development community, rather than just a select working group.
The main difference here is that, these products are no longer required in the overall Test Pilot add-on to power the others. Instead, they can work independently.
"We look forward to continuing to work closely with our users who are the reason we build Firefox in the first place," the company said. "In the coming months look out for news on how you can get involved in the next stage of our experimentation," said Mozilla.
In the meantime,the many users who have enjoyed using some of the Test Pilot's experiments, Mozilla said it won't uninstall them. It continued by saying that the many of those experiments can be found on the addons.mozilla.org, where they are available for everyone.
This was further explained by John Gruen:
"As for the Test Pilot site and add-on, we are replacing the site with a farewell message on January 22nd. Visiting the site after this date will automatically uninstall the Test Pilot add-on, but you can also just uninstall it manually if you wish whenever you like without affecting installed experiments."