Not surprisingly, today’s Support Firefox Day chat sessions proved to be some very informative and fun ones.

If you missed any of them, here’s your chance to see what happened. I’ll post the transcripts (formatted for better reading) of the four chats with Mike Connor, Firefox 3 development lead; Mike Beltzner, Firefox 3 UI team leader; John Lilly, Mozilla Corporation CEO; and Asa Dotzler, Mozilla Community liaison.

First chat was with Mike Connor:

What are the most important features of Firefox 3 and Gecko, which of them were the most demanding ones?
I believe the key features of Firefox 3 are the awesomebar and our major performance wins.

In what ways will Firefox 3 alleviate some of the common issues people experienced with Firefox 2?
We were able to eliminate a large number of memory leaks and performance bottlenecks, which were a major source of complaints.

We were also able to build a more resilient bookmark system to prevent losing bookmarks.

How was the awesome bar invention and development process?
We have felt for quite some time that history and bookmarks were important to unify, everything is about revisiting places you’ve been. It was important to iterate on different balances of information presentation, depth of results, and responsiveness.

Will FF2 users be notified of the FF3 upgrade when it becomes available?
We are working on timing for offering Firefox 3 to users via software update. We need to be sure that the experience is smooth, so there will be some delay before we start pushing updates.

Does community-driven support like SUMO affect the software development planning process? Do you get a lot of ideas and ways to enhance the next versions of Firefox based on feedback gathered from support channels?
Support is important to any healthy engineering process. Feedback from user support channels is key in identifying major issues and solving them for users in future releases.

We have been able to work out solutions to many user complaints based on feedback from our great support people!

Do you consider performance wins as the best overall performance of all browsers? What do you think about address bar in Opera 9.50 with full text search? Have you considered that idea for Firefox 3.1?
OK, first question: I believe that we are very competitive with the fastest browsers out there, but everyone has something they’re best at.

Second question: We have looked at full text search preciously, but we feel that the results are usually more noisy and less relevant.

Do you think some of the support features that we see at the main Firefox Support site (support.mozilla.com) will somehow make it into the Help menu in Firefox?  Namely, things like searching knowledge base and Live Chat just all taking place inside the Help menu?

I don’t think we’ve really dug into the full possibilities for integration as of yet, but its possible!

What didn’t you have time to implement in Firefox 3 that you’d like to implement in a future Firefox 4?
Some things include a powerful query builder for history and bookmarks, better handling of tabs.

I believe Firefox 3 will ship without inbuilt help, what impact will this have on Firefox use without online access?
I think that ultimately, very few people use Firefox without access to the internet and for enterprises can take our content and put it online internally.