Last November, the Mozilla Developer Network put out a survey targeted toward Web developers and raised a call to action. Although it doesn’t seem they ever posted the final set of results (they did some preliminary results at the link above), they had over 5,000 developers respond from 119 countries. Pretty cool.

What I find even cooler, though, is that they took the time to respond to individual responses. In my feedback, I told them I always seemed to have trouble finding alpha/beta versions of Firefox and Thunderbird to test. What I received last month was a friendly response from Alix Franquet with a helpful list of places to go to find early releases of Mozilla products.

Also in my response to the survey I mentioned how I was having serious memory usage issues with Firefox 3.5 – and I wasn’t alone. It’s also not the first time I’ve run into this problem, either. I think 3.5 peaked out at ~1.7 GB  of RAM – insane. Alix asked if 3.6 was better, but at the time I still hadn’t upgraded because Google Gears and, more importantly, Ubiquity weren’t supported. Having upgraded now, I can happily say 3.6 is much better at managing memory. Right now it’s idling at 280 MB, or 17% of what 3.5 would so often near.

More important than getting the information I commented on (after all, I usually found the product version I was looking for after a while of searching) is the fact that the company – a big one, at that – took the time to respond to an individual user’s concerns. Even when I had issues over two years ago with Firefox’s memory usage, a Mozilla rep reached out then, too. It really goes a long way to building a foundation of trust and loyalty in a customer when they know their needs are being addressed.