What's Next For Mozilla?

ezberry writes "After releasing version 1.0 of Firefox, what's ahead for the Mozilla Foundation and the venerable Firefox browser? With 6% of the market, and a notable exclusion from Google's desktop search software, PC World states that Mozilla may be thinking about adding desktop searching to the browser. Using plugins from third party vendors (and more), desktop searching may become a regular part of firefox. The article also talks about Mozilla improving firefox's popup blocker and getting OEMs to include firefox on their machines."

Exclusion from Google Desktop search?

[jolyonr]

Not here - integrates into Firefox just fine here.
Jolyon

Speaking of percentages...

[Anonymous Coward]

...where the hell did that "6% of the market" figure come from. Yesterday, the statistics all the news sites that were covering the launch quoted that Firefox had 3 percent [pcworld.com] - I know that the launch was successful, but not enough to double the share overnight.

Re:Exclusion from Google Desktop search?

[tb()ne]

It does not. Worse though (for me) is that it does not index/search Mozilla mail folders.

[e-mail]

[loac]

[e-mail] to me

Oct 17
Thank you for your note. Google Desktop Search is only partially compatible with Mozilla and Mozilla Firefox. Desktop Search does not currently support Thunderbird.

How Desktop Search works with Mozilla and/or Mozilla Firefox:

If you install Desktop Search and open a Mozilla or Firefox browser window, you'll see a 'Desktop' link appear on the Google homepage. You can click this link to go to the Desktop Search homepage whenever you want to search with Desktop Search.

Webpages that you view in Mozilla and/or Firefox aren't added to your Desktop Search index, however, so you won't be able to find them with Desktop Search.

We realize that many of our users use Mozilla or Firefox as their primary browser and Thunderbird as their email program. We may consider adding increased Mozilla, Mozilla Firefox, and Thunderbird support in a future version of Desktop Search.

Re:On demand porn

[mojo17]

Already thought of :-) Check out Pornzilla [squarefree.com]
Now the fox is ready to take over the world.

Firefox on Fox News

[Anonymous Coward]

I know this is a little off topic, but I was surprised to see them do a story about Firefox on Fox News (hmm firefox on fox how ironic). Anyways they did a small story about it on Neil Cavutos business show. They mentioned the fact that firefox is taking away market share from IE.

Article does not say...

[superskippy]

that desktop searching will be added to Firefox, just that they are considering making Firefox work with other people's desktop searching software (such as Google's).

Re:What's next?

[palad1]

There is an open source calendar server, kind of. I've heard only good things coming from people using Suse. http://www.suse.com/us/business/products/openexcha nge/

Re:FIX THE F***ING SLASHDOT BUG!

[TulioSerpio]

you have to wait a couple of month, the bug is fixed en the Trunk.

Workaround:

press Control + and then press Control -

Re:Speaking of percentages...

[Googo]

The 6% from the post seems to indicate that it is Mozilla Foundation's percentage of the market rather than just Firefox's percentage.

Re:Popup Blocking improvements

[walter.]

But Firefox CAN do this!

Re:Yay! First post!

[hermank]

Since when is Firefox only 6% of the marker??

Well, according to the

browser statistics [w3schools.com], it should be somewhere around September last year.

Patents are pure EVIL

[elerhc]

Software patents are pure evil. We cannot use them - even if Moziila would really be the first browser/sw to use them. We cannot use them because the whole idea of sw patents is bad and we are fighting that idea. If we used it to stop Microsoft copy our features, Microsoft would use its patnets to kill free software.

Partial solution: light HTML

[ThreeDayMonk]

It's the moribund Slashcode's output that is broken rather than Firefox itself.

However, you can change your preferences so that Slashdot displays "light" markup. It says that it is intended for limited browsers and/or slow connections, but it also works nicely in Firefox on a fat connection. Give it a try.

This is the option you want:
[x] Light (reduce the complexity of Slashdot's HTML for AvantGo, Lynx, or slow connections)

Re:Imperial overstretch

[geeber]

Oh please. I run Firefox just fine on 350 MHz Pentium IIs running Windows 98, and it still outperforms IE on the same machine. I don't know what your definition of "deathly slow" is, but it is apparently very different than mine.

Re:Rank them by importance

[Mant]

How often do most people search for files on their hard drive - my guess is not that often.

At home, no. At work, all the time. I have folders with code, folders with documents, archive Outlook folders, and current Outlook folders. All of which Google Desktop indexes, and searches very quickly.

Google Desktop search is far faster than Outlook's search, and will search all the archives at the same time. If I want to find a mail conversation about something, I use the desktop search. If I know I had a peice of SQL that updated a certain table, but can't remember exactly what it is called, I can use the desktop search. Find a presentation, announcement or memo that isn't very recent, search.

Just like on the internet, where these days I don't keep huge numbers of bookmarks, I just search. Now while I try to keep files on my machine reasonably orgnaised, if it is something more than a month or to old it is much quicker to search than to browse.

I know I keep my stuff way more organised than most people at work. I think it is the work environment where the deskptop search is most valuable. People have loads of important information scattered across their hard drives, and search lets them get there easily.

Re:Imperial overstretch

[JediTrainer]

XUL has already made Firefox deathly slow on computers more than 3 years old.

I strongly disagree. I'm using Firefox 1.0 (that I just downloaded this morning) to do my work on my P2/300, running Windows NT 4 (it's my 'Windows test machine' - my Linux box is better)

Overall, I must say I'm very impressed. It's quite snappy even on this crappy machine, which I believe is DOUBLE your estimate - it's about 5 or 6 years old.

Re:Popup Blocking improvements

[ppz003]

A big improvement would be if ... it showed you a dialog to "release" individual popups.

You can. Just click on the blue "popup blocked" icon in the status bar on the right, and voila! You get an option to show the popup it just blocked.

Re:Rank them by importance

[PeterPumpkin]

No, it isn't returned...several E-machines I have came with Netscape 6.2. I've been wondering about that for a while :D

Re:Firefox on Fox News

[Anonymous Coward]

From the Fox News website [foxnews.com]

"Microsoft could also be facing new competition. Rival Firefox is rolling out the full version of its Internet browser. Firefox has been stealing people away from Microsoft's Explorer."

Re:Forget search; focus on centralized administrat

[jalefkowit]

This may not be as far away as you think:

MSI packages for Firefox [frontmotion.com]

You can share your requirements for better network deployability in Bug ID # 231062 in Bugzilla [https] (I'm not gonna link directly to the bug since Bugzilla just blocks traffic from Slashdot anyway). That would help the devs improve the packages and get you the sort of thing you're talking about.

Re:Rank them by importance

[LnxAddct]

Anyone with a brain strips html tags (or any tags for that matter) first before doing text searches. You bypassing the forum's filter is simply because the coder was lazy. In php, this can be done in one line [php.net]In perl its nearly just as easy.
Regards,
Steve

Re:Thats all they need

[T-Ranger]

First: Mozilla and Firefox are released under the Mozilla Public License. Second: the code is copyright Mozilla Foundation. The FSF has absolutly no standing concerning Mozilla.

It is quite acceptable to distribute a customized browser based on the Mozilla code. It is acceptable to include, as distinct components on the source level, proprietary components, and keep those proprietary components closed. The canonical example being the Netscape browser, which comes with the AOL IM component, and other proprietary extenstions. Since providing diffs from the base mozilla.org code qualify as releasing the changes to the MPLd components, you could release a compleatly customized mozilla based browser and only have to distribute a thousand or so line patch. There are other minor details, providing pointers to where the base code is, documenting the changes (which a diff does by itself), but not very much.

Thus it would be compleatly possible for Microsoft to use Mozilla as the core of the next version of IE. All that they would have to do is post some links to mozilla.org/src (whatever), and distribute a 1000 line patch. Microsoft gives away far more complex things on msdn.microsoft.com all the time.

Re:What's next?

[16K Ram Pack]

That's a server, not a client.

And there's no replacement because there's no Evolution for Windows.

Outlook for XUL? Well, there's already Thunderbird giving the mail/address book part of it. Mozilla Calendar can be plugged into Thunderbird too. What's left? Notes?

The only other thing is making it work together better (like being able to send appointments to contacts - don't know if you can do all that).

Also, you'd need some linking to things like WEBDAV.

I'd also like to see a web-based project management piece of software that fully integrated with it as well (like "synchronise my tasks with the project plan for all the projects I work on").

Re:Boring but

[Drachemorder]

"Take out a lot of the options that can only be used by editing a text file and stick them in an "advanced" section on preferences. "

This feature already exists, after a fashion. Type about:config in the location bar and you get a nice long list of preferences you can tweak.

Re:Boring but

[mnewton32]

4. Resist the urge to include the kitchen sink

Well, it hasn't been marked WONTFIX or INVALID yet: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=12241 1