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."

Plug-in or regular part?

[Rich Klein]

Which will it be? A plug-in or a regular part of Firefox? I'd be okay with a plug-in, but Firefox doesn't need extra bloat, and I don't need another way to search for things on my own computer.

What's next ? - more market penetration !

[bushboy]

Continued market penetration is what should be the main focus now Firefox 1 is out - and of course, as we're seeing, it certainly is.

If Firefox can reach the 10% threshold, it should snowball from there.

I'm personally converting everyone I know - usually against thier will - to switch to Firefox.

With a 10% + market share, it'll be a major boost for Open Source !

I've been saying it for months..

[yetdog]

Firefox is the app that will save the Internet. From blocking popups to auto-install worms/viruses - if IE was left to roam free, unchallenged, the net would become a niche market for the people who could either a-stand it, or b-were savvy enough to get around it. Firefox is about bringing the 'net back to the people.

Re:Plug-in or regular part?

[Anonymous Coward]

ditto, i rather see this as an optional plugin, hopefully Mozilla's dev team will see it this way too, it is easier to update a plugin or extention than update the whole browser, and they need to consider possible exploites in this feature too...

Re:and dell's incentive would be what, exactly?

[Walkiry]

> pissing off the company that sells them OEM operating systems at very low prices?

No, more like cutting down their service calls when people's browsers stop downloading and running viral/spyware shit without their knowledge.

Will IE copy Firefox?

[arbi]

Personally, I think Firefox redefines the websurfing experience. I have Firefox as default browser on all my machines.

However, what is to stop MSIE from copying all the features that made Firefox so good? Are simple features like "tabbed browsing" patented/patentable?

And Microsoft's incentive would be what, exactly?

[DarkEdgeX]

Pissing off the company that sells their OEM operating system pre-installed at very low prices?

It's a two-way street. I don't know exactly how much Dell pays MS for their OEM OS's, but something tells me it wouldn't be a major hurt to buck the system. Besides, I imagine Dell and Microsoft have a contract in place for prices-- I doubt Microsoft can just arbitrarily hike the prices up because Dell grows a spine.

Cornfused

[RealProgrammer]

A day out off the presses, and it's "venerable"?

...what's ahead for the Mozilla Foundation and the venerable Firefox browser?

The adjective "venerable" has 2 senses in WordNet [princeton.edu].

1. venerable -- (impressive by reason of age; "a venerable sage with white hair and beard")

2. august, revered, venerable -- (profoundly honored; "revered holy men")

Are you talking about Netscape 7, Mozilla 1.x, Firefox 1.0, or what?

Re:Imperial overstretch

[displaced80]

Funny, I read things the other way round...

The platform's already there. They just used it to make a browser (and Thunderbird, each Suite component, Venkman, etc.)

XUL enabled Firefox to happen. Not the other way around.

Firefox wouldn't be the only thing that's deathly slow on a 3 year old machine ;-). Besides, I also use Firefox on a 3 year old iMac (a whole 500MHz G3!) and it's certainly not deathly slow.

Popup Blocking improvements

[Qzukk]

A big improvement would be if you clicked the popup blocker icon that appears whenever a popup was blocked, instead of getting a dialog asking you if you wanted to allow popups on the whole site, it showed you a dialog to "release" individual popups.

We're already seeing sites like CNN telling us to turn off our popup blocker to use it. Rather than flooding us with popups because we have to turn it off for all of cnn, users would be able to just release the popups that were needed to proceed.

Re:Rank them by importance

[KoopaTroopa]

Perhaps FireFox could examine the page you were viewing, its domain name, et al, and then compare them to the top result in a Google search for the same information. If the content was close to the same but the sites were distinct (and especially if the links were very different coming off of the page) might that not suggest a scam site? At least, a certain kind of scam site. Another flag might be JavaScript showing false URLs in the status bar on hover.

I guess that some of the criteria above might be triggered by mirror sites, but that seems like the kind of thing that might be resolved (in my uneducated opinion, so be kind) by entries in something like robots.txt on the main server -- perhaps in the form of "hey these sites are my mirrors, so don't flag them as scam sites, FireFox!".

*shrug* I'm sure there's a fatal flaw somewhere there.

Why should I need desktop search?

[Yaa 101]

It's a privacy invader, and probably windows users need it, we Linux users know exactly where files are because of how our filesystem is arranged.

So let's keep it a plugin for people that choose to have it, and not force people to it.

btw I am a XUL developer myself, SiteBar Sidebar is what i make.

Java/Javascript On A Per Site Blocking

[Anonymous Coward]

Might be nice let the user decide to have firefox block java and/or javascript from specific sites. Similar to the way it currectly blocks images. I surf with all images blocked and only allow them on specific sites.

Re:Rank them by importance

[ninthwave]

They don't demand it but with some remarks from Balmer about third party apps causing security holes, I believe they are trying to go back to the premise they had years ago that if you install anything on it you "void the warranty" so to speak.

But Balmer's speeches and reality some times diverge greatly.

Re:Rank them by importance

[Anonymous Custard]

Why in the world would a browser perform desktop searches?

Re:Imperial overstretch

[mrotschi]

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

My computer is five year old (PIII 733) and FireFox just runs fine on it. I think memory is important (I have 384MB)

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Re:Plug-in or regular part?

[Nemesis099]

Which will it be? A plug-in or a regular part of Firefox? I'd be okay with a plug-in, but Firefox doesn't need extra bloat, and I don't need another way to search for things on my own computer.

I agree with the statement completely. I'm tired of a good product adding on a bunch of stuff the user does not need to make it do everything. What really is dumb about this is that then you have a bloated product that does one thing good and a bunch of other stuff sub par. Just spend the time refining what product you have and making sure it is secure.

I don't need one program that does everything I will get the programs I want that are excellent at the tasks they are designed for.

Re:Plug-in or regular part?

[mpugh.co.uk]

Agreed. Personally I wish that RSS had been made as an extension and bundled with the default install not built right into the browser as it adds bloat to Firefox which I do not want. Better tab control would have been a better internal addition to Firefox than RSS IMO. Saying that I am a FeedDemon user ;)

Re:Rank them by importance

[16K Ram Pack]

I've actually got a solution...

An extension that gets passed the site domain, and checks the domain against a built in list, and presents an image based on the list. If the image doesn't show, you're being phished.

The list could be refreshed either per day or on user request.

Now, it does mean that someone, somewhere has to be the maintainer for that list.

SVG, please

[ishmalius]

According to Brendan Eich earlier this year, natively supporting this drawing format in XHTML documents is a priority and should be accelerated.

Firefox can already be built with the SVG option enabled. It does a good job at displaying static SVG right now. With Cairo rendering support taking shape, there will be a solid stable multiplatform rendering engine for it, readily available. And it is not a huge addition to the footprint.

Why not make SVG support a default part of the development build starting now? That way it will be properly stress-tested and debugged before the next release.

Corporate Deployment

[Xibby]

Assumeing that most companies use Microsoft products, with most running Windows 2000 or XP.

One thing Mozilla and Firefox really lack is a quick easy way to deploy & maintain them in an orginization. A MSI based installer with security updates provided by MSP (patches to the MSI install) would allow Windows administrators to deploy and maintain Firefox via an Active Directory Group Policy...

Marketshare is meaningless for browsers

[danila]

People often kick around various percentages that Firefox, supposedly, bit off Microsoft's IE. Some say Firefox has 3%, some say 6%, some say already 10%. But it's meaningless and pointless because:
1) It's a free product in a marketplace for free products. Opera is the only company that really needs to care about the marketshare, because each user is either 30$ for them, or a stream of advertising money.
2) All users are different. Do you count downloads, installations, number of users, number of people using, number of companies, number of page visits, number of hours spent using it, etc., etc.?

Because of 1) it doesn't really matter which indicator will you chose for 2), they are all pointless.

Re:Popup Blocking improvements

[good-n-nappy]

Speaking of pop-ups - has anyone else noticed a fair number of pop-ups getting past firefox these days? I looked into a little bit and it seems that the way they are doing it is with a little flash wrapper. I guess I need to go back to using the click to play [mozdev.org] extension.

I second this

[G00F]

I second this, LDAP profiles are a must now days. Bookmarks, etc.

Also, a single place where they can auto force settings in a corp, like proxies, and other settings.

How about fixing bugs?

[canolecaptain]

Instead of wondering what new features should be added, how about fixing the html / css / object plugin support? During some recent development I was frankly surprised and very dissappointed that the java applet support (via the plugin) -sucked- in Firefox and Mozilla (ok in IE). The meta tags don't work like they should, etc, etc.

Too often open source developers run after the next wizbang thing without finishing their work. Thus, only a few great projects with outstanding developer leads actually complete the rigorousness required to make them globally acceptable applications.

I'm sure this will be modded down as a troll, but as a lead on an open source project that requires true enterprise quality, I'm begging you guys to keep at your great project until the kinks are worked out a little more.

As far as the 'next big thing for browser functionality' goes, I'd like to see browsers replaced with a single video/voice/IM/Whiteboard/edit-in-place-HTML application. The web is all about communication. That communication can finally change from simple downloadable text (ala BBSs and Mosaic) to a bi-directional P2P multimedia communication platform. Do that, get rid of the bugs, and the Mozilla/Firefox/Thunderbird teams will own the web.

Re:Will IE copy Firefox?

[cham31e0n]

Technically, yes. But the child windows are presented as tabs, instead of merely entries in a Window menu or as a bunch of awkward shrunken title bars at the bottom of the screen (or whatever). The actual technology may be old, but the specific implementation is relatively new.

Re:LDAP based profiles please

[Wesley Felter]

Why is that better than storing profiles in a network-mounted home directory?

I currently prefer opera

[mattyrobinson69]

what would make me switch from opera to firefox would be automatic saving/loading of sessions, tabbed browsing to act the same as opera and adblock bundled with the installer.