Why Mozilla Needs To Pick a New Fight 351
nk497 writes "Mozilla has succeeded in improving the browser world, and its rivals have outstripped it in terms of features. So what's the point of Firefox, then, wonders Stuart Turton. He suggests it could turn its community of developers to better use than battling it out for browser market share. 'I think Mozilla has a lot more to offer as a kind of roaming software troublemaker. The company has already proven itself brilliant at pulling a community together, offering it direction and spurring innovation in a lifeless market. Now that browsers are healthy, wouldn't it be brilliant if Mozilla started a ruck elsewhere?' And where better to start than the stagnant office suite arena: 'Imagine if Mozilla decided tomorrow to build an office suite. Imagine all those ideas. Imagine how brilliant that could be. Just imagine. Now imagine Firefox 4. Honestly, which one of those are you most excited by?'"
Mozilla Office (Score:2, Interesting)
I'd use it!
Or maybe they could volunteer to help the now-orphaned OpenOffice.org group by saying, "Come over here. We'll help you organize, and you can use our familiar name. We'll even bundle it with Firefox and Seamonkey ZIP files, so you get wider distribution to billions of users."
Firefox 4 (Score:5, Interesting)
Office work is boring :-P (automated data collection, mining, and reporting, OTOH, is neat... hence Google kinda focuses on those things and sort of runs GDocs as a sideshow).
The only reason I started using Chrome is because of javascript performance (admittedly on those silly Facebook games, which I have long since gone cold turkey). Firefox4 catches up on all that. I am looking forward to returning to all my extensions.
But to stay on your point, I'd love to see Mozilla get into direct digital democracy platforms... and not just "e-voting" for "elected representatives," but full polling of how individuals would decide on each issue that was important to them, rankings of their priorities, designated allocations of their tax dollars directly towards departments, organizations, and programs they felt were worthy... essentially an open platform for secure collaborative decision-making.
No need to shoot for federal government in the first incarnation, my roommates and I sort of used a similar system on a spreadsheet back in college. So it could grow from the household level to the community and local government level first until eventually plugging into higher levels of hierarchy using the same open protocols.
Re:Firefox is good .... plus makes money (Score:2, Interesting)
I like google-chrome better, but I've run into issues that Firfox doesn't seem to have; notably while having both a web based mail account open in one tab and facebook on another. For some reason chrome gives me a lot of "aw snap!," while firefox handles it just fine. Memory leak? Don't know.
But for now, I still use Firefox, and if it would load as fast as chrome I wouldn't even think of changing it.
Wow just how wrong can one be. (Score:5, Interesting)
1. A Browser is a much smaller piece of software than an Office suit.
2. We already have a decent office suit called OpenOffice. Not great IMHO but it does work.
3. Just because they can write a good browser doesn't mean that they can write a good Office Suit.
4. Firefox 4 will be out soon a new office suit will take a few years. So I am a lot more excited about FF4 since it will see the light of day.
What does this guy want to see Mozilla fail? They still have a lot of work to do with browsers. The mobile market for one thing.
Now if you want to see my dream list of FOSS software that doesn't exist yet let me get started.
1. An Echange replacement. Not 8 things I can lash up to work but a single system that is easy to install that offers all the features of Exchange with none of the pain. Oh and it must work with Outlook and should have a good client that does everything Outlook does plus a good web interface.
2. A Google Docs replacement. I want a FOSS system I can install on my own server that has all the functionality of Google Docs but lives on my sever.
Those would be big wins as far as I am concerned.
Re:office suite? (Score:2, Interesting)
Ask that again after you've tried to mail/data merge more than 5,000 records, position non-body-text elements with pixel precision, or correctly use a typefaces' j/k rules.
The considerably less resourced NeoOffice fork is much more competent, usable, and pretty for office work.
Re:Mozilla Office (Score:2, Interesting)
Since they know more about rendering engines than almost anyone else, and since precision of reproduction appears to remain an issue with OO.o and MSO, Mozilla could start by wrapping a basic word processor UI around their rendering engine and then add a presentations UI. (They could probably figure out something for a decent spreadsheet app based on their scripting experience, but I'm less confident about their ability to quickly grok the financial functions.) When those are good enough to be standalone, they could split them into their own thing, like Thunderbird.
Re:Firefox isn't outstripped in terms of features (Score:3, Interesting)
Indeed, the JavaScript error console is very reliable with Firefox. More than with Safari from my experience.
Firebug's capability of modifying a page dynamically to test changes without going back to the source code is also easier to use than Safari's developer tools which aren't as polished yet.
Amusingly, guess which browser gets used first to troubleshoot JavaScript by most of Google. Hint: it's not Chrome.
Re:Firefox is bad .... plus makes me irritated (Score:3, Interesting)
I think it sucks, and getting worse. Here's an advanced configuration option as an example:
http://kb.mozillazine.org/Content.interrupt.parsing [mozillazine.org]
Really? Have they not heard of separating a UI and background thread? Or did they just screw it up badly? Type anything into the Awesome Bar after using FF for a few months, and every keypress results in an sqlite lookup. It responds slower than typical telnet latency, and it's very noticeable. And I can't stop it until it completes its lookup. The only solution is to reduce the amount of data available, which means limiting its functionality. It was nice for a while, but these nice ideas resulted in me not being able to use it. Leave a badly behaved page like facebook open (with constant ajax type updates) and you can't do anything on other pages. Wasn't it supposed to optimize itself so scripts didn't run on tabs or pages that weren't visible, or something like that?
I prefer IE sometimes in the rare circumstances that I don't prefer Chrome. Only the extensions keep me using Firefox, everything else is a reason not to use it.
Actually read this whole page, it's illuminating. Maybe v4 will improve things, but they went a long way down the wrong road here and will take a lot of work just to get 2.x usability back:
http://namchangkorpa.wordpress.com/2010/09/17/double-firefox-speed-2/ [wordpress.com]
Re:It Hurts (Score:3, Interesting)
Yes, the article is rubbish. In fact, I think the article is a troll.
There are no hugely exciting ideas in office suites. There are some good ideas that could be more widely used, but users have shown they do not want to do anything new (e.g. using something like Lyx instead of a word processer, or not using a spreadsheet as a database or an development platform).
Other than that, office suites are boring because they are a solved problem. They all do much the same in much the same way. They might need some incremental improvements, but they do not need radical now ideas.
don't forget WebDeveloper plugin (Score:3, Interesting)
Making CSS more debugable. Makes firefox my goto web browser for web development.
Re:Less FF Bloat please (Score:3, Interesting)
>>>it's a bit ridiculous to say that Seamonkey is Firefox without the bloat, since (historically) it's the other way around and in terms of code-base there's a lot more 'bloat' in Seamonkey!
Wow. That was a long post. :-)
My theory is that Seamonkey doesn't load the extra components (email, chat, etc) since I never use them, therefore it acts like a stripped-down browser and does so more efficiently than Firefox (150,000 vs 300,000 KB according to my task manager). It's also worth noting that Puppy Linux, which is designed to be as small as possible so it can run 100% in memory, chose Seamonkey instead of Firefox. Why? Because:
"Firefox would be too big to run in RAM in a PC with 128 megabytes." - Puppy FAQ
Re:It Hurts (Score:4, Interesting)
Features which I use and that Firefox lacked last I checked:
Process separation by tab (so that a crashing tab does not bring down the others) and seperating tabs from chrome (so that if one tab hangs, you can kill it and/or continue using other tabs without killing the browser). I'm not exactly sure whether IE8 or Chrome introduced this first - I think IE8 had the first working public beta - but it's been available for a few years.
Use of Low Integrity Level process sandboxing to limit the potential damage if the browser becomes compromised. IE7+ and Chrome. Does Firefox have this yet? (Yes, this is platform-specific, but it *is* a good feature.)
Ability to "tear out" a tab into its own window, and to re-combine tabs into existing windows (Opera, Chrome, IE9).
I'll grant that Firefox's extension selection is the best out there, and includes a lot of very cool features including some that are hard to find - if not completly unavailable at the same quality level - on other platforms. However, there's some stuff that's just integral to the browser itself, and the last few Firefox upgrades have not impressed me in that category (rapidly change your browser's skin!!)