Slashdot Mirror
Firefox-Based Start-Up Gets Off The Ground
rudy_wayne writes "ZDNet is reporting that a new version of the Firefox Web browser is coming your way, but not from the Mozilla Foundation. 'When we launch our own services, in about a month or so, we'll be looking to offer the must-have companion to Firefox,' said Bart Decrem, Round Two CEO and a former staffer at the Mozilla Foundation. 'We see tremendous room for innovating on top of the Mozilla and Firefox platform, and we see ourselves as the first company outside of the nonprofit Mozilla Foundation that's fully dedicated to serving Firefox users.'
Round Two planned a corporate launch Monday night with the promise of bringing 'a new crop of products and services that will enhance your Firefox experience.'"
Isn't there a risk for their company that anything they implement will be replicated by the open source community?
"'a new crop of products and services that will enhance your Firefox experience.'"
;-)
That sounds a lot like Ads and spyware toolbars!
If that happens, I will be returning to IE!
Comment removed based on user account deletion
If you were looking for an "enhanced" browsing experience, what would you want?
Perhaps if we post some ideas of what we want, this company could do something useful
personally for me, I'd like a button up in the toolbar that when clicked, opens every link in the current window in a new tab.
Soooo. Exactly what is "it"... aka the "must-have companion to Firefox" that this company is selling?
Really? Because I see a huge need in the enterprise arena for some sophisticated permissions in firefox along with a central managemnet application for enterprises who want to deploy firefox. As long as the price is right I think it'd be huge. There are plenty of other things that I can think of that would sell well as additions to firefox's base. And as far as Open Source not being able to make any money... please go tell that to Red Hat and Novell and come back to me when your worth even just 1 thousandth what they are. I hate responding to trolls but sometimes it must be done.
Regards,
Steve
With Microsoft expected by many to offer antivirus software for free with windows, could they be beating them to the punch? I know that there are a lot of free antivirus packages (I use AVG myself) but if they can leverage Firefox's large user base then they might be on to something. I personally think that its a bad move to play Microsoft's game, which is effectivly making antivirus software worthless in the market.
Except for enterprise solutions, Symantec and McAffee could be in for a big hit in the personal antivirus protection department. Competition is an engine for innovation, but the most efficient engines for R&D come from within the firms that are actually selling the products and getting the most feeback. Something to think about, perhaps Symantec and Mcafee will continue to innovate and stay ahead of the curve.
Well, now that I opened the can of worms at both ends...proceed
I don't keep a lid on my coffee so when I walk around I look busy -me
Not to say that I agree with that attitude, but it is reality. There has to be someone standing behind the software, so that if some disaster happens, the suit who recommended the app has some CYA ammunition for himself.
All movements for social change begin as missions, evolve into businesses, and end up as rackets.
Somehow, I don't think this product is targetted towards most geeks. It seems to me that they should be aiming at people who are starting to hear about Firefox. People have heard that Firefox is supposed to solve their security problems and introduce new features to make browsing easy. It's supposed to come with all sorts of cool extentions that you can download and customise your browsing experience.
Most of the cool stuff that geeks do with Firefox is free and easy; we install extensions at a whim, customise the security settings, and tweak about:config to our liking. The problem is, most people find these activties confusing and time consuming.
Extensions: Which one do I choose? How do I know which one has bugs? What do I do if it breaks the browser?
Geeks know that you: a) Try them all! b) Read up on some forums for past experince. c) Backup your settyings and do a quick re-istall!
Well, there you go. People think you need to be a super computer genius to do all of those things.
Perhaps this company could be useful as the AOL of the open source community.
...is get acquired by a large-pocketed firm that sees a demand for Moz coding experience. I mean, come on, do you think Flickr would have survived the next recession on photo sharing? These people are in it to get acquired.
That's very very true.
Unfortunately, being based on Firefox / Gecko, it won't create too much diversity.
On the other hand, being back up by a company, perhaps they will improve it and market it so that it will take a considerable portion of the market, and then the true standards, which the mozilla engine follows, will be respected by web designers.
I'll do the stupid thing first and then you shy people follow...
Why is everyone saying "I'm not paying for that". Unless I RTFA wrong, it doesn't say anything about paying. As far as we know, they could just advertise on the site, as they seem to be a *support* place. I know it's not that likely, but it doesn't say anything about charging.
C17H21NO4
Using the GRE to provide licensed plugins to companies that want their particular product integrated with Firefox. Entire XUL apps integrated as plugins or on remote websites with appropriate privilege elevation through imported certs.
Integrated advertising. Hey, it can work. Especially if not overdone.
Support. Yeah, not likely to earn that much here. But could happen. Especially if they are offering maintenance services.
OMFG!
that bastardization is what started the crapification of gnome.
I STILL remove nautilus and install Midnight commander as my file manager in gnome. it' gets harder every release but gnome is 60% faster without the nautilus crap.
Well, it follows them more closely than IE at least, but it failed the Acid2 test.
Hell, while we're wishing on stars, maybe they'll make it even MORE standards compliant.
Basically, clone Netscape 8's one remarkable feature: Allow Firefox to use the Internet Explorer rendering engine already built into windows. Optionally, of course, and only on webpages chosen by the user. But the mere ability to view a few pages with ActiveX and IE rendering is amazingly helpful for those few sites that still don't work in Gecko.
Don't get me wrong - I love Firefox, and especially the standards compliance and power of the Gecko rendering engine. But if Firefox is to true beat IE, it needs to be strictly superior, or pretty damn close. Firefox has already adopted this method in terms of much of the Firefox interface, but it can go even further. Remove the big reason not to switch, that some sites -- important websites like banks or internal company webpages, not to mention windows update -- just don't work in Firefox. Remove every reason to boot up Internet Explorer.
Those reasons still exist, as demonstrated by the popularity of the simple "IE View" extension. But why make it so I need to bother to keep the IE shortcut on my Desktop, too or install the extension? Not everyone is willing to go to that effort. This one feature, in a simple, easy to use interface (I can't imagine it would be THAT hard to program, as it's already been done many times) would be guarenteed to be astronomically popular and more importantly, USEFUL, to almost every one of the millions of Firefox users.
It's the proven method that Netscape and Microsoft fought the original browser wars with, adding additional features, being matched and then one upped by the competition. It's not glorious and new, but whatever the Gecko/standards evangelicals say, it's absolutely the pragmatic way to do things. Nobody else cares about the philosophical and moral implications of including the option for rendering pages with the engine behind "that evil corporation" or the fact that this could only work on Windows. We just want someting works, and works well.
Sychronize your bookmarks with what?
A central site.
why would you want to do it?
If you have multiple computers at different locations (say one at work and one at home) it would be nice to be able to have your bookmarks available wherever you are.
That being said, the mentioned project has issues - I don't want to use unencrypted FTP, and I don't have access to an SFTP server (and even if I did, I have no idea if it will work, the reference on that page "see bug X and Y", with no information on how to see those bugs is pretty useless.)