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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?
But if it's a company, won't there be drawbacks? (Ads, etc...)
1/1, Rakh it up.
I sincerely hope for thousands of browsers in the market so that you have to code for a standard not for a browser.
"'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!
Well his last company, eazel (who developed nautilus) didn't last long either
I hope they have some good ideas for innovations. But if they do, MS will eat them into their `free' browser and subsequently shut down this start up.
i agree with you, not many people are willing to pay a dime for firefox.... and anything that they can add as a feature will be reversed engineered in zero flat, unless they have business specific needs that they meet for other clients, which they very well might *shrug*
is it? it must be if they think browser extensions are going to make money. people aren't going to shell out for things they don't really need.
what's the business plan?
i wish i was but oh well
Now let me get back to my Bonzai Buddy.
Top 10 Reasons To Procrastinate
10.
I RTFA, and don't see how they are providing a new version of Firefox. They're just providing more extensions for it. Also, I have an issue with reporting "to swipe considerable market share from Microsoft." The link in that sentance links to a page that reports Firefox has 8.3% marketshare. When Firefox reaches 20% I'll call it considerable. But 8.3% is small. Personally, I hope they reach 40%+ with other non-IE browsers taking up enough to knock IE under 50%
Free MacMini
Want to bet that this "company" won't be around for long?
I know that nothing is as easy as getting money from humans. You can sell shit to them and they will buy it. (There is at least one company in Finland which been selling chicken shit for years.)
So, how much money did you want to bet?
... or I missed their business model completely.
While I understand that you may base a business on for instance ZOPE, here I have trouble to imagine how they want to earn from whom.
In a comment to a German version of the note (at best), someone thought they would later consult with respect to mass migration from IE to FF. Maybe.
CC.
TaijiQuan (Huang, 5 loosenings)
I know I'm not paying for any of those.
Machine9dotNet
I'll get excited when they say what enhancements they are actually selling. Promises of "something better" don't hold much weight.
This story has no information about the "product" this "company" will soon be selling. It sounds like a company without any outstanding products attempting to get a little advertising. A search for "round two mozilla" on google doesn't seem to find anything either. What gives?
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?
I got on the web when Mosaic was the way to do it. In all that time, I've never bought a single web browser (you could download Netscape for free from their site, yet it was sold in the store). I've never bought a plugin. I've always considered web browsers free. I think most people see the web that way. I don't see how these guys are going to make a profit.
Anything they come up with for Firefox will be copied by the OSS community and offered as a free download.
Good luck
Burn Hollywood Burn
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
Hey, Got any Chicken Shit? It is really good for the garden, and not so easy to come by any more around here. It is considered such a potent fertilizer that one should not use too much of it, or it will "burn" the roots of your more delicate plants....
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
"These people will find out the hard way that the types of people that thinks FireFox is just the most absolutely, unbelieveable, best thing EVER, are the same types of people that believe they should get everything for free."
Well, if those are his target customers then anyone could have told hime that he was doomed to failure (and probably would have).
I imagine that that's not at all the target. Instead, if I were him, I'd be targetting the mid-sized corporations that rely on IE now, and are just starting to think about looking for a way out.
I think it's Round Over for Round Two.
How about doing the same with the Segway IT?
That way we could all get a Round Two IT.
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.
They must be aiming towards OEMs.
Smaller computer makers, who can't get a good deal with Microsoft, would love to be able to customize the browser well beyond what they can do with IE. They must also be considering selling their stuff to the likes of Linspire, who have no problem with including proprietary extensions with their products.
The end-user is way below their radar.
And, if I were them, I would stay away from that layer.
http://www.dieblinkenlights.com
Funny, I couldn't discern any actual product amidst all that vapor :)
I think there is a world market for maybe five personal web logs.
hmmm, it would seem they missed the lessons learned from the dot com era.....you can have all the good concepts and ideas your college buddies think are way cool but it doesn't mean you have an effective business plan/model...
Reading at high threshold levels is group-think.
1) find hot buzzword 2) form company using said buzzword 3) ??? 4) profit!
Let's be realistic without financial support firefox would not have the marketshare it has today and some of the added functionality they are mentioning might be fun/useful and worth a few bucks to have. The one that item they mention that was interesting was SwitchProxy but I wonder how long before there are government suits looking into this.
You are off topic here. Go to the discussion about Thunderbird
People will also pay for "fill dirt", or dirt taken from a construction site where they dug a big hole in the building process.
But the thing is, there's a reason that people will pay for dirt or manure or whatever. Dirt and turds have legitimate uses. If you have a big hole in your yard after tearing down the old shed out back, you need some fill dirt to fill in that hole. If you need to fertilize a field, go buy yourself some animal feces. People pay money for these because making enough dirt or crap themselves is prohibitively inconvenient (do you really feel like raising chickens or cows yourself just for their excrement?).
On the other hand, browser extensions - which appear to be all this new company offers - are much easier either to create by oneself or to find a free version that someone else has created. Yes, the usefulness might still be there in some cases, but when you eliminate the prohibitive inconvenience of self-production, it reduces the value of the commodity tremendously.
The only way I can see this company succeeding is if they have a lot of capital available to buy the extensions that other people have created in order to lock down the market, as well as to tie people up in farcical legal battles over patents and copyrights.
Come to think of it, maybe they could hit Microsoft up for some investment prospects.
Bart Decrem was actually one of the founders/maintainers of SpreadFirefox.com. He left a week ago or so.
What I was wondering was: why should a virus scanner be "integrated" with a browser? The only thing I could conceive was that it would scan all downloaded files, but the file system virus scanners have that covered pretty well already (well, except for buffer-overrun-style exploits, but presumably Mozilla will just fix those in the browser).
The other thing about virus protection: there's an enormous effort involved to keep up with new viruses, and the for-profit antivir guys are pretty competitive. They might have a lot of ongoing work just to keep their scanner up with the latest attacks.
Have you read my blog lately?
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.
Like this one. Imagine if AmEx wanted a XUL app for their customers to check their statements etc. etc., but dont want to pay to skill up a dev team to write the XUL app...
Invoicing, Time Tracking, Reporting
Not having an added layer or two of bloated advertising crapware between me and my web browsing.
Weaselmancer
rediculous.
So they're going to
Step 1: Take a browser that appeals to tech minded people who don't use the default IE and provide enhancement and "integration" of plug-ins that are already available to said tech-minded people.
Step 2: Keep looking desperately for that "must have" widget that will appeal to "mainstream" Firefox users.
Step 3: They're going to either charge for the browser or put ads in it or collect user info for money?
Step 4: Profit???
I hope they're smarter than I am because this "business model" sounds hopeless to me.
Operator, give me the number for 911!
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
You could have said the same for Linux, back when Red Hat started shipping CDs.
I think the only likely market for this would be companies who are now using IE and thinking about switching, but wanting a corporate "face". Nifty new features would be a nice selling point, but "we offer Firefox's security and extensibility as a supported product," is really what a lot of small to mid-size companies are looking for right now.
They are probably thinking along the lines of what Internet Explorer really is, an application platform. They will probably be marketing proprietary plug-ins and extensions for Firefox to run enterprise level applications in the browser like IE.
"Who are in control, they are not in control of anything - they don't even control themselves!" - Glen Beck
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.
Make a corporate-friendly, highly manageable release of Firefox: an MSI installer, so it can be easily deployed via Active Directory; management via Group Policy; default settings that don't make a mess of your roaming profile.
If Round Two did this, I imagine that they could make a decent income from organizations that are tired of IE but want something easier to deploy and maintain than Firefox.
Mozilla bug #74085, comment 113 expresses these shortcomings of Firefox better than I did and provides more information on the above issues.
I think that this is not a big issue, just an announcement that they are planning on doing something. Just a preemptive tactic, probably to generate financing.
As for all the 'End of Microsoft Monopoly', I am not sure this is really a "Good Thing". Yes, the Benevolent Microsoft Monopoly has not been that Benevolent at times, but I view this as the 'Protestant Reformation' for the Consumer IT Service Industry [CITSI] (New useless acronym), where you end up with thousands (actually hundreds) of versions of LINUX because there is always someone who thinks they know better.
In God we trust, all others require data.
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.
Sure, that's a great idea...so now if I or my little brother close the Firefox browser, my antivirus plugin (and protection) is shut down!
I really think they should maybe work on plugins that disable Outlook from working...or maybe use a built-in BitTorrent Plugin to drip the installer for ThunderBird (Pro).
This sig donated to Pater. Long live
That's truly screwed up. Perhaps this signifies the dotcom bubble 2.0 is nigh? I'm anxiously awaiting the return of the dogfood portal.
It may not be a majority or even a large minority, but 8% is indeed considerable because it forces developers to recheck their code with Firefox. And indeed, developers do seem to be watching. Just check out the W3C browser statistics which are as good a gauge as any for what developers are using. For those who don't feel like following the link, probably within a month, fully 25% of developers will be using Firefox.
More than that, if you imagine that there are 300 million people on the web (I don't know what the figure is now; it's just a guess), and 8% use Firefox (24 million), a company who thinks they can gather, say, 1/6 of that submarket, probably considers that a decent consumer base (4 million customers).
Well, it has, but you have to _read_ the whole article...
;)
Mozilla development ecosystem. While Round Two--formerly known as MozSource--puts the finishing touches on its own products, the company is sponsoring development of several other Firefox extensions.
Ok, what do we have here? Aight, a companys name, even two since it has renamed itself..
These include FlashGot, which lets Firefox work with third-party download managers; Bandwidth Tester, which lets people determine their connection speed; and SwitchProxy, which lets people surf anonymously with Firefox by configuring Firefox to work with multiple Web proxy servers
Yay! Products!!!111!11!
Round Two also said it was supporting StockTicker, TinyURL Creator, Copy Plain Text, Extension Uninstaller, Lorem Ipsum Content Generator, OpenDownload, Open Long URLs, Search Plugins and Secure Password Generator.
w00t? Even more of them! o_O
As for Round Two's own extensions, Decrem said the company was considering antivirus software to integrate with Firefox.
Oops? Future Plans omgwtfbbq!
So, ask again where the content is
And, to give you some more reading...
http://www.google.com/search?q=MozSource
Press Release:
Take Two based startup, Take Three, has just announced that they will be offering innovative enhancements to the community of Take Two users, who are themselves a small subset of the community of Firefox users, who are themselves a small subset of the community of Mozilla based browser users.
Take Three is currently seeking venture funding based on highly optimistic projections of a high percentage of signups from a subset of the Take Two subset of the Firefox subset of the Mozilla user base.
- For the complete works of Shakespeare: cat
You mean like this?
A publicly traded company exists solely to make profits for shareholders.
Let's wait till release before passing judgement on a product.
.Net, I beg to disagree with your comments. The .Net IDE is substantially robust, and not least because it automates many of the mundane tasks we have gotten used to (e.g. opening/maintaining a db connect, window class, etc.) allowing someone to focus on the real problems at hand.
As for
No, what is really needed is a nice toolkit that integrates all the gui-building and -controlling techs in Moz/Firefox (XUL, JavaScript, etc), not only for web client, but also for fat local/intranet client stuff. But it won't matter all that much after Avalon is unleashed, because it will be like the usual Microsoft Mindflayer, sucking up developer and manager brains so that no other alternatives will be considered.
Oh well.
Considering most "viruses" exploit holes in Windows code, default settings or other circumstances common to a Windows box, I would be loath to entrust my anti-virus needs to the same people.
Symantec (Norton) existed well before the current virus plagued computing environment and I am fairly certain they will exist after MS releases their AV product.
Besides, if it's as useless as their malicious program remover - I don't think anyone has reason to worry about the future of AV providers.
As for integrating items with FireFox, I would be skeptical of a more "feature rich" browser. I agree with the Mozilla Foundation's assertion that their job is to provide a stable product that the end user can easily add pertinent features to. Once you start making features standard, you walk towards the cliff that Netscape fell off of.
I have different extensions installed on each instance of Firefox across 4 machines, suited to what I so with that computer. IMHO it doesn't get much better than that.
KS
As someone else said, a supported, secure browser is something that could make some real money. Large companies have policies that oppose free software in general. Functionality is what we respect as geeks. Companies want someone to blame and possibly go after when things go wrong. Liability is something that companies don't like and isn't a purely technical problem. It's hard to sue someone for a security problem related to free software. If someone is willing to stick their neck out on this and develops a good reputation for delivering, there is money to be made.
Disclaimer: I'm one of the mods on The Extensions Mirror, which is now hosted by RoundTwo.
Folks, from what I have read on their site, RoundTwo is not appealing to geeks. They're not trying to force geeks to pay for stuff that they can get themselves, i.e. extensions and support and the like. I get the impression that they are offering extension support and bundling for corporations which want to adopt Firefox but also want a centralized entity that they can moan at when it doesn't work.
Their stance of 'adopting' extensions and providing infrastructure for the developers to leverage for that purpose is genius, IMO - it gives the extension authors the resources to improve and maintain their extensions, and it gives RoundTwo a direct line to the authors, which makes it far easier to get the author's attention if something is broken, which is critical if they really intend on creating Firefox 'distributions' with extensions bundled in, like what bdeonline is doing with Black Diamond Firefox.
Sure, they've got the usual amount of marketing jargon out there right now, but considering that they've been supporting Mozilla software for a while now, I suspect that this is going to be the core of their business model.
SCREW THE ADS! http://adblock.mozdev.org/ Proud user of teh Fox of Fire - Registered Linux User #289618
If Woz and Jobs had issued a press release from their garage stating that they were going to revolutionize the microcomputer industry, would anyone have paid any attention? On the flip side, a lot of people gave numerous dot com outfits the benefit of the doubt during the bubble.
The moral of the story is: We don't know jack about what these guys will do. Let's check back after they've delivered some software.
Read the EFF's Fair Use FAQ
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.
sure sounds like Netscape all over again
lick the cancle button (at least thats what our Chinese QA says)
Well, there's "bamzu.com", is that dot-useless enough?
>;k
There are far bigger problems with using things like Firefox and Thunderbird in large organisations than just the (mostly phantom) CYA aspect.
As much as I love the apps, I'm considering switching back to IE and Outlook at work, mostly for the following reasons:
Added to all of these are the current lack of tools for the corporate sysadmins to deploy, configure and patch Moz family apps centrally, and avoid changes by lusers who don't know what they're doing that might break their carefully maintained system. Just moving all the profile data from the Windows-standard-that-hardly-anyone-really-uses location to something that fits in with a corporate back-up strategy is likely to be a chore.
Most of these aren't serious problems (if problems at all) for home users or small businesses where things are done informally. In a megacorp, things work differently, and until basics like the above are addressed, I'm afraid Firefox's chance of becoming the preferred browser is approximately negative regardless of any technical and usability advantages it may have over IE.
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.
I see Mozilla making a base release and then numerous companies like -- Google, This company, and whoever else will redux firefox for distribution -- to release a product that suits a specific need.
Sounds strangely like the relationship between Debian --> Ubuntu, MEPIS, Knoppix, Morphix, Kanotix, Linspire, Xandros, etc etc etc.
"God of Rock, thank you for this chance to kick ass. "
One reason I really like Firefox is that the people who work on it have really earned my trust. Who are these new people?
"I'm not religious, but at the same time I don't get why science always has to have something to prove."
Chalk this one up!
[[ the only 15 letter word that is spelled without repeating a letter is uncopyrightable: it may soon be, however. ]]
Old people fall. Young people spring. Rich people summer and winter.
This'll fly about as well as a lead zeppelin...
The only advantage Firefox has over other browsers is in it's built in extensibility capabilities, and thats the one area where it's going to ultimately end up shooting itself in the foot, if it ever becomes popular enough.
"Champagne for my real friends - and real pain for my sham friends!" http://ericblade.postalboard.com/
Sir. I fail to see how .Net (not the TLD) and IDE drive interphaces have anything to do with one another. But I digest...
.Net offer? A single platform which is really just a hodgepodge of old APIs that have been reorganized and renamed into catchy new names. It is obvious that most developers are abandoning .Net simply because it still falls under the limita[tt]ions of the APIs it is based on. There was a notable developer who wrote a column on .Net who recently ended his column by saying that .Net offers nothing new over older APIs and in fact still shows many of the ill-thought signatures of Visual Basic development! Is that what you really want to bank your life on? Is there anyone with a sane mind who would invest their development into a platform that is nothing more than Visual Basic with a few APIs borrowed from other MS languages? I think not. .Net will fail where Firefox will take the world by storm. Firefox is, was and always shall be forevermore the platfrom to end all platforms! There will be a loud crack of thunder in the skies of IT and a rain of cleansing shall pour down upon the keyboards of developers everywhere!!! And the Fox in the sky shall also say unto them, "Put down the Paxil laced Kool-Ade that the Gates has given you and drink from the fresh rain of enlightment that cometh from the sky of Mozilla"! Then a wheel shall appear in the sky resembling that of the Netscape Navigator and it shall be told to all that this is as it was foretold in the book of development! And Stallman shall rise in the clouds sourrounded by cherubs singing verses and his mouth shall open and he will utter forth, "I am the 1 and the 0"! And so shall it be. Go forth in peace and spread the word of Firefox. For thou hast been annointed.
XUL and the Firefox Chrome afford every developer on every platform the ability to build robust and static apps on a widely dispersed and growing platform. I can see a day when all computer programs run on Firefox. And what does
Man am I thirsty.
-"...bad old ideas look confusingly fresh when they are packaged as technology" - Jaron Lanier (Digital Maoism on Edge.o
You are joking, right? Nautilus is the biggest piece of crap I have ever used on Linux. It is slow, buggy, and lacking in features. Compared to Konqueror, which is faster, less buggy, and loaded with useful features.
...looks like we succeeded in making a top-notch browser, user-friendly, and helps keep the user safer than with conventional browsers. The efficient code allows it to load quickly, efficiently, and encourages users to surf the net safer than before due to lower system overhead from the lack of excessive toolbars and add-ons. Time to crap this one up too!
-- Game Developers: Stop porting badly-textured games from crappy console systems!
One thing I don't see people discussing is how this could actually benefit univsersities, such as my own, which often run into legal trouble with GPL software. Honestly, I don't understand the details, but at our last staff meeting they told us we're finally getting Firefox after using Mozilla 1.6.? for ages.
I doubt we're alone. I don't doubt many universities such as my own will be able to buy a licensed version of Firefox more easily (legally) than they can start using free Firefox.
They're calling themselves "Round Two". What happens if they're a success? What do they follow it with? They can't say "Round Three" because they've spent so much promoting the "Round Two" name.
Coder's Stone: The programming language quick ref for iPad
Is it possible that they are just using one of the buzzwords of the moment to gather money from high risk investment companies?...
There's a lot of interesting things still to do with Firefox, I've only mentioned a few, but I think these are the most obvious ones.
Anyway, good luck to Bart and his new company. I applaud the fact that you want to capitalize on a good product yet still - as a startup - commit yourselves to sponsoring free content.The best weapon of a dictatorship is secrecy, but the best weapon of a democracy should be the weapon of openness.
...good thing [firefox]. So how long until these sleezy for-profit scumbags track our useage with a new form of spyware?
The only truly sustainable way to make money in software is through services. Unless you're a monopoly.
With little mention of what products they have(What they have on their page is/was free before) it's hard to imagine what they are going to do and if it'll be any good.
With XUL and XPCOM, you can do a lot. I've seen Click-to-Dial IAX softphone built via XUL. Integrate it with Skype, or the gaim/aim APIs(does aim have any public API's) and you can just click on their name to pop it up. I think there is a way to do it already in IE with AIM. Integrated click-to-dial would be great, for skype and other softphones, and if they could re-route it thru the sip server and make the hard phone dial that'd be even better. Online prescence indicators could be cool(You want to email blah? Blah is online) but that is more for Tbird. There's so much you can do with XUL/XPCOM right now, and it makes it really easy since it is based off of Moz/FF(SSL built in, hard to beat that). Let's hope they're able to take it a few levels from web plug-in to something really useful.
Uhm, I believe you misread what I was saying. All those products you mentioned are being sponsored or supported by Round Two. Those are NOT products Round Two are actually offering. The closest the article comes is "As for Round Two's own extensions, Decrem said the company was considering antivirus software to integrate with Firefox." So, again, where's the content? As an aside, reading articles requires comprehension as well as just scanning the words.
Nah, but I sure do run into a lot of them, for one simple reason - I was writing code when many of the people posting here were still in diapers, or just a gleam in their dads' eye ... back when a "Window" meant a text box on a term (you may have heard of that - the pre-DOS days :-).
Look, what .NET does is hardly new. It's been done before countless times. Java is one example, smallTalk and FORTH are others. I've used FORTH. I've programmed in it. It's a good language. But like all of these systems, the IDE is constrained, ultimately, by the technology in use.
When I first found out about the UCSD p-System I thought "Great! Portability, a decent solid language (and Pascal was, for the time), a standardized front-end, etc." You could run the damned thing on anything that had a disk drive and a few kilobytes of RAM. But that's where things went horribly wrong.
At the time this came out, both were essentially rare. Your C64 was as likely hooked up to a tape deck as a floppy drive. Worse, the C64 had a whole bunch of crap that the p-System couldn't use. It had colour. It had graphics. It had sprites. It had sound. And to add that kind of functionality to p-System would have simply prevented it from running on many other platforms. Commodore, as you know, ended up going bankrupt.
This wasn't altogether surprising. I recall hearing about a project called "360" in the mid-sixties that attempted to create a single platform for mainframes. The idea was that the mainframes were all compatable, so you could port your software from one to the other pretty much by putting the cards in the other machine's bin. I bet you're not reading this. This was radical at the time, but it came at a price - the top end system was limited in functionality to that of the bottom end. Within fifteen years, the idea was dead, the systems lived on but co-existing with a range of incompatable systems from the same supplier. Within 25 years, the company concerned was teetering on the verge of bankrupsy.
I think you can see where I'm going with this, so let me get to the point. .NET is limited by its need to run on all current hardware and support virtually nothing original or innovative. And what goes right to the heard of the IDE. Without tools that are synergistic with the underlying technologies, programmers cannot develop great software. .NET hides the underlying technologies, limiting the scope of software development and denying programmers exposure to the very things that could inspire them.
This is ultimately why .NET will probably win out. With superior IDEs including the excellent Visual Studio.NET environment for software development, a consistant, well designed, underlying architecture, and fantastic expansion potential, I think we'll see .NET go from strength to strength. The work by people like Miguel de Icaza will help too, as programmers in other environments will be exposed to the latest Microsoft technologies, and will almost certainly be chomping at the bit to get on board.
But that can only happen with a well designed IDE. Unless software developers are comfortable when developing for .NET, they'll avoid it. But, looking at what they've done so far, and looking at their experience in this area, I don't think Microsoft has a thing to worry about.
You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
That's so much easier than firefox just having non-retarded default settings so people don't have to waste time trying to make the damn thing usable.
VH1 should do a Where Are They Now of spyware characters, including your friend and mine, the Bonzai Buddy.
It wont be long and Fire Fox will be as bloated as Netscape
'We see tremendous room for innovating on top of the Mozilla and Firefox platform' Translated: Here comes The Bloat (tm)
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Isn't the S/390, the successor of the system you mentioned, pretty widely admired? I'm not a mainframe guy so I have no clue but IBM's stuff doesn't seem to be despised.
Sad, but thought-provoking.TO BUY A NEW CAR WOULD MAKE YOU SEXUALLY ATTRACTIVE.
Why can't they just repackage and contribute, like everyone else? (Like, say, Redhat did?)
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
OK, where's the content? "Make sure to subscribe to our RSS feed or mailing list to be notified when we roll out new products and services." "In the mean time, we are proud to showcase the following community extensions for Firefox which are sponsored by Round Two." It seems like you were more interested in making fun of the person asking a legitimate question than really answering it. In doing so, you made yourself look like an ass.