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Firefox 2 Launch - Interview With Chris Beard
ReadWriteWeb writes "This afternoon Firefox 2 will be 'officially' launched. In anticipation of the unveiling, ReadWriteWeb has a brief interview with Chris Beard — Mozilla Vice President of Products. Subjects discussed include the growing enterprise usage of Firefox, the importance of user experience and security, Mozilla's theory behind Web feeds and why they haven't included an integrated RSS Reader, the growing add-on ecosystem, offline browsing, and finally a little about the future of the browser." From the article: "It felt to us like a 2.0 product, particularly if we looked at it from what 1.0 was, to 2.0. It was like half steps, from 1.0 to 1.5 to 2.0. It's also a very stable and rock solid release - it's really ready for the masses. So it really does feel like a 2, as opposed to a 1.x product. Firefox 2 has, we estimate, between 3-4 times the number of fixes than FF 1.5 did. And that doesn't just include fixes and bugs, but all of the feature work as well as memory, stability and security issues. But there's certainly a lot in it which makes it really solid." Also on the site is a concise review of the product, and an overview of Marketing Firefox 2.0.
That it is as fast or faster than the current release. I am always fearful lately of new releases as they typically mean slower and bloated.
I even recently downgraded all the office machines to Office 2000 from office 2003 as the minimal feature benefits do not outweigh the increased speed in loading and operation as well as far smaller memory footprint.
more innovation and web integration isn't going to develop Firefox any more pentetration into IE's market share. Why? Because for the most part people just don't care.
I love firefox, use it daily. Even put up with the bugs that were "ignored" for a long time (like memory leaks, having your bookmarks vanish for no reason, etc). Yet reading the review it is still clear that too many miss the point.
It doesn't matter how much better you are than IE, you have to give people a real, tangible reason to switch and then you have to make it so exceedingly easy that there is next to no effort involved. That second part is more important than the first. I like many others here can come up with many "tanglible" reasons for people to switch, I still can't get them to download it or install it.
Penetration comes with getting someone that people trust to distribute the software along side their product. May I suggest Quicken (all that tax software coming out can easily accomodate FF). Hell, get a game manufacturer to provide the browser as part of the install process. With a good windows installer it can be made a seamless part of experience.
* Winners compare their achievements to their goals, losers compare theirs to that of others.
Wow, you've read slashdot for several years? You must be a god!
Look, you don't have to go in search of extensions. The browser works fine out of the box and provides privacy protection, pop-up blocking, tabbed browsing, the best javascript implementation, proper support for more image formats than any other browser including SVG, MNG (last I checked) and proper PNG... It just happens that you can add additional functionality through extensions. If you don't need it, then you don't need them. Meanwhile, they provided a very nice site from which you can download extensions so that you can get them if you need them.
There's nothing stopping anyone from making a nice website that has a great set of extensions, except that there's apparently little demand. Every so often I do a writeup on which extensions I happen to use, and post it on my website. (The last one was on a different site - I haven't updated for 2.0 yet but that's coming.) (ObDisclosure: I have amazon referral links, but no other ads.)
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"