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Firefox 4 Will Push Edges of Browser Definition

Posted by ScuttleMonkey on from the all-kinds-of-fun-new-toys dept.

Chris Blanc writes "Mozilla Lab's push is to blur the edges of the browser, to make it both more tightly integrated with the computer it's running on, and also more hooked into Web services. So extended, the browser becomes an even more powerful and pervasive platform for all kinds of applications. 'Beard wants the new online/offline, browser/service to be more intelligent on behalf of its users. Early examples of this intelligence include the "awesome bar," which is what Mozilla calls the new smart address bar in Firefox 3. It offers users smart URL suggestions as they type based on Web searches and their prior Web browsing history. He's looking to extend on this with a "linguistic user interface" that lets users type plain English commands into the browser bar. Beard pointed me towards Quicksilver and Enso as products he's cribbing from.'"

2 of 501 comments (clear)

  1. Re:I hope they implement this as plugins by dvice_null · · Score: 5, Informative

    The summary does sound quite bad, but if you read the article, it sounds actually much better.

    "At the moment, these are two separate projects Mozilla is running to push out the edges of the browser: Prism and Weave."

    "Prism
    Prism is Mozilla's shot at busting apps out of the browser. Part of the Prism project is making the browsing core available to apps developers so they can build products like Zimbra Desktop (review) that are essentially Web apps, but that don't look like it. "

    "Weave
    Weave extends the browser in the other direction: Not toward the desktop, but instead into the Internet. Mozilla wants an individual's browsing experience to stay with them no matter what machine they are on."

  2. Penultimate stage of the browser life cycle by Bovius · · Score: 5, Informative
    Lemme break it down for you:
    • Gestation: Initial release of totally awesome browser is developed.
    • Infancy: A few people start using the browser and see how totally awesome it is. Word spreads.
    • Childhood: User base grows explosively. People start complaining that totally awesome browser doesn't have feature X.
    • Adolescence: More and more features get tacked on to browser. Side effects of bloat become noticable. Users start to ask for a lite version.
    • Maturity: Browser starts performing tasks entirely unrelated to web browsing. Browser becomes hefty and clumsy (FireFox is somewhere in this stage)
    • Entrenchment: Browser has enough of a user base to establish its own nonstandard rules for web content, essentially branching the web. Alienation and hostility ensue.
    • Death:: User base dwindles becuase the browser doesn't play nice with the rest of the world anymore.
    Those of us who think the new vision is a bad thing aren't necessarily curmudgeons who don't want anything to change. We know a lot of very specific things about how we want to interact with a computer, and we don't want the same organization that produces our web browser of choice to dictate the rest of that interaction. It doesn't really matter whether they get it right or not.