Slashdot Mirror
Why Mozilla Needs To Pick a New Fight
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?'"
"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?"
Seriously? Somebody needs to point this guy to Mozilla Labs and tell him to join the community and start working on his own dreams instead of proposing/forcing them on the community.
... you just have to say or think something and suddenly it exists.
I mean, PCPro has done a really great job of bringing us news stories before but they've kind of fallen by the wayside and become irrelevant. Maybe if they switched and stuck their nose in something else it would benefit me a lot more so I think they should do that despite the obvious potential of failure. I mean, maybe they should start publishing cures for cancer and AIDS? Imagine all those ideas like a news site that actually pays the reader money. Imagine how brilliant that could be. Just imagine. Now imagine tomorrow's news article where they tell me the top ten things that are a threat to my computer. Honestly, which one of those are you most excited by?
Oh, look at me, I'm the magical man from imaginationland and I live in imagined houses made of fantasy bricks and -- look over there -- it's John Lennon using Firefox's new Office suite!
I like how some talking heads imagine that software "just happens." It doesn't take sleepless nights and thousands of weighty e-mails and collaboration
I also like how Mozilla can afford to spread themselves thin now that they have lost the browser war. If people had his attitude, we'd only see one leader in any field because everyone else gives up and doesn't try to regain the lead.
Nothing but wishful spurious logic.
My work here is dung.
slashdot = stagnated
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."
"I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." - historian Evelyn Beatrice Hall
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.
So, you trust the corporations to just take it from here? I'm sure they'll do fine, but only as long as Mozilla stays right where it is at, ready to eat their lunch the very second they stop innovating and try to lock their customers down.
As a long-time user of Firefox, I think it is great, especially with extensions ... so I hope it's around for a long time. Plus isn't the vast majority of Mozilla's income from search engines looking to be listed on Firefox?
Hulk SMASH Celiac Disease
Browser migration ir quite easy compared to office suite. If it cant perfectly open .doc or whatever microsoft will create it has no chances to gain more ground than OO.
What's wrong with Open Office?
Firefox 3 already annoys me more than MS Office ever did. Stupidly, this is coming at a time when a person's web connectivity is more important to business than the choice of word processor.
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?
Honestly, I'm more excited by FF4. I've been using the beta for some time now and I love it. :) On the other hand, I find OO.o to be more than sufficient for my meager word processing needs. I just don't really *care* if someone reinvents the office suite yet again.
Any plan which depends on a fundamental change in human behavior is doomed from the start.
Add-ons are nice – I don’t use any because Chrome comes with all the ones I need preinstalled – but selling your browser on them, as Mozilla seems to be, is riskier than inviting Wayne Rooney to your nan’s birthday party.
Oh, I see. Firefox is outstripped in features when the set of features is "stuff I use, nobody else matters."
If Mozilla is bored, they can try making less bloated Firefox.
The SeaMonkey Beta I'm trying has the same functionality as Firefox (HTML5, addons, Gecko rendering), but only uses half as much RAM on my computer. Clearly Firefox is bloated and could use some optimization. If Mozilla needs a mission, let them return to the browser's original purpose when it started in 1999.
"I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." - historian Evelyn Beatrice Hall
Larry Ellison
There's no -1 for "I don't get it."
Where the developers on the firefox team may not care less about an office replacement. The overlap of "cool developer playground" is just not great between a browser and office. You would have better luck building a new team from scratch. If you look at mozillalabs.com/projects you can see where they are breaking into other spaces -- but logically aligned to the same problem domains.
You're making IE and Safari teams dance too quickly. Turn down the bellows on the coals and let them rest, stagnate. The current state of browsers will be good for the next 50 years. Mozilla should make a kitchen recipe sorter instead.
I really find it interesting how these Slashdot articles are stated lately. Firefox "is" the current browser that is "healthy". It has the most maturity of any of the other browsers. The others are what should be asked "what is the point of them". If you are going to make such an empty statement, then provide what your basis is. Otherwise your article is just empty space on the net with no reason to be read. This goes along with the Linux on the Desktop is Dead article. -bytes
The Mozilla community does browsers (and to a lesser degree, email clients) very well. They have no experience in office suites, so thinking that they would do better than the OpenOffice team is rather silly.
If OpenOffice didn't exist and weren't doing as well as they are, I might agree with this. But office suites are the LAST place the Mozilla team should be changing focus to, especially with OO doing as well as it is.
retrorocket.o not found, launch anyway?
The point is that Firefox runs everywhere that matters and isn't developed by a company that makes a living out of tracking my every detail. Also, none of the other browsers have anything comparable to Firefox's extensions.
Firefox got spun off the Mozilla Suite because the Suite was so bloated. Firefox then proceeded to get more and more bloated.
This really doesn't make me confident in their ability to make a lean, fast Office suite.
I keep using Firefox precisely because there are things I can't do as easily with other browsers as I can with Firefox. I yet have to see another browser which will do better than a combination of Adblock, NoScript, Firebug, Greasemonkey, Ghostery, Flagfox and PasswordHasher.
I'm more excited by Firefox 4. I already have OpenOffice, and while GoogleDocs isn't opensource, it's not bad either and so far it's free.
Mozilla Labs makes some pretty neat things, and I'm quite happy with Firefox. It'd be a lot more "brilliant" if Stuart Turton would stop thinking that Firefox is an also-ran.
For every problem, there is at least one solution that is simple, neat, and wrong.
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.
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
Stop picking fights and have a look at the many challenges which are still out there. Sunbird/Lightning for sure can use a hand. Personally, I don't think is a high quality slashdot story.
It uses the phrase "aw snap", and it is especially irritating in that it uses in a way that I consider incorrect. (generally we only used it when someone else got put down, kind of like how Kelso uses "burn")
I just read this guy as somebody's corporate troll, but across Microsoft, Google or Apple, the one who seems to have the most to gain from Firefox's demise would be...Google, now that they're pushing the competing Chrome browser into the very same space.
Technically, there's still a role for Firefox as the cross-platform browser of choice - for techies. (Safari on Windows still sucks; IE on Mac doesn't exist anymore.) I also use Firefox religiously because of Flashblock, though I have switched to Chrome for my Amazon cloud account administration, and I still use IE when I need to look at Sharepoint or the Microsoft Partner Portal.
That comment is just wrong... nothing comes close to FF in terms of features. That's bot good and bad for FF, honestly.
You can't tweak a lot of things in Google Chromium, but you can tweak the bejesus out of FF.
How about they just make Thunderbird work with Exchange?
Mozilla has succeeded in improving the browser world, and its rivals have outstripped it in terms of features.
What browser are they talking about?
Heres my request / requirement:
A better "adblock plus" than adblock plus
AND a better "firebug" than firebug
AND a better "ghostery" than ghostery
AND a better "ie tab plus" than ie tab plus
AND a better "firefox sync" than firefox sync
AND a better "flashblock" than flashblock
AND a better "noscript" than noscript
the result of this select query is .... (insert beavis voice from B+B) "uh uhuh huh chrome runs javascript 10 ms faster huh huhuhuh"
"Science flies us to the moon. Religion flies us into buildings." - Victor Stenger
Since when?
There are thousands of add-ons, persona's, search engines etc. for Firefox, plus the huge amount of customization. I have seen nothing like it on Chrome or Safari.
Safari's plug-ins are a minuscule amount, you still get that depressingly ugly gray theme, you can't get text under the buttons or increase their size...nobody should trust Google...
I only see Internet Exploder when I have to rebuild the icon cache when Firefox gets updated (why is that?), IE shouldn't even be running at all really. I thought MS got taken to the cleaners on that issue?, so why in Win7 is it still running at all?
Opera? Is there something wonderful happening there that I've missed that has suddenly made it the second most used browser in the world like Firefox is?
Somebody clue me in, I don't know what this writer is saying...
Opera is available on a lot of platforms too, and is much better than Firefox as far as bloat and memory leaks are concerned.
Opera is available on a lot of platforms too, and is much better than Firefox as far as bloat and memory leaks are concerned.
Yes, but Opera isn't also owned by a major software platform vendor, so I don't suspect them. Without that kind of pull, mouthpieces for Opera have been few and far between at the corporate magazine level.
I don't know of anything that can replace it.
I'm god, but it's a bit of a drag really...
Firefox = full of memory leaks...sure they have improved over the versions, still remains that you have to close firefox from time to time for using too much memory. I'll stick with openoffice thank you
They're traditionally the mouth piece of Micro$oft
Two of my imaginary friends reproduced once
More excited about? Firefox 4 no doubt. The current office suites work fine for me. I also do not agree that "Mozilla's rivals have outstripped it in terms of features". And even if that were through, I still find FF to be more user friendly albeit that might be because I'm more used to it.
"In a time of universal deceit, telling the truth is a revolutionary act." - George Orwell
Man do i ever disagree that firefox has officially lost the browser wars. As a web developer I rely on Firefox as my browser-of-choice because of its independence from any corporate interests. I appreciate Safari and Chrome from the standpoint they're willing to push the envelope with early adoption of HTML5 and CSS3, but they are not practical development platforms for the same reason. Add to that the proprietary funk that Apple and Microsoft throw into their browsers along with Google's "all your surfing habits are belong to us" mentality and I'll stick with Firefox. On a personal note they've earned my support for coming out swinging in the early days, for taking on Microsoft when no one else would, and for committing to standards and cross-platform dev.
stubborn tiny lights vs. clustering darkness foreverok?
I thought the whole piece was an exercise in death fantasy. For some unknown reason, he's trying to take Mozilla with him.
I can feel the rope being slipped around my neck, but before you kick away the stool, give yourself over to wistfulness for just a moment.
Anticipation is making me wait. No, fuck it, the only wistfulness I need right now is the sound of a rope creaking.
What a horrible idea, I haven't used anything but Mozilla for 5 years or more and no matter how good IE (choke, gag, vomit) gets - i will NEVER switch back to it (NEVER!!!). The moment Firefox disappears IE and the other browsers will stop being competitive. I'm a big google fan - but Chrome is not really doing the trick for me - perhaps it will get better. I am only fully satisfied as a user and developer with Firefox. so there it is. Why can't IE and Safari and Chrome just disappear? -Wishful
As has been repeated by many others already in this topic I think what Mozilla needs to do is simplify the core product (Firefox) and expand into other applications (like an Office suite) and add enhancements or connection to other applications through the plugin mechanism that really put them on the scene with their browser. I mean imagine an Office-like product equipped with a plugin structure not unlike Firefox? Pros and cons yes, but powerful, just like the browser!
I'd love to see Mozilla with a suite of individual product offerings that all click together easily. What I'd hate to see is them trying to cram everything on the back of Firefox, it's already bogged down with a lot of fluff.
I say make the browser just a browser and leave what tools I want to equip it with up to me through the plugin system.
But then again, I've been known to be crazy...
crazy dynamite monkey
Apparently this writer hasn't heard of OpenOffice. How about a full suite of jail broken iPad applications?
But Google doesn't care if people use Chrome. It's free, and doesn't include any ads (and however much it tracks you, I doubt they make much money from that alone). Much like Mozilla, they released Chrome in order to drive browsers forwards. Crucially, Google want faster Javascript engines. And Firefox has risen to the bait.
Mozilla picked up the Netscape ball when M$ killed the company. If it weren't for that, it's likely M$ would have created a whole load of proprietary formats and locked the web up into it's own little version of Bill's World. Mozilla creates and alternative and without it you would be subject to the whims of whichever monopoly has control. Just like cable tv. Just like your phone bill. Just like Walmart.
Join the Slashcott! Feb 10 thru Feb 17!
I think it sucks, and getting worse. Here's an advanced configuration option as an example:
http://kb.mozillazine.org/Content.interrupt.parsing
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/
Chrome supports "extensions" and Opera 11 will do as well, however, these are weak add-ons that do not allow something like Adblock plus, which actually blocks unneeded content from downloading, significantly speeding up browsing and, less importantly, reducing bandwidth usage.
I'm not knocking down Chrome (which I presently use) or Opera (which I've used and loved for years) but as far as I'm concerned, as long as they are not as addon-friendly as Firefox, Mozilla's browser will be in my list of must-install software.
http://groups.google.com/group/diaspora-dev/browse_thread/thread/4cd369bdf16a346f
http://www.semanticdesktop.org/
http://semanticweb.org/wiki/Semantic_Desktop
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.
I have no use for an office suite. I only use an office suite when I really have to, which is about twice a year. A browser I use daily, and faster, leaner browser with more features is quite important to me. It does not even begin to compare in importance to an office suite.
The only part of an office suite I am remotely interested in is a spreadsheet. If somebody wrote a decent spreadsheet, one that separates data from calculation and presentation, I may actually use it.
AccountKiller
NO!!! Firefox and OpenOffice have the same problems for the same reasons. I use Chrome/Epiphany/Midori and *KOffice* to be free of them, on my ubuntu desktop. They're bloated, ugly disgraces.
Remember songbird? I tried it once. Thunderbird? I tried that once too. XUL is unsuitable for any kind of serious use-- it's an ugly hack that attempts to cover up the fact that the developers behind these projects are too lazy and apathetic to target any native GUI toolkit on ANY PLATFORM. I know it's all vogue to always talk friendly about everyone on the same side of the code freedom fence, but that kind pervasive, poor design is something I consider inexcusable anywhere, ever.
Why must everything needs to be a fight or a battle. When you make it a fight it means you have to have an enemy to go against. There is some peace in the browser wars again. Nasty Microsoft is willing to play by the standards a little better, people are willing to use different browsers and web developers are more keen on using the standards. The focus shouldn't be a fight but keeping and improving the peace. This is a task in itself, making sure that Mozilla doesn't get complacent and keep their software new and current and on par with the other alternatives. Keeping market share up enough to keep developers honest and make sure they are following the standards. There is a lot of work in keeping the peace. Google would love their own standard so will Apple and Microsoft. Mozilla must keep things moderate and keep the peace.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
Though I agree that Mozilla has been good for the browser market, that does not mean that they can repeat their success else where. But assuming for argument that it could be a general software fight starter, why can't it do both? Does it have to choose to do one thing only? Maybe Mozilla can start another organization like it for office suites and direct how the organization looks so that it can essentially replicate itself.
-> Sometimes, you just gotta break free from the shackles of proprietary code.
I thought that was the job of a tailor, not a software developer?
Firebug. Even with other browsers dev tools Firebug wins hands down. I'd continue this but I take all my debates to http://www.informaldebates.com/
Seriously, you posted this shit?
If OpenOffice didn't exist and weren't doing as well as they are, I might agree with this.
It's not entirely clear how well OpenOffice.org will do given the transition to Oracle leadership.
"Mozilla has succeeded in improving the browser world, and its rivals have outstripped it in terms of features
1. Show me the 'rival' that has a large collection of available plugins, and many features that can be added using addons.
2. Show me the rival that can achieve challenge (1) and is open source and has a large developer community.
3. Show me the rival that can achieve challenge (2) and is stable
4. Show me the rival that can achieve challenge (3) and is multiplatform.
5. Show me the rival that meets challenge (4) and complies with web standards can achieve the same or better ACID, ACID2, ACID3 test score and achieves at least the same level of compliance as Firefox.
6. Show me the rival that meets challenge (5) and has a robust private browsing mode.
7. Show me the rival that meets challenge (6) and supports AES256 and higher encryption, and provides ability to disable/enable weak SSL ciphers, and provides detailed security controls.
8. Show me the rival that meets challenge (7) and supports integrated saving of passwords, and encrypting that data with a master password
9. Show me the rival that meets challenge (8) and has tabbed browsing, supports autocompleting the location bar with bookmarks, supporting tags, and customizable quick keywords for both bookmarks and search tools.
10. Show me the rival that meets challenge (9) and allows detailed controls of what options are available to javascript programs on a site. For example: disable/enable the ability to raise/lower or focus windows.. disable/enable the ability of a script to open new windows, replace right click/context menus, etc.
11. Show me the rival that meets challenge (10) and has robust equivalents to No Referrer/User Agent Switcher, Popup blocker, AdBlock Plus, NoScript, FlashBlocker, Cookie Whitelist, With buttons, JSView, Prefswitch, BeefTaco, QuickJava, LinkTargetDisplay, Greasemonkey, FoxyProxy/AutoProxy/QuickProxy, Long URL Please, Permitcookies, Form History Control, Lazarus/Form Recover, Perspectives/SSL Guard/Certificate Patrol/Remember Mismatched Domains, Safecache, History Deleter, Firefox Sync, Redirect Remover, Image blocker, Web of Trust/LinkExtend, BetterPrivacy, Site Preferences
Mozilla has succeeded in improving the browser world, and its rivals have outstripped it in terms of features
Let me stop you right there so we can all laugh long and hard at this one.
Between OpenOffice and koffice and gnumeric all my 'office suite' needs are well met. I don't need or want something new, and since libreoffice spun off I think openoffice has a chance of becoming more useful over time, so I don't worry about its future. On a day to day, week to week basis I do not use an office suite. A browser, that I use every single day--every single hour!--and better performance and more features in my browser is something I'll get excited about.
I want my Cowboyneal
I'm somewhat shocked to get all the way to the end of both the article and the slashdot posts to discover that no one has mentioned Thunderbird. So I guess that task falls to me...
Mozilla DOES HAVE a non-browser project - their Thunderbird email client. It is mildly popular, decently functional, and absolutely not the kind of market shakeup being advocated here. So, dear author, not only do you get your wish wherein the power behind Firefox gets used in a non-browser way, but you can already see the result of it. Namely, not all that much, actually.
Sorry, but did the author really have an idea how open source communities work ?
It is simple nonsense that they could propose: Ok we stop building browsers and go for an office suite now.
It simply won't work. The people are involved in firefox, because they consider its worth their time. They want to work on HTML5 or 6 or stylesheets or javascript or whatever comes next because that drives their usage or business.
And personal I do still consider Firefox a critical mass to get new standards into the wild. Lets face it: Microsoft, Google and Apple have quite some disputes with each other and Opera for itself is not heavy weight enough to help push anything out of the door. Mozilla adds just the needed base to any innovation by these companies to force the others to add it as well. But its organization does a pretty good job to integrate not every propetary nonsense.
When Mozilla started, the browser market was dominated by a proprietary application that did not respect end user control and open standards. They've been a tremendous success, opening up the web and the browsers, and making end-user control almost standard. Bravo.
I agree that the browser war is won. I don't think they should pull out -- I suspect things would start reverting if they did -- but they are victims of their own success to a degree. (For some reason that is beyond me, this huge FOSS success has become 'uncool' on Slashdot, where it's fashionable to repeat that it's 'bloated', even though the whole thing is only 8 MB.)
Now there's a new application market that's dominated by a closed, proprietary application that does not respect end user control or open standards, and that's social networking. It might seem quixotic for Mozilla to take on Facebook, but the same was said about Microsoft and Internet Explorer, which was just as dominant then as Facebook is now. And further, opening the social networking space fits aligns almost perfectly with Mozilla's mission:
Principles
in education, communication, collaboration, business, entertainment
and society as a whole.
accessible.
beings.
treated as optional.
on the Internet.
upon interoperability (protocols, data formats, content), innovation
and decentralized participation worldwide.
Internet as a public resource.
accountability, and trust.
many benefits; a balance between commercial goals and public benefit
is critical.
important goal, worthy of time, attention and commitment.
Advancing the Mozilla Manifesto
There are many different ways of advancing the principles of the
Mozilla Manifesto. We welcome a broad range of activities, and
anticipate the same creativity that Mozilla participants have shown in
other areas of the project. For individuals not deeply involved in the
Mozilla project, one basic and very effective way to support the
Manifesto is to use Mozilla Firefox and other products that embody the
principles of the Manifesto.
Mozilla Foundation Pledge
The Mozilla Foundation pledges to support the Mozilla Manifesto in
its activities. Specifically, we will:
support the Manifesto's principles;
Manifesto's principles;
and trademarks, infrastructure, funds, and reputation) to keep the
Internet an open platform;
and
within the Internet industry.
The browser is becoming more and more important. It's the platform most development will happen on in the future. Why would Mozilla not want to be part of that, and invest most of its energy into staying relevant on the most important platform in the world?
Clever signature text goes here.
This feels like an exercise in trolling. Don't give in and feed the trolls! Especially if they aren't HTML 5.0 compliant!
Since so many /. articles are concerned with Internet security, perhaps Mozilla should focus on that. And not just browser-related security issues, but give a fresh look at winning the Internet back to the good guys, such as trusted proxies with integrated, state-of-the-art malware defense.
I think that Mozilla is already sort of doing this just not in the Office Suite market. Look at song bird (I know it sucks) but the itunes-like software market is hurting much more than the office suite market with OO.org and the like. If they made songbird less bloated then maybe they could do what for the itunes-like market what firefox has done for the browser market.
They've done a good job of breaking the monopoly of IE. They should focus on security. I remember when you used FF to avoid the viruses you got from IE. Now that's not the case, unless you use noscript and ABP etc. Take the victory of market share as it is and turn towards security right out of the box.
Flappinbooger isn't my real name
I read that line and decided that the author lost all credibility. Then I read TFA and realized that nowhere does the author of the actual article say that. Guess nk947 is adding his own (wrong) commentary into an otherwise somewhat less biased article?
DNA -- National Dyslexic Association
Chrome does not have save tabs as bookmark folder yet, a stopper for me. And firefox in all its crufty leaky glory is still more stable than chrome. As far as bloat goes it is tweedledee versus tweedledum. I would not pronounce firefox dead just yet.
Have you got your LWN subscription yet?
Making CSS more debugable. Makes firefox my goto web browser for web development.
'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?'"
Firefox 4
You don't get into the Office market without something that is entirely non-geeky: A strict design philosophy, a very solid idea of what office users really need (and which the 90% of functionality are that almost nobody ever uses), and an innovative streamlined and blowing-you-away UI concept.
Here's why:
You need a strict design because Office software suffers from bloat and feature creep even more than browsers do. Just look at Word - it can compete with Emacs in bullshit functions that nobody ever uses but some coder thought would be really cool. To prevent that, you need a very good idea of what the fuck you want to accomplish, and both the competence and the rigour to keep everything out that doesn't fit the design.
You need a solid idea of what the core functionality is in order to align your design (s.a.) with the user needs. In fact, extensions or plugins would be an excellent way to keep the 10% users interested that need some obscure functionality that nobody else ever needs. Find some way to embed references to the needed plugins and an auto-update or heck if they are small even embed the plugins (or parts of it) themselves so other users can at least read the file. But whatever you do, keep the core simple and easy to understand. This is why I personally am a fan of the Mac office software - Pages, Numbers. Numbers has by far not the functionality of Excel, but it has what I need and it has a select few additional features that, as soon as you've used them once, are killer features (seperation between table and document, allowing you to put as many tables on a page as you want, for example).
Blow-Away UI is what you'll need to get users interested who already have an office suite, which let's face it is almost everyone. You don't get the majority of people with "cheap!" (OO has that, look how much good it does them) or with "features!" (both OO and MS office have more features than anyone can possibly ever need). But being more productive because it is easier and better to use - that would get a lot of people interested. It's what is lacking from the current competitors, they are both abominations in usability.
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
im using ff, chrome, and occasionally opera. i tested various websites on ie versions and sometimes other odd browser.
i want to know what browser, specifically, outstripts firefox for features ? or was it just balooney bullshit to get attention ?
Read radical news here
First open source video game that will have no paid-dlc, microtransactions, or a monthly fee and will be made to be good.
I think that everyone has a right to dream as does the person in the opening article, but I doubt it will be well received by the community. I'm going to take a wild guess here and say people who work with the Mozilla foundation do so because they enjoy what they're working on. Shifting from a browser to a video game probably wont carry along many of those same people that make FF great. I mean it's a great idea and obviously shows the corporate america ideology that you can simpy shift resources (that are usually paid for) from one area to another, but doesn't really work when people volunteer their time.
There isn't a need for another open source office suite project. If Java was taken out of Open Office the clunky performance would be gone and it would be first rate. Now that Sun is out of the picture that is more likely. No offense to anyone, I'm a Java programmer, but Java is just not *well* suited to desktop GUI applications.
No thanks.
Opera is nice, but I don't seem them having a lot of vigor for fighting hard in the browser wars.
Tianamen Square? Google Buzz? Chrome is nice, but it will always feel like a "Facebook browser" to me, it will always have the potential for being spyware.
Safari is also nice, but it is proprietary and Steve Jobs is a control freak who can take away his ball anytime he is tired of playing. Or tell you how to use your ball.
Working on an office suite? Now, that's in the same league as working on a browser.
I'd say we should put more brainpower in fundamental things, like the field of particle physics. Perhaps they can figure out how to extract energy from vacuum. Or perhaps they can invent a practical quantum computer. Now that would be useful!
I think Mozilla needs to take on the SSL/TLS CA industry.
They need to come up with a way to store DNS-hierarchy-specify CAs.
For instance, if I have mozilla.org, which is now DNSSEC-enabled, and more and more ISPs are adding DNSSEC support to their resolvers, I have a trusted way to control SSL/TLS certificates and authorities for mozilla.org and should not need a "Root CA" anymore.
The point being a Root CA such as CNNIC (The Chinese NIC) should have no ability to issue certificates for any zone other than .CN. But the way certificates work today is totally broken.
We need browser support for this, plus the whole architecture to make it work. But the core underlying technology, DNSSEC and a signed root and more and more signed TLDs, is already there.
For instance I can already put SSHFP records (SSH Fingerprint) in DNS, and I can go to a new machine that has a DNSSEC-enabled resolver and SSH to a host for the first time and be able to pull the SSHFP record and compare it to the fingerprint of the SSH key the host sends me and know that there is no M-i-t-M attack going on.
The same could be done for DNS-based CAs.
The same should be done for email-to-email servers so that they can pull SSL/TLS records from DNSSEC to use opportunistic encryption. Mozilla could be a big push to making this all happen.
This could be used to combat spam as well. If you don't have an SSL/TLS record in DNSSEC, then perhaps I don't want to receive email from you (or give it a very low score). It eliminates the ability of being able to spoof a DNS server. But we already have that with SPF records now and DNSSEC-enabled zones and resolvers, but the site-to-site encryption would be great.
Additionally, opportunistic encryption for VPN and many other devices can use DNSSEC to store keys. Mozilla can be a driving force to enable all of this and come up with some game-changing applications or at least add-ons to make it work.
The only piece of info I need is the DS Trust Anchor record of the root zone. With just this, I get all this extra security, so long as someone builds the rest.
While the state of calendaring has gotten better, partly due to these guys, there's still plenty of distance to go. You can't do calendaring without thinking about it, like you can with e-mail. You can't write an app that _easily_ provides a button for "schedule a haircut with my favorite hair-cutter". If you're talking about mobilizing a community for changing the world, let's solve the calendar stuff.
Leave a badly behaved page like facebook open (with constant ajax type updates) and you can't do anything on other pages.
Neither I nor anyone I know has noticed anything like that.
What he can't kill, he has sex on. Trent.
If Google really wanted Firefox to fail I would think they could just stop funding Mozilla.
Slashdot editors need adult supervision. Why did this stupid Slashdot story get posted? Mozilla has the add-ons that make browsing far less painful. No other browser does. Do you want to watch blinking ads?
I think you've misunderstood. The very existence of such a preference indicates that they know full well how to separate UI threads from processing threads. In fact, they seem to have even made it configurable, though I'm unsure why. This preference appears to be there in case, for some strange reason, you want to turn off the interrupting. Perhaps they have it as an option for developer testing and debugging. And what kind of awful computer slows down on the awesome bar search?
People bash FF for the strangest things.
meep
While we're at it, I think Blizzard should concentrate on spreadsheet software, Autodesk should make video editing software, and Microsoft should really focus on beet farming. Those all make an equal amount of sense as the author's premise.
Firefox is still way ahead of every other browser. Safari is all-around crappy on Windows (this might have changed, I haven't tried it in about a year.) IE is, well, IE. I won't beat that dead horse here. Opera mini is great on the phones I've had, but the full Opera can't compete on price. And then there's Chrome.
Chrome might be slightly faster, but it is a nearly featureless, juvenile program with a horrible user interface. It has nowhere near the amount of extensions of Firefox. It has an error system that uses the jargon of a near-illiterate 13 year old. It has the worst bookmark system I've seen, it doesn't handle large numbers of tabs well and you can't really customize the UI much at all. I keep trying to use it, and it never lasts a full day before I uninstall it out of frustration. I'm far from the only one. I know someone who uninstalled as soon as the first error message showed up, saying "Neither me nor my computer is in middle school."
I love a lot of Google's software. But Chrome (and Picassa too) is an example of user interface design being given to the exactly wrong type of person.
This sentence no verb.
I love chrome. I used to think "As a web developer, I could never live without [a long list of extensions]" but I've since changed my mind because Chrome just feels so nice... But there is one thing that keeps me from completely switching to chrome: The Master Password.
Currently the only way to store your passwords in encrypted form is to encrypt the entire filesystem. While it is not - in itself - a bad idea to do when it comes to laptops, it is far from the optimal replacement for master password functionality. Before Chrome implements such - and they've announced that they don't plan to implement it - I can't switch from Firefox.
Firefox has many subtle little features that make it indispensable to me:
1 - It has a customizable UI so that I can make it look exactly how I want. Other browsers may have some slight customization but Firefox lets you rearrange everything easily.
2 - The 'Awesome Bar' (URL bar) really is awesome. Instead of listing the last visited or most visited sites, it lists the sites that are most often clicked on from within the bar. This is great to easily get to the sites that you have typed in frequently but don't want to bookmark. It also does keyword searches of your entire history when you type in it which makes finding sites you visited easily.
3 - It remembers form information even if you navigate to a new page. This is incredibly helpful on many forums. Often times forums and such will have a session timeout when you write a long post and in other browsers your entire post will be forgotten but with Firefox you can just hit the back button and it's all still there for you to resubmit.
4 - It allows you to resize textarea input fields. Often times sites hard code a small size for textarea input which can make writing a big post hard to see while you write it but in firefox you can just drag it to whatever size you want.
5 - Adblock Plus. Some other browsers have Adblock but it works best in Firefox and can even block ads within Flash so that I don't have to watch ads on video sites like ustream/livestream/etc.
6 - Extensions in general. Firefox has the most robust browser extensions and you can find extensions to do practically anything you can imagine.
7 - FF4 has a much faster javascript engine that uses two types of JIT compiling whereas other browsers are only doing one kind. They recently passed Chrome's V8 engine's Sunspider performance on their test machine at www.arewefastyet.com and have the potential to become the fastest for javascript by borrowing all the method JIT work competitors do while maintaining their lead with trace JIT.
8 - FF4 has the most robust hardware acceleration support. On Linux and OSX it uses OpenGL, on XP it uses D3D9, on Vista and Win7 it uses D3D9/10+Direct2D+DirectWrite. MS isn't even going to support XP for IE9 because they only wanted it to do D3D10+D2D+DW.
by some effort to bring Thunderbird+Lightning into the new millenium. Unfortuntunately these two are missing out on 90% of the goodness their combination could bring to somebody who needs email, calender and address books for doing serious work. ... lots and lots of possible improvements.
For example, connecting emails with deadlines or follow-up todo's, re-showing emails that are related to a task after some period of time, adding notes and URLs to emails, showing Emails in a way Google Mail does
This guy definitely doesn't write business centric web applications that must be certified on specific browsers.
IE is a pain in the butt most of the time. Firefox is generally the easiest to certify on. You can forget certifying on Chrome. While our app works pretty much all the time on Chrome, certifying on it is a pain because they release so many versions so quickly that we are uncomfortable with making it a certified browsers for our application. That many releases that quick becomes a QA nightmare.
No thanks, I will keep Firefox.
"'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?"
With lines like that I can't help but think he's going to say, "now imagine a beowulf cluster of Firefoxes."
"Just a fox, a whisper."
Oeone took a shot at a Mozilla Office Suite before, well more of an everything suite home appliance.
http://www.linux.com/archive/feed/24499
They wrote the guts of Calender and donated it to Mozilla. The word processor part embedded Abiword http://abimoz.mozdev.org/index.html
In the past, Mozilla was more of a revolution than today. That I can agree on.
Lots of people have raised many valid reasons for why Mozilla should continue their work in the browser field. But the main one for me has not been said yet from what I can see.
What happens in a couple of years. Would the great browser ecosystem that we have today continue to grow in the same way? What proof do we have that we won't go back to a dark age of lock-ins and incompatibilities? Should Mozilla start up the browser project then and try to catch up on half a decade of "downtime"? No, if nothing else, Mozilla keeps the other browser vendors in line. The free and open alternative available is a great incentive for them to be better and try harder. Healthy competition benefits us all.
I just read this guy as somebody's corporate troll, but across Microsoft, Google or Apple, the one who seems to have the most to gain from Firefox's demise would be...Google, now that they're pushing the competing Chrome browser into the very same space.
More than 90% of the Mozilla foundation's income comes from a deal with Google. See this article,
where Mozilla's CEO agnoliges this, but claims they would survive without Google handing them lots
of money for putting google search on their home page:
http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/9044160/Mozilla_can_live_without_Google_s_money_Baker_says_ .
I don't believe her. She claims that "We could have a more diverse revenue stream", but I can't
think of anything Mozilla could do that gives them money without pissing off their community. As
far as I know, nothing has changed since the article was written in 2007. Ads and charging for a
browser are clearly out of the question. What else could they do?
Google saved us from a world where IE is the only viable browser.
Imagine if Mozilla decided tomorrow to build an office suite.
Oh yeah!!! Because the first set of programmers I think of doing an office suite are ones that have no experience with the domain area!
Seriously... what was this guy smoking? Or is this just Slashdot's daily troll for pageviews story because it's such an obviously stupid idea that everyone will comment?
That is all.
I haven't had a situation where I "can't do anything on other pages", but when I have tons (hundreds) of tabs open, Firefox regularly consumes 30% of my CPU time doing nothing. I have flash blocked and animations set to not loop, so you can't blame those.
And don't tell me I should have fewer tabs open. I should be able to use the browser however I want. Sure hundreds of tabs is not the normal use case, but I know there are others out there that do the same thing. Provide a better bookmark system and maybe I won't need so may tabs.
Just today, Firefox "forgot" all my bookmarks, so I had to delete my places.sqlite file to get them back. When I went to delete it, it was 124MB! No wonder the awesome bar was always so laggy. It is much faster now, but all my history is gone (not that I ever really use it, but I like to keep it). At least I got my bookmarks back.
I stick with Firefox, though, because I like it, I like the extensions, and nothing else I've tried has been a good enough replacement. Google Chrome can't handle the number of bookmarks I have, or the number of tabs I like to keep open (at least on my mac, I haven't tried the Windows version). Opera lacks extensions (though it's getting them in version 11) and is still a niche browser. Maybe it's time to try Safari again now that version 5 has extensions, but I still don't like that it is somewhat limited, like most Apple products*.
*Yes, I use a Mac, but that's because their OS is really solid and works well. It doesn't have audio dropouts like my Windows 7 PC, for example, and it doesn't have most of the hardware problems I've had with Linux (mostly video driver problems) and more commercial software works on Mac than Linux. I don't like the direction Apple seems to be going, making everything more closed, but I will stick with it until something better comes along or until I'm forced to switch.
I kinda get the point. Mozilla is a grand ole FOSS project that unites all camps of the FOSS community. No BSD vs. Linux or KDE vs. Gnome infighting, because *EVERYONE" uses FF at some point. .... No one out there has managed to pull through with this. The most promising horse, Java, actually built for what Flash is used for nowadays, failed time and time again to deliver in this field.
However, having Mozilla stirring up the Office area would be a waste. There is one thing, one very pressing thing that needs to be tackled that everyone, including multi-billion dollar corporations, have failed to go after in any meaningful way. What we need and what we have been needing for the last decade is a viable usable fully featured open source rich client environment. In plain text, we need a FOSS Flash competitor that is actually up to the task. One that does everything Flash does, only better, minus the flaws. All have failed. JMF, Curl, WildTangent, JavaFX, XULRunner/Prism (basically a dead Mozilla Project) and so on
We need a dedicated crew to finally get their stuff together and build a future-safe performant and powerfull rich client VM. This would be something the Mozilla crew could really test their skills on. I would so love to see that.
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
There's a lot more to innovation than looks.
There is no -1 Disagree mod. Slashdot.org/faq defines mod options. USE IT.
Which am I more excited by? Neither. A new office suite? That's OpenOffice.org's deal. What is Mozilla going to be able to do that those guys can't?
So yeah, I'm onboard with the "stick with what you're good at" theory. Or at least if you want to do something different, do something that some other team hasn't been working on for all eternity.
Right... Google makes 85% of the contributions to the Mozilla Foundation, but they want to kill it. Those contributions wouldn't be made if google didn't deem them profitable.
News Alert: The 'Office Suite' is dead.
ie: maybe the office suite is a "stagnant arena" because of lack of future demand.
I (we?) don't use Office. I use my email client for most text entry on my PC. When I need to write a document, I use gdocs.
I sometimes use the local office suite that came with my OS. But I didn't search for another as it just "worked" with the proprietary formats other people save their documents into. I never have (and will never) looked for alternatives. This is 100% common among other employees in my office.
Conclusion:
- I use Firefox. Keep this available and current please.
- I care nothing for Office products. Don't waste your time working on something I won't use.
- If you do revive Office Suites on future PC's... then also, can you fix the problem with traditional print media being unable to compete with online print/news sites?
I could not agree more:
Lack of a simple and convenient Exchange replacement strangles many, many commercial Linux deployments particularly in mixed environments,
Google Docs would be very nice
I wish LibreOffice all the best, and hope that, freed from Corporate America's help, it will now flourish. All projects with a horrendous build system please note!
With Zombies. And Ninjas. And Cyborgs.
You see them her eon Slashdot in fair numbers. People who love the idea of OSS, in particular the idea of not paying for software (they claim it is all about openness but it is more about not paying). However they've never participated to any real extent, nor do they understand what goes in to developing software. So they have this fanboy ideal that OSS devs are so smart and talented and corporate devs are dumb and marred in politics. So they think that OSS teams could easily outdo anything corporate on the market, if they just wanted to. Making a better office suite than Office? No problem! MS is stupid, they fuck up all the time, OSS people could do it no problem if they decided to!
Until html5 is standardized, Firefox is continuing to drive innovation. For instance, they are driving scriptable audio tag for animating audio in real time. These great ideas need to be adopted by the others, if Firefox quit, nobody would benefit from these ideas.
TFA is asserting firefox team should quit and go do something else because other browser vendors (Having much much less market share than firefox BTW) have features firefox currently does not?
Besides being a pointless argument (Quitter talk) there are some obvious factual inaccuracies.
1. Firefox plugin libaries extend the browsers feature sets well beyond what is currently available from other vendors.
2. Saying Mozilla Project should not only focus on Browsers is like saying the Apache foundation should not only focus on web servers.
after using Chrome for several months. Chrome was faster and worked better for certain sites including /., but I prefer Firefox's GUI and it handles downloads better. With Firefox pausing and resuming a stalled download almost always fixes the problem, but with Chrome I had no such luck.
They've really slid on their deadlines so it won't be surprising if its released in December or January.
With American Holidays there is a break in December, so if not early to mid December, then probably mid to late January.
Here's the problems I see with this suggestion:
1) The people working on mozilla aren't some kind of cogs. You take some volunteers working on a project, say "OK we're done with that, work on this other project" and a bunch of them are just going to leave.
2) Office? OpenOffice already exists. Some better word processors also exist -- but, the big problem is, once some group works on an office suite, people just complain "Hey, it doesn't do X, Y, Z and W that Office does" "This is slightly different from Office" "Hey, these Office files aren't handled properly". Out of necessity, the code bloats and gets more complicated to be essentially feature-for -feature compatible with office, and bug-for-bug compatible in some cases. In other words, if Mozilla worked on an office suite, over time it'd end up being just like OpenOffice.
3) Related to problem #1, the mozilla developers are free to develop other projects, or contribute to other existing projects. This doesn't mean Firefox has to be abandoned.
Finally... sorry, but I like Firefox. Safari and Chrome are OK but both do things I simply don't want my browser to do, and have lesser plugin and addon compatibility. Chrome especially got a big jump on Firefox in terms of raw speed, but Firefox has been catching up and is still competitive.
Imagine if Mozilla was to build a cold fusion power plant, now imagine firefox 4. Which one are you more exited about?
From what I've seen, the one real innovation in Firefox was the introduction of open-sourced extensions/add-ons.
The browser itself, w/o the extensions, is nothing to write home about.
You don't hear people saying that windows is awesome because of all the awesome programs that runs on it, do you?
(note: i actually do use FF - also Opera and Chrome, as the mood and my needs warrant)
I'm still looking for a well documented stable office suite that runs on Linux.
1. A good desktop publishing package that understands kerning and tracking, and has decent (doesn't have to be as good as TeX) equation setting that can be done without a mouse. And handles nested lists of various types without getting hopelessly confused. And can produce a table of contents from a list of styled headlines. E.g. TOC consists of a nested list using Heading1, heading2, and heading3. But the TOC headlines can be styled differently from their appearence in the document. And can produce a decent index.
And allows you to flag a word, and index it in various ways. E.g. 'twist tie' is indexed as "fastener -> wire & paper" "bag closers -> twist tie" (The index entry for duct tape would be endless...)
2. A spreadsheet program that is a reasonable superset of excel. Every one I've tried so far has problems running VLookUp against another sheet in the same workbook. If it doesn't implement the same syntax, that's ok: But then it has to have documentation.
3. A presentation/outline generator that is even half as capable as the one on NextStep -- Concurrence. It allowed me to move back and forth between an outline form and a slide form, allowed speaker notes, and allowed printing with/without speaker notes.
4. A database front end with the capability of Access
5. A drawing program with the capability of Canvas or Create.
Third Career: Tree Farmer Second Career: Computer Geek First Career: Teacher, Outdoor Instructor, Photographer.
Mozilla needs to stick to Firefox. As a matter of fact as far as I'm concerned they are behind. One major release and IE9 is on par, Chrome comes out of no-where and gets FF with its pants down. If you ask me they need to drop development on all other projects and work solely on FF.
The only way Mozilla would ever get my support for working on an "office suite" is if they contributed to LibreOffice, if they released yet another open source office suite it wouldn't have my support. Unless of course it was phenomely
"how brilliant it would be" == "how bloated it would be"
"imagine all those ideas" == "imagine all the useless features"
All i want at least is a basic browser which is fast and non-bloated. even chrome is starting to feel a bit bloated .. :( and this is on a high end workstation
Yeah, i'm the odd one in the bunch, running so many things at once, but seriously, the cpu cycles, IOPS and RAM is better used elsewhere than "having useless features available", or maintaining bloat
Pulsed Media Seedboxes