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Why Mozilla Needs To Pick a New Fight

Posted by CmdrTaco on from the zombies-need-killing dept.

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?'"

24 of 351 comments (clear)

  1. It Hurts by eldavojohn · · Score: 5, Insightful

    "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.

    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 ... you just have to say or think something and suddenly it exists.

    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.
    1. Re:It Hurts by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Insightful

      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.
       

      Maybe you should point him to it instead of wishing someone else would do it.

    2. Re:It Hurts by BrokenHalo · · Score: 5, Insightful

      Is the energy of mozilla better on improving browsers or office suites ?

      Better stick to what it's good at. No point in reinventing the wheel.

      But I draw the reader's attention to an entirely unsubstantiated quote from the submission, apropos Firefox: ..."and its rivals have outstripped it in terms of features."

      What might those be? I would be the first to agree that Firefox is not always the quickest at rendering webpages, but that is easily cured by a few microseconds of patience. But as far as features are concerned, Firefox has no equal. You pick what features (extensions) are important to you, install them, and that's that.

    3. Re:It Hurts by ebuck · · Score: 4, Insightful

      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.

      This is my biggest complaint with many Open Source "lusers" and it happens all the time. I often see bug reports which look like, "Please fix ABC or add new feature XYZ ASAP. It shouldn't be too hard to fix. This ticket is priority important because I need this feature yesterday." People seem to think that Open Source means that programmers will magically write the software they need for free.

      They don't know their history. It only took Mozilla nearly five years to release something that resembled a better web browser, and even then the early releases were slow and sometime buggy.

      The good news was that after five years of no competition, Internet Explorer's team had been cut to the bone and IE was so stagnant that it took a few years before Microsoft could effectively restart the team. Somehow I don't think they'll let that happen to their office suite, as that's where they make most of their money (as opposed to IE which was a give-away product released only for competitive purposes).

    4. Re:It Hurts by cheesybagel · · Score: 2, Insightful
      The process separation has the advantage that you get a more stable browser. The disadvantage is that the browser will consume more memory because of unnecessary duplication of data.

      The biggest improvement was putting the plugins in their own process. Those were the things that crashed Mozilla the most.

  2. no, because... by spikenerd · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.

  3. Firefox is good .... plus makes money by xmas2003 · · Score: 2, Insightful

    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
  4. Not Excited by Office Equipment by SwordsmanLuke · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.
    1. Re:Not Excited by Office Equipment by Rysc · · Score: 3, Insightful

      Mozilla didn't reinvent the browser, they just reimplemented Netscape Communicator, then later split off the navigator piece into phoenix/firebird/firefox. It was never a revolution it was just what people actually wanted: a browser that's (1) free to use, (2) doesn't crash all the time, (3) supports standards and (4) runs on every platform anybody cares about. At the time 1 beat out Opera, 2 and 3 beat classic navigator and IE, 4 beat IE and some others. Mozilla and Firefox were never revolutionary, just (finally) a good, solid browser. The fact that this has become relatively ordinary since then is very nice, but still not a revolution.

      --
      I want my Cowboyneal
  5. Less FF Bloat please by commodore64_love · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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
    1. Re:Less FF Bloat please by Nursie · · Score: 2, Insightful

      Wasn't seamonkey descended from the old mozilla suite?

      The one they ditched and rewrote because of bloat?

      Irony.

    2. Re:Less FF Bloat please by kestasjk · · Score: 2, Insightful

      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.

      Try using Dillo or Mosaic, they use only kilobytes of RAM, so they must be the best! It's not like browsers do anything with that RAM, after all..

      --
      // MD_Update(&m,buf,j);
  6. Oracle by MrEricSir · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Larry Ellison

    --
    There's no -1 for "I don't get it."
  7. Your basis? by bytesaber · · Score: 2, Insightful

    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

  8. Doing what you do best by Andy+Dodd · · Score: 3, Insightful

    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.

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    retrorocket.o not found, launch anyway?
  9. Mozilla Suite vs. Firefox by ceejayoz · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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.

  10. Firefox isn't outstripped in terms of features by Dalzhim · · Score: 3, Insightful

    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.

  11. Re:Firefox 4 by sammyF70 · · Score: 4, Insightful

    automated data collection, mining, and reporting, OTOH, is neat... hence Google kinda focuses on those things and sort of runs GDocs as a sideshow).

    I WISH I would be just aiming at "+1 Funny", but what makes you think automated data collection, mining and reporting isn't what Google Docs is all about?

    --
    "DRM is like the Ford Pinto: it's a smooth ride, right up the point at which it explodes and ruins your day."-C.Doctorow
  12. Microsoft troll? Or Google troll? Or Apple... by xxxJonBoyxxx · · Score: 2, Insightful

    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.

  13. Other browsers outstripped FF in features? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Insightful

    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.

  14. Re:office suite? by takowl · · Score: 2, Insightful

    It's not exactly snappy (a word processor with a splash screen?), nor particularly good looking.

    No new office suite is about to overtake it, though, unless a big company throws a lot of resources into creating a free office suite. Openoffice (should I say Libreoffice yet?) has a great advantage in the amount of code already written: it's slow, but it beats everything (except perhaps MS Office) on features. Even IBM's "Lotus Symphony" is based on Openoffice code. Now if they could just make it rather faster...

    I think Mozilla should stick to what it's good at. Firefox has not been 'outstripped in terms of features': nothing else has matched the power of its extensions system. It's been overtaken on speed and HTML5 support, but Firefox 4 will go a good way towards clawing that back.

  15. Firefox and Independent Software by daniel.baker · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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?
  16. Um - Thunderbird, anyone? by BobMcD · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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.

  17. Mozilla does not need to pick a new fight by hkmwbz · · Score: 3, Insightful

    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?

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    Clever signature text goes here.