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?'"

Comments

Firefox 4

[rwa2]

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.

Wow just how wrong can one be.

[LWATCDR]

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.

Re:Firefox isn't outstripped in terms of features

[Anonymous Coward]

Indeed, the JavaScript error console is very reliable with Firefox. More than with Safari from my experience.
Firebug's capability of modifying a page dynamically to test changes without going back to the source code is also easier to use than Safari's developer tools which aren't as polished yet.

Amusingly, guess which browser gets used first to troubleshoot JavaScript by most of Google. Hint: it's not Chrome.

Re:It Hurts

[cbhacking]

Features which I use and that Firefox lacked last I checked:
Process separation by tab (so that a crashing tab does not bring down the others) and seperating tabs from chrome (so that if one tab hangs, you can kill it and/or continue using other tabs without killing the browser). I'm not exactly sure whether IE8 or Chrome introduced this first - I think IE8 had the first working public beta - but it's been available for a few years.

Use of Low Integrity Level process sandboxing to limit the potential damage if the browser becomes compromised. IE7+ and Chrome. Does Firefox have this yet? (Yes, this is platform-specific, but it *is* a good feature.)

Ability to "tear out" a tab into its own window, and to re-combine tabs into existing windows (Opera, Chrome, IE9).

I'll grant that Firefox's extension selection is the best out there, and includes a lot of very cool features including some that are hard to find - if not completly unavailable at the same quality level - on other platforms. However, there's some stuff that's just integral to the browser itself, and the last few Firefox upgrades have not impressed me in that category (rapidly change your browser's skin!!)