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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?'"

53 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, Funny

      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.

      See also: Why can't I build a dirigible with my mind?

    2. Re:It Hurts by kg8484 · · Score: 2, Informative

      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.

    3. 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.

    4. 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.

    5. Re:It Hurts by the_womble · · Score: 2, Interesting

      Yes, the article is rubbish. In fact, I think the article is a troll.

      There are no hugely exciting ideas in office suites. There are some good ideas that could be more widely used, but users have shown they do not want to do anything new (e.g. using something like Lyx instead of a word processer, or not using a spreadsheet as a database or an development platform).

      Other than that, office suites are boring because they are a solved problem. They all do much the same in much the same way. They might need some incremental improvements, but they do not need radical now ideas.

    6. Re:It Hurts by Mr.+Spontaneous · · Score: 2, Informative

      According to http://www.arewefastyet.com/, they're beating Chrome in Sunspider. That, plus their graphically accelerated rendering + compositing makes their Windows builds quite speedy.

      --
      Its all fun and games until someone loses an eye... then its just fun.
    7. 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).

    8. Re:It Hurts by IB4Student · · Score: 2, Informative

      There also this source:
      http://www.conceivablytech.com/2784/products/mozilla-firefox-4-is-twice-as-fast-chrome-7/
      But, honestly, most of the pages that I go to do not have tons of javascript all over them, especially with noscript. Firefox 4, Chrome 7, Chromium 8, Opera 11, and heck, even IE 9 all render my pages in an instant. I have the "exact" same addons on both firefox on chrome (as close as I could get). However, on certain websites, chrome takes a bit to load all of the pages, and it is because some of the addons that I use are poorly implemented in Chrome (without addons, it loads instantly). I have all of the browsers on, but right now I'm sticking to firefox 4 (the UI is customizable and slimmer. I'm only on either 1440x900 or 1024x600--I need to treasure my vertical pixels).

    9. Re:It Hurts by reboot246 · · Score: 3, Funny

      That could be dangerous on a touchscreen! :)

    10. Re:It Hurts by cbhacking · · Score: 3, Interesting

      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!!)

      --
      There's no place I could be, since I've found Serenity...
    11. 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.

    12. Re:It Hurts by gobland · · Score: 2, Informative

      Hmmm, I believe Firefox is able to 'tear out' tabs into their own window (right-click on the tab and select 'Open in new window'. You can get them back again with drag-and-drop...

  2. Firefox 4 by rwa2 · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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.

    1. 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
  3. 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.

  4. 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
    1. Re:Firefox is good .... plus makes money by mark72005 · · Score: 2, Informative

      I haven't had a lot of luck with Chrome. On my work PC it seems to slow things down, and doesn't display some important pages correctly.

      Firefox is generally very reliable at handling things that were written for IE, and it still seems faster to me.

      Plus, Chrome's bookmark situation is convoluted and dumb.

    2. Re:Firefox is good .... plus makes money by Fnkmaster · · Score: 2, Informative

      Agreed. Chrome's rendering, display and scrolling are significantly slower on messy, complicated HTML than Firefox. There was a big advantage on Javascript-heavy pages, but with Firefox 4 that's gone since the browsers are now roughly on par in Javascript performance. And Firefox 4 has GPU-accelerated rendering now which speeds up certain types of intense rendering quite a bit too.

      Given all the advantage of Firefox in terms of extension-availability, there's no particularly strong argument in favor of Chrome. And don't you dare say "Firefox leaks memory" - this is the most tired meme at this point. If you have issues on your PC configuration, just try adjusting the caching settings mentioned here. There haven't been any real issues with Firefox memory usage since FF 2, for your average use case user (people who open 30-40 tabs simultaneously may conceivably have some legitimate gripes, but their usage patterns are definitely not typical).

  5. 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
  6. 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);
    3. Re:Less FF Bloat please by guanxi · · Score: 2, Informative

      Seamonkey and Firefox share code, but not, I think, to the extent you are saying. Firefox ditched much of Seamonkey's options and features. I haven't used Seamonkey since around FF1.0, so I don't know it's current state.

      Another feature seamonkey has which I love: The ability to resize this damn edit window so it's not so small. ;-) Just grab the corner and drag.

      That's in FF4, which I'm using. You can also find that in extensions.

    4. Re:Less FF Bloat please by Rysc · · Score: 5, Informative

      The Mozilla project was started as a from-scratch rewrite of Netscape Communicator (Netscape Browser, Netscape Mail & News, Netscape Composer) in an open source fashion. Actually that's not entirely accurate: When the project started they started with the Netscape 4.x source code and only decided to throw it out and start over a few months later, probably after the project leaders had been drinking, but this is incidental.

      As the project progressed Mozilla-the-project added all of the Communicator apps on top of a common core. Eventually Netscape the company took a pre-1.0 version of this and released it as "Netscape Communicator 6", which was commonly understood to be "As slow as molasses," meanwhile Mozilla continued to release Mozilla-the-suite (Mozilla Browser, Mozilla Mail & News, Mozilla Composer, and the new kid on the block: Chatzilla). Eventually some developers in Mozilla started up a guerrilla project to make "Just a browser" and released Mozilla Browser with a few UI tweaks as Phoenix, which was too bad because Phoenix-the-bios-vendor had a browser in some of their product and didn't like that, so they renamed it to Firebird, which was too bad because the Firebird database guys were there first, so they renamed it to Firefox, which made no sense to anybody but at least wasn't trademarked yet. Netscape-the-company, in a last gasp of breath, released a Netscape browser based on Firefox, called Netscape 8, which contained a brand new sidebar! But nobody cared. Once Firefox had stolen enough thunder and press Mozilla-the-project refocused its efforts on that and formally discontinued Mozilla-the-Suite, which pissed off a lot of people who said "But we like the all-in-one suite!" These people went on to rebrand Mozilla Suite as Seamonkey, after an old code name that somebody liked. Meanwhile Mozilla Mail & News was spun off of the Suite as Thunderbird and (eventually) the calendar component, which had never quite made it in to the suite, was spun off as Sunbird (after a few false starts) and then kind of re-integrated into Thunderbird with the catchy name "Lightning" when somebody realized that few people actually used a standalone calendar and sometimes bundling makes sense after all (which just proves the point us Seamonkey fans have been making).

      Chatzilla, meanwhile, got more or less forgotten, languishing as a Firefox extension, and Composer saw some life as Nvu, stagnated, then became KompoZer (because Z makes everything better).

      I think the point here is that Firefox is the bloat-free version of Mozilla Browser, in that you didn't have to get the rest of the communicator suite with it. Since that suite *is* Seamonkey and still shares a large majority of code with Firefox (common core and the Browser component) it's a bit ridiculous to say that Seamonkey is Firefox without the bloat, since (historically) it's the other way around and in terms of code-base there's a lot more 'bloat' in Seamonkey!

      --
      I want my Cowboyneal
    5. Re:Less FF Bloat please by commodore64_love · · Score: 2, Interesting

      >>>it's a bit ridiculous to say that Seamonkey is Firefox without the bloat, since (historically) it's the other way around and in terms of code-base there's a lot more 'bloat' in Seamonkey!

      Wow. That was a long post. :-)

      My theory is that Seamonkey doesn't load the extra components (email, chat, etc) since I never use them, therefore it acts like a stripped-down browser and does so more efficiently than Firefox (150,000 vs 300,000 KB according to my task manager). It's also worth noting that Puppy Linux, which is designed to be as small as possible so it can run 100% in memory, chose Seamonkey instead of Firefox. Why? Because:

      "Firefox would be too big to run in RAM in a PC with 128 megabytes." - Puppy FAQ

      --
      "I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." - historian Evelyn Beatrice Hall
  7. Oracle by MrEricSir · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Larry Ellison

    --
    There's no -1 for "I don't get it."
    1. Re:Oracle by Temposs · · Score: 4, Informative

      Not correct: http://www.openoffice.org/

      Take a look at the fat Oracle logo in the bottom left. Oracle is still very much in control of Open Office.

      What you are probably referring to is the majority of other contributing organizations to Open Office have gone and started their own fork called LibreOffice, which is not under Oracle's control.

      There are negotiations being held to have Oracle relinquish control of the Open Office name, but as of yet it has not happened.

      --
      Knowledge is just opinion that you trust enough to act upon. -Orson Scott Card
  8. Turn down those coals. by Culture20 · · Score: 3, Funny

    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.

  9. 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

  10. 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.

    --
    retrorocket.o not found, launch anyway?
  11. 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.

  12. 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.

    1. Re:Firefox isn't outstripped in terms of features by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Interesting

      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.

  13. Wow just how wrong can one be. by LWATCDR · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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.
    1. Re:Wow just how wrong can one be. by LWATCDR · · Score: 2, Informative

      I have looked at it and it does look interesting. The problem is that Zimbra doesn't really replace exchange unless you pay for the enterprise version.

      http://www.zimbra.com/products/compare_products.html
      The Community version is not feature complete.
      While close not really a FOSS solution for an Exchange replacement.

      --
      See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
  14. 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.

  15. 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.

  16. 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.

  17. What are they talking about? by vlm · · Score: 4, Funny

    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
    1. Re:What are they talking about? by greg23s · · Score: 2, Informative

      add "https everywhere" to that list...

  18. Re:office suite? by Nethemas+the+Great · · Score: 2, Funny

    You speak like you might have actually used the software...

    --
    Two of my imaginary friends reproduced once ... with negative results.
  19. Re:Mozilla Office by The+MAZZTer · · Score: 2, Informative

    Bundle OpenOffice with Firefox? You know how large the OpenOffice download is compared to Firefox, right?

  20. Re:office suite? by Magic5Ball · · Score: 2, Interesting

    Ask that again after you've tried to mail/data merge more than 5,000 records, position non-body-text elements with pixel precision, or correctly use a typefaces' j/k rules.

    The considerably less resourced NeoOffice fork is much more competent, usable, and pretty for office work.

    --
    There are 1.1... kinds of people.
  21. Re:office suite? by The+MAZZTer · · Score: 3, Funny

    Office 2010 has a splash screen. Even better, it has a cancel button on the splash, just in case you get tired of waiting and change your mind!

  22. 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?
  23. Re:Mozilla Office by Magic5Ball · · Score: 2, Interesting

    Since they know more about rendering engines than almost anyone else, and since precision of reproduction appears to remain an issue with OO.o and MSO, Mozilla could start by wrapping a basic word processor UI around their rendering engine and then add a presentations UI. (They could probably figure out something for a decent spreadsheet app based on their scripting experience, but I'm less confident about their ability to quickly grok the financial functions.) When those are good enough to be standalone, they could split them into their own thing, like Thunderbird.

    --
    There are 1.1... kinds of people.
  24. Re:Firefox is bad .... plus makes me irritated by b4dc0d3r · · Score: 2, Interesting

    I think it sucks, and getting worse. Here's an advanced configuration option as an example:

    http://kb.mozillazine.org/Content.interrupt.parsing

    Possible values and their effects
    true
    Parsing can be interrupted to process UI events. (Default)

    false
    Parsing cannot be interrupted. The application will be unresponsive until parsing is complete

    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/

  25. 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.

  26. 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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  27. Re:I have two words: Adblock Plus by Trashman · · Score: 2, Informative

    Um, Check your sources please. Recent versions of adblock for chrome does block elements from downloading now.

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  28. don't forget WebDeveloper plugin by acomj · · Score: 2, Interesting

    Making CSS more debugable. Makes firefox my goto web browser for web development.