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

It Hurts

[eldavojohn]

"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.

Re:It Hurts

[BrokenHalo]

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.

Re:It Hurts

[ebuck]

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).

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.

Re:Firefox 4

[sammyF70]

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?

no, because...

[spikenerd]

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.

Not Excited by Office Equipment

[SwordsmanLuke]

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.

Less FF Bloat please

[commodore64_love]

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.

Re:Less FF Bloat please

[Rysc]

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!

Oracle

[MrEricSir]

Larry Ellison

Re:Oracle

[Temposs]

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.

Mozilla Suite vs. Firefox

[ceejayoz]

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.

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.

What are they talking about?

[vlm]

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"

Firefox and Independent Software

[daniel.baker]

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.

Um - Thunderbird, anyone?

[BobMcD]

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.