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Mozilla's Nightingale: Why Firefox Still Matters

Posted by Unknown on from the greenspun's-tenth-browser dept.

An anonymous reader writes "Mozilla could be heading into an open confrontation with its rivals Google, Apple and Microsoft as browsers evolve into platforms. Mozilla's director of Firefox engineering John Nightingale gave some insight on the past, present, and future of Mozilla and outlined why Firefox still matters. While Mozilla is accused of copying features from other browsers, the company says the opposite is the case. Nightingale says that a future Firefox will give a user much more control over what he does on the Internet and that Mozilla plans on competing with the ideal of an open web against siloed environments." Chrome may have a nice interface and be a bit faster than Firefox's rendering engine, but if Firefox failed as a project I'd miss its Emacs-like extensibility (something all other browsers lack).

4 of 260 comments (clear)

  1. Only open source standards compliant browser by zget · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Firefox matters because it's once again the only open source browser that goes by standards instead of doing whatever they want. Chrome was there for a long time, but now immediately when they started to gain some market share Google decided to do what Microsoft did in the 90's and start implementing their own features and not documenting them good enough for others to implement. Then they went on and created websites that only work with Chrome. I have no idea why and when Google started acting like the new douche bag in town, but it's finally happening. And things were going so well for web designers now that Microsoft picked up their act and made IE9 standards compliant and HTML5 capable..

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    Google+ vs. Facebook, and why Google+ will fail
  2. Platforms by danbuter · · Score: 5, Insightful

    I don't need my web browser to be a full platform. I need it to be a web browser. I wish these guys would figure that out.

  3. Noscript by Holammer · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Noscript is the #1 feature why I'm using Firefox. I suspect a lot of medium to advanced users desire its functionality.

  4. What good is extensibility... by QuietLagoon · · Score: 5, Insightful
    ... if Firefox's new and unnecessary rapid development cycle renders plug-ins invalid every three months, and the plug-in developers choose not to participate in Firefox's inane rapid development cycle. I, a Firefox user, am left with an egregious choice of keeping the browser secure by jumping on the rapid development cycle bandwagon, or using the plug-ins I want to use by skipping the security updates embedded in the rapid development cycle.

    .
    All in the name of inflating the ego of some developers who are in a testosterone-enabled development war with other browser developers.