Firefox Succeeded In Its Goal -- But What's Next?

trawg writes: It's been more than 10 years since Mozilla released version 1.0 of Firefox, one of their first steps in their mission to 'preserve choice and innovation on the Internet'. Firefox was instrumental in shattering the web monoculture, but the last few years of development have left users uninspired. "Their goal was never to create the most popular browser in the world, or the one with the best UX, or the one with the most features, or the one with the best developer mode. ... It would be foolish to say a monoculture will never arise again (Google are making some scary moves with Chrome-only web applications). But at this point in time while Chrome is the ascendant browser (largely at the expense of Firefox), Mozilla’s ability to impact the web in general is greatly reduced." Perhaps it is time to move on to the next challenge — ensuring there is a strong Thunderbird to help preserve a free and open email ecosystem.

Comments

Re:monoculture again?

[MobyDisk]

Firefox does not use WebKit. It uses Gecko.

Re:No they did not. They have failed HARD.

[R.Mo_Robert]

Mozilla was the original code-split from Navigator, and it's purpose was to preserve Navigator as a browser for the half of the web that was optimized for it (remember the old "best viewed with..." buttons? Good days). Firefox née Phoenix was a fork from Mozilla to strip out Netscape-sponsored features of the Mozilla engine (giving us the Gecko engine). It succeeded in this goal, as well, for a time.

Your history is a bit off. Gecko was Mozilla's focus since Mozilla itself was created to continue Netscape's work on the next version of their browser after failing on their goal of improving the (horrible) Netscape 4.x layout engine, which was their original goal for version 5 (although I think they might have been experimenting with both possibilities at the same time before giving up the former). Firefox (originally Phoenix then Firebird) was created with the goal of taking that same layout engine, Gecko, but wrapping only a simple browser around it rather than the entire Mozilla/Netscape Communicator-style suite. Netscape never had many Netscape/AOL features in the Mozilla suite itself; those (e.g., AIM integration, branding, and a different default theme--Modern instead of Classic, etc.) were mostly confined to the Netscape-branded releases that AOL/Netscape released using the Mozilla suite as a base (starting with Netscape 6--skipping the scrapped version 5 attempt, though version 6 was horribly delayed and based on a somewhat unstable pre-1.0 release of the Mozilla suite). In any case, Gecko has not only been there since before Firefox, but it's one of few things that Firefox and the Mozilla Suite (which effectively lives on as Seamonkey) share, albeit a very large and important thing since it's used for so much (not just HTML rendering but also creating the UI itself via XUL and a theme).

Thunderbird was created with a pretty similar goal: take the same layout engine but include only the e-mail features from the suite.

Back to the original mission!

[HnT]

Remember when FF was all about making it a lean, mean browsing machine compared to the silver-bullet one-for-everything Netscape behemoth? I think FF would really benefit from making these virtues of old their new priorities again, instead of the Mozilla Foundation and Corporation trying out-do Apple in feel-good, empty world-improvement campaigns and slogans and trying to out-do Apple and Google in UI design with yet another "UI improvement". Or doing things like completely crippling developers who are using self-signed certificates. This paternalism is just ridiculous.

Re:Here is what I *HOPE* is next

[sexconker]

>"Firefox Succeeded In Its Goal -- But What's Next?"

Here is what I *HOPE* is next:

1) Stop trying to be and look like Chrome. Just stop.

2) Stop trying to force users to not have tabs on bottom, having a menu bar, having separate buttons, etc. Let users control their user interface how they want.

3) Remove all that developer stuff that 99.99% of users don't use or care about and put it in an addon.

4) Remove all that chat and conferencing stuff that 99% of users don't care about and put that also in an addon.

5) Focus on speed, security, stability, bug-fixing, and documentation. You don't have to be a feature-of-the-month club.

6) Continue to support as many platforms and systems as possible, including old ones.

Oh- and thank you for all the hard work that went into Firefox- the browser of my choice (and that for my users, family, and friends) for the last decade.

You forgot the most important part - bring back the fucking status bar you fucking shits.

Re:Here is what I *HOPE* is next

[chefmonkey]

You forgot the most important part - bring back the fucking status bar you fucking shits.

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-...