Interesting.

I wrote a note about that at the WPW forum today (before I read this post).

Link: Post #5

http://www.webproworld.com/web-programming-discussion-forum/81525-pointing-finger-programming-future-computing.html#post428793

This doesn’t mean that the browser will go away, of course, but it is intriguing to speculate about whether the balance will tip somewhat. Major shifts like this can catch incumbents off guard.

Mozilla, on the other hand, never welcomed companies like Flock into the community, to the point where they are tempted to throw away their investment in Mozilla. It looks like when you actually compete in the same space as Firefox, the search box revenue for Mozilla the corporation trumps the ideals of Mozilla the non-profit.

But leaving that aside, is there a point where Mozilla can say that Firefox ‘is’ successful, and they can broaden their focus to other things a bit? No one is suggesting Mozilla might pull a Microsoft and lay off the browser team for a few years, but is there a point when they might be able to accept that bit of risk?

I would also note that when you said “focused on both xulrunner-as-a-platform and Firefox-as-a-browser,” you left out a big piece of the story: Thunderbird-as-a-mail-client. In many ways Thunderbird was also a “red headed stepchild of the Mozilla development community.” Mozilla was aware of that, but Thunderbird was given a different fate than XULRunner’s – Mozilla Messaging was created. Is it time for a Mozilla Platform Group to be created?

I too am worried about the monopolistic dominance of Apple and Google. They have to answer to “shareholders”, while Mozilla does not. Please keep it that way, Mozilla.

Good luck, XULRunner.

https://wiki.mozilla.org/Evangelism

Matthew points out a lot of the work that we do – documentation, XUL + Addons workshops, web standards, external project messaging, support for public meetings, etc. Lots and lots of stuff.

But overall Matthew’s observations are correct – we don’t have anyone right now who has the sole purpose to make sure that xulrunner and embedding issues are healthy. We’ve been very focused on Firefox as a project. This is a very explicit decision that we made a while ago. And we’re aware of the consequences of that.

But the flip side of that is that the focus that we’ve been able to bring to Firefox-as-a-product has ended up creating a really great browser for people to use. And that has given us the leverage we need to accomplish our larger mission – keeping the Internet open and alive. If we had focused on both xulrunner-as-a-platform and Firefox-as-a-browser I don’t think that we would have been able to move as fast or have been as successful as we have been.

In my mind this post represents the entirety of the opportunity cost of that decision. Once again, it’s not like we didn’t know that was going to be tough for a lot of people. But we knew that the larger battle was for end users and leverage on the web.

And I think that we’ve been successful there – note that without Safari’s default placement in OSX (the same mechanism that IE enjoys) that WebKit’s entire market share across all platforms is less than 1.5% of the entire market. WebKit isn’t an answer to the problem of keeping the web alive right now. (And they wouldn’t have even had the opportunity without Mozilla around to open it back up. There’s a reason it says “Gecko” in most WebKit UA strings.)

So is this a painful choice for a huge number of developers? Yep. But did we make the right choice? Yep, I think so.

But can we improve things for people who want to use embedding and xulrunner? I think so. I’ve been talking with people about that over the last couple of months and am hoping to be able to turn that into direct action pretty soon here – there’s still a lot left to do on this front. I’m not in a position here to make promises, but I can say that it’s a personal concern and one that I’ve been spending time on.