A narrative on the future of web browsers and web browsing

Browser Bits and Bobs for May 20, 2008

Tuesday, May 20th, 2008

My ex-colleague Jan Odvarko writes about his fancy replacement for Firebug's system console. Atul Varma on why Firefox 3 is awesome (really awesome). A newsletter for Firefox extension developers called about:addons. The first public release of Moonlight, a Silverlight port for Linux. Ours is not the place to question why. And if you feel ...

Browser Trends: Business Models

Wednesday, May 14th, 2008

Commercial web applications must overcome a vexing business dilemma: how to make money in the face of so much free competition. This is a symptom of the VC-fueled internet economy that has prevailed since the dot com days. Venture capital firms provide companies with money based on some woolly half-baked ...

Browser Bits and Bobs for May 12, 2008

Monday, May 12th, 2008

WebKit announces a new mailing list for reporting security vulnerabilities. Deb Richardson elucidates the new Firefox site identification button. Besides the practical merit of this feature, it is a fascinating study in communicating potentially confusing information to end users. Dion Almaer with a hack to duplicate the way Firefox lets you jump ...

Browser Bits and Bobs for May 7, 2008

Wednesday, May 7th, 2008

Microsoft ships XP Service Pack 3 with continued support for Internet Explorer 6. Firefox wins favorite browser in the LinuxJournal Readers' Choice Awards with 86% of votes cast. John Resig implements a complete HTML parser entirely in JavaScript. Multiple interfaces are provided including SAX and a DOM builder. Amazing. Flock wins a Webby ...

The Future of Firefox Extensions: Make Them More Like Web Apps

Wednesday, April 16th, 2008

A few years ago, having just started work on a very ambitious (and now defunct) Firefox extension, my business partner and I met with some of the Mozilla top brass to pick their brains. One of the most interesting tidbits that we walked away with was the rough estimate that ...

Is Apple Gunning for Firefox?

Thursday, March 27th, 2008

Update: I got a couple of comments very quickly from Mozilla people complaining that this post is rehashing old news and is needlessly inflammatory.  I admit that I did hesitate to address this topic since the keynote in question was so long ago, but I felt like the issue was ...

The Mozilla/WebKit Arms Race

Thursday, March 20th, 2008

Biologists talk about a phenomenon called the evolutionary arms race. Cheetahs, for example, only survived if they were fast enough to catch the slowest gazelles. Gazelles, on the other hand, only lived to produce offspring if they could outrun the fastest predators. These are powerful evolutionary forces, and as a ...

Firefox and the Mozilla Platform

Monday, March 3rd, 2008

The subject of the Mozilla platform ("Gecko") and its relevance beyond serving as the foundation of Firefox has been a subject of great debate for quite some time. The topic flared up again this weekend on one of Mozilla's developer newsgroups. The impetus appears to have been a relatively obscure ...

Browsers and Commoditization

Friday, February 29th, 2008

Vladimir Vukićević of Mozilla made waves yesterday with the discovery that Apple's Webkit (the engine that powers the Safari browser) uses undocumented OS X features that are not available to other browsers running on the Macintosh. This is unlikely to point to a simmering conspiracy on the part of Apple, ...

Do We Really Want the European Commission to Regulate the Web?

Wednesday, February 20th, 2008

Opera CTO Håkon Wium Lie continues to promote and defend his company's legal action against Microsoft for anti-competitive practices with a guest editorial in The Register. One thing seems incontrovertible: Microsoft should not be allowed to tie Internet Explorer to Windows and strong-arm hardware manufacturers into refusing bundling deals with ...