A narrative on the future of web browsers and web browsing

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 ...

Why Doesn’t Dell Bundle Firefox?

Friday, February 1st, 2008

A tad less than a year ago Dell launched a forward-thinking customer feedback website called IdeaStorm, modeled on social news sites like Digg. The site appears to be a thunderous success (as its name would suggest), and one of the most popular requests, shipping machines with Linux preinstalled, has already ...

The Runtime Wars (Aka XULRunner’s Exaggerated Demise)

Tuesday, January 29th, 2008

"I keep telling people that Firefox is just a measly stub built on XULRunner, but they don't believe me. They claim that Mozilla stopped supporting XULRunner and I'm telling lies." This comment was made to me by Benjamin Smedberg, who is the driving force behind XULRunner, Mozilla's platform for building portable, ...

Interview with John Lilly on Read/WriteTalk

Tuesday, January 15th, 2008

Read/WriteTalk, the podcast arm of popular blog Read/WriteWeb, has a wide-ranging audio interview with newly minted Mozilla CEO John Lilly. The first and most interesting topic is the nature of Mozilla as a commercially funded non-profit and the influence it is likely to have on other organizations: John Lilly: A lot ...