A narrative on the future of web browsers and web browsing

Browser Bits and Bobs for May 15, 2008

Thursday, May 15th, 2008

Opera Mini 4.1, with a number of bug fixes and tweaks, has been released. TechCrunch with an article on Mozilla's "stealth data project", which aims to collect statistics on web usage from Firefox's 170 million strong user base. Mozilla CEO John Lilly provides some clarification. Mozilla joins the LiMo Foundation, which develops ...

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 ...

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 ...

Apple’s Safari Push is Not About the Money

Monday, March 24th, 2008

Apple has been causing a stir with its heavy-handed tactics for pushing Safari onto Windows users. Those who have iTunes, whether or not they have ever installed Safari, are apparently getting an automatic update dialog proposing to "upgrade" to the latest versions of both products. Reactions range from that of ...

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, ...

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 ...

Browser Trends: Site-Specific Browsers

Monday, January 14th, 2008

One thing that clearly differentiates web apps from their desktop counterparts is that the former run inside a tab or page in the web browser rather than in their own process. This has a number of drawbacks, several of which are elegantly set forth in the blog post announcing the ...