A narrative on the future of web browsers and web browsing

My Wild Guesses, Speculation and Unfounded Opinions about Google Chrome

Tuesday, September 2nd, 2008

September is here, and I'm slipping out of a mild off-season hibernation after a relatively laidback summer ("relative" being the operative word when you're coming off ten years of stressful startup life). In particular, this blog has been sorely neglected. I'm planning to ramp things up once again, and what ...

Thoughts on XULRunner, Part Two: One XULRunner to Rule Them All

Thursday, August 14th, 2008

In part one of "Thoughts on XULRunner" I discussed why XULRunner is of strategic value to Mozilla Corporation and the community at large. Assuming (with a rather optimistic leap of faith) that anyone besides me is convinced that it would be worthwhile to turn XULRunner into a fully fledged Rich ...

Thoughts on XULRunner, Part One: Why XULRunner?

Friday, August 8th, 2008

The "Firefox Plus Summit" last week was a wonderful event, bringing together 400 odd members of the Mozilla community, from core Mozilla developers to localizers from around the globe. For me, the key lesson of the summit was the continued high level of interest in Mozilla as a platform. This ...

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, ...