A WHOLE New Plan for the Popular Mozilla Browser
This is REALLY an interesting read. For those who may have been under a rock for the past 2 years, there is a great alternative to Microsoft’s Internet Explorer. Last year, IE 7 actually copied most of the features that Mozilla Firefox brought to market several years ago. I doubt that Microsoft will be able to keep up with Mozilla’s latest plans.
Look What’s Cooking in Mozilla’s Lab
It’s experimenting with ways to incorporate popular features, like social networking applications, into the Firefox browser
by Aaron Ricadela
Technology
After breakneck growth during its first two years on the market, Firefox has become the Web browser of choice for about 15% of PC users. Not bad, but if the open-source software project hopes to expand its appeal beyond tech-industry insiders and programming geeks, it may need to innovate even faster.
Mozilla’s Firefox exploded in popularity after its 2004 release by jazzing up a software category that seemed stale. It packed in features like easy-to-manage bookmarks, tabbed browsing, and an effective pop-up ad blocker. But Microsoft (MSFT), whose ubiquitous Internet Explorer browser hadn’t been updated in years, last October released version 7 of its browser, essentially matching Firefox feature for feature and showing how quickly technical advantages can dissipate on the Web. “It’s hard to sustain long-term advantage in browsers,” says Chris Beard, vice-president of products at Mozilla.
A More Social Firefox
To help regain its edge—and potentially introduce Firefox to a larger audience—Mozilla has started experimenting with ways to fold features of popular Web sites right into its browser. At the same time, the company, a subsidiary of the nonprofit Mozilla Foundation, has opened more early-stage technologies to feedback from developers under a program launched in March called Mozilla Labs.
On April 2, the company announced one of the effort’s early fruits: The Coop. The add-on software lets users share favorite Web site links with friends by dragging a page right onto a photo of the person. Internet buddies who inhabit the virtual coop (Mozilla’s blog entry on the project features a close-up of a cackling chicken) arrive courtesy of social networking site Facebook. It’s just one way Mozilla’s engineers envision computer users interacting with one another through their favorite community Web sites—all within the confines of its browser.
“We didn’t even chew off all the use cases that we wanted,” says Basil Hashem, a senior director of product management at Mozilla. Also in the works are ways to share photos from Yahoo’s (YHOO) Flickr site and videos from Google’s (GOOG) YouTube, and a tool that lets users update their online status so Facebook friends know whether they’re available to chat.
