If you read this blog, then the chance that you view this page from Firefox hits a high 65%…

Firefox 1.5 was already quite a blast on Microsoft’s leadership on the very strategic browser applications market. Not necessarily in terms of market share, but it cannot be denied that Firefox 1.5 suddenly enhanced one’s pleasure to browse after four and half years with no major user experience improvement in Internet Explorer 6.0.

The gap widened further with the release of Firefox 2.0, in my opinion the best browser available for a long while despite a rather poor reliability (many crashes on my Mac) and probably not so optimal memory management (still by far better than IE7, thanks to the implementation of tag browsing), until IE7 was released. Now that the game is even at last, and open source (Konqueror, Camino, Amaya, IceWeasel, etc.) share rising month in, month out, I’ve just found out that Mozilla has been preparing its homerun rather quietly.

Firefox 3.0, available in alpha – namecode Minefields (download the latest CVS repository trunk here, and see roadmap from FFox 2 here), is getting real serious.

You can tell in a wink that the aim of this new version of Firefox does not rely in achieving a breakthrough in design. However, I was blown away by the tremendous usability standards the Firefox community of developers achieved to match. Here are 2 points I would like to put the spotlight on:

- Downloads may be paused and resumed even after a crash (no need to install a widget anymore). I know this is just a small thing, but it’s not the first time Mozilla integrates a widget on a standard release of Firefox. However, does Firefox, in integrating its most famous and useful widgets, face a risk to alienate its ecosystem of developers? Trying to understand the intentions of Mozilla, I actually realized that answer is “No”, for 2 reasons: first reason, the risk is largely balanced by the market share gain perspectives. This major strategic shift may help other widgets leverage the community of users. As an illustration, let’s say Firefox can afford to lose support from a dozen developers (the couple or so widgets integrated every year) if its market share rises accordingly – helping commercial widgets monetize better. Second reason, if I were a Firefox plug-in developer, it would be an honor to see my piece of software integrated into the mother ship.

- MozStorage, the system using embedded database SQLite already implemented in Firefox 2, has been improved to comply with DOM Storage specs and should allow for using some web apps, like Gmail for instance, offline. As far as I see it, the Mozilla Corporation partly tackles the number one constraint in the development of web applications: broadband availability. As you may have noticed, this post focuses here on Firefox rather than the entire Mozilla Corporation since I believe Thunderbird is not worth Outlook. It looks as if Mozilla feels the same and intends to slowly kill fat client application Thunderbird with its embedded database: Gmail + Google Agenda & Yahoo! Mail market shares can only benefit and Outlook & Thunderbird suffer from the move. [Nota: CartoReso too uses an embedded Java database, stored in memory, named HSQL]

Watch out Internet Explorer, Opera & Safari teams, Firefox 3.0 seems to have what it takes to become a killer application not only amongst geeks, but on the consumer market as well.

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