Firefox 3.0 is getting real serious
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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Lost, still using ie7
Jeremy,
I’m afraid of Firefox 3.0 and there’s a reason why Mozilla/Firefox have been silent about it. Since Firefox 1.5, they made good progress in “consumer market”, as they could offer a more stable and secure alternative to IE6. On top of it all, Firefox 1.5 was simple, as in not full of features only geeks care about. This was probably the reason why Mozilla-browser was a failure. Firefox 3.0 is still so heavily in development that they think at Mozilla that no way should anyone -who doesn’t know exactly what he’s doing – install it as it would have negative effect on the Firefox brand. (it crashes, pages look wrong…). Now, as to why I’m afraid of Firefox 3.0… well, the reason is Firefox 2.0, which was in my opinion a step backwards from what Firefox 1.5 was and a major step towards what Mozilla was. The first releases of Firefox 2.0 were a bit instable and bug-ridden – something that should not have happened.
And of course, Opera isn’t open source, Safari/WebKit on the other hand is. Opera is the odd player, who’s in this market for money. (Then again, how many million dollars Mozilla did make from having the Google search box in Firefox? It was an awful lot of money, as far as I remember. That makes you think how much Apple makes with Safari… I bet they too get something out of that similar feature)
I believe next battlefield will non-PC platforms, something Safari/WebKit (Nokia, Apple) and Opera (Wii, Mobile phones) have already entered, but Firefox has stayed out of. These are of course markets open source has more challenges to enter.
Your point is very interesting Kari, I had actually never thought of Firefox that way.
You’re right about Opera not being open source (corrected), but Safari isn’t either. Here’s a Wikipedia article taking a snapshot of existing open source browsers:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_web_browsers
Ok, techincally Safari is not open source, but the layout engine behind it, WebKit is, and that’s why I wrote Safari/WebKit instead of just Safari. The reason WebKit is open source is that it’s originally based on the layout engine behind Konqueror, KHTML.
Your current list of open source browsers is a bit redundant as Camino uses the same Gecko engine powering Firefox and IceWeasel is GPL-compliant fork of Firefox – that is, they’re basically Firefox.
I know Kari: I’m actually a user of Camino (but I’ll switch back to Firefox soon I think) and I had tried IceWeasel a while ago.
[...] version of Firefox, 3.0, will probably be released somewhere around November. Jeremy wrote about Firefox’s first alpha back in April here, where he pointed out some of its promised killer-features. The tech world changes quickly and now [...]