Firefox 4 will push out the edges of the browser
Chris Beard, VP Labs, Mozilla
(Credit: Rafe Needleman / CNET)This post has been corrected from the original: Mozilla has no plan to ship Firefox 4 this year; references to that effect have been removed.
After the product road map roundtable I live-blogged Wednesday, I had a talk with Chris Beard, VP of Labs for Mozilla. Beard is working on the things you won't see in Firefox 3, but will, if he has his way, surface in Firefox 4.
Beard's philosophy is this: The browser needs to evolve. Beard believes the browser concept hasn't fundamentally changed in 10 years. It's still an isolated piece of software, he says. Mozilla Lab's push is to blur the edges of the browser, to make it both more tightly integrated with the computer it's running on, and also more hooked into Web services. So extended, the browser becomes an even more powerful and pervasive platform for all kinds of applications.
At the moment, these are two separate projects Mozilla is running to push out the edges of the browser: Prism and Weave.
Prism
Prism is Mozilla's shot at busting apps out of the browser. Part of the Prism project is making the browsing core available to apps developers so they can build products like Zimbra Desktop (review) that are essentially Web apps, but that don't look like it.
The dream is to be able to take any Web site or app and turn it into an app that can run directly from the desktop. A very big part of this initiative is to make sites/apps work when they are not connected to the Internet. HTML 5 (the next version of the basic standard for the encoding of Web sites) includes explicit support for local, offline resources.
HTML 5 and Prism will, Mozilla execs say, render Google Gears obsolete. Not to mention other important, and proprietary, Web app platforms that are already in production, like Adobe AIR and Microsoft Silverlight (What is Silverlight?).
Weave
Weave extends the browser in the other direction: Not toward the desktop, but instead into the Internet. Mozilla wants an individual's browsing experience to stay with them no matter what machine they are on. That means synchronizing bookmarks, home pages, favorites, and passwords to an online service that the user can attach to when he or she fires up the browser. As more people move between browsing machines (their laptop and their mobile phone, for example, or between different PCs), this will become more important.
Firefox 3 is laying the groundwork for this. It has a new transactional database that stores user preferences and favorites. However, it won't be used for cross-browser syncing in version3; Beard hopes this extension to the database is rolled out in Firefox 4.
Firefox 3 users will, though, experience some online services being fed into their browser. For example, Mozilla will update all running browsers every 30 minutes with malware signatures, to stave off drive-by downloads and phishing scams.
Beard wants the new online/offline, browser/service to be more intelligent on behalf of its users. Early examples of this intelligence include the "awesome bar," which is what Mozilla calls the new smart address bar in Firefox 3. It offers users smart URL suggestions as they type based on Web searches and their prior Web browsing history. He's looking to extend on this with a "linguistic user interface" that lets users type plain English commands into the browser bar. Beard pointed me towards Quicksilver and Enso as products he's cribbing from.
Beard said the Labs are playing with other "crazy ideas," but that Prism and Weave technologies are are being targeted at the next version of Firefox.
Further reading: See Labs.mozilla.com.
Rafe Needleman writes about start-ups, new technologies, and Web 2.0 products, as editor of CNET's Webware. E-mail Rafe. 
Prism and Weave are good (although I'm not so sure about Weave from company' standpoint) but our organization will stay with IE as long as more important features above did not exist in Firefox.
You are asking for too many things that the 99% of home users are not going to need, and what is the core of Firefox's market: the home user, not the business user.
I don't understand why you would need control over Firefox via Group Policy Object (whatever the hell that is).
Things like AD and Group Policy integration are very proprietary to MS, and it is possible the restrictive licensing on MS software may be a barrier to complete integration with the Windows environment. Regardless, I think such platform specific features should be limited to extensions/plugins/etc whenever possible rather than being incorporated into the main product. Browsers are already too monolithic in design to be adequately secure, and with concepts like Prism it looks like Mozilla wants to evolve FF into an "application engine", eventually making the web browser as we know it just another app running atop the engine (which I thought was the original intention of the pre-FF mozilla browser, with the underlying Gecko engine and XUL and the like all providing the underpinnings of the actual browser, or other web client front ends--I guess prism extends that to offline experience too though).
All that would be needed from Firefox to be integrated with group policy is reading registry settings from software\policies before anything else. Insisting that this is in some global conflict with the universe and would make Firefox oh so dependent on Microsoft is simply ridiculous.
Other issues, such as deploying by group policy are already easily achievable, and there are offerings of MSI-based installations of Firefox from third parties.
Hopefully, the goal will simply be to produce a great browser.
Also glad to see they're extending things in a different direction than Flock.
Personally I'd be happy if Mozilla spent less time trying to reinvent the browser, and just cleaned up Firefox as it currently exists. It's buggy and slow, and I've gone back to IE on my Windows boxes at this point. I now only rely on Firefox on my Linux boxes.
If people want the bloat, they'll add it on themselves.
Excuse me, but I feel that the growing Firefox community disregards what the Opera browser has been doing for years in presenting innovative features like:
1/ tabbed browsing
2/ bookmarks and toolbars settings cross-platform synchronization
3/ mouse gestures in browsing
4/ saving window sessions
to name a few.
So, please refer to Opera Links as a curent basis of comparison to the Weave feuture set. Thank you!
Integrating Firefox with any OS makes that OS far less secure. That's why I don't use Internet Explorer in Windows (except at work where I have no choice).
If I owned a Mac, wouldn't use Safari because it's likely to integrate with MacOS. Never mind that it's a hard to use browser...wife owns a Mac laptop. I've tried Safari and was unimpressed.
Sure, not doing so might be good for *you* right now, but what if it leads to new features and essential uses that we never would have thought? Maybe desktop integration's time is now, unlike 10 years ago when Microsoft tried it, because we now have more technologically adept end users who understand Twitter and mash-ups and drive everything that is the social web.
Innovation has its cost. You can't always develop stuff only for the lab. Sometimes, you just have to put it out there and see where the users take it and go with them. Part of the excitement is that you'll never know exactly what you're going to get. What you learn and what you end up with from that can be very good things.
Still, from the Mozillas point of view, forcing all current Firefox users use the new features is just so efficient method to spread them. That makes me a little pessimistic about that 'Litefox' ever appearing.
Heck that is why I'm afraid to get Windows livecare yeah i beta tested it but one of the reasons I hated it is because it was tightly integrated. If I use one tool for everything I lose the advantage of having one tool that performs well since there is no competition. Like buying satellite receivers from Direct TV and Dishnetwork instead of RCA making anymore brands. Well I'm not a big fan of monopoly.
bill gates said the same "blur the edges between the browser and OS" years ago. look what it got him: class action suits, trade violations, and lots and lots of unhappy users. and IE still sucks ballz.
sometimes a browser should just be a browser. how about making it better instead of adding more bloated features? for example: pass the acid 3 test, change the "-moz-border-radius" css code to the css 3 valid "border-radius" -- AND MAKE THEM LOOK GOOD! i could go on.
better is better than "more features." there's a whole lot of things in this world with tons of features but truly suck. there are very few things that simply work, work right, and work right dependably every time.
better rocks. features suck.
How long does Microsoft grant you use of Firefox? 30 days,60,93days? After reading The Truth about Linux I get very scared. The Firefoxes are questionable. I really don't want all work to be payed to Microsoft as Firefoxes probably has many of the Microsoft Intelectual Property inside. I don't see sticker on it like -Intel Inside". But it uses Internet Explore. It must. How can it not? The Firefoxes must break into IE pipes to download the internets from the worldweb and the gopher. If I reboot it after 30 days, am I still libel for infringment and accessory? Will they come after me? I don't want to get sued. I don't have enought money to pay for defense. I just want to see the internets.
I have no idea what your link is about either. It looks like it was written by a 2nd grader. I can't even figure out what you are trying to say? You don't like Firefox? You don't Like Microsoft? You don't like Linux? SO you like Microsoft (that link is a pro Microsoft link) All you want is "The Internets" I had no idea there was more than 1 internet. Its not Internets its internet.
And "Is Firefox has Microsoft Permissions?" What???? The grammar on that is terrible. I don't even know what that is saying? Should it read "Does Firefox have Microsoft Permission?" The answer is, they don't need their permission. They are 3rd party software, they don't answer to Microsoft.
thanks for cnet...(K)
http://www.edebiyathocasi.com
- by CrisMcConkey June 9, 2009 9:35 AM PDT
- I am more interested in have compatibility with Quicktime Streaming media (RTSP, from Darwin Streaming Server) restored than any new whistles and bells. The incompatibility started with Firefox3 on day one of its release, but actually stretched back further in the development onn the way to FF3. I tried to find a regression range where if worked before and didn't worked after. Once I discovered that it went all the way back and that the fault was with the framework that FF3 is built upon, interest on the part of the Mozill development team seemed to evaporate. See my bug report: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=472015
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Showing 1 of 2 pages (34 Comments)Now I'm wondering about FF4 development. Is there some way to check now, or are those of us who use quicktime streaming media going to be ignored?