Chris Blizzard on Mozilla
Monday, April 14th, 2008Chris Blizzard, now working at Mozilla and Linux integration, gave a most interesting talk, about Mozilla, and their new mobile initiatives. We managed to speak (but not nearly enough) about the mobile strategy afterwards (i.e. I think limiting it to the n810 or tablet like devices alone, seems myopic; phones are where its at), and I hope the conversation continues. Now for some quick notes.
- mozilla.org, is where products create motion. Been around for just over 10 years now
- Mozilla targets human beings (not developers)
- Focus on protecting open standards
- “Creating Joy!” for users
- Avoid feature creep (this is the secret of add-ons) - control the product, and just say, go build an extension. It isn’t just about customising your experience, but its about keeping the core experience joyous and uncluttered.
- Fix real problems on the web (i.e. pop-up blocking)
- 500 contributors to Firefox 3, 75 Localization teams, 200 people, 11,000 patches, 165+ Million users, added +45 million users in the last 6 months, and doubled in the last year - these are impressive statistics (I for one, am impressed by their developer community)
- Who are we targeting? Read Seth Godin’s blog entry “Why downloading Firefox is like getting into college“. Also, Stephen O’Grady’s Blog “Ode to the Common Man“
- Bring the full web to mobile. FF3 is where great technology for mobile exists.
- Apple has reset the idea of what the Internet on a mobile should be, thanks to the iPhone. They’ve definitely opened up the market for mobile based browsers. Note, no reason to redesign your website for mobiles in the future…
- Fennec - mobile browser experience
- Performance numbers on the n810 - faster than MicroB and WebKit. Not even optimised for ARM (i.e. no atomic locking), but already at a headstart
- Fennec will support add-ons. Touch and keypad versions are coming soon… Keep in mind all this is just getting started
- Android includes WebKit as part of the base platform. Mozilla on Android? Not quite yet, since Google wants only Java based applications. No mention of native applications yet from Google.
- Not really considered Series 60 (it would be nice), no talk of PalmOS, there is some form of Windows Mobile version, but its not released
- Gecko is hard to embed, in comparison to WebKit. The technology needs to improve, so that the gap that WebKit has, doesn’t widen further
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