Comments for Firefox 3 Plans and IE8 Speculation - Browsers Heading Apart Again

Firefox 3 Plans and IE8 Speculation - Browsers Heading Apart Again

2007-01-11T20:38:51Z

Mozilla has published a wiki page detailing its plans for the next version of Firefox, codenamed "Gran Paradiso". The target release date is sometime in the third quarter this year and it hopes to release a major version of Firefox every year. While Firefox is still aiming for a broad mainstream audience, Mozilla recognizes that its strengths for normal users are its extensions and customization. It notes on the wiki that "Microsoft will continue to establish deeper ties from IE7/Vista to live.com & MSN" and even that other "web service providers" may introduce their own browsers (Yahoo? Amazon?). So Firefox is aiming to be the best general Web browser - e.g. it wants to be faster for AJAX apps.

Among the mandatory requirements listed for FF3 are improving the add-on experience, providing "an extensible bookmarks back-end platform", adding more support for web services "to act as content handlers" - all of which show that Firefox wants to be an independent information broker rather than a simple HTML renderer in its next version. Microformats will be a key part of this too - and this is currently listed as a "highly desirable" feature for FF3. Also good to see extensible identity management listed there. All of this encourages best-of-breed apps to flourish, which is an excellent direction for Mozilla to take with Firefox. It probably also plays into Google's hands, as they have a number of best of breed web apps - and are acquiring them at a great rate too (YouTube, JotSpot, Writely, etc).

]]> Also in the works is Microsoft's IE8. According to ActiveWin.com, a Microsoft official at CES told them that work has already begun for IE 8 and it may be released as a final product "within 18-24 months". IE8 will apparently "compete even more directly with Firefox". Looking ahead, it's obvious that IE will continue to hook into the advanced functionality that Vista offers.

So if anything, I'd hazard a guess and say that IE8 will head back into ProprietaryLand - leaving Firefox to become more of a vehicle for independent web services, particularly those from Google. While IE7 and Firefox 2 were more alike than different (feature-wise they're practically identical!), with IE8 and FF3 we will likely see the two biggest browsers head off into different directions.

Comment from Juha on 2007-01-11

2007-01-11T21:30:11Z

Comment from Emre Sokullu on 2007-01-11

2007-01-11T22:15:18Z

Yes they'll definitely need to be more active to keep up against Firefox. IE 6 was passive too long time and that's why they've lost big market share against their competitors. And AFAIK, not just IE but also Windows will be released more frequently now on.

Comment from Pierre Lambert on 2007-01-11

2007-01-11T22:42:09Z

IE8 will apparently "compete even more directly with Firefox".

Isn't it the same thing as saying "Well, IE is not as good as Firefox yet, but we plan to be closer in 1¬Ω years."

Comment from Alex Iskold on 2007-01-11

2007-01-12T00:19:47Z

I think that IE dev cycle is WAY too long. You can't plan to roll out things in 18-24 months because it ends up being 36-48 months. They need to hire a few agile development coaches...

Looking at Firefox plans, I think that they have a few more iterations to crystallize (unless they are coding already), so they might be looking at Q4 instead Q3 realistically.

Alex

Comment from Thomas Scovell on 2007-01-11

2007-01-12T02:09:27Z

Microformat support in a similar (if not better) way to how RSS feeds are recognised could be fairly excellent. I doubt FF will be alone there, Bill Gates seems fairly enthused about micro(soft)formats too. ;)

Comment from Devon on 2007-01-11

2007-01-12T02:54:33Z

I like the idea that the two browser have their own idea of what direction they should go in. As long as IE's "improvements" doesn't break the net (i worry about their intentions since they'll likely be used by the millions who don't know there's better), it'll be ok. I don't like IE, but as long as there's decent well-known or well-established alternatives like Firefox, Opera, or whatever Yahoo or Google might come out with...I like the sound of this. Plus, I'm really looking forward to seeing what the Mozilla people might do with microformats.

Comment from zoel on 2007-01-11

2007-01-12T04:35:58Z

IE7 is premature , how abou IE8...:-( , Ilove FF variants

Comment from James on 2007-01-11

2007-01-12T04:49:52Z

Firefox = Fx not FF :)

Comment from Garrett on 2007-01-11

2007-01-12T05:17:31Z

Looks like going back to IE/Netscape war again.

Comment from Kris on 2007-01-11

2007-01-12T05:34:43Z

Working with MS in the past and to present leads me to believe never anything they present to the public will actually ever work, let alone work with plenty of other vendors. The only reason MS has a stronger share than Firefox is because it is pre-install and most people are not educated enough to learn a different browser, no matter how simple it is. IE7 also should not actually take away from the OS it-self. Btw also VISTA is WinMedia Edition on crack, also MS takes away for rights for users. Use the Beta first and then decide on Win XP Pro 64bit if your wanting a larger ram cap than 4gig's.

Comment from Buck on 2007-01-11

2007-01-12T05:46:13Z

It's certainly no surprise that Microsoft would want IE to have deeper ties to Microsoft sites and Google would want FF to have deeper ties to Google sites. Conceptually that need not be a bad thing, but I think users and particularly influential developers and such should be keeping a close eye on that. Webservices are nice but at some point the centralization and association of large amounts of information about individuals and their net habits becomes a genuine privacy concern. Ideally, one would use separate services thereby compartmentalizing things. However, as ties between a browser and a particular company's services are deepened and as consolidation in the industry occurs, users are to some degree driven in the opposite direction.

Comment from Richard MacManus on 2007-01-11

2007-01-12T07:35:59Z

Fx it is. I never realised that was the preferred abbreviation! Someone emailed me the evidence:

http://www.mozilla.org/support/firefox/faq#spell-abbreviate

Comment from Dracos on 2007-01-12

2007-01-12T08:04:44Z

IE7 was a token effort designed to distract as many people as possible from Firefox. They caught up on some features, but the standards support is still piss poor. Trident hasn't changed all that much since IE5, so I personally think IE7 should be called IE5.7.

IE8 needs a new rendering engine from the ground up if it has any chance of competing when it's released (late 2008 or later). Cookie management, parental controls, and anti-phishing toolbars do not justify a bump in major version number.

But since MS refuses to break any backwards compatibility, the chance of that happening are only fair at best.

Comment from Tinus on 2007-01-12

2007-01-12T08:16:53Z

This week alone I installed 5 firefoxes for people who hated the automatically updated Internet Explorer. Does that say something?

Comment from Ray on 2007-01-12

2007-01-12T09:28:39Z

It's actually a requirement by law that Microsoft have backwards compatability, so it really isn't their fault.

Comment from Marcus Greenwood on 2007-01-12

2007-01-12T10:07:19Z

This fills me with a deep sense of horror! ... Each iteration of IE just means more fudges in CSS, HTML and JavaScript. I expect this version to be about 20% more standards compliant than IE7 with 50% of the old bugs fixed and a bunch of new ones to go along with it (a bit like last time really). *sigh* Will just have to deal with it as it comes I guess :(

Comment from John on 2007-01-12

2007-01-12T10:24:54Z

I admit I liked the speed and feel of IE6, but I feel if MS does not keep with standards and waters the browser down like they did with IE7, they will lose market share. I hope FF 3 is a bigger upgrade to the rendering engine than FF2.

Comment from Max Rubin on 2007-01-12

2007-01-12T13:47:53Z

It never hurts to be conservative in computer upgrades.
Many users are reporting bugs in IE7 - printing from Wordperfect for example . ( wonder how that happened ?)
Most of microsoft products for the most part are betas for users to test.
Waiting for Vista.

Comment from Robert Brown on 2007-01-12

2007-01-12T14:49:57Z

That sounds like more of the same really. Microsoft is driving IE down the proprietary route (non standard tags and dodgy CSS rendering), something it has been doing since version 4. Whereas the Firefox developers are really trying to be good web citizen and go for lowest common denominator functionality.

I can live without IE easyily, but what I really worry about is Microsoft signing deals with some big websites so that they "work better" with IE's proprietary functionality.

Comment from blipy on 2007-01-12

2007-01-12T15:38:21Z

> This week alone I installed 5 firefoxes for people who hated the automatically updated Internet Explorer. Does that say something?

Yeah. That Firefox will never take off because most people will never make the effort to install it for themselves.

Comment from natmaster on 2007-01-12

2007-01-12T18:00:14Z

I think you got a little confused there. Firefox IS the fastest for AJAX apps.

Comment from Michael on 2007-01-12

2007-01-12T18:41:16Z

I admit I liked the speed and feel of IE6, but I feel if MS does not keep with standards and waters the browser down like they did with IE7, they will lose market share. I hope FF 3 is a bigger upgrade to the rendering engine than FF2.

Yes, FF3 will have Gecko 1.9 with it's many rendering improvements. In comparison, both FF1.5 and 2.0 used Gecko 1.8, which is why you saw no real difference.

Comment from Grant on 2007-01-12

2007-01-12T19:08:16Z

Should these two part even further, it will become an even greater pain for developers. They could do whatever they want as far as plugins and customization goes, but could we please agree on a standard specification for css?

Comment from Lothar on 2007-01-12

2007-01-12T19:21:09Z

I sincerely hope that IE will include the tag for their next version. It would be great to see the same rendering speed on IE as one gets on Firefox with canvas.

Comment from Folletto Malefico on 2007-01-12

2007-01-12T19:26:18Z

(feature-wise they're practically identical!)

I don't call "identical" an extensible platform vs a monolitic one. Firefox is *extensible*, very easily. This alone is the real Fx force.
Extensibility is the key. I wonder when they will learn this lesson. :|

Comment from Peter Laudati on 2007-01-12

2007-01-12T20:54:41Z

Interesting to see all of the speculation that MS will be moving toward "proprietary-land" with IE8? Wonder what that speculation is based on. Certainly nothing in this blog post?

I had to do a double-check as I read the comments to see if I missed some evidence suggesting that this was going to occur. While still playing catch up, IE7 did move closer to covering most of the CSS standards. It didn't introduce any new proprietary features that I'm aware of. So given that 'new' direction from MS on IE7, that's why the IE8 'proprietary-land' speculation baffles me.
-Peter

Comment from Cody on 2007-01-12

2007-01-12T22:10:17Z

Seriously, I don't understand why people haven't looked at the other way things can go. From the look of things, IE and Firefox are about to diverge FAR more than IE/NS ever did. I picture this being the beginning of a dual-browser world.

It's clear that Firefox will be offering features that IE simply can't keep up with (due to update speed and overall developer support). When the several million gmail users keep seeing the little banner that says "best experienced with Firefox" they are eventually going to check it out, and probably keep it. Google is going to begin offering features (just like MSN/Live have) that will work in concordance with Firefox, which means that they will start pushing (yes, just like drug dealers) people into using their browser of choice.

On the other side is IE, which is clearly looking to extend their own services market, which they want to do with more proprietary means, and also through the use of non-web standards (and if you doubt this, you're a fool. Dig into IE 7 a bit to see where they really 'improved' it). Microsoft is the king of self-integration, which means that you won't be able to do much with your XBox , or your Microsoft Home Server if you don't have IE to support it.

If the puzzle pieces haven't fallen into place yet, then here's the clue. This isn't just a browser war where the two sides are pushing their own version of html and javascript, this is a complete separation of services, with major companies driving separation.

Web browsing is already an old feature, so it can be accomplished easily by either player. It's the features and services that each one supports that will drive adoption. At this point, the massive use of google services will ensure firefox survival. This means BOTH browsers will eventually become necessary if you want to use all of the services. Really, this isn't anything like the old browser war, this is more like Windows vs Mac.

Oh, and one other thought that strikes...Firefox is ensured survival on the grounds that Windows is losing market share to linux in more rapid strokes, meaning that, for web developers, designing for IE (quickly becoming the closed market) is going to limit your customer base more than developing for the browser supported on every OS.

Comment from Juha on 2007-01-12

2007-01-12T23:48:55Z

I suspect what's biting Microsoft with IE is the thing it thought would lock in users in the first place: operating system integration.

IE is very much part and parcel of Windows. Any changes to IE have to work across the board with various Windows components, something that the Firefox developers don't need to worry about.

Worse yet, Microsoft has to develop IE for multiple platforms currently. If you look at IE7 for XP and Vista for instance, the former offers Protected Mode and has even been built with a different compiler than the latter.

The question is, to what extent does the above put brakes on browser innovation for Microsoft?

Comment from corallinkz on 2007-01-15

2007-01-15T13:04:23Z

I hope opera will join the battle too.

Comment from Jens Meiert on 2007-01-16

2007-01-16T08:11:17Z

I'm looking forward to Firefox' development, though some nasty bugs still need to be fixed. But I'm quite sceptical concerning IE, mostly due to its inferior usability.