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.
Listed below are links to blogs that reference this entry: Firefox 3 Plans and IE8 Speculation - Browsers Heading Apart Again.
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Planned features for Firefox 3 from. mozilla links Firefox3/Firefox Requirements from. mozilla wiki + Firefox 3 Plans and IE8 Speculation - Browsers Heading Apart Again from. Read/WriteWeb Among the list of mandatory requirements, read, what is the mos... Read More
After years of Web standards diatribes and countless hours of petitioning and politicking, we finally saw IE7 adoption of standards-compliant css support and several bug fixes. But with the pending launch of Vista, will all that tiresome work be in vai... Read More
N'apportant pour le moment pas le moindre changement en ce qui concerne l'aspect visuel de son interface, Gran Paradiso Alpha 1 est pourtant garni ne quelques nouveautes qu'on ne voit pas mais parfois importantes, par exemple le changement de la Read More
An interesting tidbit came out of the recent Foo Camp New Zealand (which unfortunately I wasn't able to attend). Robert O’Callahan from Mozilla, who is based in NZ but drives the rendering engine of Mozilla/FireFox, spoke about how Firefox 3... Read More
Later today Mozilla is launching an upgrade to its Add-Ons website (a preview is here, although it doesn't appear to have all the new features). Add-ons are extensions to the Firefox browser and Mozilla is aiming to make them more... Read More
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Sort of related: both Firefox and Thunderbird are problematic to use on Vista currently.
Posted by: Juha | January 11, 2007 1:30 PMYes 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.
Posted by: Emre Sokullu | January 11, 2007 2:15 PMIE8 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."
Posted by: Pierre Lambert | January 11, 2007 2:42 PMI 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
Posted by: Alex Iskold | January 11, 2007 4:19 PMMicroformat 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. ;)
Posted by: Thomas Scovell | January 11, 2007 6:09 PMI 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.
Posted by: Devon | January 11, 2007 6:54 PMIE7 is premature , how abou IE8...:-( , Ilove FF variants
Posted by: zoel | January 11, 2007 8:35 PMFirefox = Fx not FF :)
Posted by: James | January 11, 2007 8:49 PMLooks like going back to IE/Netscape war again.
Posted by: Garrett | January 11, 2007 9:17 PMWorking 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.
Posted by: Kris | January 11, 2007 9:34 PMIt'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.
Posted by: Buck | January 11, 2007 9:46 PMFx it is. I never realised that was the preferred abbreviation! Someone emailed me the evidence:
http://www.mozilla.org/support/firefox/faq#spell-abbreviate
Posted by: Richard MacManus | January 11, 2007 11:35 PMIE7 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.
Posted by: Dracos | January 12, 2007 12:04 AMThis week alone I installed 5 firefoxes for people who hated the automatically updated Internet Explorer. Does that say something?
Posted by: Tinus | January 12, 2007 12:16 AMIt's actually a requirement by law that Microsoft have backwards compatability, so it really isn't their fault.
Posted by: Ray | January 12, 2007 1:28 AMThis 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 :(
Posted by: Marcus Greenwood | January 12, 2007 2:07 AMI 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.
Posted by: John | January 12, 2007 2:24 AMIt never hurts to be conservative in computer upgrades.
Posted by: Max Rubin | January 12, 2007 5:47 AMMany 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.
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.
Posted by: Robert Brown | January 12, 2007 6:49 AM> 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.
Posted by: blipy | January 12, 2007 7:38 AMI think you got a little confused there. Firefox IS the fastest for AJAX apps.
Posted by: natmaster | January 12, 2007 10:00 AMYes, 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.
Posted by: Michael | January 12, 2007 10:41 AMShould 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?
Posted by: Grant | January 12, 2007 11:08 AMI 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.
Posted by: Lothar | January 12, 2007 11:21 AMI don't call "identical" an extensible platform vs a monolitic one. Firefox is *extensible*, very easily. This alone is the real Fx force.
Posted by: Folletto Malefico | January 12, 2007 11:26 AMExtensibility is the key. I wonder when they will learn this lesson. :|
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.
Posted by: Peter Laudati | January 12, 2007 12:54 PM-Peter
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.
Posted by: Cody | January 12, 2007 2:10 PMI 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?
Posted by: Juha | January 12, 2007 3:48 PMI hope opera will join the battle too.
Posted by: corallinkz | January 15, 2007 5:04 AMI'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.
Posted by: Jens Meiert | January 16, 2007 12:11 AM