The Future of Firefox: Interview With Mozilla's Chief Innovation Officer
In my recent visit to Silicon Valley, I got the chance to visit the Mozilla headquarters. Among others at the organization, I spoke to Chris Beard - Mozilla's Chief Innovation Officer and the person overseeing its efforts to bring new concepts to the browser, a.k.a. Mozilla Labs. We discussed where Firefox is heading and how it compares to Google Chrome in particular. We also talked about Mozilla's new mobile browser Fennec, the add-on platform, and how recent innovations by Mozilla - such as Weave and Ubiquity - fit into the big picture. In this post we'll focus on the near future of Firefox.
Firefox vs Chrome
Chris Beard and I first discussed what Mozilla is doing to keep Firefox, its flagship product, competitive in the latest generation of the 'browser wars'. Google, whose headquarters are just up the road from Mozilla and who I also visited on the same day, upped the ante in the browser industry in September last year when it launched a brand new browser called Chrome. Not only that, but Google went out of its way to claim that Chrome represents the next generation of browsers, because (according to Google) it is much better than existing browsers at managing the increasingly sophisticated web apps we see on the Web nowadays.
Beard noticeably bristled at the suggestion that Chrome performs better with heavy duty web apps. He noted that Firefox is also working hard to make highly interactive web apps run smoothly. Regarding Google's claim that Chrome's isolated tab processes mean a more stable browser, Beard replied that Firefox too is very stable and that it doesn't crash much these days. And to be fair, in this author's experience the latest production versions of Firefox have indeed performed much better than they used to. I still get the odd browser crash though.
What's the Vision for Firefox?
But arguments about browser stability aren't going to differentiate the two browsers, Firefox and Chrome, in the eyes of the general public. So I asked Chris Beard to explain Mozilla's vision for the future of Firefox. Beard replied that the vision for Firefox is to help users navigate and manage an increasingly complex world. Beard likened this concept to intelligent agents; and he also used the term 'trusted assistant'. Beard told me that the browser will be "tied to services" - he mentioned the current activity happening in the Linked Data and Semantic Web communities.
Add-ons are a huge part of the current Firefox experience and Chris Beard said that some of those add-ons will become more integrated into the core browser. While that isn't a new trend, I noted that it sounds similar to what Flock has done. Flock is a browser built on the Mozilla platform that integrated many social web elements into the browsing experience (Flickr, YouTube, etc). I suggested that Firefox may want to offer bundles of add-ons, so that users don't have to go hunting around for various individual add-ons. Beard said that yes, this is in the works. He said that users will be able to create add-on "lists" and offer them as a single click to other users - much like Amazon's wish lists. However he noted that there are usability issues to overcome, because some add-ons aren't necessarily compatible with others. He said that currently Firefox has around 8000 add-ons and that we can expect this bundling feature to come out in the next couple of months.
As for other upcoming changes to Firefox, Beard told me that many aspects of the current Firefox experience could be in the cloud - for example bookmarks and the "Awesome Bar" (Mozilla's term for its adaptive learning URL bar). Beard said that portability of the user experience is important in this era of the Web and so they'll be looking to offer certain functionality and data in the cloud.
Another part of Mozilla's strategy for Firefox going forward is to integrate aspects from some of its associated products, such as Ubiquity (an experimental Firefox add-on that gives your browser a context sensitive command-line - see ReadWriteWeb's most recent write-up) and its sync product Weave (our write-up). Beard told me that all Mozilla products are designed to be extended, but this may include making them part of the core Firefox browser. Ubiquity, for example, may end up being baked into Firefox in the future.
In my next post, we'll explore Mozilla's strategy for Fennec (its new mobile browser) and we'll look at recent developments in other Mozilla products such as Ubiquity and Weave.
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The only comparison between Firefox and Chrome is that they both are web browsers. The similarities end there. My husband uses Chrome. He likes it over IE. He has never tried Firefox although lots of people rave about it (including me). He installed Chrome for my dad. My dad HATES Chrome! Chrome is lame. It does nothing...which is why my husband likes it so much...it's no-frills. Ewww! I don't want a boring web experience. Firefox made the web fun again!
At the bottom of your Google-distributed RSS feed, which I read in Google Reader, this article had a huge Google Adsense ad for "Install Google Chrome".
I'm afraid that innovation may not be enough :/
The downfall for Firefox will be the Addons. Everyone loves them. The problem? They add more weight to an already "hulking" browser. I know people who can't live without them but complain of the added slow downs and crashes.
IE beats FF in terms of speed, it doesn't allow such open ended nonsense. I use FF myself and I just get frustrated from them lack of speed. 4gigs of ram can't even stop me from getting the dreaded "program is not responding" error. It's frustrating and I'm tired of this browser war frustration.
Put your geek heads together and get me something that works. All of you.
Oh and Chrome, you're not that fast. In fact you became worse in terms of speed after leaving a browser window open for a period of time, much worse.
With Google now working with Homeland Security, it would be nice if Firefox, Mozilla did some joint coding with startpage.com. They are an EU search engine that ISN'T gathering all the personal data the Google is. Just a thought.
I'm starting to get bummed out by firefox. The anrkist said, the speed is the deciding factor. Safari4 has been fairly good to me.
http://gchakrab.wordpress.com/
ditto goodmars: Webkit wins the prize for speed (followed a close second by Camino on my MBP). FF has become bloated and certain or too many add-ons can bring it to a screeching halt. (And Chrome was no great shakes on any of my Windoze boxes, nor was the "beta" on my MBP - even Opera was faster.) BUNDLING add-ons is NOT a good idea, and the recent "beta" with "cognitive navigation wheel" was a joke.
We're in the final phase of testing a new analytics application heavy in JavaScript and Flash and we find the current Chrome beta to be faster than any other browser during application loading. Not far behind is Safari 4 beta with a gap before Firefox 3.1 beta. Naturally the slowest is IE8.
The latest Chrome beta stands out because it is perceived as MUCH faster bringing up large JavaScript apps. I'm not entirely sure how this is accomplished, but it has to do with the internal architecture of the V8 engine - both with parser optimizations and code caching.
The strategic goal is clear: to move forward to a new generation of web apps that will make the ones we have today seem quaint. Chrome and the pressure Google is putting on Firefox will move forward the web as a platform, and I believe that is a very good thing.
All of a sudden Firefox loosing it's fame,ny Firefox is crashing every day .Firefox lost it's way somewhere.
"how recent innovations by Mozilla - such as Weave and Ubiquity"
Weave is an innovation?
Opera already has Opera Link. Then there's Foxmarks, Google's sync service, etc.
IE8 isn't bad at all. I was a Firefox user till IE7 was around, but switched to IE8 recently. Very stable, memory consumption remains under control, always recovers from crashes, starts up fast on a clean XP SP3 install and the only addon IE7Pro (now IE Pro) does everything I need that most of my Firefox addons did. Of course, it lacks horribly still in supporting web standards, but the user experience of IE8 is the best IMHO. I've got more used to Web slices than RSS feeds.
Firefox needs to get very clever. Chrome is faster, but has little or no addons. Firefox would do well to up speed and make switching addons on and off easier. I also needs to make an awesome mobile browser. I know they have one... but they have to make it into 'the one' everyone wants to use. If they fail to do this they will become irrelevant within 5 years.
I've loved Mozilla's browsers for years and nothing I've seen from anything else changes that. Firefox is still my browser of choice, and nothing beats the ecosystem of plug ins. Songbird and Flock are great, too and would not exist without Firefox.
Without Mozilla's work earlier this decade, we would all still be using IE5, and MS would have little incentive to improve. Competition is critical, and the newest round of competitors is one of the best things to happen to the web in a long time.
I recently switched both my personal computers from firefox to chrome. Why? I loved the functionality of firefox and all the plugins but firefox is a resources HOG! I've been waiting for a few years now for mozilla to slim down firefox and it has never happened. I'm sick of firefox slowing down my computer by eating up ever more RAM as the day progresses.
I've loved Mozilla's sövebrowsers for years and nothing I've seen from anything else söve changes that. Firefox is still my browser of choice, and nothing beats the ecosystem of plug ins. Songbird and söve Flock are great, too and would not exist without Firefox.
Firefox needs to get very clever. Chrome is faster, but has little or no addons. Firefox would do well to up speed and make switching addons on and off easier. I also needs to make an awesome mobile browser. I know they have one... but they have to make it into 'the one' everyone wants to use. If they fail to do this they will become irrelevant within 5 years.
4gigs of ram can't even stop stüdyo from getting the dreaded "program is not responding" error. It's stüdyo frustrating and I'm tired of this browser war frustration.