The Firefox computer, by Toni Schneider, (CEO of the company that runs wordpress.com) sounds very interesting to me (thanks Paul for the link):

I run a PC at home and a Mac on the road. Their respective operating systems just don’t get me very excited these days. The only thing I car about is that they run Firefox. That’s because my digital day is currently spent in the following apps: WordPress, Yahoo Mail, Bloglines, 30boxes and Google. And they all run perfectly well in Firefox. So as long as I can get to Firefox, I’m pretty much surrounded by everything I need for my work. (...) This leads me to the following conclusion: I want a Firefox computer. A nice, sleek, solid state notebook with a big screen that you open up and it just runs Firefox.

Toni would be pleased to see that such projects are actually on their way. One is a laptop, other are desktop solutions. After all, a Firefox computer makes only sense in a connected environment, at least for now[1].

  • The famous OLPC project is mostly a Firefox computer. It's an inexpensive, tough laptop (solid state, no moving parts such as a hard drive) running a derivative of Firefox.
  • Linutop, which first version is finalised in terms of hardware, and which needs more love in terms of software. [2] It currently runs Xubuntu, a derivative of Ubuntu with the the XFCE desktop environment. It runs Firefox, Thunderbird, Gaim, Abiword (for opening Word documents) and Gnumeric.
  • Easy_Gate, a Linux-based computer including a DSL modem running Firefox, which price is included in the monthly fee charged by French ISP Neuf Telecom.
  • I have been told of other similar projects, but have not seen them yet. Stay tuned!

Update: So, the idea is that when you travel, you need Internet Access so that your Firefox computer can deliver the services you need. But everybody has a computer these days: your friends, your parents, your company, the cybercafés... So what you actually need is just Firefox, and your bookmarks. This is exacty what is trying to solve the Region Ile-de-France, (Parisian region local government), who is going to distribute 175,000 USB keys to high school students. Open Source software will be put on the keys (such as Mozilla Firefox Portable Edition), Thunderbird and OpenOffice.org. So basically, with such approach, any Internet-connected Windows PC becomes yours, provided that you carry with you your computing environment, stored on your USB key.

Of course, the next step is to store all your bookmarks in the cloud, and access it from any Web browser-enabled PC. For now, sites like NetVibes.com, My.Yahoo and the Google Browser Sync Extension compete for offering such a service.

Notes

[1] We'll see how the upcoming versions of Firefox are going to address the off-line issue. This promises to be very interesting.

[2] Full Disclosure: I've been given one of these for testing.