I recently compared the Mozilla project's state 5 years ago with today, and cried Victory. I reckon I declared victory in a provocative way, as I must say. Of course, a lot has been achieved during the past 10 years, but Mozilla is now facing another set of challenges. Here is an attempt to list them:
More competition on the desktop
Microsoft finally seems to get its acts together and is reinvesting in Internet Explorer. IE7 was just a start, but IE8 sounds promising, at least in terms of Web standards support, which is good. It's a bit too early to discuss user experience improvements, but Microsoft may do better this time...
Likewise, Apple is not resting on its laurels. Webkit is quite impressive in terms of performance. Safari has an edge over Firefox as it is shipping with all new Macs, just like IE is shipping with all PCs because it's bundled with Windows.
Mobile
Mobile is the new frontier when it comes to Web browsing. The current version of Gecko has made a very significant progress in terms of memory usage and performance, rendering it a good opponent on the Mobile browsing market. However, Opera is entrenched there and Webkit has made good strides in this area. The mobile industry is changing as it increasingly adopts Open-Source, while users demand "real" Internet access instead of the old "walled garden" approach. Pieces of the puzzle are falling into place, but it's not going to be an easy win for Mozilla.
Online services
Online services that are tied to the browser are becoming important in order to improve user experience, as several extensions such as the late Google BrowserSync, Foxmarks and some others have demonstrated. Synchronizing bookmarks across several Firefox instances was interesting to many people, but now that Firefox 3 and its AwesomeBar are spreading like fire (no pun intended), bookmarks and navigation history are proving to be increasingly valuable to users. Mozilla Weave, in this regard, is very promising.
Apple now has MobileMe and Me.com, and if I was in Microsoft's shoes, I'd do something along these lines for Windows around Live.com, so we can expect some heat to happen around online services dedicated to client applications.
The Open Web versus proprietary stacks
This is the issue that worries me the most... While Microsoft has promised that IE8 will support Web standards, it looks like it wants to impose Silverlight as the technology for "serious" development of applications that need to run inside a browser, in way very similar to Adobe's with Flash. If Mozilla's mission is to defend the Open Web, what happens if the Open Web is made obsolete by proprietary technologies?
Conclusion
When you think about it, what Mozilla has achieved so far, though very impressive, seems almost easy when compared to the challenges that we're now facing...
I listed these challenges in order to prove one point: Mozilla indeed is very successful, but it should not get distracted by exciting, yet out-of-reach, goals. This could cause Mozilla to lose its (main) focus and then fail to overcome its upcoming challenges.
However, Mozilla does need bold goals and an ambitious direction to keep its community together. In this regard, having Mark Surman joining Mozilla Foundation as Executive Director is very good news.
6 réactions
1 De sipaq - 22/07/2008, 18:52
You say "Mozilla" but what you really just mean is "Firefox". The Mozilla universe is way greater than just the Firefox universe and while I agree that you list the right things from a Firefox perspective, you totally miss out the relevant challenges for other parts of the Mozilla universe (universal calendaring and mail for everyone, gecko and XULrunner as a platform, ...).
I dearly hope that Mark Surman does not make the same mistake once he joins MoFo.
2 De Mark Surman - 22/07/2008, 20:26
Good list, Tristan ... and I agree with the comment that the opportunities and threats are well beyond Firefox. Of course, much of this cuts across many of the products in the Mozilla universe. For example, what happens with data in the cloud
and protecting who we are and what we know about ourselvestouches everything from email to universal calendaring to things we do on the web. I guess that's the advantage that Mozilla has: it can see these issues from alot of different perspectives and, hopefully, use this to promote broad approaches that keep the internet open.A small side comment wearing my biased-Linux-user-hat: you need to include '10s of millions of Linux based sub-$500 netbooks' as a part of the desktop competition landscape. This is going to happen. And, as someone who uses Firefox, Thunderbird, Sea Monkey Composer and Prism because they are the best options for what I do on Linux, my inkling is that this is a good thing for the Mozilla universe.
3 De lrbabe - 23/07/2008, 00:20
sipaq: The web is the platform, and the success open web is the more important thing Mozilla has to focus on.
I see the competition between browsers to support standards of the open web as the result of Mozilla's work on gecko. But now it's time to think about "what can we do which could benefit to everybody, using those modern web browsers ?", "How can one work towards our aim to promote the Open Web, if it's not only by distributing our navigator?"
The market share of Mozilla's runtime is not the answer, and I think people at Mozilla have other very good ideas.
4 De AbriCoCotier - 23/07/2008, 09:54
What Mozilla has achieved for now, I think, is just to build its major soft (Firefox : the Desktop Browser), and to have made itself a well-known name.
But, as the web is expanding quite very fast, Mozilla's to-do work is increasing too : Mobile Browser, new standards, browser competition, and so on. In fact, Mozilla has just come into the boxing ring.
5 De Sébastien - 23/07/2008, 10:50
I'm watching the "competition" on the desktop (Air, Silverlight, ...) for a year now. And i think the "desktop" is the key.
As the hardware was the key, as the OS was the key, now, this war move to the desktop. So, the browser is under the light now. But tomorrow, if Desktop Rich environments are "accepted" by the developers and the users, the browser will become secondary, in a way.
I think XUL may play a major role in this competition, where AIR and Silverlight are already present with "products". It seems to me that as long as XUL suffer from an IDE, Documentation, Samples, ... In fact, a developing RAD, it will still stand as a extension support, used by geeks.
So, this could be a huge project for Mozilla... (unless this is already in the box ??)
6 De sipaq - 23/07/2008, 11:54
lrbabe: I have heard the "the web is the platform" and related stuff too often to actually still believe in them. That is a viewpoint that might be true for people living in highly computerized and webified places like Silicon Valley, but is certainly not true for most of the rest of our planet.
Investing into the Mozilla platform is not only a very beneficial thing for Firefox and the open web, it will also benefit millions of users of other mozilla-based applications and millions of people who do not (yet) use mozilla-based products.