This afternoon, I exchanged a couple of informal emails with a British journalist on various topics, when he asked me:
What's the next big news from Mozilla?
Mozilla is going to turn 11 next month and well, many things are getting me excited these days, so I gave him a couple of links. I thought I could share them with my readers. Here is the response I gave:
- We're hard at work to ship Firefox 3.1 which will bring a lot of innovation to Web developers. We're not yet ready to articulate why it's so cool (at least to ordinary people, but we're working on it), but here is a quick demo that will make Web developers cry
- Another thing that takes a lot of our energy is Firefox for mobile, codenamed Fennec.
- Mozilla Labs is a new effort that focuses on distributed open innovation. Among their many projects, Ubiquity and Bespin.
- The market of Web browsers sees innovation, with Google Chrome, and Apple Safari 4 Beta (released today). It's good for the Web, so Mozilla is happy.
Since I've responded, Paul Rouget has published yet another cool demo based on the video and canvas elements (if you happen not to have Firefox 3.1 Beta 2 running, you should check Chris Blizzard's screencast)[1]. One thing to note is that we had lunch Paul and I today when we discussed ideas for his next demo. Then the idea of changing the background of a live video popped-up, and in a couple of hours, the video was shot, imported, and the demo was built. It says a lot about the power and simplicity of Web technologies (and Paul's skills, too 
).
In the meantime, our colleague Dion has published a very cool article about the evolution of browsers: Browsers are finally catching up; It isn’t the Future of Web Pages is it?. Go read it as I won't paraphrase it. My writing would not make it justice.
Now I guess that you understand why I'm still excited about Mozilla after all these years!
Notes
[1] Yeah, I'm the guy on the video. We usually try to put more attractive people in our videos, but Delphine has a bad cold so she was not so keen on appearing on the video this time. But at least, she appeared on the ArsTechnica article!
7 réactions
1 De Un Estran Avec Vue - 24/02/2009, 22:11
Tristan,
Why doesn't mozilla publish x86_64 builds of its betas? You are shunning a growing segment of users from looking into the next big thing. Although x86 builds do work, they don't provide the same performance.
Thanks.
2 De Fjoerfoks - 25/02/2009, 09:42
You did forget to mention the upcoming Thunderbird 3.
3 De Nicolas - 25/02/2009, 10:21
How it is possible than the Linux native Firfox build is slower than the windows version under wine ?
4 De Tristan - 25/02/2009, 16:20
@Nicolas. Several people have compared Firefox 3 on Linux and in Wine. In most cases, it's faster in Wine than without. There are several potential reasons for this:
@Un Estran Avec Vue : I'm told that there are X86_64 nightly builds now.
5 De Un Estran Avec Vue - 25/02/2009, 19:02
Merci, je viens de les trouver.
6 De Piou2fois - 27/02/2009, 13:17
Nothing about this post, but here is a great news for Firefox :
http://labs.blogs.com/its_alive_in_...
Ciao
7 De Nicolas - 02/03/2009, 10:29
1 - the difference should not be noticeable. Gcc is sometimes comparre to ICC not visualC.
2 - Why not ? (and it is still for 2-5% speed rank increase)
3 - wine emulate the windows API though X but is still faster.
Can't it be possible than low level graphical interface of Firefox (xul) is more optimised with windows API and less for native linux api ?