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13 Oct 2005
At this year's LinuxWorld show at Olympia vnunet.com caught up with Tristan Nitot, president of Mozilla Europe, to discuss the organisation's plans for the future.
Nitot worked for Netscape until 2003, but has been involved in the Mozilla project for much longer and managed the launch of Mozilla in Europe.
Formerly a keen skydiver when not slaving over a keyboard, he enjoys vintage motorcycles and digital photography.
The browser market is hotting up again and you're facing increased competition from the likes of Opera. What's the mood at Mozilla about this?
These are interesting times. At Mozilla our mission statement is to bring back choice and innovation to the web, and we always work to this goal. We're a huge project with thousands of individuals, and working to achieve this goal brings us together.
As such we are looking to see more of Opera. It's a good product which is web standards compliant, something that's very important for the future of the web. I don't believe there's one web browser for everyone. If Opera works best for you, then use Opera. If Mozilla works best for you, then use Mozilla.
What about the threat from Microsoft? How do you rate its browser development?
We'll be seeing Internet Explorer 7 sooner than expected; it was only due to come out with Windows Vista but Microsoft changed its mind. That's good news for the customer, because they get the benefit.
The web is maybe 10 years old, if you take the Netscape IPO as your starting point. IE really came in with Windows 95 and there was tremendous competition for four years, culminating in IE5 and by this time Microsoft had the vast majority of people.
Then for two years only one release, IE6, and that only had slight changes like improvements to the web standards system. Other than that Microsoft's done nothing, apart from Windows XP SP2 and some users still don't feel comfortable installing it for fear of application incompatibility.
Once Microsoft controlled the internet entry point, its interest in innovation ceased and it went back to making money from Office and Windows.
There's nothing wrong with that in a business sense. But we're not part of a business, just one part of a project. We thought the web needed choice and innovation.
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Do you agree?
Another area improvement: accessibility
Firefox 1.5 will be the first product based on Mozilla technology that works with screen readers. Other assistive technologies can be made to work with it as well (screen magnifiers, voice input software, etc.). Firefox 1.5 will also be the first web browser to support DHTML accessibility (http://www.mozilla.org/access/dhtml)
Posted by: Aaron Leventhal 23 Oct 2005
How about this...?
I've got a "Bookmark All Tabs" option in the appropriate menus. That saves them all in one Folder.
Posted by: Dave Harper 21 Oct 2005
Firefox customization, deployment, administration and collaboration
After I read about the "four key areas", I am really wondering why the most important area of Firefox development is so neglected? Firefox is already competitive or even better than other browsers in most aspects, but why should Firefox stop at 100.000.000 private users if he could gain another 100.000.000 of business users? Now is the time, the big companies can't migrate to Windows Vista and IE7 within the next years because of the exponentially grown consumption of hardware resources. With easy and free to use customization kits, deployment and administration tools every big company or small Internet Café could switch to Firefox within days. One installation could look like IE 6 for users, who can't adapt the new GUI quickly. The normal installation could share company wide bookmarks, extensions, preferences and icons. Home workers could take annotated snapshots of Intranet pages with ScrapBook and prepare browser based presentations with S5 and WebDeveloper on their portable installation at home. 1) openSUSE 10.x is getting faster, more comfortable and stable every week 2) There is no real alternative to OpenOffice 2 any more for MS Office users 3) Flock has been made public recently and adds useful collaboration features to Firefox, easily extendable by company (Greasemonkey) extensions 4) SVGs and cairo are taking back the web AND the desktop to the next level by enabling feature and graphical Rich-Client applications, based on nothing more than free standards (XML + JavaScript = AJAX) 5) Why should Mozilla not help to move all company Windows desktops to Linux + OpenOffice + Mozilla? "For large organisations, Firefox supports enterprise management technologies such as a configuration system for managing user preferences, specification of rules for web access (WPAD), digital certificate security rules (OSCP), and automatic user login to servers (NTLM). These make centralised administration of large Firefox deployments possible" http://www.theage.com.au/articles/2005/03/21/1111253920087.html Firefox Enterprise Notes http://weblogs.mozillazine.org/ben/archives/008431.html Client Customization Kit http://www.mozilla.org/projects/cck/ FirefoxADM http://sourceforge.net/projects/firefoxadm/ Make Firefox Look Like Internet Explorer http://johnhaller.com/jh/mozilla/firefox_internet_explorer/ Flock - Blogging and online bookmarks build right into Firefox http://www.flock.com/ Beauty and Magic for KDE "Plasma will blow you away. Nothing you've ever seen or will see in the coming years will come even close to what you'll experience with Plasma. And that's a promise." http://users.ox.ac.uk/~chri1802/kde/zrusin-X-future.html Keep up the good work and take back the web AND the desktop, René Leonhardt
Posted by: Rene Leonhardt 21 Oct 2005
user experience?! hey, what happened to tabbed GROUPS?!
grrr. ver 1.5 of firefox has taken away a vital feature (which safari & maybe all webkit browsers lack): being able to save a set of tabs as a group! why anyone would want to cripple a product in the name of making it 'streamlined', i do not know! please put it back! and while you are at it, allow tabs to be dragged & dropped in any user-defined order (or amongst windows); in fact create a canvas as a workspace for urls (rss objects etc).
Posted by: zahadum 14 Oct 2005
Choice = improved evolution
"If Opera works best for you, then use Opera. If Mozilla works best for you, then use Mozilla." Thank you to Nitot for this excellent point; it seems many people on either Opera or Mozilla "sides" forget what the point of browser development is: choice. With having more choices, standards and security are constantly improved and people can choose whatever fits their personal needs. It's not a religion and fanboys shouldn't be out to get everybody. I love Opera and it's my main browser, but if the rare site fails to render, I will try Firefox first and then IE last.
Posted by: og 13 Oct 2005