Firefox 2 Launch - Interview With Chris Beard

ReadWriteWeb writes "This afternoon Firefox 2 will be 'officially' launched. In anticipation of the unveiling, ReadWriteWeb has a brief interview with Chris Beard — Mozilla Vice President of Products. Subjects discussed include the growing enterprise usage of Firefox, the importance of user experience and security, Mozilla's theory behind Web feeds and why they haven't included an integrated RSS Reader, the growing add-on ecosystem, offline browsing, and finally a little about the future of the browser." From the article: "It felt to us like a 2.0 product, particularly if we looked at it from what 1.0 was, to 2.0. It was like half steps, from 1.0 to 1.5 to 2.0. It's also a very stable and rock solid release - it's really ready for the masses. So it really does feel like a 2, as opposed to a 1.x product. Firefox 2 has, we estimate, between 3-4 times the number of fixes than FF 1.5 did. And that doesn't just include fixes and bugs, but all of the feature work as well as memory, stability and security issues. But there's certainly a lot in it which makes it really solid." Also on the site is a concise review of the product, and an overview of Marketing Firefox 2.0.

I certianly hope...

[Anonymous Coward]

That it is as fast or faster than the current release. I am always fearful lately of new releases as they typically mean slower and bloated.

I even recently downgraded all the office machines to Office 2000 from office 2003 as the minimal feature benefits do not outweigh the increased speed in loading and operation as well as far smaller memory footprint.

New tabs are great

[joshetc]

I love how they put an X on each tab and the tabs automatically resize after a certain number of tabs is added / removed. Every time I try to switch tabs I accidentally close one and every time I try to close more than one tab I accidentally switch to the second tab instead of closing it. Maybe I'm blind and there is a way to switch back to the old tabbing system? This one blows though IMO so someone please enlighten me! Or do I just revert to 1.5?

Get a clue already.

[Shivetya]

more innovation and web integration isn't going to develop Firefox any more pentetration into IE's market share. Why? Because for the most part people just don't care.

I love firefox, use it daily. Even put up with the bugs that were "ignored" for a long time (like memory leaks, having your bookmarks vanish for no reason, etc). Yet reading the review it is still clear that too many miss the point.

It doesn't matter how much better you are than IE, you have to give people a real, tangible reason to switch and then you have to make it so exceedingly easy that there is next to no effort involved. That second part is more important than the first. I like many others here can come up with many "tanglible" reasons for people to switch, I still can't get them to download it or install it.

Penetration comes with getting someone that people trust to distribute the software along side their product. May I suggest Quicken (all that tax software coming out can easily accomodate FF). Hell, get a game manufacturer to provide the browser as part of the install process. With a good windows installer it can be made a seamless part of experience.

Re:Get a clue already.

[maxume]

Ack! Thbbbt. Sorry, hairball. Anyway, bundling is the software equivalent of a traveling salesman sticking his foot in the door. It stinks.

The goal of Firefox is to have a browser that supports web standards and puts users first. It does a great job of that. It isn't to have 100% market share. To the extent that it re-energized ie development, it is a boon for web standards. Better is better, even if it is from Microsoft.

Re:Get a clue already.

[ryanov]

The reason to use it is already there -- no idiotic little script can install something without your knowledge into your always-running web browser. This does change with IE7 to a certain extent, but it's still very much the way it was. That's why I have switched people to it, and they have noticed the difference. Most of the people who were using IE had their computers crapped up in weeks. Not so with FF.

Re:Get a clue already.

[Poorcku]

It depends on the organizational culture also, though. At the University where I work, it all started with a few co-workers that tried the 1.0 FF. It spread, slowly, so that now even the non-tech-savy users have and use FF. Change resistance is also a factor: people are afraid not of the change but of the consequences of the change itself. IANAW (webmaster) but imagine the code you`d have to rewrite if the management decides to switch to FF. All those pages that worked only with IE now have to be compatible. The majority of the ppl will not read a REVIEW of a BROWSER. Period. People will however listen to the informal leaders, the trendsetters. So, FF will spread slowly like any other technology, and there will always be at least 15% of the population who will not adopt it.

The ultimate browsing experience

[Yahma]

I think firefox needs a tagline. Maybe Mozilla foundation can contact BMW [bmw.com] and include a free firefox CD with every BMW sold. (ie. the Ultimate Driving Experience along with the Ultimate Browsing experience). Things like this will help firefox's penetration. People really need a reason to use firefox over IE, and right now I can think of two good reasons:

1) Firefox doesn't have the huge ActiveX security hole that IE has.
2) Firefox offers tabbed browsing (now that IE7 is out, this is no longer a Firefox advantage).

So the list of major advantages firefox has over IE is dwindling. I think integrating some form of anonymous browsing, either through a network such as Tor, or through an anonymous proxy service [blastproxy.com] would give Firefox yet another advantage over IE... Maybe Firefox 3?

Re:The ultimate browsing experience

[StringBlade]

At the same time, here's a good reason not to get Firefox:
1) Firefox doesn't have that huge ActiveX feature that IE has

Believe it or not many corporate intranet sites and even some web sites in general use and like ActiveX to make their pages more "interactive". Until FF can replace ActiveX with something more secure while providing similar functionality I don't see FF replacing IE in any large corporate environment whose web development teams are using ActiveX components -- and that's a lot of them

One more thing:

[Kadin2048]

3) Inline spell-checking.

Not a biggie if you don't use online forums, but with the increase in the number of websites that let you write as well as read (think MySpace, Facebook, various forums, Writely/Google Docs, etc.), people are going to come to expect more advanced editing capabilities in their browser. Having spent some time using browsers that have inline (red underlining) spell checkers, such as Safari and Konqueror 3.5, going back to Firefox is always painful.

It's not nearly as much of an advantage over IE as tabbed browsing was, so there's little doubt that the gap between the two has narrowed somewhat, but it's still something.

ActiveX

[tsunamiiii]

Does this Version support ActiveX nativly? If not then this is never gonig to find its way into corp. Too many apps use ActiveX for this to be reliably not to mention Corperate standards have IE and not Firefox, save startups. This will be standard when Suse is standard.

Re:to OP: What I've been wondering about with FF..

[drinkypoo]

Me? I've read slashot for several years, used Firefox for several years off and on... but I just don't like the fact that I have to go in search of extensions.

Wow, you've read slashdot for several years? You must be a god!

Look, you don't have to go in search of extensions. The browser works fine out of the box and provides privacy protection, pop-up blocking, tabbed browsing, the best javascript implementation, proper support for more image formats than any other browser including SVG, MNG (last I checked) and proper PNG... It just happens that you can add additional functionality through extensions. If you don't need it, then you don't need them. Meanwhile, they provided a very nice site from which you can download extensions so that you can get them if you need them.

There's nothing stopping anyone from making a nice website that has a great set of extensions, except that there's apparently little demand. Every so often I do a writeup on which extensions I happen to use, and post it on my website [hyperlogos.org]. (The last one was on a different site - I haven't updated for 2.0 yet but that's coming.) (ObDisclosure: I have amazon referral links, but no other ads.)

Re:New tabs are great

[drinkypoo]

Firefox does provide a lot of configurability through the GUI but they also don't provide a lot, because the simple truth is that there's a LOT of potential configuration options in any program and Firefox seems to have gone towards the heavier side. This is a GOOD thing, though! This way, you have the GUI for the things for which you need it, and you can use about:config for strange configuration changes not needed by the mainstream. As fasterfox proves, you can always have an extension to allow configuration of some of the more obscure parameters.

Re:to OP: What I've been wondering about with FF..

[drinkypoo]

Firefox is still relatively lean. I agree, it could be leaner. Frankly though I don't think that the install size is the problem, it's the memory leak issue. That seems to be much better, however, in 2.0.