Here's my take. I think Microsoft wants to unify their operating systems.

Windows Phone was the first "Metro" experience, but it runs on an old CE kernel and the stack above that is Silverlight (and XNA). Metro is huge. It's the first really new user interface Microsoft's shipped since Windows 95. Metro makes classic Windows and even iPhone and Android feel ancient -- the same old square icons on a desktop we've all been using for the last several decades.

Windows 8 brings Metro to the desktop, laptop, and tablet world. This world, though, is built on the NT kernel, with the WinRT API above that. Sure, you can build Silverlight-like apps in Windows 8 Metro, it might even be trivial to port your WP app to Windows 8 Metro, but you can't easily go the other way.

So, what can Microsoft do about this? Well, it's easy, move Windows Phone onto the NT kernel, and carry over the bulk of the WinRT API. This would make developing your Windows app for any form factor, from desktops to phones, a very easy task. Throw in some nice Visual Studio and Blend templates for re-shaping your app to fit the various form factors, and you've got something really compelling.

The problem with that? Well, today's Windows Phone hardware probably isn't sufficient to drive an NT+WinRT OS. Enter "Superphones."

Superphones, I'm guessing, are the first generation of Windows Phone that run on the NT kernel and support the WinRT (or at least enough of it for most apps.) Note the Apollo release timing is not far from the expected Windows 8 release. Put that together with the recent news that the Windows Phone chief was put in charge of a "a new role working for me on a time-critical opportunity focused on driving maximum impact in 2012 with Windows Phone and Windows 8", and there might be something to this.

So, what do you all think. Am I crazy? Would "same API" across all devices be a worthy Microsoft goal? An achievable one? And what about X-box? Could Microsoft pull off the hat-trick, and unify all of their major platforms under a Metro front end? No doubt that's a tall order, and there are three CPU architectures to deal with. But Microsoft is a big and wealthy company.

The Mozilla Foundation discloses all of the revenue and spending that's done by both the Mozilla Foundation and the Mozilla Corporation.

Perhaps next time you take anonymous swipes, you'll actually do some research.

Mozilla Firefox users and usage is increasing. For the last year or so it hasn't outpaced the growth of the Web, but it is certainly increasing in absolute terms. I don't have the graphs in front of me but it's tens of millions of additional Firefox users so far this year.

Google isn't selling ad space along side their content, like you see on television. Google is selling the ad product itself. AdWords, AdSense, DoubleClick, those are Google ad products and that's where Google makes 95+% of its revenue. Google is not selling "ad space" or "air time" in the classic sense. They are selling the ads themselves. They own the ad product being used.

NBC does not own all of the ad studios in the business. The thousands upon thousands of ad shops own their own business and produce their own ad. Butt Google does own the biggest "ad studio" in the business, with AdWords, AdSense, and DoubleClick. That's their primary business, the ad business. Google makes and sells ads. The other businesses they engage in support their ad platforms.

If you can't see how Google is different from NBC, then you're not really thinking about it very hard.

You can read Mozilla's annual update here http://www.mozilla.org/en-US/foundation/annualreport/2010/ and see that we spend the money on people and infrastructure mostly.

No "number was revealed. "What you're referring to is speculation from a well respected reporter based on what she heard from her sources. Neither Google nor Mozilla have confirmed it.

Mozilla is open about pretty much everything you can imagine. The only two areas where we are not totally transparent are some employment issues and business dealings where our partners would not partner with us if we tried to force transparency on them.

Mozilla does release financials every year so you can see what revenue we generated and where we spent it. That makes it sort of possible to see what specific deals look like in broad terms but no matter how much we'd like to, we simply can't force transparency on other companies.

Mozilla is building an open standards-based API for apps that allow app developers to develop once and run anywhere. Have a look here for a preview. We'll be investing considerably more in this project in the coming year. See more here https://apps.mozillalabs.com/

And no, Mozilla would absolutely not sacrifice something fundamental to our Mission for revenue. See more here http://www.mozilla.org/about/mission.html

It's not quite as simple as that. A better bulleted list would be:

1. An alternative to the proprietary mobile stacks which control the full vertical from hardware to app stores. An open Web stack based on real standards.
2. An alternative to Facebook Connect, Sign in with Twitter, and Google Accounts. A web-wide ID system that doesn't depend on one particular provider.
3. A set of standards for Web applications discovery, monitization, and installation and an implementation that will work across all platforms.

"I agree with you as for web pages. But write Firefox add-ons to what spec?"

The Add-ons SDK. Write to that and your add-ons won't break with updates. https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/developers/builder Yeah. It's that easy. Write to the stable APIs of the Web and the stable APIs of Firefox. When you do that, things shouldn't break and when they do, they're very rare and can be pinned on Firefox as legitimate bugs.

Mozilla's good enough to manually scan all add-ons hosted at addons.mozilla.org and bump compatibility on any that don't use APIs which have changed. We have over 90% compatibility with AMO hosted add-ons that way. Unfortunately, not all add-ons are hosted at AMO and even though AMO makes the scanning tools available to anyone, many not-hosted-at-AMO add-ons don't avail themselves of this option.

It's a positive development. Personally, I'd be more than happy to see Microsoft sponsor Mozilla. And while I'm sure it'd be a shock to many on Slashdot, I suspect the only thing blocking it is Google's wallet.

That's a mis-understanding of how Mozilla works. We don't sell our search to the highest bidder. We want to provide the best possible experience for our users while making the Web a safer, more competitive, and healthier place to live and do work.

In Russia, for example, Google is an also-ran and so Firefox ships Yandex as the default search service. This is not because Yandex outbid Google -- there was never a bidding opportunity, but because Mozilla believes that Yandex is the best choice today for Firefox users in Russia.

Bing is an increasingly good search service in the US and as a result of their improvements, we added Bing to Firefox 4's built-in list of search services. We didn't do that because Microsoft outbid other people on that list. We did it because Bing is a useful search service for many US users. It turns out that Bing is not doing as well in the rest of the world, so where it's not useful to our users, we don't included Bing.

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"And yet Dotzler is in charge of just that, speaking for the Mozilla Foundation and marketing for Firefox."

Actually, I'm not marketing for Firefox. That was a long time ago (years.) Today I'm the Director managing the Firefox desktop product.

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"I wonder if that guy is still the community coordinator for marketing..."

I'm not. I haven't been involved heavily in marketing since a year or so after I co-founded SpreadFirefox back in 2004. I'm currently the Director of the Firefox Desktop product.

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The author of this article only reports performance numbers for Microsoft's Windows OS and Mac OS X but fails to report the actual performance under Linux. Pretty pointless article with such limited numbers.

Pointless because it's only relevant to 98% of Firefox users? It would it be nice if every website reviewing Firefox has 6 machines (or VMs) so they could report on win32, win64, Mac32, Mac64, Lin32, and Lin64? Actually, make that about a dozen different OS versions. Win XP, Win Vista, Win 7, Mac OS X 10.5, Mac OS X 10.6, Mac OS X 10.7, Linux âz will all give different performance scores.

It's not pointless to be incomplete. It's difficult to be complete.

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Nope. Memory usage in the Firefox Aurora channel (less than 12 weeks from release) is down between 30 and 50 percent and un-used memory is cleared much faster. Way to go making assertions without doing your research.