Mozilla has joined forces with Khronos to create what could be a new standard for the World Wide Web: 3D browser graphics.

The creator of Firefox has joined graphics consortium Khronos to bring a public 3D browser-based environment within a year.

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Technorati Tags: Firefox, Mozilla

Interview With Mozilla’s Chief Innovation Officer

Written by Richard MacManus 

In my recent visit to Silicon Valley, I got the chance to visit the Mozilla headquarters. Among others at the organization, I spoke to Chris Beard – Mozilla’s Chief Innovation Officer and the person overseeing its efforts to bring new concepts to the browser, a.k.a. Mozilla Labs. We discussed where Firefox is heading and how it compares to Google Chrome in particular. We also talked about Mozilla’s new mobile browser Fennec, the add-on platform, and how recent innovations by Mozilla – such as Weave and Ubiquity – fit into the big picture. In this post we’ll focus on the near future of Firefox.

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Firefox vs Chrome

Chris Beard and I first discussed what Mozilla is doing to keep Firefox, its flagship product, competitive in the latest generation of the ‘browser wars’. Google, whose headquarters are just up the road from Mozilla and who I also visited on the same day, upped the ante in the browser industry in September last year when it launched a brand new browser called Chrome. Not only that, but Google went out of its way to claim that Chrome represents the next generation of browsers, because (according to Google) it is much better than existing browsers at managing the increasingly sophisticated web apps we see on the Web nowadays.

Beard noticeably bristled at the suggestion that Chrome performs better with heavy duty web apps. He noted that Firefox is also working hard to make highly interactive web apps run smoothly. Regarding Google’s claim that Chrome’s isolated tab processes mean a more stable browser, Beard replied that Firefox too is very stable and that it doesn’t crash much these days. And to be fair, in this author’s experience the latest production versions of Firefox have indeed performed much better than they used to. I still get the odd browser crash though.

What’s the Vision for Firefox?

But arguments about browser stability aren’t going to differentiate the two browsers, Firefox and Chrome, in the eyes of the general public. So I asked Chris Beard to explain Mozilla’s vision for the future of Firefox. Beard replied that the vision for Firefox is to help users navigate and manage an increasingly complex world. Beard likened this concept to intelligent agents; and he also used the term ‘trusted assistant’. Beard told me that the browser will be "tied to services" – he mentioned the current activity happening in the Linked Data and Semantic Web communities.

Add-ons are a huge part of the current Firefox experience and Chris Beard said that some of those add-ons will become more integrated into the core browser. While that isn’t a new trend, I noted that it sounds similar to what Flock has done. Flock is a browser built on the Mozilla platform that integrated many social web elements into the browsing experience (Flickr, YouTube, etc). I suggested that Firefox may want to offer bundles of add-ons, so that users don’t have to go hunting around for various individual add-ons. Beard said that yes, this is in the works. He said that users will be able to create add-on "lists" and offer them as a single click to other users – much like Amazon’s wish lists. However he noted that there are usability issues to overcome, because some add-ons aren’t necessarily compatible with others. He said that currently Firefox has around 8000 add-ons and that we can expect this bundling feature to come out in the next couple of months.

As for other upcoming changes to Firefox, Beard told me that many aspects of the current Firefox experience could be in the cloud – for example bookmarks and the "Awesome Bar" (Mozilla’s term for its adaptive learning URL bar). Beard said that portability of the user experience is important in this era of the Web and so they’ll be looking to offer certain functionality and data in the cloud.

Another part of Mozilla’s strategy for Firefox going forward is to integrate aspects from some of its associated products, such as Ubiquity (an experimental Firefox add-on that gives your browser a context sensitive command-line – see ReadWriteWeb’s most recent write-up) and its sync product Weave (our write-up). Beard told me that all Mozilla products are designed to be extended, but this may include making them part of the core Firefox browser. Ubiquity, for example, may end up being baked into Firefox in the future.

In my next post, we’ll explore Mozilla’s strategy for Fennec (its new mobile browser) and we’ll look at recent developments in other Mozilla products such as Ubiquity and Weave.

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Technorati Tags: browsers, Chrome, Fennec, Firefox, Google, Mozilla

Software giant claims  that the world’s most popular web browser ia faster and safer than even before.

Microsoft will make the latest version of Internet Explorer, the world’s most popular web browser, available for download from 19 of March.

Microsoft claims that the Internet Explorer 8 (IE8) is faster, more user-friendly and more secure than previous versions.

Steve Ballmer, the chief executive officer of Microsoft, said: “With Internet Explorer 8, we are delivering a browser that gets people to the information they need, fast, and provides protection that no other browser can match.”

One of the key new features of IE8 is “Accelerators”, which allow surfers to perform common tasks, such as looking up an address on a map, without navigating first to a separate website. Web users can also keep an eye on their favourite sites by using “Web Slices”, which are stored in the redesigned favourites bar and flash when a site is updated.

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Internet Explorer is currently used as a main browser on around 67 per cent of the world’s computers. This represents a decline from a peak of around 91 per cent in 2004, since which time rival browsers such as Mozilla’s Firefox, Apple’s Safari and, most recently, Google’s Chrome have started to eat into IE’s market share.

Internet Explorer’s dominance has attracted criticism and controversy in equal measure, not least with the European Commission, which in January announced its intention to investigate Microsoft’s practice of bundling Internet Explorer with its Windows operating systems, stating: "Microsoft’s tying of Internet Explorer to the Windows operating system harms competition between web browsers, undermines product innovation and ultimately reduces consumer choice." Microsoft has already been fined over $1 billion by the Commission for bundling Windows Media Player in with its operating system.

On the internet, IE’s dominance has also caused problems, as the browser’s ubiquity has made it a favourite target for hackers preying on its programming vulnerabilities. If Microsoft is to claw back some of its lost market share, it must convince people that the new IE is more secure. Microsoft claims that IE8 offers the best security features among leading browsers, and that Internet Explorer 8 blocks two to four times as many malicious sites as competing browsers.

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Technorati Tags: browser, Chrome, Firefox, Internet Explorer 8, Microsoft, Safari