The Future of Firefox: Chris Blizzard speaks at SCALE

At the Southern California Linux Expo, Mozilla evangelist and board member Chris Blizzard gave a presentation on the future of Firefox. He discussed Mozilla's long-term goals, demonstrated some of the impressive integration improvements that Firefox 3 will bring for Linux users, and also provided some insight into Mozilla's recent efforts to bring Firefox to the mobile market.

[Lord Anubis]

"Mozilla's long-term goal, said Blizzard, is to "make sure the web remains a viable platform." He spoke about some of the emerging changes in the Internet ecosystem and expressed concern about new technologies like Microsoft Silverlight and Adobe AIR, which he describes as proprietary stacks that threaten to displace open standards. Mozilla aims to guard the web against potential vendor lock-in by delivering truly vendor-neutral technologies that are accessible to all web users and developers."

that's the paragraph i like the most.

[BloodySinner]

Same here.

[Bonsai1214]

his name is blizzard. that in itself is kickass. then there's firefox 3, which is blazing fast, faster than almost every other browser out there.

mozilla is going to do well and survive for a long time.

ps, the new webkit is pretty fast too, and tests show its faster with javascript than the ff3b

[Bladestar]

Yeap... that's what he said... and many people specially those that do not understand what he is talking about... he is talking about innovation on the web arena as a bad thing. "Microsoft Silverlight and Adobe AIR"... at least some people are actually trying to not be stock in the stone age using technologies that werent designed to work on this day... Call flash wherever you call it but people have created great things (games, video stream, etc) thought it may not be a W3C standard and propietary... This guy reminds me of those people that still feel that they should use CGI to create dynamic pages... afraid of change and want to continue using Javascript, CSS and HTML until the day they die... Don't get me wrong, I love Javascript but the language is obsolete and does not serve well for today's need... it's too slow, and does not support most Object Oriented Features...
No support for Generics, Custom Attributes, inheritance... (yeah in case one of the know fool here tries to challenge me on this... using function.prototype to simulate inheritance does not mean javascript support it)

Silverlight will allow developers to use Real Programming languages like Java, Visual Basic.Net, C# and C++... managed and more important... "Compiled code"... no longer will code need to be downloaded as text and interpreted by the browser.

I know why this guy is worried about Silverlight... because silverlight can run independently from a browser... browser is not needed to run silverlight pages. Silverlight uses the a subset of the .net framework... imagine if people no longer need browser to browse the internet? heh! why would anyone need a browser if code no longer needs to be interpreted? What if data is downloaded an excututed natively by the OS? ooppps! there it goes Firefox!

"to displace open standards" uhh... just in case you didn't know silverlight is based on XAML which microsoft submitted to make an open standard... just as C#... created by microsoft but open standard.

Yeah, go on Hate on Microsoft without knowing what you are talking about... What this buy is saying it's obvious... Silverlight on another form of viewing web content that renders obsolete a browser will be view by firefox as "to displace open standards"... they do want to keep they jobs...

I'm all for forcing Microsoft or Adobe to make things like this open standards instead of simply staying on the stone age as far as internet... I make a living making web components (grids, etc)... but anyone with experience on web development knows it's limitations and that something must change to acomodate new requirements... an anyone with half brain would know that the problem with existing web technologies is that is interpretted.... and if ever made compiled than browsers aren't needed.... this is like asking your mom if you are a good person.... bias!

[meepmoopmeep]

good for blizzard and mozilla

[bootsielon]

A blizzard commands the firefox?

[Tarmgar]

Firefox is indeed faster and better. Too bad people using IE won't take in the truth.

[Biphter]

Since IE 7 came out and completely sluggarded my machine I decided to try Firefox, I like it. I wish Sony would get Firefox into the PS3 instead of the sloooow browser it has now.

[Tarmgar]

Yea, IE 7 slows my computer down, Firefox does not. And the text in IE is blurry for me, but with Firefox it's nice and crisp.