Firefox as a platform
Om Malik has an article in the November issue of Business 2.0 that sheds light on Firefox as a platform for application development. It's good to see this aspect of the Mozilla project getting attention. Mozilla technology is more than a means of experiencing today's web, it's a big step towards creating the extensible rich client of tomorrow's web.
In a recent interview, Ben Goodger had a few comments on the road ahead for Firefox as an application framework:
Some of our goals in the next 12-18 months include improvements to the core rendering technology to make web developers' lives easier and also "productizing" the application development platform if you will, so that people will be able to download a "XULrunner" (with Firefox, probably) and then run other compact applications on it.
If the push to neatly package and spread Firefox to end users is the first phase of adoption, the second will be the formalization and popularization of its development environment. Applications drive platform adoption. Right now, the excellent web browsing experience you get out of the box is driving adoption, this is the first application. Soon we'll see the development of third party XUL apps that, in and of themselves, can provide the incentive needed to download and install Firefox.
October 22, 2004 @ 12:18 PM | Category: Technology