The future of Mozilla
I attended the free Mozilla booze-up Labs event the other month; it was quite interesting; Ben Galbraith spoke about what Mozilla is up to, and what they are planning in the near future… It was interesting because I got the feeling that whilst they have a few interesting projects in the pipeline, they don’t really have anywhere specific to take their browser engine; it has gotten to a point where it performs on par with all the other browsers, and all the other browsers perform on par with it.
So where should Mozilla go from here? I think it is blindingly obvious what they could do, though I don’t think they’re gonna like my suggestion… Before I mention what it is, lets take a closer look at Mozilla.
What is Mozilla’s greatest asset?
Ben touched on it briefly in his presentation, but mostly he spoke about the other side-projects and other new and exciting bits and pieces…
It’s the browser, right!? … Isn’t it???
Well, no it isn’t the browser, there are plenty of alternatives which perform just as well, and do exactly the same thing; Mozilla’s greatest asset is their add-ons. This is their only unique selling point; there are literally thousands of high quality plugins that are very easy to install, and make the browser do things Mozilla could never have imagined, and best of all, they didn’t have to do any of the development for it! I see Mozilla’s add-ons a lot like Apple would see their app store for the iPhone, a free asset that others keep maintaining for them, with a common goal of market domination. No other browser has an add-on library like this… At least till now!
Enter Google Chrome extensions
Yes, google just launched their Chrome extensions, and Mozilla should be suffering in their jocks – as soon as Google have all the most handy extensions, there is not much of a reason to stay with firefox, it will be especially difficult, as Chrome will no doubt be pre-installed on many devices and OS.
So what should mozilla do then?
To put it plainly: drop their browser engine, and concentrate on their add-ons. In the ideal world we would have one browser engine, so that developing websites and javascript would be so much easier. Chrome and Safari already use the web-kit engine, so I’m suggesting that Mozilla write XUL to work on top of the web-kit engine, and concentrate on making their plugins work on it. I think Galbraith felt that he had done all he could at Mozilla, and the realisation that the future is not in the browser itself, but in the add-ons might be why he is no longer with Mozilla, and instead working on an App store for Palm…