Chris Messina provides some raw thoughts on Mozilla in the form of a really long video (50 minutes!) and the notes he worked off of. You can get an idea of the content from his notes, but there’s a whole lot of extra detail in the video. I’m interested because I’m working on the section of my book called “Why Choose Firefox.” So I have a particular interest in the browser part of this topic — and a bit of bias too.
Chris says “browsers are dead. Browsers are a commodity.” Then he suggests that Mozilla needs to focus on its platform, meaning (I assume) XUL, the rich client platform upon which Firefox is built.
I have a slightly different read on the prospects for Firefox than Chris: the future looks really good to me, from the standpoint of the new way of web working. We need a whole lot more than what our browsers are giving us. Firefox is the leader in supporting web ways of working. Now it needs to solidify the lead so that IE doesn’t catch up.
I’d suggest that Firefox is where Mozilla needs to focus. To borrow a phrase from James Governor: Mozilla should double down on Firefox. Forget everything else. Rich client platforms? Who cares! When’s the last time you heard someone get excited about Eclipse?
Yes, so everyone’s talking about Silverlight and Flash/Flex and now JavaFX. Those things need to run somewhere… often in a desktop browser. They don’t make the browser obsolete, unless Mozilla gives up and considers the current incarnation of the browser as all it can do, as just a minimalist shell for rich Internet interactivity. I think the browser can take on a whole lot more capabilities: handling individual workflow, maintaining the user’s social contacts (an idea Chris brings up in the video), doing a better job of being an external brain for the worker through maintaining bookmarks and clippings, etc.
Chris thinks people will just use the browser that comes installed on their machine: Windows users will run IE7 (largely caught up in features to Firefox) and Mac users will run Safari. Though IE7 doesn’t have the breadth of add-ons that Firefox has, Chris thinks within six to eight months that IE will catch up.
Maybe Chris is suffering from The Curse of Expert Ennui. This is related to The Curse of Knowledge described in Made to Stick. With The Curse of Knowledge, we know so much we can’t make it simple or comprehensible for those who don’t already understand it. We can’t imagine not knowing it; we get caught in complexity and caveats.
The Curse of Expert Ennui (which I just made up) happens when we’ve been immersed in a cutting edge or otherwise advanced project for so long and seen it through so many ups and downs that we become tired and jaded about it. We can’t judge the project’s long-term likelihood of success because we were too close to it for too long and we’ve suffered too many setbacks along with the successes. Psychological research DOES suggest that we tend to pay much more attention to bad news than good — and that means that having suffered through equal amounts of bad and good news over the course of a project we are likely to overestimate what the bad news means for the future.
There are a few reasons why I think Firefox has better chances than Chris allows:
- Firefox continues to increase in market share
- For now, Firefox wins in terms of browser add-ons, and as people move more of their work into the browser they are going to look for the ability to customize the browser and add capabilities that provide a better workflow across web applications
- Macs are a more popular and viable choice even in businesses, and people might not be willing to settle for Safari’s lack of add-on capability. The iPhone’s introduction in the summer should give another boost to the OS X platform and bring more potential Firefox users.
- Firefox is the browser of choice not just for techies or open source devotees — increasingly people who are interested in productivity boosting methods like Getting Things Done look to Firefox because it’s the browser most often featured on sites like Lifehacker, Lifehack.org, and the site I edit, Web Worker Daily. It’s Firefox where you can get something cool like the GTDInbox that makes over Gmail into a personal information manager implementing the Getting Things Done approach.
This suggests a way for Mozilla to spread Firefox — solidify its place as THE browser of choice for people who want to work productively and then work on improving Firefox’s support for individual worker productivity within a networked and connected world. No, this isn’t the Joe Sixpack crowd. And it’s not the MySpace crowd — though certainly many of those people have jobs now or will have jobs in the future where they want to work using the web in productive and connected ways.
So I’ll agree with the idea that Mozilla should stop thinking about itself as a browser company. It should also stop thinking of Firefox as just a browser. Firefox is the platform Mozilla should be focusing on. Grow the community building add-ons, get out ahead of the IE7 add-on curve. And focus extra effort on productivity, workflow, and social connectedness from the browser.
8 Comments
The Curse of Expert Ennui. Love it. Was just talking to my boss-man about this, actually.
I’d say double down on Firefox as well. Silverlight, Flex/Apollo, JavaFX, etc are going to provide FANTASTIC competition in the client space, and that’s great news for us as consumers of clients. I think JavaScript still has some legs, still some more interesting angles to play out, and the increased competition in this space will just accelerate it’s coming into existence.
Anne, this is great, and just the kind of perspective I was hoping for. And I think you also added a dimension to my point about the Mozilla Platform that I don’t think I articulated well. Somewhere in between the browser and client-side hacks like Greasemonkey is something really powerful — and allowing the browser to better integrate with — I’ll say it — iLife and so on, would be incredible. For example, can we please fix drag n’ drop in the browser?! Why can’t I just drag a folder of photos on to Flickr.com and have the browser know that I mean to upload them? I mean, this is one example — but this is also I think what you’re talking about.
I also think that, in terms of extensibility, Firefox absolutely wins over Safari and IE… but, I also see the frameworks I mentioned competing with Firefox more directly… to the point where you’ll get dedicated web apps that are driven by a single URL (see Gmail Browser and Mailplane) — and act more and more like desktop apps. I guess my broader criticism when it comes to the platform is simply lack of tools for tinkerers when it comes to the browser chrome, submitting simple patches and improving the general design of Firefox. In fact, most mockups still are done in ASCII text for Firefox — and somehow that strikes me as missing something important… like oh, say, behavior?
Anyway, this is great stuff. And I think having this conversation is much needed. Especially since we (us web workers) represent a growing demographic that can have an increasing influence on Firefox itself!
All the new web development platforms that people are coming out with are closed, except for JavaFX, but it remains to be seen what JavaFX actually is. If people start making applications with these frameworks, they won’t be accessible from the browser, just like Flash is today. Let’s take your GTDInbox example, for instance. If Gmail was written in Flash, Flex or Silverlight, GTDInbox would be impossible. You can’t alter those applications from the outside because they are closed. If we allow those solutions to take over, it will be a huge setback for innovation on the web. The goal of Mozilla is supposed to be to promote innovation on the web, and that is why they should be focusing on developing an alternative to those platforms.
“The Curse of Expert Ennui” — that’s something I’m going to add to my vocabulary and my worldview.
Well said. I also think that with the web, technology enthusiasts are so used to the rapid pace of change that they expect *every* new browser version to be the next killer app or to represent some paradigm shift in the way we use the web (for instance, adding new features on the level of tabbed browsing and popup blocking). Instead, it’s often just the sum of many small incremental improvements that make the browser (or any app) much better over time.
Double down on Firefox!!!! Fix the memory model, which is utterly horked. its not a feature, its a related set of bugs. Love fox, hate the leakiness.
Firefox 3 will have a new cycle collector that will handle memory leaks. It’s already mostly implemented on the “Gran Paradiso” alpha releases.
fixing the memory leaks would be awesome. those leaks on billy g’s crappy pretense of an OS means that FF2 sometimes doesn’t perform the way it should.
as someone who has written code for living for 28 years (i have proudly coded in more dead languages on dead platforms that anyone you know!) i heartily concur with those posting about needing better tools. a good toolset allows a developer to concentrate on the problem and not on all the other gyrations of building software. good tools are like grease on a bearing or oil in your car engine — they smooth the way.
i also concur with the idea of making the browser into other things ala Songbird. i’ve tried out songbird and its pretty interesting (and i am looking for an itunes replacement — it is too slow when scrolling thru a 100+ GB music collection) but perhaps making a totally separate app isn’t always the way to go. suppose that music blogs when renedered in firefox just used some songbird-ish features instead? suppose you could download all of the mp3 files but maybe not have them play when you were in FF? making the browser more aware of what it was rendering so that it could provide more services for the user is a direction i’d like to see things go.
and anne - web worker daily is right up there with lifehacker as one of my “must read daily” blogs!! good stuff here and there!!
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[…] It also makes me think that I wish that I could have this experience about once a year to REALLY bring home what the experience of using the interfaces that I design must be for very many people. It lifts the ‘Curse of Knowledge, or the The Curse of Expert Ennui as Anne Zelenka might describe it. […]