<< Weekly Status Report, W24/2008 | The roads I take... | Integration eines Magento-2-Webshops mit FreeFinance und selbstgebautem Warenmanagement >>

Aww... Some Things To Be Said...

Yes, Firefox 3 has been released and did set the world record with probably (judges need to determine the official number still) 8 million downloads in 24 hours. For one thing, congratulations to Mozilla Corporation for that marketing boost and to the whole Firefox community for delivering an improved and still damn good browser for the masses.

So, the world is good, the sun is shining and everything is fine. Or is it?

For one thing, I can't hear the word "awesome" any more. I think some people should listen to the song "Now That's Awesome" by Bill Engvall and realize that this inflational use of that word is probably removing its real meaning. Thanks.

Then, something that has to be said is while the mass products make the big headlines (Firefox does that well), the nice products fill up the gaps in the market that those mass products can't fill. That's what e.g. SeaMonkey or Camino are trying to do, and I hope we have our success with that.

And then, sure, Firefox is showing that Mozilla and open source can produce and even market mass products. Good. But is that all we are here for? I don't think so, and I think it's quite interesting that Marc Surman from the Shuttleworth foundation has written up a blog post about his thoughts that the Mozilla Foundation should do more than what it does right now and try to encourage users to become participants/contributors in our vision of the open Internet, making this a really good place for the future and enriching the whole world this way. Let's start our quest for improving ourselves and mankind as a whole with a really open Internet (oh, Captain Picard and his crew from Star Trek's "The Next Generation" would love me now if they were real)!

All in all, there's still some way we need to go until everything will be fine - and I think every step in that direction is worth making. Mozilla Foundation can play a good part there, I hope SeaMonkey can as well in its "corner" of the net, and if we make it, then - and only then - it will be awesome. And I mean that.

Entry written by KaiRo and posted on June 20th, 2008 16:09 | Tags: Firefox, Mozilla, Mozilla Foundation, SeaMonkey | 3 comments | TrackBack

Comments

AuthorEntry

hitchi

quote
I must say I'm not happy with firefox 3 except for the fact it made me look for an alternative; so i was looking for an alternative and found much more than that.
Firebird was my first browser after ie an konqueror, it was fast fast and reliable, not so right now; how the hell does seamonkey runs faster, slicker, allows me to open lot's and lot's of tabs and keeps on going fast and sleek, i mean, i have the all suite installed, isn't this supposed to be heavier, bloated, what ever?Not at all, as sleek as it can be!
Hope firefox will get on track and be the web browser it was meant to be; but seamonkey is way better.Thank you for this great work and sorry for so much time of negligence.
2008-06-22 03:08

Mark Surman

from Toronto

quote
Niche products
You're right that the growing open internet isn't just about going beyond 'products' but also about products that fill gaps. Creating a mass movement around the open internet means making it easier to contrib to all of this.
2008-06-22 22:15

Mitchell Baker

quote
Robert

I may think that things are a bit shinier than you do :-) But I fundamentally agree that Firefox is but one tool in the work of creating an open Internet. There is a great deal to be done yet. This involves open source projects like SeaMonkey (which I think of as a highly successful open source project of a scale that would have boggled us all not long ago), it includes other products and projects. And it includes a bunch of things we don't see clearly yet. I too am pleased to see a discussion beginning about this topic.
2008-06-23 21:21

Add comment