Firefox 3 goes on a diet, eats less memory than IE and Opera
Ryan Paul talks about what a big changes we’ve made since Firefox 2 in our memory handling and also compares against other browsers as well. Nice to see this getting some press.
Mozilla speeds up Firefox: Users say it’s twice as fast as Safari, three times faster than IE
Gregg Keizer talks about the improvements we’ve made in Firefox 3, as well as how we compare to other browsers and browser engines. It’s easy to talk about simple benchmarks but Mike Schroepfer states our goal pretty clearly:
“There are lots of ways to ‘game’ the system [in benchmarks], but what we’re trying to do is speed up the things that enable people to run the really heavy-duty applications on the Web.”
Forget Facebook. The Web’s platform is Firefox
Matt Asay interviews John Lilly and discovers how large our ambitions really are. An important quote here that goes to the heart of how we develop and deliver software:
Our question is always, how do we grow in a way that is leveraged? We always lead with the user experience and think about the money secondarily.
Cairo 1.6, Quartz, and Gecko
Vlad talks about the work that he’s been putting into Cairo to make Quartz a first class citizen, including support for the iPhone. Vlad seems to feel that Cairo is really starting to come into its own after being in development for so long. (Mozilla has been working with cairo for so long that it’s important to remember where it was when we started.) There’s some good stuff in here for Linux folks too. Soren has been doing a lot of good work on pixman and Mozilla has been investing in improving upstream cairo performance (some of the MMX work is funded by us) in order to help Linux and our mobile efforts. All good stuff.
ARIA on Webkit’s R(a)dar?
With the beta release of IE8, WebKit is the last major browser engine that doesn’t have support for ARIA. The upstream WebKit bug picked up a tag that points to Apple’s internal bug tracking system. Which means that Apple may or may not be working on it. If this were fixed, it would be a pretty big step forward for the web.
Year of the Gecko
Mike Shaver reflects on where we are today. I liked this quote in particular:
Other people are excited too, from users and journalists to extension developers and companies looking to add web tech to their products. In the mobile arena especially we’re seeing a ton of excitement about the gains in speed and size. A lot of people aren’t yet used to thinking of Mozilla as a source of mobile-grade technology, but they weren’t used to thinking of us as a major browser force either. It’s fun to break the model.
Fast, small, cross-platform, industry-leading stability, solid OS integration, excellent standards support, excellent web compatibility, great security, ridiculously extensible, a productive app platform, accessible, localized to heck and back, open source from top to bottom: it’s a great time to be building on top of Gecko, and Firefox 3 is just the beginning. Wait until you see what we have in store for the next release…
With mobile browser, Mozilla hopes to shake up market
Washington Post article on our entry into the Mobile browser market. They note that Samsung has been working with us, submitting UI ideas and also working on bits of the underlying platform and that the N800/N810 OS includes a Mozilla-based browser. (Sadly, the MicroB that’s on the N800 is a tad old and hasn’t benefitted from all the recent performance and size we’ve been doing at the end of this release cycle.)
Long essay on the decline of native mobile apps and the trend of moving mobile apps to mobile web apps. The web app deployment model (unencumbered by greedy operators) mixed with the fact that a vendor can often leverage huge amounts of existing work and the testing matrix gets much smaller means that the web as a delivery mechanism for mobile apps is becoming a reality. (Expect to see more on this topic from Mozilla in the near future – we’ve got some great stuff coming down the pipe.)
Andy Rubin on Android (quoted by Robert Love)
We’re building an open-source platform for mobile phones called Android. The strategy is to provide Web-style innovation and rapid development on the cell phone, which we think is still in prehistoric times. If you have people developing applications at home, one of them will create the next Facebook. That’s the idea behind our mobile mashups. Third-party developers get data from one site and overlay it on something like a Google map. We want to deliver thousands of applications to your phone.
Of course, I’m not sure you need Android to do that, but I agree 1000% with the goal. A decent web browser is the first place to start, which is one of the main reasons why we’re investing in Mobile.
Nit: Matt Asay, not Assay. :)
Fixed – thanks!
er, nokia? samsung? is there some other connection or are the two sorta smashed together in that description?
urp.
we, after a few thousand dollars in bobcat and soil compactor rental, are still flooding.