Joho the Blog » mozilla

An open open mobile OS

davidw — Fri, 23 Nov 2012 19:38:17 +0000

This isn’t news. I’m just slow. But in July, Mozilla announced it will launch its new mobile operating system in Brazil. The plan, apparently, is to focus first on emerging markets.

The Mozilla mobile OS is going to be completely open, based on HTML 5. This means you won’t have to develop for a framework specific to a platform (iPhone or Android, e.g.). Because it’s Mozilla, it will be open open. (Remember, Mozilla are the folks that bring us Firefox.)

Another reason this is good news: The Mozilla browser is third, behind IE and Chrome, and is dropping. Mozilla is a pillar of open openness and we don’t want to lose it. Mozilla growth opportunities = Goodness.

The Firefox difference

davidw — Mon, 31 Oct 2011 11:34:19 +0000

Sebastian Anthony points to a distinguishing philosophy of Firefox that was not clear to me until I read it. The title is “Firefox is the cloud’s biggest enemy,” which he in the comments admits is not entirely apt. Rather, Firefox wants you to own and control your data; it uses the cloud, but encrypts your data when it does. This is a strong differentiation from Google Chrome and Microsoft IE.

Microsoft the good sport

davidw — Thu, 19 Jun 2008 06:49:28 +0000

The Microsoft Internet Explorer team sent a nice cake yesterday to the Mozilla Firefox team, congratulating them on the shipping of version 3.0, as they did when Firefox 2.0 shipped. Nice. Seriously.

Here’s an idea from one of the comments that’s funny but would be unnecessarily not-nice to actually do:

I reiterate what someone said when the last cake appeared – Mozilla should send a cake back, include the recipe, and ask for advice on how to improve it. ;)

: )

[Tags: firefox mozilla microsoft internet_explorer competition business ]