Mozilla is making major announcements about Firefox again.
In an e-mail to the firefox-dev mailing list, Firefox Director of Engineering Dave Camp has outlined what he calls the Three Pillars of the new Firefox:
- Uncompromised Quality – aim to strip out Firefox’s half-baked ideas or carry them through to completion so that they’re “polished, functional, and a joy to use.” This program is internally dubbed “Great or Dead”—as in, if the Firefox devs can’t make a feature great, it should be killed off.
- Best Of The Web – a slightly more nebulous pillar that will concern itself with the add-ons community and partnerships with third parties like Telefonica. “We intend to spend some significant effort making addons even more awesome by improving security and performance for users and building a better API that increases x-platform compatibility for addon authors and partners,”
- Uniquely Firefox – attracting new users to Firefox by “focus[ing] on the reasons users choose us in the first place.” The only specific example given is an improved Private Browsing mode, which Camp says will “land shortly.”
Dave Camp elaborated further about the Uncompromised Quality pilliar in regards to Electrolysis (e10s), the multi-process support of Firefox (much like Google Chrome) which will be part of the future Win64 releases. “One of the first things we need to get right is e10s. e10s is the only way to get the kind of snappy experience we need to make Firefox feel great.” Problem I have with his statement is Mozilla has been developing e10s since at least May of 2009 and it is still no ready.
In regards to Best of the Web, Dave Camp brings up Pocket, and the objections for users who would have prefered to have this as a bundled add-on instead of integrated (bloat) into the core Firefox. There is a slight hint that may be they will ‘fix’ pocket, but more likely what happened with Pocket will be more of a lessons learned and what not to do in the future.
Finally, Uniquely Firefox pilliar has me totally confused. I am not familiar “an improved Private Browsing mode.” I have looked around and even posted in mozillaZine, but nothing at the moment. Once I find out more, I’ll do an update post.
Source: ars Technia UK
