Thanx! Mozilla at Fosdem 2008
A truly amazing weekend. I attended Fosdem 2008. I basically spend all the time at the Mozilla room meeting with a lot of interesting people.
Some of the most interesting talks were the talks about:
Mozilla Prism
Mozilla Prism is an application that lets users split web applications out of their browser and run them directly on their desktop. Prism will either be built directly into Firefox 3 or available as an extension. This is a really exiting product from Mozilla Labs.
Mozilla Mobile
Firefox will be available on the mobile phone. This time it's for real. A dedicated team is now focused on developing a version of Firefox that will run on a mobile phone. Some features from the normal desktop version of Firefox might be stripped, but the mobile version will have both XUL, extensions and all the other important stuff. MathML might be stripped, but this has to be decided later on.
The mobile adventure is a very important. Just think about the last 10 times that you checked your mobile phone. I bet that only 1 or 2 times out of 10 it was actually to call someone and to answer a call. The other times it was properly to check email, browse, GPS or some other thing that didn't involve the traditional phone usage. Firefox Mobile might be able to do all of these tasks.
A lot of people might start talking about how to distribute Firefox Mobile and if/and how Mozilla should strike deals with handset manufactures. This is important, but I think it's more important to focus on actually making the product. So let's get a product first!
Read more about the mobile Mozilla Firefox
Mozilla Support
The support channel for Firefox consist of a knowledge base, a forum and live chat. It's an important part of the community since it both helps the users with their Firefox problems but also helps the developers to focus on specific areas where the users are experiencing problems. Eventually the support site (in some way/layout) is going to replace the built in help. That's the one you get when pressing F1.
Firefox 3 will also include (from what I was told) a utility that pops up when you cant get access to the internet. Some kind of connection wizard. This was one of the biggest problems when upgrading from Firefox 1.x to Firefox 2.
Other cool stuff
Another cool presentation was the Songbird presentation. Songbird is a desktop media player build on top of Mozilla. It has a web page API and some of the coolest icons and graphics on the web.
Both the Songbird player and the TomTom Home are both built on top of the Mozilla trunk. A year ago this would be highly risky. This has all changed and now the trunk is really stable.
All in all being at Fosdem has been a great experience and I hope that I can get even more involved in the Mozilla project.
Ads:
 |
 |
