Firefox 3 profiled in the New York Times
May 26th, 2008 by Gen KanaiEDIT: The article is now on the front page of the BOTH the Business section AND the Technology section!
NY Times, Business section, front page, Monday, May 26th
NY Times, Technology section, front page, Monday, May 26th
The New York Times is my hometown paper, and I’m a regular reader of The Grey Lady, so it’s a pleasure to see Mozilla’s efforts for Firefox 3 profiled in my paper: Open-Source Upstart Challenges the Big Web Browsers.
With tasks like e-mail and word processing now migrating from the PC to the Internet, analysts and industry players think the browser will soon become even more valuable and strategically important.
“People in the industry foresee a time in which for many people, the only thing they’ll need on a computer is a browser,” said Mitch Kapor, the software pioneer who now sits on the board of the Mozilla Foundation and has created a start-up, FoxMarks, that is developing a tool to synchronize bookmarks between computers. “The browser is just extraordinarily strategic.”
That notion has helped to rekindle the browser wars and has resulted in the latest wave of innovation. Firefox 3.0, for example, runs more than twice as fast as the previous version while using less memory, Mozilla says.
The browser is also smarter and maintains three months of a user’s browsing history to try to predict what site he or she may want to visit. Typing the word “football” into the browser, for example, quickly generates a list of all the sites visited with “football” in the name or description.
Firefox has named this new tool the “awesome bar” and says it could replace the need for people to maintain long and messy lists of bookmarks. It will also personalize the browser for an individual user.