According to Berliner Zeitung Mozilla considers themselves an obvious partner for Google’s Android platform and the Open Handset Alliance. Well, I think what we are seeing now is an agony of the lizard; sadly, the dinosaurs are dying out.
Actually, anyone in the IT world should have seen it coming. Mozilla struggles with Firefox 3, has been losing against Opera and most importantly against Webkit standard-wise for a couple of years already and has now lost the mobile battle with the emerging of Webkit on iPhone and Android. While Mozilla is busy polishing Gecko 1.9, which is still due in several months, Webkit implements new web standards in a matter of weeks, and Epiphany, the Gecko-based browser for the Gnome desktop, is possibly changing engines to Webkit for the next Gnome release. Rats are leaving a sinking ship.
Nobody wants to hack on Firefox anymore, except for Mozilla’s payed hackers. Thunderbird and Sunbird are not seeing any manpower at all, stagnating for ages. Songbird is a piece of crap at the moment. Ever wondered why Blake Ross doesn’t work for Mozilla? A bit more shocking: Nobody actually wants to surf with Firefox anymore. It became as bloated as Mozilla Suite once was, it is slow, crashing, tilting for a couple of seconds for no reason, and the only compelling reason to stay with Firefox so far have been its extensions. But frankly: the best extensions are easily ported to other browsers or aren’t needed at all, since they are already implemented there. Working in the same environment on all platforms might have been a reason several years ago, now it’s more important to have system-wide software integration. That’s why many people preferred Camino or Epiphany to Firefox on their respective platforms. No, I don’t actually care about Windows, maybe someone will create an integrated Webkit-based browser for Windows.
XUL is also dead. With about 99% certainty. WHATWG is developing (X)HTML5, which will include most of XUL’s features in a long shot. Web applications are built with universal toolkits nowadays, XUL has never been one, it has always been Gecko-centric. The probability of implementing XUL in Webkit is roundabout zero. So what’s left to Firefox? Actually nothing. Mozilla has missed the opportunity to develop a great rendering engine by setting it free from all the Mozilla framework. They are years late on separating the engine and applications (XULRunner). They have a load of cross-platform infrastructure libraries, which should have emerged to separate open source projects years ago. They haven’t. Now, Mozilla is trying to fix loose ends in an over-due project, barely fixing crashes and memory leaks and integrating things to the mainline, which are better left to extensions.
Mozilla has lost its open source spirit long ago. We’ve missed that tipping point, because we were eagerly waiting for Firefox to kill IE. It’s now time to wake up and save what’s there to be saved. And to join the next web revolution, which will be lead by Webkit.