Rah Rah for Mozilla
For the last month or two I’ve been meaning to write a little essay on the rise of Mozilla and the fall of IE, but these are suddenly a dime a dozen. In the past 18 months I’ve gone using IE 90% of the time and Mozilla for the remaining 10%, to 95% Firefox and just 5% IE.
There’s still a lot to be said about the use of Mozilla as a truly portable application platform. There is an amazing variety of high-quality extensions . Here’s my personal collection:
- DOM Inspector
- Web Developer
- Sage
- Google Preview
- Google Pagerank
- FoxyTunes
- StockTicker
- Del.icio.us Integration
There are lots of lessons to be learned here, but I have a plane to catch this morning, so I will be even more terse than usual.
First, it takes a long time for a general purpose platform to emerge. I’m not sure if Mark Andreesen thought it would take this long when he decided to take on Microsoft in the late 1990′s. I think someone once said that creating a new platform always takes 10 years. Second, success feeds on success. I’m looking at these extensions and thinking that I had better know how to write one. Fortunately, tutorials and reference information are readily available. Third, building on existing standards (in this case XML, RDF, JavaScript) can only help.
O’Reilly (as usual) has the definitive book on Creating Application With Mozilla. They also host the Mozilla Developer Center.