I’m back to life. Need a few hours to respond to emails, clean flat, eat food and get up to date with current status of the Internet before I’ll go online.
btw. 3000 emails in one week (beside of spam, including bugzilla and maillists) – something is wrong with this system…聽 we need to invent sth different or IT folks will have to start getting back from holidays day earlier to read them…
I’ll be mostly offline for the next week. If you’ll send me email, it’ll wait, if you’ll bug me, it’ll wait, overall, you can call me/SMS me in emergency. Any other contact will be delayed by one week.
I look forward spending one week without a computer. It’s really important, each year, after holidays, I find my passion to what I’m doing once again. Now I feel burn out. Last time I was resting it was a training camp in August 2005. Gimme the break, and I’ll change the world – right? 馃檪
Some time ago, I wrote a document that is targeted to all developers around the world, who creates their products and speak only english.
It may help you understand how the localization process looks like, what are the common problems and how can you make localizers life easier by avoiding small mistakes that result in their drama.
Feel free to comment, edit, update, and promote it. I hope you’ll find it interesting 馃檪
So. Opera revealed it’s version 10 vision. Great read. Happy to see them once more claiming that their primary competitor is IE, not Fx.
Let’s try to look at this from a wider angle. IE7 is getting near, with the release date set, currently, to October 2006 (not sure about this…)
The world is getting prepared:
It seems that we have something to offer to this 90% of users *instead* of IE7, right? All of those browsers, beside of Flock, are in their mature state now. They can be offered to users as the ultimate solution, day-usage browser. All of those browsers, beside of Opera are open source, which means that some new browser may appear soon basing on any of them. What’s even more important – all of them have pretty active community!
Are we ready to attack IE’s market? Yes, we definitely are. With this variety of choices for user, with this wide angle of features (and I didn’t even mentioned extensions for Firefox!), I’d say we cannot to much more for the user to make the browsers more ready for competing with IE.
Of course, it doesn’t mean that there’s no space to progress… Far from that. There’s a lot of space for new features, and in fact this is the moment when we can start working on those features. We reached the level of standard support, speed, feature set, quality, that meets IE’s one, and *now* the teams can focus on real feature development :} I’d say that browsers have around 5-8 years of life before they’ll morph into something else becoming the part of Desktop Environment of any kind.
To finish my summary of current status for all free people of earth (not middleearth yet… ;)) who wish to help in the upcoming battle, I’d like to add that we’ll have three rounds of this battle. At least. Think of it as a strategy game:
First round is now. Everything that will happen before IE7’s release date is our attack. IE is hardly blocking, and is not trying to counter attack yet. It’s a perfect moment for us to attack hard and make everything possible to make IE weaker before the second round. We have no way to defeat it yet, but we can win a better position before second round. The only thing that can make us loose position are environment things like security, media handling, internal wars between ourselves.
Second round will start with IE7 release. From that moment I predict that the attack will be impossible to block. It will be stronger than anything that happened in browser market ever. With advertisements, marketing, media, there’ll be a lot of buzz.
Third round will happen a few months later. When Opera will release O10 and Mozilla Firefox 3.0. It may be a counter attack. It may be very crucial moment, when all the expectations for a good browser from Microsoft will not be fulfilled.
So it seems that from our point of view, we’ll have two moves. First, and the third. I cannot predict what will happen later, maybe Microsoft will release IE7.5 soon? Or 8.0? What will others do depend a lot on the situation after those three rounds. We’re all way smaller than MS and we can react faster. Only MS must plan everything year or two in advance, so their strategy must ignore recent changes on the battlefield.
First move is used rather well. We could do more, but we’re doing good. We shouldn’t expect any radical market share changes, but we’re slowly progressing, getting more and more every day, with most of it going to Firefox now. We’re a bit too much ignoring media. I’d say that media handling is our most important preparations part before round two. We need to make them remember the signal – we’re free, we’re modern, we’re secure, we’re fast and it’s here where the progress happens.
Second round may be used by us. As every Aikido sensei will tell you, the more strength the attacker uses, the more of his strength you can turn against him. We’ll have to be Aikido warrior. The key is a message. We need to stick to the Microsoft marketing with our own message. “Switch to newer version of IE” will be their message? Let’s add “Or any other browser, which are developed faster, are more secure and have more features!”. The comparisons will make us weaker, we’ll not be able to fight head to head, because MS did a damn good job to fix the key marketing features we could use. Tabbed browsing is extremely good key feature because once someone start using it, he’ll do everything possible to explain it to others, and it’s rather easy to promote it with terms like “speed”, “comfort” etc. But it’s ot that easy to promote SVG support, WebForms, client side session storage, widgets, or shelf. It’ll be hard to reach users with this signal.
We need to stay calm, wait till the wave passes by, and join it. Repeat our message, tie it with Microsoft’s one, and we need to have support from media. If media will compare IE7 with other browsers all the time, majority of users will get their knowledge about IE at the same time with new message. There’s more to discover…
Of course, majority of users will never read any message about it, they’ll even not know what this IE is beside of that it’s “the Internet”… but after the security update from MS they may have problems with their new browser. See new features. And understand that they just got the new tool, so they *may* start seeking for info about it, became more interested in IE7 related articles, or ask for help their more experienced friends. And we can be there. In all of those places. And we must do everything possible to be there by that time.
Microsoft will want to get rid of IE6 fast. They’ll use a lot of resources to scream loud “Change the browser”. We need to help them spread this message everywhere 馃檪 And use it.
Third round is a counter attack. Microsoft may or may not make a serious mistake in the second one. If they’ll fail with security, then we’ll be way stronger here. Any major security hole will be a disaster that we must use well. Once more – media handling. We must be prepared. We must cover any security related message. All the major players – Opera and Mozilla – must speak about security. If there’ll be security hole in our browsers, we must fix it ASAP and react immediately. If there’s a hole in IE7, and Ms will not fix it very fast. We need to reach with our message to media and users.
Then, depending on how the situation will looks like, we’ll have new releases. O10 and Fx3. They should happen once the media became bored of describing IE all the time and start be hungry for news once more. We should be prepared to read the user reaction on IE and we must have terrific products by that time. Users will be more aware than ever of browsers, their existence, the fact that they can change one etc. Fx 3.0 and O10, and all the other next versions, should provide the ultimate answer for those who’ll have any concerns. On the side note, around that time KDE will probably be ready with KDE4 which’ll also work on Windows. It means that we will have new apps on Windows like KOffice 2.0 and Konqueror 4.0…
That’s all for now. That’s how I see it. This game will be very hard for us. We already reached most of the users who wanted to switch, were ready to switch and were waiting for us. Now there are two areas. First one is where the Flock and Opera are heading. The areas that are less known, Opera in small media, Flock in blog world, we may expand there – but we don’t know yet how deep we can reach it. Second one is the users who don’t know how to switch, are not interested or too confused. We need to reach them with the help of computer sellers, ISP’s, media, and their friends. I hope that all the browser’s vendors know what I wrote here, and are prepared. We’ll see soon…
Disclaimer: My goal is not to wipe out IE from the market. My goal is diversity. The market, to be fresh and vibrant, needs to have 3-4 major players, and be free of the threat of one player blocking it. IE7 seems to be a average browser, and deserves average market share. We need to ensure it’ll not stand like this for the sake of the web future.
We’re probably one day from second round of Flock localization for Flock 0.7!
We’re hunting bugs in current 0.7.4 and if all goes properly, tomorrow, we’ll send localization bundles, and after next few days we’ll release over 16 localizations!
I’ll post more tomorrow, once 0.7.4 codebase is clean 馃檪
I just came out from the Flock team meeting, where we once more discussed the issue of openness. We are open, we want to be more open, and we see that it’s something more than simply opening the sources. Actually, it requires resources. To became really open for all our users, for all potential contributors, for our partners, friends, competitors, for the market and for the world, we need to use more energy than to stay silent. That’s one of the lessons I got recently.
If you don’t pay attention, you drift to closed model.
We’re in the middle point, when we did too small effort to open ourselves, so we don’t get too much in return. And because we don’t get too much from being open, we keep not paying too much attention to this issue.
The perfect example is our Wiki Roadmap. We are open! Damn! And look where we are. We released Cardinal like weeks ago, and you can’t see where we’re progressing now! We understand that it’s our work that must happen first. It’s we who must spend resources, time and will, to give you everything you need to consider if you want to help us. THEN we can eventually start seeing benefit. So yes, we’ll break the barrier now.
Will started preparing the feature discussion documents for the Wiki and they should appear very soon. We want to involve you in the discussion on our features, we don’t want to fall into “we know better what you want, and we want to surprise you so we’ll stay silent and release late” model.
I’m very excited about this, it’s a high time to do that now, and I’m very happy to hear that Flock team share the opinion. This time, the discussion was started by Daryl. Kudos to him, for not letting us drift away. I’m tempted to start writing now about all the features we’re planning or even considering for next Flock release, but on the other hand, I’d prefer to leave the joy of communication to other devs so they can write about features they’re working on and get your help. Also, it would be better to have them on the Wiki so you can immediately write your thoughts about our ideas and add yours.
So, let me just give you a tips, we’re working on idea of what we call People. We want you to be able to see your friends activity, no matter where. To be able to open a tab and see your friend photo, last blog posts, pictures, IM conversations, emails. Imagine so way more powerful vCard, live updating with recent signals of activity, and last bits of communication with you both. We want to extend our favorites manager, so you can spend less time on managing your data, and be able to find what you need with minimum effort. We want to give you ability to store your settings remotely and synchronize flock between multiply machines, we want to give you ability to use your browser UI to get the data you really want. That’s far beyond of the idea of Microsummaries but in the same direction. To give you precisely the data you want to have with minimum UI and clicking. Looking for a book? Why can’t we give you the list of books matching your search pattern in a small dropdown so you can stay up to date with what’s on ebay or amazon without having to click through it. We want to make searching easier. Searching is the default way people use WWW today. We want to make it as easy and fast as possible, giving you ability to search across multiple search engines, filter the result data, maybe even point you results that were chosen by others (friends?) you trust. We want to bring more of your friends photo to you, making it possible to view new photos as photostream, watch/save videos. We want to make shopping easier. Remember BookBurro extension? You may be interested to know that Jesse is our Senior Engineer 馃檪
Think about what you use on your daily basis… Browser, email, office… ah! Instant messaging. Right? Hey! It’s so social! Let’s make it easier no matter what IM network you use.
We’re also baking the thing that I’m developing right now. Imagine thing like Netvibes, or Google IG directly inside your browser. Extendible, powerfull, tied with your data, with people you like, photos you want to watch, emails you have, news feeds you subscribe… We want to give you a summary of *your* WWW world. And I’m happy to say that yesterday I started working on this.
We don’t know if we’ll make it all, and if it’ll be exactly like I described it above. Those are just early ideas we’re brainstorming now. We’ll bring them to the Wiki and let you know so you can add your thoughts.
We know that we still are fresh and full of ideas. We still see the browser we’re working on as a huge field with amazing amount of free space for new ideas, features that may make your life easier. We see the browser not only as a tool, but as a part of your life flow.
More details comming soon! 馃檪
Kilka s艂贸w, nie po to 偶eby przekonywa膰, tylko 偶eby frustracj臋 wy艂adowa膰…
Mog臋 tak jeszcze d艂ugo, ale ju偶 si臋 wy偶y艂em. Wi臋cej bzdur, frazes贸w i pustych hase艂ek reklamowych tutaj.
Here it comes. FIrefox Day started 馃檪 (for polish users: www.dzienfirefoksa.pl).
I think it’s a great idea, and what’s important, fresh thing. Never heard of similar thing before. Thanks also goes to Paul Kim, who managed the whole thing, to amazing Tristan Nitot, who made this campaign possible in Poland, and to Marek St臋pie艅, who prepared it for us.
To cut major “concerns” raised by our friends who suddenly became so worried about Firefox download size – it won’t have any influence on the package size. Thank you.
I love how Microsoft announce all their news long before they actually do whatever it is they announced. “Our next operating system will rock! In three years. Maybe four.” “Our browser is going to be amazing! It will ship next year.” “Our search engine will be better than the competition! In six months.” (That last one is especially funny to me since they keep saying it every six months, as far as I can tell.) But I’m especially amused by the latest one: “Our CEO will quit! In two years.”
Perfect 馃檪
Also, basing on their current release management process, they may not make the CEO release on time and they’ll slip by year or two.
I spent some time during this weekend on examinating different versions of Firefox and other browsers against BenchJS.
Why BenchJS? First, it’s independent. It doesn’t use Gecko like Mozilla people would like it to be used. Second. It’s pretty generic. It tests animation, various JS functions, window open and window close, table drawing etc.
It also probably has some flaws. Like, for example some browsers may “cheat” by reporting that they finished after they finished calculations but before the result was presented on the screen and layed out.
So, on the one hand, please, remember that this is data from one benchmark test. It doesn’t say what “is faster” overall, it says what “is faster on this test”. So all “gecko is slow” people, don’t use it in your flamewars please. On the other hand, it says something. It may or may not represent the wider situation, but it’s a piece of data and we should think about it.
All results are the best ones of three tries.
Let’s get to tests.