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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:

• Safari 2.0 is gathering market together with wider adoption of MacOS. Safari 2.0 is very fast, lightweight browser that has all of what Mac user may want and is a default browser on operating system that gains market now.
• Camino progress also depends on MacOS. Camino is getting near it’s 1.1 version now, and should be ready before IE7.0.
• Seamonkey is already on the market, with same feature set as Mozilla Suite 1.8 and ugly icon. Seamonkey 1.1 should be released soon. (what’s new?). Seamonkey seems to be a good choice for many business customers, who’re seeking full internet suite in one.
• Firefox will have version 2.0 by then, where the focus is shifted to User Interface and User Experience. Not too much in terms of technology, a lot of small fixes to make the life easier. Seems to be the best choice for majority.
• Opera is read with Opera 9, before IE7 we could get one or two minor updates, but even with what we have now, Opera is very fast and powerful suite for users who like to feel the speed, out of the box solutions, and want “something more”.
• K-Meleon is hardly known to anyone, lacking any buzz, while it’s a pretty damn fast browser, that may serve you well! Update: Wow! Those folks are really trying to stay out of the buzz too much… K-Meleon 1.0 is there! For almost 2 weeks! And they didn’t care to update their website! Huh! They really deserve some buzz :} K 1.0 has a lot of new things and works great!
• Flock – youngest kid in this playground. Focused on young people, using web a lot, blog-generation, web2.0, call it whatsoever. It has it’s unique feature set, pretty good reviews, and before IE7 it’ll get it’s 0.8 version with plenty new stuff on board.
• Konqueror in it’s 3.5 version, support web standards very well, is unfortunately limited to Linux users, but is a browser of choice for most KDE folks.
• Epiphany – Gnome’s browser of choice
• Kazehakase – Japanese browser, I don’t know too much about it, beside that it’s actively maintained with latest release on May 2006.

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 🙂 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 🙂

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 🙂

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! 🙂

Kilka słów, nie po to żeby przekonywać, tylko żeby frustrację wyładować…

1. Rząd będzie rządem kontynuacji (po rządzie Marcinkiewicza).
2. Ale będzie to też rząd, który nie będzie zajmował się przeszłością – “przeszłość pozostawmy historykom”. Tylko, że rząd Marcinkiewicza zamiast historykom zostawiał ją komisjom sejmowym, komisjom rządowym, a sam Kaczyński obsesyjnie powtarza słowo “układ, który trzeba tropić”. To jak to jest?
3. “Sukces to jest słowo klucz jeśli chodzi o przyszłość Polski” – odkrywcze. “A porażka, to słowo którego będziemy unikać w kontekście Polski”. Jestem do usług, gdyby pan premier potrzebował więcejtakich durnych frazesów.
4. “Podkreślił jednocześnie, że Polska ma najniższy w Europie dochód narodowy, malejący przyrost naturalny, coraz bardziej negatywny bilans imigracyjny. Kraj boryka się z niską innowacyjnością, brakiem mieszkań, słabą infrastrukturą i wysokim bezrobociem.” – od prawie roku kierowana jest przez partię pana Kaczyńskiego, i nie zrobiła absolutnie nic w kierunku poprawy dowolnego z tych punktów. Mieszkań dalej nie ma, a zamiast pozwolic polakom na nie zarobić, PiS chce je polakom budować. Znowu socjalistyczna jałmużna. Bezrobocie jest nadal, i nie przeprowadzona została, ani nawet zaplanowana żadna reforma systemu finansowego państwa, która sprawiłaby, aby firmy chciały zatrudniać więcej osób. Bilans imigracyjny jest tragiczny (więcej osób wyjeżdza z Polski niż się rodzi!), i od momentu nastania tego rządu, z Lepperem i Giertychem w składzie, oraz Kurskim, Gosiewskim i Wierzejskim na zapleczu, ten trend zdecydowanie przyspiesza. Jeśli to jest rząd kontynuacji, to należy się spodziewać wzmocnienia tych symptomów krysyzu. Gratuluję. W ogóle genialnym pomysłem jest wymienienie katastrof jakie posiada ten kraj pod rządami PiS i zapowiedzenie “kontynuacji”… Brillant
5. ” Przyczyny takiego stanu rzeczy tkwią w dominacji różnych niedobrych interesów grupowych, które wywierały wpływ na polską politykę we wszystkich jej dziedzinach” – wreszcie coś do rzeczy. Zgadzamy się, panie Kaczyński, że związki zawodowe to tragedia i katastrofa dla zdrowego, wolnego rynku, ale jeśli mnie pamięć nie myli, to rząd PiSu raczej ulegał górnikom, niż dbał o interes państwa.
6. Jak wyjaśnił, zastąpił Kazimierza Marcinkiewicza, aby w rządzie koalicyjnym “panowała spójność działania” – zatem Marcinkiewicz nie był jej gwarantem, zbyt dużo swobody? Cholera… faktycznie, takie podejście zapowiada dużo wolności i swobód obywatelskich, skoro premier ma tak histeryczną potrzebe totalnej kontroli.
7. “W rządzie – przypomnę, że są w nim pan premier Lepper i premier Giertych – na zasadzie symetrii znalazłem się ja.” – znając zdanie pana Kaczyńskiego o obu powyższych, uznaję, że bardzo surowo siebie ocenił. Słusznie, i surowo. “Skoro w tym rządzie są dwie katastrofy narodowe, to na zasadzie równowagi muszę i ja dołączyć”
8. “To musi być sukces odczuwalny przez miliony polskich rodzin, sukces, który będzie budował ich perspektywę i przyszłość” – “To musi być sukces, który jest pozytywny, sukces, który pcha nas do przodu. Sukces, który daje więcej zysku niż kosztów.” – jak już pisałem, służe durnymi, pustymi frazesami, jeśli pan prezes będzie chciał jeszcze kiedyś wystąpić.
9. Jak ogłosił z trybuny sejmowej, a ja to przeczytałem na info.onet.pl –  “nie może być to sukces ogłaszany w mediach, czy z trybuny sejmowej.” :> Będzie to tak zwany sukces cichy, nikt go nie zauważy i nie będzie się o nim mówić. Niewidzialny sukces.
10. Zdaniem szefa rządu, podstawami do sukcesu i “nowego początku” są: wzrost dochodu narodowego, wzrost eksportu, wzrost produkcji przemysłowej, spadek bezrobocia i mocna złotówka. – oraz “poprawa bezpieczeństwa, lepsza pogoda, bezpieczniejszy kraj, żeby ludziom żyło się dobrze, żeby nie było wojen, dobry system zdrowia, lepsze filmy w kinach, radość obywateli i ogólnonarodowe szczęście”. Gratuluję wnikliwej analizy i wstrząsających wniosków.
11. “Małżeństwo to związek mężczyzny i kobiety. Będziemy tego wszystkiego strzec. Nie damy sobie wmówić, że czarne jest białe” – a’ha! Wreszcie debata z argumentami! Nareszcie! Widać, że pan Kaczyński to poważny człowiek a nie zaślepiony, zakuty konserwatysta, który boi się dyskusji więc zatyka uszy i wrzeszczy “nie, bo nie!”.
12. “Będziemy czynić wszystko, by polska rodzina została obroniona wobec tego ataku, który są na nią prowadzone” – to niezbędne. Rodzina przetrwała tysiące lat, ale dziś, bez opiekuńczej ręki PiSu, rady sobie nie da.
13. Godzić w instytucję Kościoła to godzić w fundamenty polskiego życia narodowego – oświadczył Kaczyński, a następnie ugodził fundament –  “Kościół boryka się ze zły bagażem przeszłości”. Panie Kaczyński. Kościół boryka się nie tylko z przeszłością, kościół boryka się także  ze stanem współczesnym. Jest w nim nadal miejsce dla pedofili i gwałciciceli, nadal odmawia rozliczenia się z agentami w swoich szeregach, nadal odmawia dialogu ze współczesnością i nadal pozwala na sianie nienawiści przez Radio Maryja.
14. “Kościół jest depozytariuszem jedynego powszechnie znanego i na ogół deklaratywnie przestrzeganego systemu wartości” – to bzdura. Jest nim etyka, a nie kościól. Jeśli już naprawde trzeba coś religijnego, to jest nim wiara, a nie instytucja, która jest kościół. Ludzie, jeszcze, wierzą w Boga, a nie księży… Kościół to instytucja, która zajmuje się zarabianiem pieniędzy i polityką. Ludzie nie wierzą w instytucję.
15. “Polska jest pod tym względem państwem niemal jednolitym” – kolejna bzdura. Każdy sondaż wskazuje, że liczba zadeklarowanych katolików maleje z dnia na dzień (dzięki samej polityce wewnętrznej Kościoła). Nie jesteśmy państwem wyznaniowym ani monokulturowym. Czas się z tym pogodzić.
16. Za drugą – jeszcze groźniejszą – patologię uznał przestępczość i “pozostającą w jej centrum korupcję”. – a w samym centrum jest teraz chyba PiS i ludzie PiSu na wszystkich stanowiskach… tak surowa ocena samych siebie?

Mogę tak jeszcze długo, ale już się wyżyłem. Więcej bzdur, frazesów i pustych hasełek reklamowych tutaj.