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Firefox's Birthday, and Mozilla's Opportunity

Dana Blankenhorn on ZDNet asks an interesting question today: "Where Should Mozilla Go From Here?" It's hard to believe that the company's Firefox browser turns only five years old today. Stephen Shankland also weighs in on where Mozilla and Firefox should head next. I'm in favor of Mozilla becoming a more independent company, so that it can push its own initiatives in flexible ways, and I also think it has a huge opportunity in the mobile browsing space.

Mozilla and Firefox are entrenched now, and despite the fact that Mozilla still gets the bulk of its revenues from Google--to the tune of tens of millions of dollars a year--Mozilla folks make their own decisions and should do more of that in the future. I have no doubt that Firefox will become the world's most popular browser, primarily becasue of the very healthy ecosystem of plug-ins available for it.

In mobile browsing, though, Mozilla has a really special opportunity. Let's face it, mobile browsing on smartphone displays is a pretty awful experience. What's needed are new interface metaphors, and Mozilla has some really innovative ones in its Fennec mobile browser.

Until now, though, Fennec has been used mostly on isolated software platforms and not available in wide release. I'm hoping that one of Mozilla's key initiatives going forward will be widening the scope and functionality of Fennec, making it the mobile browser that we all want. It's slated to inherit many Firefox extensions, too, which could make it even more useful. Kudos to Mozilla for another promising browser project.

• firefox
• mozilla
• browsers
• Fennec

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