Firefox 4 Will Push Edges of Browser Definition
Found on Slashdot on Friday, 28 March 2008
Mozilla Lab's push is to blur the edges of the browser, to make it both more tightly integrated with the computer it's running on, and also more hooked into Web services.
Early examples of this intelligence include the "awesome bar," which is what Mozilla calls the new smart address bar in Firefox 3. It offers users smart URL suggestions as they type based on Web searches and their prior Web browsing history. He's looking to extend on this with a "linguistic user interface" that lets users type plain English commands into the browser bar.
Wait, I vaguely remember a giant lawsuit against MS for having integreated IE tighly into the operating system. Now FF plans to do the same, and everybody is expected to rejoice, because it's FF. Honestly, I don't want want any software to integrate itself into my OS; I want stand-alone applications which leave nothing on your machine once you delete the folder you extracted them to. As said before, Mozilla is doing exactly what others did: bloat up the software, what results in more bugs and less performance. Instead, they should remove everything besides HTML/CSS rendering from FF. You want extras like bookmarks, javascript, preloading and some weird "awesome bar"? That's why there is plugin support. Well, FF4 is even off my "things to test" list now.