Mozilla's Vision of an 'Internet Life' Platform

An anonymous reader writes "Mozilla chairperson Mitchell Baker has been saying the company may be changing and thinking beyond Firefox in the future. Her ideas have become clearer: she is formulating an 'Internet Life' platform (not based on Gecko) that would enable users to manage their identity on web. Mozilla believes this could be a way for the company reach new users. She wrote, 'Windows is a locked down operating system compared to Linux. One is proprietary, one is free software. In the early days some Mozilla contributors urged that we should care only about Linux. They felt our mission would be better served by limiting our offering to platforms that align well with the Mozilla mission. We choose a different path. We chose to take our values to where people live. People were living on Windows, so we went there. We made it easy for people to switch from Windows to Linux by providing key functionality across platforms. If we hadn’t, the web would be a very sorry place today. We should bring Mozilla values to where people are living today. We should do so at multiple layers of Internet life.'"

Mozilla has lost its way

[Anonymous Coward]

All we want is a great browser! They've lost the ability to do that much.

Re:Mozilla has lost its way

[MightyMartian]

It really is beginning to look like the same mad road Netscape went down, chasing ghosts into irrelevancy.

Fuck sakes...

[Anrego]

Am I the only one who just wants a damn browser! I'm not even that old and yet every time firefox (or anyone) releases a new browser my first thought is "oh great, what new age approach are they going with this time".

Is it so much to want:
- My browser to look like every other application on my computer. Title bar where it's supposed to be.. toolbar that functions normally.. etc
- A URL bar where you enter.. a URL
- An area where the website is displayed

Extra features are nice (I have a fair number of extensions installed), as long as they don't hinder this basic functionality. I don't need a "paradigm shift" here. I use my web browser a lot, but it's not the central focus of my computer. More to the point, I like the way I browse the web.. stop trying to change it!

Re:Fuck sakes...

[GrumblyStuff]

I agree completely. I'm sick of having to choose between updating for security reasons and not updating so my UI doesn't get all tossed around.

They should just start it as a new project rather than crumming up Firefox even more. (Remember Firefox was suppose to be like Mozilla-lite, lean and fast?)

Re:Mozilla has lost its way

[Lunix Nutcase]

They seem to have chrome and android envy

I don't blame them too much when Chrome is eating market share both from IE and Firefox. The problem is that Firefox's response is to copy Chrome. But why would I want to run a poor copy when I can just run the original?

Re:Fuck sakes...

[pseudonomous]

Despite massive code-churn, chrome's UI has been pretty much static, at least for as long as it's had a Linux port. I think they're on to something. Once people get used to using the browser (or any program, for that matter), they don't want to relearn the interface after every update, they just want the damn thing to work.