The more we work with Firefox, the more we begin to wonder when it stops being just a browser and becomes some sort of Swiss Army knife of applications. We spend a inordinate amount of time on in Firefox. Now we are browse-philes, we love many browsers and have written about some of them on this blog, however, we spend most of our time in Firefox. For instance, we are writing this post in Scribefire – a Firefox plug-in. Our bookmarks were in Firefox before (GMarks) before we migrated them to a WordPress blog (which we recommend by the way and will describe further in a future post). Every year, new plug-ins come out for Firefox, that make it more functional and increasingly make Firefox our goto application for much more than web browsing. We certainly never thought Firefox would become this when we began using it as an alternative to Internet Explorer (who remembers that application anymore, of course companies are the last to figure out that IE has been dead to computer people for some time.)
So, forecasting that Firefox will continue to grow in functionality, we thought we would do a little searching to see what is written on this topic. We found an interesting article..
http://news.cnet.com/firefox-4-will-push-out-the-edges-of-the-browser/
It turns out that Mozilla has very big plans for Firefox in the direction of making it a platform for apps. (for those that may not realize it, this does even more to reduce the Windows monopoly, as apps with both increasingly be run from the server side, or from within the browser. Bad news Microsoft, browsers are platform independent)
Prism: Focused on turning Firefox into a hosting application for other apps (think plug-ins on steroids)
Weave: Persisting more of your data to a secure location, allowing you to have more of a portable computer system
Firefox 4 seems to be the when a number of these things will come together. Could be some time as the present version is 3.06.
