Chris Blizzard Talks about the Future of Firefox

Mozilla evangelist and board member Chris Blizzard gave a presentation on the future of Firefox at the Southern California Linux Expo. He discussed Mozilla's long-term goals, demonstrated some of the impressive integration improvements that Firefox 3 will bring for Linux users, and also provided some insight into Mozilla's recent efforts to bring Firefox to the mobile market.

Much of the presentation focused on new technologies that are in Firefox 3, including improvements to the user interface, platform technologies, performance, resource usage, and operating system integration.

Mozilla's long-term goal, said Blizzard, is to "make sure the web remains a viable platform." He spoke about some of the emerging changes in the Internet ecosystem and expressed concern about new technologies like Microsoft Silverlight and Adobe AIR, which he describes as proprietary stacks that threaten to displace open standards.

Increasing Firefox's performance and reducing overhead are also very high priorities for Mozilla. Blizzard notes that the developers are making a "huge amount of progress" on memory improvements and says that there are over 300 such improvements in Firefox 3.

Firefox's mobile potential 

One of the most significant topics addressed during the presentation was Mozilla's plans for mobile technology. Mozilla intends to go beyond what Apple has already accomplished by leveraging Firefox's unique strengths, like highly flexible add-on support. The organization is also looking at ways to make the browsing experience take advantage of other mobile device capabilities, including support for GPS, cameras, and phone functionality.