Tuesday, February 5th, 2008
Random thoughts from a Firefox
Robert O’Callahan has a nice recap of BaaCamp down under.
Robert talks about various talks that he went too, for example on AIR which touted:
features that can and should be provided by browsers too, possibly via extensions like Gears for the laggards, ideally via standard APIs like HTML5.
Robert feels like there is still a bit difference between the browser and Flash:
There are few philosophical differences between AIR and the browser. The biggest one is that AIR doesn’t sandbox apps, so users have to make a trust decision to use an AIR app. I don’t know how high a barrier that is to AIR app adoption; I hope it’s a high one, because users should be reluctant to let applications abuse them! Another, related difference is that AIR lets apps escape browser chrome such as the forward/back buttons and the address bar. I can see that app designers would love that — yay for integrity of artistic vision! — but I’m not sure users would. Browser navigation (back, forward, bookmarks, addresses and autocomplete) is a powerful mental model that is not only deeply entrenched but is actually very useful.
He then goes into detail on the IE 8 features, and finishes up on bug hunting with Firefox 3. I have been using that on the Mac, along with Webkit, and I am impressed. It is fast, and doesn’t churn the memory as much. I couldn’t use Firefox 2 anymore!
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