First of all, don’t get me wrong: Mozilla has been doing a fantastic job in the past few years. They managed to push an open source project (Firefox) to the masses in proportions like no other before. Yet, I personaly believe that they could have done much better on the following points.
- Bet on XulRunner: their framework is solid and mature. It probably requires a bit of syntactic sugar in some areas like XPCOM, but as a whole it is a very good one. We have seen some nice spin-offs recently such as SongBird and Miro. Yet, the Mozilla Foundation is reluctant to market XulRunner. The result is that the Mozilla platform is still a niche and few developers have the knowledge to build more than Firefox extensions. With the rise of RIA platforms such as Apollo, JavaFX or Silver, I am very pesimistic on the chances for Mozilla here… What a pitty, their platform had so much potential!
- Avoid the bloat in Gecko and Firefox: the facts are here, performance-wise things could get much better. Especially, the way Gecko handles memory is clearly not efficient as it leaks quite a bunch of memory. It also looks like Gecko is a complex piece of code. The recent rise of WebKit should be a warning: it does not have to be that complex! I predict that we will see an increasing range of browsers, applications and devices that use WebKit and not Gecko. Also, Opera has been much lighter for many years, still having lots of nice features…
- Invest more on Thunderbird: the issue is being much debated these days, so I won’t jump into it. Although Thunderbird fits my needs very well, more resources (including marketing) have to go into it.
- Market the Mozilla Public License: this license is simply excellent as a middle-ground between liberal (BSD, MIT, …) and restrictive licenses (GPL). Many people and organizations fit more into this type of license, yet Mozilla is apparently not going to push it anytime soon dispite the clear potential benefits. I suggest that they make a new version of the MPL that would be less Mozilla-specific so that other projects could reuse it instead of making derivatives (e.g., the CDDL from Sun). That is exactly what Apache did with the version 2 of their license, and many ASL-licensed projects have fostered since then.
- Integrate better their applications on MacOS X: I am aware that work is under way here, but having form buttons in web pages that look like on Windows 95, or having Firefox not picking up the system proxy settings is not nice (Camino does pick it up right BTW).
All very good points. I had no idea gecko was so leaky! Mozilla’s XUL could have been great as a RIA platform, esp when XML was in it’s heyday!