At the time Firefox was a breath of fresh air. It was just a browser without all the mail, IRC client, web page designer that came with Netscape. It was very fast. It had cool features like tabs. Linux was well supported.

Over time this has changed and I find Firefox getting slower and less relevant. The developers seem to be under the impression that Firefox users are their personal army to push web standards. I only used Firefox because it’s a tool not because of any social movement.

Things like how Firefox handles SSL, specifically self-signed certificates are a pain compared to other browsers. I hate it when my browser crashes and I lose all open tabs/windows. Things seem to get worse every new Firefox release.

In the past I didn’t have much of a choice, I had to put up with this as under Linux there wasn’t anything else available. That however has changed with Google Chrome. It’s much better than Firefox ever was and I’m now using it full time.

The GNOME developers have also dropped Firefox/Gecko and are moving to WebKit. This is the same engine Google Chrome uses as well. In the very near future, I except Firefox will no longer be the default browser in most Linux distributions.

On Windows, I also expect Firefox usage will drop. Microsoft has made Internet Explorer v8 much better and somewhere in Redmond they are working on v9, v10, etc. As people upgrade to Windows 7, willl they keep using Firefox? I suspect IE will start be “good enough” for most people.

On the Mac, most people are going to use the default and that is Safari.

When you look at the mobile scene it’s much the same. Microsoft is going to use IE in Windows Mobile devices. Google has another WebKit based browser for Android. Apple has Safari on the iPhone. Nokia will use WebKit as they now own QT.

Notice how the industry seems to be standardizing on WebKit? The odd man out there is Firefox. Who is going to use Fennec on their phone?

Another thing to consider is that the Mozilla Corporation gets most of their funding from Google. It’s not very hard to see that coming to an end too as Chrome becomes more important.

It says it will run on x86 and ARM chips. It will be based on Linux with a new windowing system. This is independent from Android although there could be overlap between them.

Not sure if I’d ever use it instead of Linux/GNOME but it’s worth checking out.

Might happen eventually but until there is a critical mass of iPhones that support OpenGL ES 2.0 it would be a mistake to cut off the rest of the user base right now.

I wonder when Google will update Android? They only support OpenGL ES 1.0 right now. Not sure what Microsoft has offhand, they keep rewriting the OS every version. Should make doing cross platform games more interesting or a bigger pain in the ass.

Sadly we still can’t publish any applications yet. No idea why companies in the USA, UK, France, Austria, Germany, Spain and Netherlands are so special. Maybe we’ll just have to create a US presence for the company and get around it that way.

Daniel Robbins was the original creator of Gentoo Linux. He did a good job too but some users were not happy and kept pushing him to manage the project more in the “community”. From there, you get the Gentoo council and lots of processes. Now things get masked longer, more software in overlays of varying quality, devs leave because of personality conflicts, and the distro seems a bit stagnant.

I was glad to see Daniel developing again. I emailed him to get more details about Funtoo. Depending on what their goals are, I might switch over.

That’s too bad, but since that’s the case, I’ve now switched to Tracker

I’ve been waiting for that for a while. I’ll have to try it out soon as I find that Epiphany/Gecko that I’m using now crashes a lot.

Not as functional as iPhone version yet, but we aren’t in a big rush given that we can’t sell it on the Android market.

Long term, we want to have all our apps on iPhone, Google and maybe Microsoft if they can figure out their app store.

I emailed Google about this and they told me that:

At this time, merchants with a U.S. or U.K. business address and bank account can use Google Checkout. Google Checkout merchants can ship goods inside and outside the United States and United Kingdom. We look forward to making the service more widely available in the near future, although we’re unable to comment on the timing of Google Checkout’s availability in specific countries.

Even though our company is legally able to do business in the US and UK, Google isn’t going to let us. I think that’s silly. Google needs to get going on this. We want to develop/sell applications on your platform, why not let us?

Apple has clearly got the edge here. They all everything ready to go with iTunes.

I think I need a drink. Think I’ll try this sangria recipe out.