Operations

Firefox is by far one of the best browsers available but for many people it's still a hard browser to accept. After reading through several editorials on the pluses and minuses of both Firefox and Internet Explorer 7 all I can say is that Firefox needs a lot of work. There are a lot of extensions that people have made for Firefox that fix about every complaint I have, except one. That one problem would be that Firefox doesn't install onto my computer this way. Sure it's up to every user to figure out how they want their browser but I think we need to move beyond that thinking. It's time for Firefox to evolve beyond the old thinking of how a browser should be.

There is a delicate matter of when to integrate a feature and when to leave things up to third-party extension developers. Apple is the perfect example of a company that screws over innovative third-party developers by ripping off their ideas, for example [http://www.macobserver.com/article/2002/07/29.7.shtml Watson and Sherlock]. I do not support this one-way exchange of ideas and innovation. I instead advise the careful consideration of the perceived problems listed below. If a feature can increase user adoption of Firefox as a default browser then it should be strongly considered for integration. Then if and when possible the original developers of the integrated features should be given credit. The way the [http://www.mozilla.com/en-US/add-ons/campus/ Firefox Campus Edition] was developed is something I've considered very commendable. The bundling of extensions with the browser in that case seemed appropriate. However for the general public, it may be more appropriate to tightly integrate fixes to the problems listed below into the actual core Firefox framework.