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It seems to be a question which various blogs and article collation services were running on their front pages. But in reality it was a non-question. The question wasn’t about losing the deal, it was about whether Mozilla was able to convince Google of their importance in a post Internet Explorer 6 landscape.

Since the last deal was signed, Microsoft’s presence on the internet had majorly dwindled. They’re no longer the go-to company that they were, where a product by Microsoft meant seamless integration which it leveraged to give an impression of better build quality. The internet seemed to be word in the dictionary that no one at the corporation quite seemed to know what to do with. If remembered correctly they even dissolved the Internet Explorer team before attempting to finally bring it back and move people forward. All while doing this, they struggled to understand what was happening on the internet. Allowing the bad reputation of Hotmail’s spam and scam flaws to snowball. Now they are Bing, but they also appear to be forward thinking and that’s largely down to Windows Phone 7.

In the face of the decisions that Microsoft had been making, the Mozilla corporation got caught up in it’s celebrity and once that mirror finally cracked it found itself in a new world. No longer was it fighting against a company with a blatant disregard for the internet, it was fighting against while also fighting simultaneously alongside a company that made its bones off the internet.

Google and Mozilla have successfully come together to push forward and implement a lot of innovations that we today take for granted in our internet lives. That’s what good innovation is about, things that seemed like they should’ve always been like that and to be honest. The internet is a much better place for it.

But now Google is in a position where it’s dependency on Mozilla has been negated and it’s almost in a position of luxury with it’s support to Mozilla. If it’s a question of whether Google would like to have Bing as the default search engine on all of it’s browsers, then of course the answer is no. But does it need that answer to be no? Can it allow it? That’s the question that Mozilla have to ask. Of course given the structure of how things had broken down, Mozilla also had to worry about being low-balled by Miscrosoft should Google withdraw. Already being tight on resources, it really needs to grow it’s workforce rather than reduce it.

The ship that is Mozilla looks in terrible shape as things stand. While it was doing great things with it’s name alone, the overall management of the flagship product (Firefox) meant that bug-fixes were coming out and innovation in the browser was rather stagnant or long-winded. The place you can mostly see the demise of Mozilla is in the Evangelism Team and the presence it holds; once able to convince the mightiest of sites to standardise code, the team seems to now be MIA without even an intern checking the bug-tracker. So it’s no surprise that we’re seeing vast amounts of Web Apps pop up supporting only Chrome in the exact same manner the Web Applications once only supported Microsoft’s Internet Explorer 6.

And what of the resources that Mozilla does still retain? Well a lot of resources are entrenched in the various aspects of Mobile. While others appear to be bumbling around never quite achieving much in the open . Now that’s not to say that said developers aren’t achieving lots, but there’s less transparency in Mozilla of late and of course that’s down to where they presently find themselves in the grand scheme of things. Whether it’s another Mozilla move in homage of the way that Google handle things with Chrome or if it’s just regret and paranoia, it seems to be something that Mozilla are hoping no one seems to have noticed.

Time for Mozilla’s Firefox for Android is running out, the train is fast approaching beta and that’s where people put reviews in the Android market. As things currently stand, the present Nightlies aren’t even usable as a browser. Not that Mozilla acknowledges users would actually like to use it in that fashion. But it’s likely that, based on how the browser is working at present, they’re likely to get a real hammering from the average users who are expecting Firefox for Android to work. And of course there’s still the possible class action lawsuit for voluntarily handing over all their private data to Google without so much as a notification let alone a question of choice.

Mozilla should’ve spent it’s last eighteen months in talks with the likes of Samsung and Sony. The conversation should’ve been centred around providing the browser built in to televisions and Playstations. They should’ve also spent that time improving the clearly neglected and not-so-forward thinking platform so as that they could provide users with Thunderbird for Android. Those aren’t the greatest of feats on their own but they grow Mozilla’s usage and usage guarantees cheques. Another thing that seems to have fallen victim to Mozilla’s tunnel vision is Image Search, Google’s efforts in that area now have it as clear competitor to TinEye and it will come to the fore more and more; there was a separate cheque to be cut with that one.

Mozilla is apparently on a big recruitment drive at the moment, bringing back disgruntled ex-community members and contributors and saying “hey, you once cared, come back and make it better as a job”. Will it work? Who knows. But if it enables them to catch up to Google’s Chrome it could be a good thing for the internet as a whole and force Chrome not to follow the universally hated road that Microsoft done with Internet Explorer. Though of course the PR from Google would attempt to make them look innocent in that regard.

So this time round at least, it wasn’t about being in danger of losing the Google deal, it was just about making sure they had enough to move forward. But if they fail to use the money to drive the company forward, this will indeed be what marks the beginning of the end. Let’s hope that the personality of the user experience team comes to the fore also, because money being used correctly or not, if they can’t arrive at solutions other than what Google has arrived at, people will simply give up on Mozilla.

Reports are emerging that Kodak is about to file for Bankruptcy and to be honest, I don’t think anyone is surprised. See the issue with Kodak is that while it’s business was pictures, it’s done nothing but fail in terms of leading the foray into the future of photography.

Both Kodak and Polaroid should be in a two way battle with each other and that battle should be about digital photo filters and social photography. So the big question here is, why aren’t they? Why is it instead instagam that leads in this space? And why is it that even late to the party in such a field and in such a desperate position, why haven’t they bid on instagram?

At this point, it’s probably too late to simply rebrand instagram as Kodak and so there’s undoubtedly a limit as to what instagram can bring to Kodak. This is of course other than a lifeline. Kodak are no strangers of not seeing the bigger pictures. Despite being the first company to announce the invention of digital cameras they were one of the last major brands to get into the field and only underlined their mistake by later dominating said field.

It’s been speculated that the once iconic brand will in fact sell off all of it’s digital patents portfolio in a bid to stay a float. Which again would be a bad decision seeing as outside of a niche consumer audience, digital is the only viable business left. Rumours are floating around that Google is interested and this would indeed provide greater protection in the ongoing patent war they have with Apple.

But perhaps it simply is the end of an era for Kodak as we know it and perhaps it’s survival could actually be a means to an end. The company that would gain the most from acquiring a slight controlling share would be HTC. The business they done with Beats By Dre shows a bit of forethought. Despite growing popularity, they were becoming bogged down with audio criticism and so bought a chunk of one of the biggest names in audio today. They also have a problem with their cameras and this could be a much cheaper option than a deal with the likes of Canon or Nikon. After all, Samsung, Apple and even Nokia have been making good cameras for their phones for a while, a little help would go a long way.

No matter how I look at it, Kodak never managed to manoeuvre themselves into a position whereby they can grow in the mobile market and the hedged bets they made in regards to consumers all went horribly wrong. The issue is that one eye was always on sustaining the current business model and not enough was made on revolutionising the business.  It’s a shame, but sometimes the mighty must fall in order to remind those around them of what mistakes not to make.

In terms of mobile and Mozilla, we’re by and large talking about one of two things here. It comes pretty much down to the efforts directed at Android and the efforts directed at B2G.

Boot2Gecko

The Boot2Gecko efforts are the simplest to deal with, why because they’re over ambitious.  Booting to the web is something that so few consumers, in reality actually want. It’s a concept designed by geeks who see the Cloud as some form of utopia. Totally forgetting that it’s simply a rehash of the 80′s where network computers were connected to mainframes and it’s been given a new lick of paint. There’s a curiosity about things like booting to the web but that’s roughly where it stops. Google’s failure with ChromeOS is testament to that and Google better than anyone have the motive for ChromeOS to be successful but the traction just isn’t there.

See the problem with things like ChromeOS and B2G is that they’re just not tangible. The consumer likes to own things, likes to feel things. They like to feel as though they’re in possession of something. That’s why things like App Store’s for PC and Laptops have been so slow in their adoption. People wanted to the prestige of boxes. This is all supported by data that all the major browser makers should be able to get a hold of; how many users are installing web apps on their home screens? And let’s compare that to the same app installed via the various markets out there.

The very notion of ChromeOS and B2G catching on is a euphoric fantasia. The world has only just taken the step to smartphone after being invited so many times over and the world didn’t come to accept that invitation till it was ready, no amount of prodding or pulling managed to speed it up. Granted it only took for the right presentation of the right user experience but none the less, it was an incredibly slow painful process.

Here’s a simple question that should’ve been the basis of the whole rebuttal of the proposal for B2G. What incentives does such a proposal offer to anyone with a stake in this? To the networks, it would require a mass infrastructure in most places around the world. To the OEMs it offers what? It doesn’t allow them to try and lock users into their own brand of user experience nor does it wear and tear on the phone in the same way. Even for the developers of apps, how will they peddle their wares? No one is about to give up on revenue, thus B2G is simply a passion project. If Mozilla can’t out-market Chrome in their push for Firefox, how do they expect to out market what is now the biggest most used operating system in the world?

Users enjoy native apps. The apps are the definition of the era we’re in. To direct finite resources in anything to the contrary is a waste of said resources.  Yes, perhaps I was wrong when I stated previously that Mozilla should throw it’s weight behind MeeGo given it’s abandonment. But I’m sure there was another ship better suited for jumping on rather than building a new ship from scratch.

Native UI Firefox

The native UI is the third UI revamp of Fennec. The initial UI was based on Froyo. A thing of beauty, it was full of curves and looked slick. Then came the Gingerbread overhaul and let’s be frank, it was ugly and now we’re back to beautiful with the Native UI.

There’s been a lot of hype about this third incarnation and it’s strangely odd how much every time it’s mentioned as native, UI is neatly tacked on to the end despite it being more than just a UI overhaul.

In a perfect world, Firefox would be modular and developers could simply slap any UI they wanted over the top. So Java, XUL, C# or new emerging technologies. However that isn’t the case, perhaps that’s why it almost feels like Mozilla is waiting for Blackberry to die before rolling out it’s client. Remember those B2G resources? They’d be better spent making this a reality.

As a result of this incarnation of Fennec, some of the more stand out features of the past have been lost. Slide right for tabs being a prime example and slide left for navigation being another. Those were original and innovative, but that also means unique and different. So for every user that loved those features there’d be at least one that hated them.

The new UI has landed on the Nightly channel and it’s not really with much excitement. In fact it’s with disappointment. Despite the UI being snappy, it”s not really worth anything is pages are clipped. The pages are being served with odd dimensions and text boxes can’t be accessed. I get that this is a channel for alpha testing, but that’s it; The Nightly channel is for testing, not development. What happens if these bugs aren’t fixed in time for the Aurora merge? Does Mozilla back out the native UI? Does Nightly once again become a epileptic seizure risk depending on what sites you’re visiting with the XUL UI? Is the general non-responsiveness just accepted until said native bugs are fixed? How did this get approval for the tree?

There was actually talk about how to improve things with the XUL UI, which were missed due to the linear approach. i.e. the use of an omni.jar inside the APK which could shave off a little time off of startup. I’m curious as to what other Firefox 4 train start-up improvements never made it into the browsers mobile cousin. I’d definitely like to see them happen for Fennec, no matter which UI is preferred. Let’s see Fennec be all that it can be.

Once you start to look past the buzzword of ‘Native UI’, other issues start to arise. The AwesomeBar is no longer awesome. And now there’s no longer a Firefox on a smartphone, but rather Firefox is assimilated to become part of the smartphone; Things like bookmarks and browsing history, once something shared solely between the user and Mozilla are suddenly shared with Google too. Mozilla who once stood up proudly for internet freedom and privacy has suddenly kowtowed before Google and willingly handed over everything it can. It’s hard not to feel this was done in an underhanded fashion given that all attention has diverted elsewhere and with closer inspection, all Mobile decisions have gone private and behind close doors.

Google’s goal with Android was to create an ecosystem for locking people into their services. It’s about revenue. Whether this is about their search or their advertising. The current implementation of Native UI Fennec feeds into that, providing Google with more data about Firefox users than they’ve ever previously had access to. Why is Mozilla attempting to drive the Google business model and in such a nonchalant way? Were the alpha testers on the Nightly Channel informed of this? Asked if this was preferential before the change took place? No, but it was pushed through without regard of some of the core principles Mozilla has built it’s issue upon.

So now we’ve identified The Pledge being Fennec, The Turn being that Native UI Fennec will, based on current design, wisp away both privacy and freedom. I’m eager to see what The Prestige will be.

Thunderbird

We’re yet to see any traction with Thunderbird for Android, not even a mockup. Perhaps it’s unrealistic to expect anything prior to the roll-out of Native UI Fennec to the masses. But it’d be nice to know if this is something Mozilla want to pursue or not.

With Google Chrome doing so well, there’s a lot of eyes on it and the usage model it promotes. The problem with the Google approach to browsers is that it’s so comprehensively one-size-fits-all. One-size-fits-all works for some people but when a user is no longer of what one-size is and in fact Google starts slicing bits off of the whole a user is entitled to, a problem arises. For people that know no better, that’s fine, they don’t know that there’s more to internet browsing than the main window. To people who want the bare minimum again that’s fine, but it isn’t necessarily right.

Dietrich Ayala recently raised in a blog post a few ideas about Firefox and how to bring it forward in the current climate of this browser cold war. Dietrich has gone on to evolve his ideas for the modularisation and thus the progression of Firefox by suggesting that we bundle core features as add-ons.

While somewhat in agreement, I don’t believe it makes the change in as effective a way as possible. Recently I’ve talked about the level of frustration I’ve felt regarding the various sister and cousin projects that Firefox has and how I believe that more of the burden should be on the platform. Well that’s at least what I’ve been getting at and it’s basically what I’m attempting to further lobby for.

There are various aspects of the Mozilla family where to put it frankly, the approach is simply sloppy and inefficient. It can be improved and thus should be improved. Take Tabs for example, there were various changes made to tabs between Firefox 4 and Firefox 10, there was an even bigger change made between Firefox 3 and Firefox 4. The changes made should automatically be carried over to Thunderbird and yet they’re not. Why? Because the design doesn’t allow for streamlined changes like that. The Tabs API should firmly be in the platform and thus such changes should be reflected in the children unless desired not to.

Again with for example the Firefox button, it should be as simple as deciding the populous and hey-presto you have it in the development channel of both Firefox and Thunderbird. By decreasing the dependencies between parts at the bottom, you create a greater ecosystem for the applications at the top. You’re also able to pool your resources more effectively allowing for more workers at the bottom and greater precision at the top.

The idea itself extends beyond that. You can think to include the RSS reader. Google has decided to leave it out of their browser. This isn’t a matter of simple numbers, as they run Google Reader, the advertising revenue there is enough to warrant being browser free. However I’ve been informed that even then, the number of users that use the Google Reader service pales in comparison to the number of users of their browser. Mozilla are also of the opinion that the RSS reader isn’t an aspect of their browser that warrants enough resources to make it ground-breaking. Now that in itself is a disappointment, especially when you consider extensions like Brief are exactly what users should be presented with. It’s easier to read and the learning curve is considerably lessened. That said, resources are finite. But ultimately an RSS reader is something that’s in that grey area between browser and Email client. So between the two, the collective requirement of a good reader aspect should be sufficient to not only create something like Brief but improve upon it.

Firefox has for as long as I can remember featured the ‘Send Link’ feature. Now personally, I can’t remember the last time I shared a page via email. I’ve sent pages via Instant Messenger, via Social Media and via Text Message, but via Email? No. When it was suggested that Firefox add a feature to enable social sharing of page, the masses cried bloat. I cried in gratitude, the masses won out, I stuck with the prototype extension. But this is something that should’ve been done on the platform, thus servicing sharing on whichever app in whichever manner the application required. This could’ve also lead to allowing users to customise their application and thus have their personal sharing needs. Again with the ‘Save Page As…’ feature, the rarity of users wanting to actually download whole page is so low a number that it may be impossible to see without aide. Instead the feature should by default to save as a PDF and the option entitled Download or Save Copy. And at installation a user can select whether to save pages as PDFs or HTML files with folders. I know that it’s far more likely to want an email saved as a PDF than it is a HTML file with folders in tow and let’s not forget that Mobile defaults to the option of PDF.

These are but a few examples of how the platform stepping up, decreasing it’s dependencies and becoming 100% API reliant can foster the applications and enable innovation rather than what feels like struggling to simply staying afloat. If it’s a question of is it time, the answer is a resounding yet. For the greater good, it really is. But will it happen? I fear not.

I’ve just read on planet.mozilla.org that Alex Faaborg is leaving Mozilla. It’s a sad day for Mozilla and Firefox. His contributions over the years have been immense and in my time as a contributor I’ve only ever had my respect and admiration for the UX team grow. I’ve been accused of criticising the team but that isn’t the case for me all, for me I merely comment with passion for the project of which the UX team has fostered. If not for that team, I wouldn’t have built the confidence and will to get involved. We’ve all lost a huge part of what makes Mozilla such an amazing product. I have no doubt that Alex Faaborg will go on to be even more successful in his new field. I only hope that we can live as a product can live up to the standards he’s set. I’m truly grateful to be a product of some of his immense design work. Good luck to him.

This is a question of brand identity and UX Design. Mozilla has recently (relatively speaking) invested heavily in UX. To the point that it actually managed to snag an employee or two from Google.  So now that they have teams of people behind user experience, the user is set to be empowered.

As with any UX changes, the push for change is often met with hardship. You only need to look at the furore that happens every time Facebook so much as tweaks a design let alone changing it.

Mozilla has enough man power in tow regarding UX now, that there are different teams and it’s two of those teams that I focus on here. Desktop and Mobile. The two teams have undoubtedly taken different approaches to their vision of what Firefox is and this has been enabled by Mozilla by failing to establish brand identity. Something which I previously spoke about.

You would think that natural evolution would see one team assimilate another and be reborn something like a Venn diagram. However it would appear that Microsoft may be to blame for this natural evolution failing to take place. Thanks to a rule of native code only and then banning the GPL license from their Market Place (App Store).

This has meant that the User Experience, while designed well, is designed differently from Desktop to Mobile. While the bulk of features trickle from Desktop to Mobile and thus Mobile team is often inspired by Desktop. It doesn’t mean that there’s UX consistency. This varies from small things like using different shades of colours for security level indication depending on platform, it also extends to bigger things like the lack of key-hole on Mobile.

Sadly though, not just for the end user of Firefox, but also other Mozilla product users, like that of Thunderbird and also Mozilla as a whole. It’s only delaying the inevitable. Touch screen workstations are quickly become a reality. Whether laptops at home or work, you’re likely to own or at least be using one regularly in as little as five years by my estimates. And Mozilla will be forced to be ahead of the crowd on that one thus time runs short. It’s at that point that Mozilla will be forced to look at making their design consistent across touch experiences and that will spread further. Brand identity consistency will stretch first across Firefox and then across Mozilla.

When it happens it will be a good thing for everyone. It means that teams will be shuffled and people good at designing on a massive scale will do while people that are better with intricacies will concentrate on those while people be overseeing coordinating and keeping consistent. Hopefully it will promote the switch to being completely API dependent, but that’s another subject. But when it happens, we’ll all benefit from a better User Experience across the board.

Thunderbird was supposed to be to email what Firefox was to web-pages, but isn’t that in itself flawed? I mean if we’re thinking about yesteryear when all the average consumer had to choose from was different flavours of Outlook, it was even a stretch back then. In terms of email what is there to open? What is there to educate? People weren’t looking for alternatives to Outlook because it was bad. There were improvements to make, but not on the level that IE6 had to make changes to stop holding the internet back. And it’s for that very reason that the adoption rate for Outlook was so overwhelming.

If you fast-forward to now, you’re wondering even more about what is the point of Thunderbird, it’s been killed off and resurrected by Mozilla, pushed around between parent departments like an unwanted baby on a Friday night, and even then it’s simply flagging.

From what I can see, the issue with Thunderbird is that it’s a relative of Firefox more like a cousin than a sister application. This can be seen in things like the approach to the UX, rather than Mozilla saying as a company that they want their products to follow this train of thought or what-not, Thunderbird has it’s own design team which at my last checking haven’t ported over specific design features from Firefox. Namely Tabs in Titlebar, Application Button and tab design that define what the Mozilla experience is.

There are some flaws in the whole Mozilla approach to their products, it’s that the environment is so product orientated rather than platform orientated and if you’ve read back through some of your posts, I’m a big fan of the platform. Even more so in the potential of the platform. However, unless Mozilla make a prioritised move to supporting the products solely through the platform, it could cause it’s own self collapse and Thunderbird is testament to this.

Looking at Firefox for example as a whole (including both desktop and mobile), there’s a lot of duplicated code, two ways of achieving the same thing, where as Mozilla should be creating a single API that can do both depending on the interface. This is the sole reason that it’s taken so long to port Thunderbird to Android which is in fact likely to be a driving force of Mozilla when it comes to fruition.

Android lacks sufficient email clients. The default email client is literally substandard and poor. Even Google seem to be at odds as to understand what a touch-based smartphone email client should be like, you only need to look at GMail for Android to understand that. But where is Thunderbird for Android to fill this gap? We know that users like consistency, if a user uses Firefox at work, they’re likely to use Firefox at home if they’re yet to set an allegiance. Failure to convert the Thunderbird product to a platform and re-release as a killer App will see the death of it. Which Firefox following slowly but surely after. Firefox will encounter problems that could’ve been avoided when they move to a native UI for Android, but still there will be underlying problems. If someone at Mozilla is thinking along my lines, Firefox could be in problems, as the Thunderbird release for Android could shift the focus from Firefox to Thunderbird as the flagship product.

There’s been a bit of a furore in the world of Social Network Aggregators of late and it’s all down to what’s considered the second biggest Social Network on the planet. Earlier this year, Twitter and UberMedia went head-to-head in a bidding war for Tweetdeck in which Twitter eventually emerged victorious. There were an incredible amount of questions regarding the purchase and the answers to which are finally starting to appear.

There was hope that the purchase would empower TweetDeck, no I lie, that it would super-power TweetDeck with resources that TweetDeck had lacked. TweetDeck for a while had been under pressure to add support for more social networks, namely Tumblr and with the growing buzz around Google+, users were hoping for the best.

However since the purchase of TweetDeck by Twitter, we’ve in fact seen the opposite with Twitter releasing a statement stating they’d attempt to bring TweekDeck more in line with their current products. The first change of which has lead to the removal of features and the first of which to get the chopping block was deck.ly a service that would allow for extended tweets. It’s hard to imagine how Twitter envision the product. I mean if they want to put their mark all over it, what can users expect from the way that Twitter would do Facebook?

TweetDeck has or at least had the biggest market share in terms of clients that use Twitter and given Twitter’s previous announcement that they wanted to move away from having third party clients making software in favour of their own flavour of how Twitter should be interacted with, it’s simply looking like Twitter have gone about killing the share the third party client has in the most expensive way. Sadly for Twitter the sheer arogance and ignorance they’ve shown won’t empower the service but will rather malign it. The question is a simple one and the answer even simpler. People use the other clients because they’re simply more in tune with what they want from a client. Twitter’s vision isn’t right for everyone and they choice of client and thus experience is what made it so appealing compared to the likes of the competition which often didn’t provide alternative experiences. This is echoed through the story of Tumblr that has a high turnover rate of users due to the fact that there’s a lack of choice in the way consumers interact with the product.

Tweetdeck fans all had their ideas on what would improve the client, ranging from features implemented in a fuller fashion to new features added all together. My personal top of the list was push notifications for the mobile client. When using my phone, I’m more likely to reply via the official Twitter app due to the notification and the notification alone. The Tweetdeck model meant continuously polling the twitter API which ultimately meant a very dead battery. People want instantaneous interaction where possible and that was never a choice with Tweetdeck unless your phone lived on it’s charger.

For a long time now I’ve thought about alternatives. The obvious and most glaring choice has to be Seesmic, it like TweetDeck has both desktop and mobile clients and that’s important for this generation where synchronisation is quickly becoming the barometer for what’s considered good modern software. However, the choice of platform for the desktop version is where Seesmic falls down having opted for Microsoft’s Silverlight. Now I hear people saying that they offered a web version and indeed, as do Tweetdeck. However there’s something about Social Aggregation session that I want separate from my browser. It’s an entity on it’s own. Sometimes I’m happy to have the two running side by side, but in most cases, I’ll be on a webpage and I’ll want to flick away and to my session checking out TweetDeck. Sometimes I’ll want to kill TweetDeck due to it locking up my system somewhat and sometimes, I’ll simply want to watch a movie and still use TweetDeck. All in all, TweetDeck isn’t a part of my browsing, it’s a process alongside it. Which may sound odd as I often use my browser to compile documents on Zoho Docs or of course log in to WordPress to compile a post like this one here. But perhaps that’s because I view Social Aggregation as a distraction and the browser as the focus to my sessions on the computer.

So given all of that, why is it that I’d advocate the Mozilla Platform as the perfect platform to launch a competitor off of? Well aside from being Android-ready, Mac OSX-ready, Windows XP/Vista/7 -ready, what else is there? Forgetting the flexibility and the ability to support extensions pretty much out of the box meaning that any competitor would put services in the driving seat allowing them to add their services in a manner they want while allowing the users a choice of official plugin or user plugin. I think the argument speaks for itself. Tweetdeck as it currently suggests is heading for dark days, at present it doesn’t even provide inline photo previews for the hugely popular Twitter-image site Lockerz let alone the hugely popular social network Tumblr. I wouldn’t bet on it’s future, but alas, there’s no real alternative that betters it.

Some of the biggest news in tech for a little while has to be Google’s acquisition of Motorola. It was a piece of news that came completely and utterly out of the blue. With the way that Microsoft and Apple had been trolling the various Android manufacturers, tension had begun to grow around the Android ecosystem and questions about the sustainability and longevity of it’s life were being asked. Google released a statement that basically told everyone watching to remain calm and that Android would be fine. Obviously knowing that such a masterful roll of the dice was poised, it was indeed a statement that held a lot of weight and a lot of developers, manufacturers and fans are all breathing a sigh of relief.

The intentions behind the acquisition are still murky and perhaps that adds to the strength of the position that Google now find themselves in. It goes without saying that the strength of Android is the sheer diversity of the experience, I’m not just talking about the various flavour of ROMs but the fact that it’s managed to unite various fans of various manufacturers behind a single operating system. But if Google were to start making handsets, surely they’d alienate the strength that is Android, i.e. the myriad of devices. Do they really wanna do that? As such, you have to question whether or not it’s worth the risk? The question here, it what happens to the manufacturing business. I believe it’d be silly not to sell it off, the value of Motorola was the patents and the phone business which has seen shakier times of late can be sold off in parts minus the patent to the various manufacturers that have committed to Android.

Google took their sweet time creating this new found Android strength and that’s not necessarily a bad thing, alas it’s better late than never. It’s a mistake that they’ve worked to rectify. The same can’t be said for their biggest and most glaring mistake which has essentially been the decable of Android 3.x (Honeycomb). It’s pulled into question Google’s commitment to open. For the reality is that Android was adopted, especially by early-adopters as a feasible alternative to a modern smartphone operating system (Apple’s iOS) and in failing to follow through on promises of openness, there’s some real concerns growing about Google’s commitment to openness. At the point of writing this article for example, it’s still impossible to find a link to the source-code of Honeycomb.

Sadly there’s not much out there in terms of alternatives. Samsung has Bada on offer, which is for all intents and purposes a solid operating system. However, it is sadly a ways behind Android in all aspects including the all important one of Apps. Something which Blackberry still seem to have their head buried in the sand over despite being forced to lay off employees as a result. The keyword here is adoption and both Blackberry and Bada fall short of the mark. Whether they like it or not, users conversations about phones often revolve around what Apps are available and being the only platform without say Angry Birds for example only alienates current users and does nothing to attract new ones.

The great-white hope is undoubtedly MeeGo, however with Nokia’s abandonment, is there really much hope? There were rumours of both Sharp and LG releasing a MeeGo phone each. And Nokia, though they pretend otherwise have received nothing but high-praise for their MeeGo phone. However, the deal signed with Microsoft and overseen by their current Microsoft-minded and ex-Microsoft employee of a CEO, means that MeeGo was never gonna get a fair shot by Nokia. That said, MeeGo remains in there with a fair chance, they just have to go about it in the right way, if they can’t get manufacturers to adopt and commit to a line of MeeGo handsets, why not do what Linux does, go the slow but long route? Why not force adoption by the manufacturers after the fact? I’m always surprised when I’m at a party and I see someone pull out their phone only to notice it’s running a non-standard ROM like CyanogenMod or Android Revolution HD or MIUI. Right now, MeeGo doesn’t have the drivers to run on all the phones that those ROMs do, not officially at least, but how about less officially? ‘homemade’ releases running drivers borrowed from Android? Could that work? After all, the more demand for these things could push the manufacturers to look into making this experience available via official means.

Even Mozilla has chimed in on the operating system front, wanting to take on Android in what can only be described as in a ChromeOS flavour. This of course has raised quite a few eyebrows as ChromeOS is struggling to prove both it’s relevance and demand. The sad reality is that while there is enormous potential for Web Apps, that potential has not even begun to be realised. Mozilla’s flavour has been at least tentatively dubbed Boot 2 Gecko (B2G) and was met by community insiders with a diverse range of reaction. Some excited for the vision and cause, but many others sceptical. Some like myself believe that the resources going into B2G would be better spent elsewhere within the development sphere and were promptly reminded that not everyone works on everything. However with Firefox 8 recently signed off with Tab Groups (Panorama) in a still incomplete state along App Tabs and the Open Web Apps Labs Experiments seemingly fallen by the wayside, why would you spend man hours on a project like this when the Flagship products implementation of Web Apps currently feels so half-arsed?

Rumours are going around that before the end of the year, we’ll get to see Ice Cream Sandwich (Android 4.x) from Google. The aim of Ice Cream Sandwich is to unify the experience between smartphone and tablet. As such, you have to wonder if we’ll actually be allowed to get our hands on the source code for this one. Or whether or not the source code for Honeycomb will ever surface. Apple too has gone to work on unifying the experience between their various platforms. Their latest incarnation of OSX borrows heavily from the iPhone/iPod/iPad experience and we’re lead to believe that the next incarnation will further unify the experience. Microsoft seem to have made the single experience a real priority with Windows 8. They’ve taken the good work started with Windows 7 and given it a Windows 7 jacket. What was once a mouse-orientated experience seems to be firmly committing to touch. And to be honest, what I’ve seen of this thus far, it seems to be work getting excited about.

So I ask again, why with all that’s happening in the world of Operating Systems, if Mozilla trying to get involved now? Some of my disappointment at least stems from the fact that I believe Mozilla should be chucking their weight behind the truly open MeeGo rather than the superficially Android. MeeGo had a healthy patent folio behind it in the form of it’s founding partners Nokia, Intel, AMD and Novell. And all it’s a fantastically polished OS to boot. All it needs is the Apps and the handsets. It’s already been designed to run on Tablets as well as Netbooks too. It’s everything that Mozilla’s B2G could hope to achieve in the next five years. However, it’s not web based and perhaps that’s where the problem lies. But I believe, the days of consumers mass adopting web based Apps are a long way off. Even on an Island as small as Britain, we don’t have 100% coverage and the percentage of coverage significantly drops if we’re limiting that to 3G. MeeGo is the hope for the future and Mozilla needs to get it’s house in order before thinning it’s resources in such a way. Android is a good start, but I believe we can be more open than that. At least I can hope.