As the Internet becomes ever more ingrained into everyday life, competition between companies offering a window into the World Wide Web looks set to grow more ferocious than ever. Mozilla Firefox once looked like the browser to beat, but in recent years it has lost considerable ground to Google Chrome.
Now, Mozilla has circulated an email to developers laying out the three ways the company plans to restore Firefox’s popularity. The first centers around incomplete functionality in the application — any feature that doesn’t work as intended at present will either be completed, or abandoned and removed altogether.
The second is being referred to as “Best of the Web,” and represents a renewed focus on working with the Firefox community and other third parties. A partnership with Telefonica is a major element of this effort, according to a report from Ars Technica.
The final tenet of Mozilla’s three-pillar plan will focus on what brought users to Firefox in the first place. An overhaul of the program’s private browsing functionality will be the first manifestation of this research, and should be distributed via an update sooner rather than later, according to Director of Engineering Dave Camp.
It’s also been announced that Firefox will soon phase out its usage of XUL and XBL, although it’s not clear what they will be replaced with. HTML5 would seem like the most appropriate choice given the current state of the Web, but no official word has been given thus far.
These changes certainly seem like a step in the right direction, but it remains to be seen just how much can be done for Firefox. The browser wars continue to rage, and it’s very difficult for a program to restore its former glory, even with the best intentions — for evidence of that, just look at the lengths Microsoft has gone to distance Edge from the much-maligned Internet Explorer.
