Firefox the new Emacs?
I was just talking to a couple of guys in my Internet Systems Research class who are probably going to be writing a Firefox plugin as part of their research project. We joked that Firefox could soon become a platform for everything. Then I realized that that’s not a joke. That’s probably what Google is is doing.
So, will Firefox become the new Emacs? For those who don’t know, Emacs is an old UNIX text editor that is still very popular. The main reason for its popularity is that it really serves as a platform for all sort of other applications. In Emacs you can browse the web, read your email, read news, play games, manage your address book, work with a version control system, write a weblog, and chat with other people.
Now, I’m not saying that any of these functions will get folded into Firefox (or even have plugins written for them), but I’m just saying that given a useful, flexible platform, people will build upon it and they’ll build things that no one would expect them to build.
And why would Google want this? Because it provides a portable platform for innovation free of the Redmond Giant. Google can’t let the platform be controlled by someone else.
