Recommended: “From Browser to Platform: Mozilla Rises”

Nigel McFarlane discusses why Mozilla may become the application platform of the future.

It makes perfect sense in many ways. Mozilla supports a range of operating systems. It’s also designed to operate fairly consistently across different OS. The same Mozilla plug-in can be used on Linux, Windows or Mac versions of the browser.

Sure, Microsoft has HTML Applications. But they require you to run a system that supports Internet Explorer. That pretty much limits you to Windows, and older Macintosh systems.

With Mozilla, on the other hand, companies could create applications and services that could be used by employees on various operating systems across the company. And they would likely need to build it once.

Think, for example, of a searchable employee handbook with a toolbar for commonly visited documents. (For an example of how such a document might work, take a look at the CSS2 Specification using Mozilla with the site navigation bar enabled [View → Show / Hide → Site Navigation Bar].) Moving their browser-based internal applications to Mozilla could then give IT departments more flexibility in which operating systems they invest.