In the midst of the winter snow, after safely coming out of Microsoft campus in Redmond this evening, it's great to be home and blogging. All the police at each intersection directing traffic and the cars piled up hills...not a pretty sight.
Many of the pending features in Firefox 3.0 have been well-documented and hyped: JavaScript 2, memory usage improvements, new rendering engine and the use of SQL Lite database.
One particular feature to potentially watch out for is the offline support for web apps. On Tuesday, Marc Benioff, CEO of Salesforce, unveiled what was known as "Salesforce.com 2.0". For the most part, it was an announcement about a Wealth Management Edition of its CRM.
However, it may not be surprising and could be interesting if Salesforce makes more announcements in the near future. In particular, it'd be interesting to see if they leverage and participate in Firefox 3.0's effort to push for offline support of web apps. Sure, there has been some talk about the integration of email services such as Gmail or Hotmail, but what would really be an eye-catcher would be something like a CRM.
As Microsoft is embracing/weathering the software as a service model, it banks on the fact that enterprises will not rely strictly on online models. However, if a move like the above were to occur, it would be Firefox and Salesforce's way of marrying both components. Also, the installation scheme would presumably be simpler than each specific software application.
In any case, until Firefox 3.0 announces integration and offline support with some killer online apps (besides email), it may not be as convincing and revolutionary. Ray Ozzie's claim is that SaaS orgs have always compromised functionality. "For example, users always have to be connected to the Internet to use a Web-based word processor". His approach, therefore, is "software-plus-service".
If prominent SaaS organizations can pull off such a feat with Firefox, they may be coming up with their own "software-plus-service". Obviously, it would still be a long road to convince the enterprise. And if it does happen, there would be some gray lines between the software licensing and software as a service models.
You can download the latest Firefox 3 Alpha at: http://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/mozilla.org/firefox/nightly/latest-trunk/