Seeing as firefox regularly passes a couple of hundred megs of ram on my PC I don’t really trust the mozilla programmers to judge what is costly and what’s cheap.

Now if it can be done seamlessly. Sure, why not. If it means that when I open a new tab to go to a page I know I want to go to I still have to wait a few seconds for firefox to connect to del.icio.us just to give me useless information then no thanks. Let me have my blank page.

Also, while the rest of your suggestions are quite interesting they hit a flaw when being used around someone like me. I have incredibly varied and erratic web browsing patterns and so the probability that the browser can detect anything useful is quite low. This argument will also hold for early-on detection i.e. before the browser has had enough data to recognize anything.
One workaround is to set a threshold amount of data req to recognize patterns before which no suggestions will be displayed.

I like the idea of the browser auto-detecting addresses etc. but the issue here is that it may not always detect the address OR something that is not an address is detected as one.

if I type -> it searchs in the history
when ‘Enter’ pressed -> `search on the web`

so the first part is already in place, but most people don’t know this behavior.

the last ideas are really neat, why not make a user stack to accumulate (structured) data… so you can parse | send | use them to fill a form .. i don’t know.

( and in a few times we will rebrand the browser as fire-forth ^^ )

Chrome might be very good, but its the ideas the Mozilla team comes up with which make Firefox great.

‒ Near to zero configuration;

‒ The Browser is almost invisible, and doesn’t get on your way;

‒ You can do almost anything with the “Omnibar” (ex: “w pixies” takes you to the pixies page on wikipedia);

‒ The “contextual new tab actions”, as you mentioned.

Thanks for that info! Weave looks like a great idea too! w00t

I’m staying with Firefox!

You are Apple;

This means that if it were not enough of a conflict of interest (Iphone VS Google’s Android) to have Google CEO Eric Schmidt sit on your board - It is now. Look for Schmidt to resign sometime in the next six months.

If you are Microsoft;

This means that if you ever considered making Internet Explorer open source in the past, now is the time… You can not afford to wait, not even another minute. Expect Microsoft to make Vaporware like noise over the next few months about cloud widgets to give IE closer ties to cloud based initiatives.

If you are Yahoo;

you need to buy Mozilla.

If you are Firefox;

Keep your friends close, and your enemies closer…yes continue with your Google revenue deal, but learn how to monetize your Browser outside of a paid search deal. Leverage your large user base to form “spin-off” type “power of the crowd” businesses. Note to Firefox, hey you guys ARE a social network…you just haven’t figured that out yet.

If you are Sun;

Realize that Java is even less relevant every day. First we kicked you out of client side computing because you were a resource hog. Realize that Java will now continue to be less and less relevant on the Server. What a waste of a good company… McNealy must have got hit in the head with one to many hockey pucks.

If you are a social network;

“social networks” would follow along with users in the browser. Truth be told, we thought it would be Facebook, or even more likely Firefox that would lead in this initiative. So if you are a social network, you need to know now Chrome is the first step in a series of moves that will make it unnecessary for your peeeps to ever visit your site (directly) again.

If you are an application developer;

Life used to be simple, eh? You knew that you should be developing applications for Windows, because that is where the 100’s of millions of users were. Fast forward, and now you need to choose what platforms to support, and when. Of course it makes sense to develop for Windows still, but Apple now has a mass of millions of Mac OSx users, and if it a browser based app, write once for Safari, and it should work without much adaptation on the Iphone. There are over a billion cell phones in use world wide, however every phone requires writing to separately (yes even all those different flavors of Java are different phone to phone. Suddenly with Android coming, and a matching desktop browser you need to be here.

Lastly if you are a consumer;

There is always a bottleneck somewhere … Think back 5-10 years ago, before what we now refer to broadband… Dial up was painffulllllyy slow, and when you tried to browse, the bottleneck was in your “last mile” connectivity. Once you got broadband, the lag time in reaching a site was likely in your PC (not enough ram, slow processor, etc). Before either of those issues though it was the software that was not “smart” enough to keep up with the ever faster CPU’s being created.

Look for Chrome to optimize all these new “cloud” based application initiatives like Google Gears, etc. This is just another nail in the coffin for desktop based computing. In 10 years, likely 90%+ of your applications will reside somewhere outside of your home or workplace - but certainly not on your desktop.

http://www.twitter.com/A_F