New Year, New Firefox Version

So, it's a New Year. Cool. What am I looking forward to in the next year? What new Geekdom goodness am I drooling over? Lots of interesting movies, TV shows, and music to think about. Plenty of new techie things being announced that are pretty exciting. Some may happen, some sound like corporate hype (the hack-proof Vista, anyone?). The one that I think will definitely happen, and will probably live up to it's hype, is the new version of Firefox scheduled for this year.

Well, Mozilla says that Firefox won't be released officially until the end of 2007, but I am still looking forward to it. The Alpha version was released in early December. The people that are developing it "hope that it will be a major step toward making Web applications indistinguishable from programs that are installed on the desktop."

This, to me, sounds like the missing piece in Web2.0 development. Programmers that are creating applications for the web are sometimes limited by browser specifications. Now that a browser is looking to make Web2.0 a reality, I think we will see even better online applications.

I found out over the holidays that some people are afraid of Web2.0 concepts, especially the thought of storing documents or projects that they are creating online. What if you internet connection goes down? What if the website crashes? well, those are always a possibility. But creating anything comes with risks. If you create a Word document and store it on a hard drive - what happens when your drive crashes? Zip drive back-ups can get lost, CD-R backups can get drop and broken, etc. There is always a risk of loss. Even printed copies can get lost, accidentally thrown away, etc. We've just gotten over the fears in existing project creations. I think we are just going to have to wait until people get over fears of Web2.0 technology, too.