The Firefox Kid and a new Web OS Project

While drinking my first cup of coffee on this wonderful Saturday morning in July, I bumped upon an article at Slashdot about Blake Ross, The Firefox Kid, and his latest project, Parakey. The details about Parakey are sparse because it it still in development. However, what is interesting is the peek that Blake has allowed to date.

In a nutshell from what I have gathered, Parakey is an open-source based application that instals on your desktop and runs in your browser and bridges the gap between desktops and the web. In essence, it is like a Web OS. As the project matures, we will see more details.

You have to read the article to get the full scope. There is also some interesting historical information about how Blake got involved in the Firefox creation.

Here is an interesting note, Facebook just purchased Parakey for an undisclosed amount. The we will continue be a highly dynamic place.

Firefox Has 28% Marketshare in Europe

I predicted this a year ago. At the rate that Firefox usage has been increasing it appears that Firefox now consists of 28% of European users. "Europe Helps Life Firefox Market Share". In some countries usage is as high as 48%! Whoa! At any rate, I think Firefox's ascent will continue especially when Firefox 3.0 comes out with its capability to support offline web applications similar to Google Gears technology.

If you are interested in web analytics, here are a few sites that clearly show the Firefox trend.
W3Schools Browser Market Share
Market Share Hit Links

What will be interesting is how this trend continues through 2007.

Offline Web Applications with Google Gears

As I expected, the unexpected innovation has been released by Google. I actually started using Google Gears the day it was announced from a user perspective when they enabled it in Google Reader. It definitely works and is actually a significant breakthrough at the tip of the ice berg.

Over at OnLAMP they put out some articles using Google Gears with PHP and MySQL. The Power Of Google Gears (part1, part2). It has only been a little while so let's see how this offline browser technology evolves. Mozilla is working on a similar technology in the next release of Firefox. Maybe we will see more of this later this year.