The morning’s executive briefing sessions are underway here at OSCON. Tim O’Reilly just led a discussion on stage about Firefox add-ons — what they’ve achieved, how the open source model has shaped their development and what they contribute to the web.

Sitting on the panel were Mozilla‘s Mike Shaver, who oversees the Firefox extension developer community, as well as two of the ecosystem’s most successful developers in terms of sheer user numbers: AllPeers CTO Matthew Gertner and StumbleUpon‘s Garrett Camp.

One of Tim’s first questions was a biggie: Why does Firefox’s
performance suffer when I install extensions? Shaver handled that one,
explaining that the browser’s architecture lets developers interact
with any of the services within Firefox. Ultimately, it’s a trade off.
Developers get the infinite access which allows them to shape the user
experience of the browser, but that sometimes results in a performance
hit.

Continue Reading “OSCON Report: Why Mozilla Matters” »

All things open-source are on the agenda at O’Reilly’s ninth annual Open-Source Convention, which runs July 24-27 in Portland, Oregon.

Over 2,500 attendees are expected at the 2007 edition of OSCON. As always, we’ll see the usual tutorials and break-out sessions for programmers, designers, security experts and the like, but there will also be a healthy amount of debate about where open-source is headed and what issues it’s currently facing both as a model and as a philosophy. Some would argue that open-source lives on in every bit of technology we touch — from our set-top boxes and our web browsers to online services like Wikipedia and Flickr. Others would argue that it’s under a bigger threat than ever from patent threats and money-minded opportunists.

The debates begin in earnest on Tuesday with the O’Reilly Radar executive briefing sessions. We’ll be there to bring you the session highlights, as well as all of the important announcements. Chances are, we’ll also see a few applications and hardware innovations that we’ll want to tell you about as well.