Bango

What, you didn’t know that Firefox had more than a few branches off from it’s Mozilla base? To keep things simple, we can think of them as cousins (just hope they don’t start kissing). Both the Webrunner and Instantbird projects show a lot of promise and might just be the next big thing for the Mozilla team.

Webrunner - WebRunner is based on a concept called Site Specific Browsers (SSB). The idea behind Webrunner is to make a super light weight browser that is stripped down of all the toolbars, user interface and more so you have a lighter memory footprint and more a a base around the web application you are pointing it at.

Instantbird - This instant messenger client will be Mozilla’s version of Trillian, Pidgin and others that have come before it. That alone should gain it a lot of traction. The basic backbone of the program is up and ready to download right now - but your not yet getting anything other than the ability to say, “I downloaded Instantbird back when it first came out!”. Bring AIM, Yahoo, MSN and others all together the Mozilla way.

I welcome both into the vaguely-related-to Firefox family. From personal use, Instantbird still has a ways to go but Webrunner is looking interesting right now for simple web applications you can’t do without.