Mozilla has decided that when it comes to Android devices, performance is more important than the wealth of add-ons that can be used to customize Firefox.

Yesterday, Mozilla’s Director of Firefox Engineering Johnathan Nightingale announced on a mailing list that Firefox will move to Android’s native user interface, ditching the XUL technology that has been in use by Mozilla since before there even was a Firefox.

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“Firefox on Android is a critical part of supporting the open Web, and this decision puts us in a position to build the best Firefox possible,” Nightingale said.

Firefox is widely used on personal computers but a rarity on mobile phones, where–unlike Apple’s Safari or the unbranded browser Google builds for Android–it’s not installed on any phones by default. Firefox is the chief way Mozilla tries to implement its vision of empowering users of the Web and keeping that Web an open technology.

Firefox with a native Android interface should mean faster start-up, less memory usage, and smoother zooming and panning, Nightingale said. The native UI project page for mobile Firefox, aka Fennec, also listed better battery life as a benefit.

It’s not clear when the rebuilt version will arrive, but it won’t be for either the beta or Aurora versions currently in testing, Nightingale said.

Start-up time is a big deal when comparing Firefox to the built-in browser on Android, especially since Firefox often gets kicked out of memory when not in use, forcing another sluggish load when a person taps a link and needs the browser again.

“After substantial discussion, we have decided to build future versions of Firefox on Android with a native UI [user interface] instead of the current XUL implementation,” Nightingale said.

Only the user interface will change; the browser will still use the underlying Gecko engine for processing Web page elements. But leaving XUL behind will be a big deal for anyone who built Firefox add-ons using the technology, and it complicates the process of translating Firefox into different languages, too.

“It’s still early days, so we have a lot of questions to answer,” Nightingale said. “We’re talking with the Add-on SDK team about the best way to support extensions. We’re talking with l10n [localization] about how to ensure we support Firefox users wherever they live around the world.”

One possibility, according to Some meeting notes on native-UI Firefox is blunter: “Extensions are gone.” The notes raise the possibility of using Mozilla’s Add-On Software Developer Kit (SDK), an online tool for creating add-ons, but at present that works only for new-style “Jetpack” add-ons that aren’t available on mobile right now.

For now, there’s a lot of planning to do about the transition.

“By the end of next week, we will have a clearer outline of the work ahead,” Nightingale said.

While we have seen over the week just gone by the massive interest in SharePoint and a steady increase in the deployment of SharePoint 2010, how it is being used across the enterprise varies. A new EMC-sponsored AIIM report shows that one of those uses is as an enterprise content management system.
SharePoint Deployments

The report — entitled Using SharePoint for ECM: How well is it meeting expectations? by Doug Miles and based on the results of 674 surveys carried out across AIIM members between April 15 and May 5 — confirms that, already, SharePoint 2010 is being used by a large number of enterprises for content management.

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Recently published, it shows, in fact, that over a third of organizations are using SharePoint to manage content across the enterprise, and over half believe that SharePoint will become their primary enterprise CMS in the future.

While it is debatable whether this is a good or bad thing, it also shows that over 60% of users are showing strong interest in third-party additions and integrations, which can fill perceived functionality gaps.

Behind those figures, though, there are some notable caveats. While many are using it for content management, traditional enterprise CMS applications such as scanning and capture, forms processing, document workflow and records management have yet to be widely adopted.

There are other problems too. While we have noted before that planning deployments is still a major issue for many enterprises, both this research and other research released by OpenText during the SharePoint Anaheim conference shows that deployment still appears to be haphazard.
Where is SharePoint Now?

It is not really surprising that interest in SharePoint as an enterprise content management system is as high as it is, given adoption rates across all verticals and in all business segments from SMBs to Fortune 100 companies.

Over the past ten years, since the first release, it has moved from being an intranet and basic collaboration application to something that is now used for portals, collaboration, forms processing, business intelligence, business process management and content management.

According to Miles, who heads AIIM’s Market Intelligence Division, its adoption is in the region of 60-70%, and with the improved functionality in SharePoint 2010 of content management, records management and business process management capabilities of SharePoint, this is set to increase.

While there is still no agreement as to whether it provides true enterprise CMS capabilities in comparison to traditional suites, there is no doubt from this research that where it is deemed to be lacking by enterprises, third-party add-ons are being used instead.

While the popularity of SharePoint is indisputable, and despite much talk about upgrading to the 2010 version since it was released in May last year, it seems enterprises have been slow to make the jump, the research shows.

According to Miles, only 8% of SharePoint users have completed the upgrade to 2010, while the rest are either happy to stay with the 2007 version, or just haven’t got around to moving yet.

That said, 21% have deployed SharePoint 2010 as a first use with 6% of those live already and a further 28% moving from 2007 to 2010, with half of those expecting to be fully live by the end of the year.