Netcraft: Will Firefox repeat Netscape’s mistakes?:

Against this background, the news that Mozilla will be working with Adobe, Apple, Macromedia and Sun to develop an open, scriptable plugin model is worrying. The logic behind this move seems to be that in order to capitalise on users’ increasing willingness to consider alternatives to Internet Explorer, Firefox needs to match it in all areas, including plugins. What is particularly ironic about this move is that it represents an eerily exact rerun of an earlier – failed – strategy.

This post argues that Firefox may be going down a somewhat proprietary path with this plugin approach and possibly creating security risks along the lines of ActiveX. I am not too worried about that for one reason: firefox remains open source. If the developers take it in a bad direction I’m confident that another group will pick up the source and go somewhere else with it. While competing forks of firefox is not ideal it is better than having no choice at all.