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As noted recently by many bloggers the development of Firefox 3 has started, codenamed Gran Paradiso, which seems to be something more like a backend release, taking care of some parts of the older codebase dating back from Mozilla days. This is good, but also bad. It is nowadays out of doubt that the browser has become the most important application on our computer and that Firefox brought back some competition into a field that seemed rather clear back then. I personally wouldn’t want to change Firefox for any other browser, although I’d certainly give Safari a shot if there’s really a Windows version coming along.

But what I don’t understand is that Firefox is not present in any of the embedded devices that we are facing. The iPhone obviously runs on Safari, or more precisely WebKit, I bet Apple TV too, the Wii runs Opera/KHTML and all Microsoft devices will run IE7 or the like (let’s forget about those half-grown mini browsers on mobile phone, I expect they will disappear and soon we’ll all have full-fleged browsers on our phones). But where’s Gecko?

Back when Mozilla announced that they rewrote the rendering engine completely to be faster and more extensible, I thought that was a good move, because speed is the real killer on the web and that was the one big advantage that MS had at some point compared to NS, that they were considerably faster in rendering. Now FF3 is bringing even more speed, and for a browser Firefox integrates nicely with other important apps (e.g. Google page preloading and Search extensions), but what if the majority of Internet enabled devices are mobile or embedded devices and not computers? Sooner or later there’ll be a large number of mobile phones and set-top boxes like Apple TV, TiVo or the Wii that will provide Internet access.

It is well documented in this blog that I absolutely love the Wii and I am truly fascinated about its capabilities. As soon as I have one, there is no real reason except for the input device to not use my TV as Internet device when it comes to surfing the web for entertainment reasons.

I have been looking at some interesting things where TV and computers merge more obviously than in the past, especially sofatube, which is a different UI to youtube caught my interest. This is the way to go. I’m watching video content on my notebook regularly, it sometimes even replaces TV as evening entertainment. If I could watch all those videos on my TV, that would be perfect. Mario Sixtus recently noticed that Sony’s new LCD Screens allow to subscribe to RSS feeds directly on the TV.

But again, where is Firefox? I think it is a smart move of Opera to jump on that bandwagon and offer a browser especially for those environments. Because soon there will be no boundary between different devices. Why not put your iPhone into a charging socket or some sort of docking station, which connects it to your TV, a remote keyboard and mouse and then use it as a full featured computer or multi-media TV station. With video on demand, videocasts, Youtube and Google Video you’ll have plenty of content available.