Portable everything
The Mozilla Foundation just announced that it’s going to join the U3 consortium, which is developing a standard for storing software on USB drives.
Mozilla has joined forces with other companies before to develop de facto standards: in June, Mozilla started working with a number of companies to create a new standard plugin framework to compete with Microsoft ActiveX.
The results so far have been promising: Firefox and SeaMonkey now support the framework, and Adobe, Apple, Macromedia, and Sun now offer plugins that use the framework. Hopefully this move will produce useful results as well.
Other companies jumping on the bandwagon include:
- McAfee
- Checkpoint, with support for VPN
- ICQ
I don’t have a USB storage device of any kind (floppies usually suffice for me), but I may consider a stick when the U3 software becomes available.