Review of Mozilla's 2002

An anonymous reader writes "MozillaZine is currently featuring an article looking back at the last 12 months of the Mozilla project. It's amazing to see how far things have come in 2002. A year ago, there was no Mozilla 1.0, no Netscape 7, no Phoenix, no Chimera and no shipping AOL clients using Gecko (Mozilla's rendering engine). An interesting read."

Comments

Technical advancement not the issue.

[Skyshadow]

I use Mozilla. I mostly like Mozilla.

But, starting with 1.0, technical advancement just is no longer the issue for Mozilla. Open Source projects have the proven capacity to nominally pace their commerial counterparts' new features and to do so with a much more sane and better-written approach.

No, the problem is really one of adaptation: Once it's build, once it's available, how do you make people come and use it? Let's not fool ourselves; even OSS's favorite son (Linux) didn't succeed in the arena that Mozilla must, and Linux can't really help Mozilla where it needs it.

This is going to be the key question in the next five years: How do you even distribute better software? How do you even *give away* better products? We've already *seen* the "download and use it" scheme fail when competing against a product which is already on the desktop.

And don't kid yourself: We can't count on AOL's massive firepower on this one. This is the wrong time to expect AOL to help us; they're not in any position to make big changes. Besides, Netscape is not Mozilla.

This is something we have to answer and answer well in the coming year, and I mean the next couple, not the next ten.

Re:Technical advancement not the issue.

[ostiguy]

Its just software. Its not about global conquest.

If AOL adopts it, and then within 1 yr 20% of american web surfers are using the gecko engine, then everyone will need to adhere more closely to standards, and life will be grand.

Get worked up over standards, not about achieving global dominance.

ostiguy

Re:Technical advancement not the issue.

[ryanvm]

This is something we have to answer and answer well in the coming year, and I mean the next couple, not the next ten.

Why? What will happen if Mozilla stagnates? Will people stop working on it in their free time?

My point is that the beauty of Open Source is that you really don't have any competition. If you're doing it for free, nobody can run you out of business.

This is why when asked about Microsoft, Linus generally responds that he doesn't give a shit what they do.

Is the road to success as a standalone?

[budGibson]

To me, the most significant point in the article was Mitchell Baker's note supporting phoenix. In it, he lists one of the reasons for supporting phoenix as an experiment to see whether mozilla can succeed by building core browser functionality that others adapt.

This is where OSS succeeds right now in mainstream implementations, as a base that a value-added integrator can then modify for clients to achieve a lower cost solution. It is hard for OSS to market directly to end-users. OSS is not close enough to end-users to know how to modify interface and other features to suit their needs. However, value-added integrators are.

With microsoft, value-added integrators face high licensing fees and the danger that microsoft will try to eat their lunch. In OSS, this is less an issue.

However, there is one problem with this view. There's plenty of reason for value-added integrators to use mozilla. What is the reason to contribute back? In the end, I suspect the interest for contribution to mozilla is with platform providers, e.g., AOL, who do not want access to their platforms controlled by their competitors. Note, a number of OSS projects have moved to corporate sponsorship congruent with this view, e.g., Gnome, Mozilla, and even Apache.

So, mozilla might find its real success as a neutral technology that can be adapted across a number of platforms by value-added integrators. It will have to look for support to corporations whose interest is in having neutral access technologies for their platforms.

Re: Validation

[Dirtside]

That's not good enough. Even a browser which is supposedly standards-compliant can have bugs which cause wierd display glitches, even if your code is letter-perfect. Mozilla 1.0 (I think, might have been 1.1) had a strange bug where certain combinations of COLSPAN and WIDTH settings would cause the final cell in each row to be wider than it should -- even if the W3C HTML validator said the code was perfect, and the code worked perfectly in every other browser (including pre-1.0 versions of Mozilla) I tested, including three versions of IE, old Netscape 4.7, and so on.

The bug was eventually fixed, but simply writing and testing it once wouldn't have worked.

It's so much easier to simply validate against the W3C standards instead of checking to see if your pages work in every browser.

Yeah, it's so much easier, but you're ignoring reality. Browsers have bugs, and if you don't test it in the browsers that are *actually* in common use, you're asking for trouble. Even if it works in an early version of IE, Microsoft (and even the Mozilla project) have broken things in later versions which worked in earlier versions.

Re:2003 is the year of Mozilla's dead....

[BZ]

Well, lessee...

1) AOL Communicator is a pet project of a AOL VP who hates Netscape and wants the division to disappear. It's not clear to me how he thinks Gecko will get maintained after that.

2) Mozilla developers developed XUL because it makes UI development a lot faster and easier than using WxWindows.

The real problem Mozilla is facing right now, imo, is not the UI toolkit but the fact that Gecko is likely to be very much obsolete in 2-3 years unless a good deal of major work happens in the very near future...