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Mozilla's Major New Roadmap
kerz writes "mozilla.org today released a new version of it's famed roadmap, this time with some pretty major changes. First and foremost, they plan on ditching the large Mozilla suite in favor of Phoenix and Minotaur. Secondly, they have plans to change the milestone cycle to allow for more time to fix the Gecko layout engine to be smaller and more efficient. MozillaZine has the scoop..."
1.Switch Mozilla's default browser component from the XPFE-based Navigator to the standalone Phoenix browser.
2.Develop further the standalone mail companion application to Phoenix already begun as Minotaur, but based on the new toolkit used by Phoenix (this variant has been codenamed Thunderbird).
3.Deliver a Mozilla 1.4 milestone that can replace the 1.0 branch as the stable development path, then move on to make riskier changes during 1.5 and 1.6. The major changes after 1.4 involve switching to Phoenix and Thunderbird, and working aggressively on the next two items.
4.Fix crucial Gecko layout architecture bugs, paving the way for a more maintainable, performant, and extensible future.
5.Continue the move away from an ownership model involving a large cloud of hackers with unlimited CVS access, to a model, more common in the open source world, of vigorously defended modules with strong leadership and clear delegation, a la NSPR, JavaScript, Gecko in recent major milestones, and Phoenix.
6. ???
7. Profit!
Ok, I admit to adding 6 and 7.
Trolling is a art,
"what exactly is happening to XUL?"
Short answer: nothing; sorry we mentioned it.
Longer answer: we brought XUL up because if we "switch to Phoenix" from the app-suite browser, based on Phoenix as it has been distributed so far, we drop Mac XUL support. We don't want to do that. So in the roadmap, we go out of our way to say that we *are* going to build Phoenix for OS X, when we switch.
I wonder how we can make this simple point more clear, without inviting confusion. Jumpy roadmap readers seem to skim, and fly off the handle out of fear that we're dropping XUL, or something silly like that. Rest assured, we are supporting XUL fully.
XUL with some form-submission smarts, but using XML-RPC, SOAP, WSDL, or whatever's appropriate, should become the basis for web applications. XUL widgets should form the kernel of a pragmatic XForms implementation. And XUL's still great for cross-platform applications. We like XUL too.
I use the integrated suite every day -- mostly the browser, mail/news, and message compose. Before any change to the default build, we'll make sure that this mode of operation is possible if you configure mail (Thunderbird, I mean) as an add-on to the Phoenix-based browser.
Remember, your add-ons persist across upgrades, unless an incompatible change to the new toolkit (which is XUL, XBL, JS, and CSS) invalidates a particular add-on (in which case, you'll need to get the new, compatible version of that add-on once it's out; this kind of invalidation should not happen often). So once you've added the mail extension to the browser, you're set -- you should be able to operate just as you do today with the integrated app-suite.
That's the goal, anyway, and a requirement to meet before we switch the default build.