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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..."
Nice to see a focus on keeping the engine and the codebase lean and mean. Good luck to em.
This is a Good Thing, IMHO, as Mozilla itself was getting fat and bloated. Of the Mozilla step-children I like Pheonix the best and I'm glad to see that the Mozilla team has the self-honesty to realize the better way to go and ditch major portions of their established work.
Boobies never hurt anyone. - Sherry Glaser.
1. Smaller
2. Faster
3. Less bloated
Less is more, in many, many things. Including software.
GF.
Lots of petrified grits
This is lame. I *LIKE* the existing XPFE browser / application suite.
Phoenix is nice, the new standalone mail/news client will probably be nice as well, but I see no good reason for them to drop the application suite.
All this talk about how Mozilla is too big, too bloated, has too many features, etc., is a load of shit, IMHO. Unless you're trying to run Mozilla on a freaking Pentium 100 with 64 megs of RAM or something else antiquated like that, performance is fine. And if anything, there are still plenty of features that *should* be put into Mozilla, that the Mozilla.org folks refuse to implement, despite how many votes the RFE has, or how many people want it.
I say they should just keep developing Mozilla as it is, keep improving it, keep adding features, and let the people who want to work on Minotaur, Phoenix, whatever, do so.
// TODO: Insert Cool Sig
Mozilla originally took too much of its Netscape roots to heart. That is understandable, but its a very good thing that people were finally able to break from that past. Netscape Communicator was supposed to be all things.. Mozilla continued that track, but with a nicer rendering engine and snazzy features.
I don't personally I have a problem with the size of mozilla, but since I only use it for browsing, it will be really nice to get rid of the rest of this monolithic application.. but to have it available for when I want it.
The path it has set now reminds me of the KDE applications. The PIM/Mail suite has a great deal of functionality.. but you don't have to load it just to browse a web page. (Though many would argue that Konqueror also tries to be all things to all people..)
On Linux.. Mozilla and Phoenix are the way to go.. though on OS X, Safari is a really nice browser.
Well, they aren't competing any more than Mozilla and Camino compete. When you're dealing with open, free projects, there really isn't such a thing as "competition".
I imagine that people would use Phoenix on the Mac if they wanted to have that nice "one browser on every platform" feeling. I know that's why I sometimes use Mozilla on my Mac.
All this means is that Mac users have even more choice when it comes to browsers, and to me that's a good thing(tm).
By the way, Phoenix already exists for the mac (sorta).
--
the strongest word is still the word "free"
The RFEs you mention, will hopefully be things that are implementable as extensions to Phoenix - this will take some of the burden of feature enhancement requests off of the Mozilla.org folks and let others develop them independently.
That's not what it says. It does say one of its goals is :
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.
Make risky changes to 1.5 and 1.6 Mozilla. That doesn't sound like ditching to me. The post and the Mozillazine blurb miss the jist of the document.
It might also be detrimental to Mozilla on the Mac. Right now, it's basically Camino vs. Safari. If it becomes Phoenix vs. Camino vs. Safari, the Mozilla camp becomes split.
Learn to Play Go
... in the first place.
I know I'll loose points for this, but heck, even IE and OE/Outlook are seperate applications even though they mostly use the same core (MSHTML, Outlook uses the base OE libraries). Why can't Phoenix and Minotaur be like this? I love Phoenix. I use it almost exclusively at work, and pretty often at home. And, for the record, Mozilla is a dog on my home laptop, but Phoenix runs quite snappily. Modularity (more than just selecting components from the 'net install) is the way I think the Moz project should go, and I'm glad that they're heading down that path.
Now we know the new name for Phoenix... Mozilla!
So use Pine.
Don't laugh! I still use it as my email of choice. I used to use Netscape, but when I got DSL and my Linux machine fully running, I just stuck with Pine. (I tried Kmail for a while, and Opera mail). People laugh at me, but when I am at home, I can view attachments fine with it. When I am away from home, it is a bit harder. But I don't have to download my email either. I can download PuTTY wherever I am, ssh into my box, and read my mail in about a minute. I did this recently while traveling in France. I also use fetchmail to gather my various accounts into one on my machine at home. Even on dialup I can check my mail pretty quickly.
People can't believe that I still use Pine, but it is light, fast, and easy. Of course, if access to my home machine is cut off for some reason, I have to use my ISPs webmail, but I LOATHE webmail. I don't have a compelling reason to use a GUI mail client.
My beliefs do not require that you agree with them.
IANAMD (I am not a Moz developer), but I believe one of the problems is that some things in Gecko cam't be fixed without redoing the architecture. By every account I've read, most of the Gecko codebase is a mess.
we should expect that after 1.7 Phoenix's Gecko will be diferent than Minotaur's one
Huh? Do you even know *anything* about how Moz/Phoenix/etc. work? Gecko is developed as a component which is embedded in applications, not as a part of applications themselves. Hence, there won't be a "Phoenix Gecko" and a "Minotaur Gecko". There will be Gecko, and Phoenix and Minotaur will embed it. From what I've read, installing them both on the same machine will likely have them share a common Gecko install, they won't even install two copies of it.
Not to mention that they want the Mail app to be able to stand alone or embed in Phoenix according to the user's wishes . . .
The idea is that the Gecko stuff will be put into the Gecko Runtime Environment, which will be a DLL - loaded once, rather than for each process using it.
http://rocknerd.co.uk
I think you're wrong, and here's why:
First, I'd like to address your "stability and adoption" comments. Stability - Phoenix is, at the very least, as stable as Mozilla, and anecdotal evidence I've seen suggests that it may, in fact, be far more stable. Adoption is certainly not an issue - it's not like mozlla.org is saying "Hey, our previous product sucked, try this new one!" - they're merely integrating similar, better technology into an existing product, and removing some of the not-so-great parts.
As for the lack of a migration path - remember, Phoenix is based on the same technologies (Gecko, XUL, XBL) as Mozilla, so development-wise, that all stays pretty much the same. The main difference for developers will be the new code ownershp model, about which I can only say "It's about time!"
So, while the "resistant-to-change, mozilla-loving" part of me agrees with you, the logical, wants-the-best-for-Mozilla part knows that this is the rigt path for the project.
If all the world's a stage, anyone who says they want better lighting spends far too much time in a dark theatre.
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.
Why is Gecko allowed to undergo fairly hefty changes? Easy. Apple's release of Safari brought attention to KHTML. Heck, Mac rumor sites had all but crowned Chimera (now Camino), based on Gecko, into the OS as the default browser. Then wham, out of left field, here's Safari.
Why did such a large company go away from what the open source community considered the gold standard, Mozilla and its technologies? KHTML was a smaller codebase than Gecko, and easier for a new project to make completely their own. That's right, there was a better open source alternative out there most people had never really thought about.
People started talking about KHTML, Safari, Mozilla, and Gecko. Apple managed to shine a new light on what had been seen as acceptable without question because of, get this, a lack of competition (!) in the open source browser community. Until the little man came on the scene, Mozilla and its Gecko brethren had a near monopoly on the "not-IE" browser market.
So the next time someone wants to know what Apple's given the open source community after taking BSD for the core of its new OS, you'll know what to tell them. Not only has Apple open sourced Darwin and checked their improvements back into KHTML, they've also provided a competitive peer for Mozilla and other open source projects.
It's all 0s and 1s. Or it's not.
A lot of people talk about Phoenix being so snappy compared to Moz, and using less memory. Now I don't know if this is a accurate measure of anything, and I KNOW it isn't directly comparable to IE, but in Task Manager, on this XP box, Phoenix currently has a Mem Usage of 35816 K. Is that supposed to be GOOD /lightweight?? I'm seriously wondering. It takes more memory than anything else on my machine right now. (FB: I have 5 tabs open).
Random is the New Order.
The basic no frills standalone HTML editor the world needs is vi.
And if people would stay away from Frontpage and the like, the world would be a better place too.