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AOL Lays Off 50 Netscape Coders

Posted by timothy on from the but-mozilla-is-resilient dept.

xcable points out a CNET story which begins "America Online on Tuesday said it has laid off 50 employees involved in Web browser development at its Netscape subsidiary amid a reorganization of its Mozilla open-source browser team," and offers a reminder that "AOL recently made a deal with Microsoft to use IE in future AOL releases." This adds a bit more detail to yesterday's (updated) story about the establishment of the Mozilla foundation.

4 of 713 comments (clear)

  1. Finally! by micromoog · · Score: 0, Flamebait
    Now the mutant monstrosity known as Netscape can finally die, and the browser war can now be faught by the remaining worthy competitors, IE and Mozilla (and some might say Opera).

    My condolences to the 50 coders, though.

  2. Since they worked at AOL by CompWerks · · Score: 0, Flamebait

    Letting them go was doing them a favor

    --
    If you can read this sig - the bitch fell off.
  3. Too late, too late, & other thoughts. by supabeast! · · Score: 0, Flamebait

    A few months ago I would have cared. But last month Apple released Safari 1.0, and after using it for a while, I realized that Mozilla Navigator is a big, bloated mess, with endless confusing interface changes. Now I just do most of my important browsing with Safari, although I still mess with Mozilla at the office where I have to run Linux.

    Other thoughts follow.

    Mozilla advocates really only have one big point for pushing Mozilla- standards compliance with some particular group's standards. Honestly though, most people don't give a rat's ass about being compliant with W3C, Microsoft, or anyone else's. We just want the damned web sites to render right.

    Mozilla/Netscape mail is nice, but I really only use it because I want to use Verisign certs on Linux without installing Gnome and I haven't gotten around to finding another client.

    Composer is just crap, and produces some of the worst HTML out there. It's more efficient to buy Dreamweaver than it is to waste time trying to get anything to not look outright ugly when done with composer.

    Address book is nice, but so are the dozens of other options out there. If Mozilla Mail didn't automatically fill propigate addresses to it, I wouldn't know it exists.

    Chatzilla is pointless. There are dozens of great IRC clients around, nobody really needs more.

    Bugzilla is nice, but if the Mozilla crew had been trying to make a decent browser instead of a huge suite of internet apps, it wouldn't have been needed.

    To sum up, bloatware sucks.

  4. This should be filed under by pair-a-noyd · · Score: 0, Flamebait

    "who gives a shit?"
    I mean really. Like this is important?
    Only retards use AOL or M$ or would care about either subject. I know a few older folks that use AOL and they live in constant fear of being hacked. They are also totally terrorized at the thought of trying something different.
    They have some idea that if they don't march to the drumbeat of AOL / M$ that black helicopters will swoop down on them and ninja hit squads will bash their downs down and assassinate them for *thinking* about trying an alternative.

    They feel that it's their lot in life to be a $lave to M$ and to AOL..
    They are en$laved to the machine.
    I shit you not.