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AOL Lays Off 50 Netscape Coders
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.
The Register have an interesting take on this too here
slow poison to Mozilla
;-)
Not at all. Mozilla will continue, overseen by the new Mozilla Foundation.
And if a gift of $2M is "slow poison", then perhaps we should get them really annoyed - they might shower us with even more money.
Gerv
(gerv@mozilla.org)
Netscape isn't really the point. Mozilla is. and I currently use mozilla as my primary browser. It has tabs, much better implemented than konqueror. It works on all the platforms I use, so I don't need a different set of keystrokes and menus on each machine. The mail program is better than anything else which doesn't cost money, and arguably better than many that do.
Netscape comes bundled with AIM, but besides that is more or less identicle to mozilla. Firing netscape coders translates to firing mozilla coders.
Buttsex.
450 (down 10% from 500) working on Netscape
There appears to be a lot of confusion about this. "10% of the Netscape workforce" doesn't mean "10% of the people working on Netscape-the-browser."
As I understand it, excepting the "transition team" who are helping to set up the Mozilla Foundation, they've laid off almost everyone who was paid to work on Netscape/Mozilla for AOL.
Gerv
(gerv@mozilla.org)
---------- Forwarded message ----------
;-)
Subject: Netscape is dead
Resent-Date: Tue, 15 Jul 2003 14:14:05 -0700 (PDT)
Resent-From: champions@netscape.com
Date: Tue, 15 Jul 2003 14:13:27 -0700
From: Daniel Veditz
To: champions@netscape.com
well, the final whackage happened this morning... No more Netscape client.
Of the handful of apps people left three I know of (Seth included) were
transfered to Photon (AOL Communicator), the rest laid off. The Gecko team
(backend), which mostly survived the December cuts, was dismantled. A lot
were cut, a few found other jobs in AOL, none are going to be working on
Gecko.
Mozilla development is now going forth under a new "Mozilla Foundation" --
see the mozilla.org site for details. AOL's kicking in a chunk of change
and some machines to get it started, and then it's on its own.
The evangelism team was cut in half and disbursed, so the revamped
devedge.netscape.com site is now dead.
There will not be any more Netscape releases. When asked about security
firedrills execs said they'd assemble a "SWAT team" to address it and
possibly push out a bugfix, but I'm guessing the PR would have to be
pretty bad for them to go to that expense.
Dunno what happens to the newsgroups. I suspect they're already unofficial
and function only because Markus makes time for it every once in a while.
Good luck to us all,
-Dan Veditz
P.S. I'm still employed, folks already working on the AOL client were not
affected. But there's rumors of another layoff/reorg after the next AOL
client ships so my time may still come
What was the choice to go with XUL instead of a cross-platform toolkit like Qt or Wx?
I wasn't in on that decision, as it was before my time, but I can make a guess. Back in October 1998:
- QT wasn't free
- GTK wasn't ready (although we do use bits of it)
And anyway, like I said, you need to have control of the widget set if you want to be able to modify it to allow animated GIFs on buttons, and other stuff you need to support CSS2 styling.
Gerv
Failed in the sense that it never dug Netscape, as a browser and company, out of the hole. But I'm sure glad to see that Mozilla rose out of all that effort.
As to what they were doing, you should check out ex-mozilla, a list of all the ex-employees that have accumulated over the past --- decade? --- and a little description each wrote up of what they did and what they're now doing. Bittersweet.
www.firastudios.com
As one of the laid off employees I can assure you that Mozilla is going to be a shambles for at least six months. I have a ton of bugs and while I'll help where I can I'm certainly not going to have the chance to fix these things, what with looking for a job and earning a wage somewhere else. Therefore they'll sit in a heap with a zillion other bugs that no one wants to touch because they are not sexy enough to fix. Mozilla will survive and as open source it can't die, but suggesting AOL axing paid developers is not all bad is like saying the same of a mugging victim who spends half a year in hospital recovering from a beating.
With that said, Mozilla 1.4 is an awesome browser. It destroys IE in almost everyway and hopefully its stability will be enough to win new converts while the transition and recovery happens.
On top of that, even in 2003:
- QT for Windows isn't Free.
- GTK for Windows still doensn't work 100% correctly and doesn't integrate well with the environment.
Yeah. (Mozilla, that is.)
1) Tabbed browsing. Easier/faster to repeatedly click "X" in the corner than to wave over one of 20-30 windows. I let pages load in the background while reading one.
2) With Prefs Toolbar, easy image/Java/Javashit/cookie control. All off by default. Re-enabled only when required. One click in a checkbox. Proxy is on by default, hooked into Proxomitron. Turned off if and only if a site requires it, for the duration of that site view. One-click (well, one-pulldown) control of User-Agent. For dumbfuck web designers that see "What? Not IE? No HTML for you! No, we're not even going to send the HTML and let your browser try to render it, we're just going to tell you to go away because we don't want your business."
3) Security. No ActiveX, no other dumb misfeatures, less integrated with the OS so that as-yet-undiscovered dumb misfeatures are less likely to affect an entire system.
In short - Mozilla offers me control over my browsing experience (in terms of feature #2, a level of control I haven't seen since Netscape 3. Netscape 4 was a downgrade in terms of burying/hiding the Javashit and image autoload options to make them less accessible.)
In comparison, IE offers me virtually no control over my browsing experience. So I use Mozilla, not IE. If the job is "viewing web pages", Mozilla is the better tool for the job.
Evidently you're not a very advanced browser user. I don't mean this as an insult, if Safari does everything you need, great. For me, and many others, despite the bloat, Mozilla has necessary features that other browsers lack.
Let's start with cookie handling. There are a handful of websites that I want to accept cookies from. With Mozilla I can have it prompt me every time a site wants to set a cookie and if the cookies really are necessary I'll accept, otherwise I'll reject. With Safari you don't have that degree of fine-grained control.
Keyword bookmarks. Sure, Safari has the "Google" bar at the top. In mozilla I get the same feature by typing "g Search Terms" in the address bar, and mozilla knows to expand "g" to the full google search URL, placing the search terms in the appropriate place. But I also have keyword searches for IMDB, dictionary.cambridge.edu, google groups, google images, amazon, a w3 validator... In Safari there doesn't appear to be a way to do that.
More complete proxy control: I can say I don't want a proxy for 10.0.0.1/8 and have my entire internal network unproxied. There simply doesn't seem to be a way to do that in Safari.
Anyhow, I could go on and on about the features that Mozilla has that Safari doesn't, but I think I've made my point.
You clearly do not know anything about the architecture of Windows, IE or AOL's "browser". AOL is NOT using "IE" it is using the Windows HTML rendering engine which IE also uses...
Windows ships with an HTML rendering engine as a COM object. Internet Explorer (IE6) uses this rendering engine to render pages. So does the Windows shell, so does the Windows help system and so do many 3rd party apps, including AOL. This is the main reason that AOL used "IE" It was a componetized "browser" long before anyone at Netscape even understood the concept.
Windows will ALWAYS contain an HTML rendering engine that will ALWAYS be available to third party vendors. Even if there is no wrapper in the form of a stand alone browser ("IE") from MS itself. The interface to the engine is multi- layerd as well, always supporting the older protocols, so new version of the engine will still work with older versions of software written for it. (It is currently on it's 2nd API)
BTW if you want to see what is available to third parties, check out the "MyIE2" browser. A tabbed, mouse gestured, popup blocking alternative to IE built using the windows HTML rendering engine. It's still mssing a couple of more advanced features which I hope get added soon, but it just shows that the lack of a MS branded "IE" is no loss to anyone, in fact it's an incentive for 3rd party developers like AOL!
Contrary to popular belief, coding is not all free blow-jobs and beer. Those things cost MONEY!