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.

Comments

The Register

[KingDaveRa]

The Register have an interesting take on this too here

Re:They've sort of laid off Mozilla as well...

[Gerv]

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)

Re:Whaaa????

[Anonymous Coward]

---------- 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 ;-)

Re:They've sort of laid off Mozilla as well...

[mpsmps]

According to wheezy's post on Mozillazine:

That article plays some number games, sadly. There is no such thing as "Netscape staff." Netscape is a brand. I repeat: NETSCAPE IS A BRAND. When the statement "less than 10% of Netscape staff" is made, that should translate to "less than 10% of AOL's Mountain View campus." The bottom line is, 100% of former Mozilla developers in the employ of AOL are no longer working on Mozilla. I don't know of any exceptions.

Re:If...

[Gerv]

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

Re:Big Deal

[SpriteGF]

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.