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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.
Now stop whining and playing around with those Linux boxen, boot to Windows XP and connect up to the hive. We have to complete our assimilation of the Alpha quadrant.
So are AOL's long-term lease on IE, and its buy-high-sell-low Netscape strategy precursors of further mergers (think MSN/AOL)?
Not only could it provide many more chances for opportunistic middle managers to use layoffs to make it look like they're Doing Something, but the thought of putting Time Warner's clout behind its longstanding efforts at being a multimedia content provider must make MS salivate. (MSNBC? Zzzz.)
How do you propose that people download alternative browsers if IE is totally removed from Windows?
After all, it's not like you can go out to the local Circuit City, Best Buy, Office Max, etc. and get a browser off the shelf, and whithout a browser, you can't view webpages to get to be able to download something.
I've used it as my default browser since 1.0. Faster rendering and tabbed browsing were really the issues for me. I had a brief flirtation with Phoenix for 0.3 and 0.4, but switched back to Mozilla for greater stability. This is on Win32, so the only other option for me Opera, and I didn't want to pay money for a good browser.
Anyone who loves or hates any language, platform, or manufacturer, doesn't know what they're talking about.
Wait a minute, there are 10 coders working on Mozilla and 450 (down 10% from 500) working on Netscape, even though Netscape is practically just a skin and some annoying AOL branding on top of Mozilla??? What's wrong with this picture?
The requested URL
Looks like AOL is just outsourcing browser development and saving a buck or two by not having to pay the salaries for in-house development. By outsourcing, they can also just stand by and see what happens and eventually pick the fruit by using whatever browser comes out on top.
Regardless, this is sad news. Sad, but not unexpected. Here's hoping some far-sighted investors will pick up Netscape/Mozilla -- it would probably be the bargain of the week, especially if MSIE really is dead in the water until Longhorn is finished.
Maybe this is Larry Ellison's chance to show us once again how badly he hates Bill Gates.
"Obviously, I'm not an IBM computer any more than I'm an ashtray" (Bob Dylan)
$2e6/50 = $20,000/yr
And, if that 50 was only 10% of the Netscape workforce, and we split that $2 mil over 500 users, that's a Christmas bonus, not a salary.
So, $1 mil/yr for the Moz Foundation is chump change. An earlier statement that "5 coders is plenty for Mozilla" seems kind of silly to me. I wonder how big the IE team is.
Thanks for the good time, honey, I'll call you. Here, buy yourself something nice.
Now we get to see how Moz survives as a *real* open-source project (i.e., w/out funding). At least it's got a good code base (right?).
John.
>> If Mozilla surpasses IE ...
That won't happen unless Microsoft drops IE and starts shipping Mozilla.
-- Slashdot: When Public Access TV Says "No"
Sorry, but who couldn't see this happening??
1) Microsoft changes default browser back to IE.
2) Mozilla foundation setup.
As far as I could see, the writing was on the wall for the Netscape coders at AOL as soon as they stopped using it. Why keep the coders if they aren't adding business benefit any longer?
(Forgetting the benefit to the community here)
Curiosity was framed; ignorance killed the cat. -- Author unknown
if they had worked on the portable Gecko completely and forgotten (Or at the very least, pushed right back) things like XUL and skined interfaces, they could have written a handful of application shells for their supported platforms and dropped in an excelent browser engine.
So, Mr. Know-It-All Anonymous Coward, pontificating from on high, here's a pop quiz. If you have to implement an entire widget set in your browser to have any hope of supporting styleable form controls etc. (as outlined in CSS2 and above), is it better to:
a) Write one user interface for all platforms using those same controls, and use that UI as another testbed for them
b) Write five or more separate user interfaces, and have to keep them all up to date and in sync?
Without XUL, there would have been no Netscape help in doing Mozilla for Linux, Mac, BSD etc. because there would have been no incentive to chase such a small part of the browser market.
Gerv
(gerv@mozilla.org)
The reason that AOL uses IE is to that MS will have AOL pre-packaged on the computers with a nifty shortcut link to install the software. This way a user doesn't have to download the software online, or worry about how they are going to get online. Most users are still using a modem, and have no way to get online unless they first contact an ISP. This way, AOL is already on the computer, and they don't have to call anyone. It's just there. That is why they use IE. And MS wants them to use it, well, because they are the largest ISP and they all use IE.
AOL will stop using IE when Windows starts to lose it's market share (by a LOT)
"Time is long and life is short, so begin to live while you still can." -EV
The parent post should be modded down.
Netscape employees are a large work force (and test force) behind Mozilla. Half the testers and coders on Mozilla are/were Netscape employees.
"Time is long and life is short, so begin to live while you still can." -EV
AOL kept them around long enough to extract that $750M from Microsoft without having to waste time and money pursuing the antitrust complaint.
Microsoft paid what is pocket change to them to deliver the final blow to the stake in the heart of what was once their biggest competitor in the browser arena. AOL/TW got badly needed cash, Microsoft got another seven years of IE dominance amongst the mouth-breathing internet user set. Web pages will continue to be designed so they'll look good for AOL retards instead of being designed to comply with established standards so they look good in all standards-compliant browsers.
As usual, Microsoft wins, the other party to the agreement thinks they won but will later realize they didn't, and the internet-using public loses.
But look at them now. Time Warner clearly has control of the company and AOL is losing customers and money like there's no tomorrow. Perhaps there really is no tomorrow this time. Maybe people are flocking because the whole world is slowly sinking into the ocean. I don't know. None of this makes any sense from a logical point of view. But as soon as you start caring about those shares and money then one might see how some short sighted individual could make decisions like these.
:)
I just wish I knew their name.
It's also a very nifty way, if you're looking up a lot of things, to temporarily keep track of them. Keep the tabs open on the pages that are interesting, and close the ones that aren't.
I know that in principle the same thing could be acheived by opening new windows, but that get's very cluttered, especially if you have other apps open.
(I'm using Firebird on Windows 2000 at the moment)
It's not wasting time, I'm educating myself.
I bet Microsoft's happy to see another competitor dying, though.
I can't imagine that Microsoft really gives too much of a damn. I don't know if I'd really even call it a "competitor," considering Netscape/Mozilla is free, and IE is "free" (since it comes with the OS.
I don't really see much of an impact on Microsoft (AOL contracts excepted).
Chris -- http://www.bitter.net/
Tieing yourself to a browser more than 9 of 10 people don't want to use seems like a good way to cut sales, not increase them.
That's a little more harshly stated than I think the reality is. What survey has shown that 9 out of 10 people don't want Netscape/Mozilla? And if that survey exists, did people get to try the advanced features that these browsers have that IE lacks?
I think it's more an issue of 9 out of 10 people don't know there's a better browser out there, so they use what comes with their computer.
I wondered about this as well. Especially with AOL's user base dwindling, and heavy competition from others (MSN in particular), why on earth would they strike a deal to use IE? What to they *gain* from that?
As far as I can tell, the whole deal is a MS win all the way. AOL will be tied to Windows, and people it's already pretty difficult for a non-techie user to get connected to the internet using a new Windows box *without* getting hooked up to MSN.
I just don't understand why they settled the way they did. It seems to me they'd have much more to gain in battling MSN by undermining IE's dominance and allowing themselves to have control over their browsing engine.
Personally I'd say it's more like 9 out of 10 people are perfectly happy with what they have and don't want to move away from something they're comfortable with.
Which is exactly the same as saying 9 out of 10 people don't want Mozilla.
(after all, if they did want an alternative, they'd have downloaded it - which is what we all did)
Avantslash - View Slashdot cleanly on your mobile phone.
The problem with Joe Average User trying to use any browser other than IE is that there are too many websites out there that ONLY work on IE. They don't use web standars, they use IE-specific code. Try to view those pages on Mozilla (or nearly any other browser that is standards-based,) and they simply don't work. It's a chicken-egg problem: those sites won't change, because 90% of users use IE. Users won't change, becuase many sites won't work outside IE. I had always hoped that if AOL switched to Mozilla, it would FORCE those websites to change, because of the number of users AOL has. Unfortunetly, it doesn't look like it will happen.
Would people really be praising Netscape/AOL instead if they had constantly hacked the limping, near dead Communicator codebase? Would we really be pleased that the two most popular browsers BOTH sucked at standards compliance? Is a 20%/80% market share split OK, when they are both as bad as each other?
The fact is that the moment Microsoft decided to kill Netscape, they were dead. I've seen many suggestions about what they should have done, but the fact is that none hold water. If they hadn't started over, they'd have still lost, because IE was better engineered, had more resources and so on. If they had started over but not used XUL, XPCOM or NSPR Mozilla would have been Windows only. It would have minimal marketshare on Windows, as opposed to having nearly 100% marketshare on Linux.
As it is, they started over, and took their time about it, and made something good.
I'm not convinced that they'd have more market share even if they had carried on using the old 4.x codebase really, at least this way Mozilla/Firebird has legions of geek fans who are spreading the word, as opposed to dumping all over it like they used to.
Poor old Netscape - put in a lose/lose scenario, they lost. You have to give them some credit for making the best of a bad situation. That's something most journalists won't say though, it's realistic and therefore boring.
The information appears to be that all Mozilla coders have been laid off, or transferred to other projects. Mainly laid off.
The 10% figure appears because they counted a lot of people who have nothing to do with the browser as being a part of the "Netscape workforce". This is feasible because, as I read, there wasn't any official definiton of what the "Netscape workforce" was. So they adjusted it to make the announcement seem much less direct than it really was.
It's truly fortunate that this was postponed until Mozilla was essentially finished. I'm not sure of the wisdom of the breaking it apart into minor pieces, as that may require more effort than can easily be afforded, but it makes sense as each of those pieces will be easier to maintain. We should probably expect Mozilla development to slow down significantly from now on, however. At least until things are reorganized, and new development teams have formed. (If people aren't working full time on the project, you need lots more of them, which means a differnt project structure.)
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
Well it looks like the day of Netscape's execution is nigh, but I wonder, with the formation of the Mozilla Foundation, why doesn't AOL donate the Netscape trademarks to the foundation.
Though Netscape has been increasingly marginalized, I think from a sheer brand name recognition point of view, if Mozilla, or Mozilla Firebird become Netscape, they will have a much easier time entering the collective conscious of many more people out there.
I tried Mozilla Firebird 0.6 for the first time yesterday and have to say I was very impressed! It was Netscape and Mozilla minus all the bloat, as advertised. If a Netscape 8 label is thrown on this and the usual barrage of AOL advertisements doesn't install with it, it could have a great chance of siezing some market share from the stagnating Explorer 6.
Of course, AOL will likely keep the Netscape trademark and simply let it get full of dust bunnies (as a portal web site no one will go to) to the point where no one remembers it anymore.... but if they'd only donate it to the Mozilla Foundation... it at least seems like a reach around for the current and future rounds of Netscape employees being fired.
-Joe
If we're all god's children, what's so special about Jesus? - Jimmy Carr
IE will continue to be developed and extended by MS army of coders. they're just going to lock the browser major version to the OS and not supply a standalone download. if you're thinking that IE is on feature freeze, you're greatly mistaken.
aside from that, new features and standards are only added by web developers when the critical mass of the target market has access to them. I doubt any 2nd party browser can pick up critical mass to get significant developer support - let alone in the span of time between MS OS releases.
MS just isn't offering IE as a free standalone download. No doubt it's to escape legal backfire from their declaration that it's an integral part of the OS (if it really is - then you can't offer a free download as they do.)
i'm not going to dismiss the possibility that something else might eclipse IE - but i am willing to dismiss the possibility that it'll happen as a result of lack of development and extension by MS.
// "Can't clowns and pirates just -try- to get along?"
I have been using Mozilla since version 1.0, on both Windows and Linux. We have seen a great improvement in stability and performance, as well as a few useful features, since that first version.
:-)
...short of bug fixes, new features, and performance improvements in Mozilla... the user should not be able to tell the difference.
I think that it would be best for Mozilla to throw everything they have at tweaking Mozilla as is. New features are great, but if you want more people to switch from IE, Mozilla will have to be polished so that there aren't little quirks that frustrate IE users experimenting with Mozilla.
Not only that, but you can keep those experimenters by further improving Mozilla's performance and stability.
It might be next to impossible, but if Mozilla could load faster than IE, without Mozilla being pre-loaded in the background, you would win a big chunk of converts with that alone.
Page rendering actually seems faster in Mozilla, with version 1.4 on Windows. So startup time should still be the big focus, but improving rendering time is still good
Some other people also recommend making Mozilla a complete and total IE replacement on Windows. I agree. It should become something like the Coke/Pepsi test. They should look, feel, and smell the same to the user. All menus should be laid out the same. All icons should look the same. All widgets should behave the same.
I know there are IE skins for Mozilla, but someone needs to go further with that idea and redo the entire browser interface, pulldown menus and all!
Main features, desired first of all by 90% of browser users, to add to Mozilla and Opera will be feature already in IE: (1) *stable* support of *all* plugins that needed to display a plugin-based content that is already on the Web and (2) simulating IE to display a IE-oriented content that is already on the Web.
Let me try it in few small logical steps. Why do people use browser? To access online content. What content? The one published for existing web users. What do people use now to surf? IE. So, what is the main feature they need? IE-compatibility. What about W3C standards? leave for academicians. IE is the real standard.
Personally I hate IE way of standard ignorance. I love W3C standards. But when I develop my content I develop it not for myself, but for other people, 90% of them are IE users.
Mozilla (and/or Opera and/or KHTML) can surpass IE only if it will work *exactly* (including all standard problems) as IE *plus* it will have some additional useful feature, (like tabs, gestures and smart bookmarks) many of them all non-IE browsers already have.
Less is more !
Well, not really, but like a whole bunch of the more complicated Windows "controls" it can be embedded in a similar fashion. It works similar to the way Gecko works in Mozilla. The browser embeds a browser "control" into the window that contains the back buttons and the like.
You can verify that the IE "control" is separate by openning the Help option in the Start menu in any version since Windows NT 4 or Windows 95. It will open up a window that contains an index on the left and a document on the right. Right click on the right pane and the popup menu should look surprisingly similar to IE displaying a webpage. (In XP, you'll need to choose an option, let's say "What's new in Windows XP" before a "standard" browser control appears.) This is an embedded IE control.
Hopefully this answers your question: IE will remain just like it currently really is, a control that can be embedded in any program. It's already a "standard" control since Windows 98/2000. It will just now be - er, even more standard, or something. I really don't know what the "change" means, from a developer point of view. (I think it means "IE 7 will not be backported to older Windows versions.")
Mozilla does something similar. If you have the DOM Inspector installed on Mozilla, then you can "inspect" a browser window and look for the "tabbrowser" element in the tree. (Look for the "hbox" above the "statusbar" on the bottom, and then open the last element until you see "tabbrowser" - openning this up (last element always) eventually brings up a "browser" element. This is the XUL element that contains the HTML page you view.)
You are in a maze of twisty little relative jumps, all alike.
Two things, though.
First, IE and Windows help to provide a mutual lock-in, while bundling Mozilla with Windows would permit easier migration away from Windows because users would no longer have to confront Something Different as a browser.
Second, security holes have afflicted Microsoft for long enough that they simply shrug them off, claim that they'll be fixed in the next update, that premature open notification of vulnerabilities is Bad, and that Hackers are responsible for Evil.
The cumulative problem of security holes will be used as evidence for the need to have TCPA instituted as a standard, which will also cut down on Terrorism and Pedophiles as well as Bad Hackers.
No need for MS to adopt Mozilla and compromise a perfectly useful leveraging tool in IE, that now has over 90% of the market.
"Provided by the management for your protection."
The problem with this argument is that you're looking at it from the standpoint of someone who has at least a partial clue. 90% of the people in the world that use a web browser only use it because that's what browser was there for them to use.
Ask the average Joe off the street what web browser he uses, and you can expect either a blank look or "uh...AOL?" to be the answer. Do you really expect them to have the skill to go download another browser and install it? Why should they?
It's the principle of Path of Least Resistance. If you want Mozilla to take over, get Dell and Gateway to make it the default browser, and AOL to replace IE in its client. They won't. That would piss off MS. Hey, maybe that's why they say monopolies stifle change?
You know what? I'm a victim of this too. That little E is sitting right next to my start menu. Want to bet which browser gets used most? From a technology standpoint, both browsers show web pages almost identically, and the differences are only visible on pages where people consciously use the latest-and-greatest. You know, the ones that any sane company wouldn't use because it doesn't work with the Lowest Common Denominator.
Personally, I'd like to see NO middleware layer, but a well-defined API that anyone can use, but so well defined that it can't be ABused, letting people write the frontend in anything they like from Motif/C to Tcl/Tk.
:-)
What, like this? The doxygen server is down right now, so some links don't work; but we do have an excellent embedding API - used by Galeon, Epiphany, Camino, and many other projects.
the firebird/mozilla integration will undoubtably take place, but with 50 developers and monetary support gone, I doubt it will be to its full potential, and only be a footnote in the history of browsers. But I may be wrong. I hope I am wrong.
People are already raving about, and switching to, Mozilla Firebird, and it's only at 0.6.
Anyway, if you sit there and watch, you are more likely to be right than if you come and give us a hand
Gerv
Worse news...AOL has signed a pact with microsoft to use MS servers for delivering digital content..Time Warmer digital content. MS quietly makes a huge deal like this and it slips under the radar on /...people are too busy bashing MS to see the forest for the trees.
Netscape killed themselves with their own hubris and irrational reverence for Communicator 4. The rewrite might have been justfied, but the goal of making an exact clone of the old version was just a terrible management decision.
I guess they missed the memo where users decided that Communicator sucked. The whole premise seems to have been that there was some sort of giant secret Netscape fanbase out there that was only concerned about standards compliance issues. Quite the opposite -- in the laundry lists of bitches about Netscape, for most users compatibility was very low on the list.
It seems like they had this arrogant, obsolete Rule The World independant platform strategy left over from the Netscape Communication days and it just did not fit either AOL or mozilla.org. Not to mention the just plain arrogant decisions about compatibility that was not befitting a browser with 1% marketshare.
Even when you go back to old slashdot discussions about Mozilla, the concerns were being echoed -- Why make the mailer run in the same process space as the browser? Why not lightweight and modular like IE? Why so bloated? And the answer was "Because the way Netscape does things." Well, end users looked at it and just said "Netscape? Bleck." They were dead from the get-go.
It wasn't until the writing was on the wall and the pinkslips were in the mail did mozilla drop their Party Line of "When In Doubt, Copy Version 4". Firebird is what Mozilla should have been since the beginning -- a fresh new platform that had a chance at attracting users and devs.
Business. Numbers. Money. People. Computer World.
The Netscape employees were a part of AOL that did not earn AOL any money
Wildly incorrect, unless you don't include saving millions (tens, hundreds, I have no idea) of dollars as "earning" money. AOL is getting IE for free. Why? Because of two factors: 1) AOL was likely to win its case against MS. But, that was a minor thing, and MS would likely have made more money on the IE licensing than they would have lost on the case. So why?
2) AOL was waving Netscape around as their big stick, all the while hoping to never have to use it. The better Netscape got, the more reasonable AOL's threat became, and the more MS was looking at paying out for the suit AND losing the IE business to Netscape (thus legitimizing Netscape and likely moving a huge chunk of the industry with it).
MS could not allow that, and AOL knew it. I doubt anyone has ever gotten as sweet a deal out of MS, and this one was possible due to the hard work of Netscape employees.
Mind you, I think AOL has made the wrong choice. They're tying their fate to MS, and free or not, IE is now able to control the AOL users' experience without the threat of Netscape stepping in to replace it. I see a very dark future for AOL users, and I'll be continuing to shepherd all of my friends and relatives who use it over to the bells and other ISPs. Give them Mozilla mail+browser and an account with Joe dialup, and most of them are all set.
I suspect that when Microsoft sees that adoption of Windows XP04whatever/IE 7.0 just isn't happening at the rate they expect it to, and their browser market share is dropping as users replace IE6 with more modern browsers from Mozilla or Opera or whomever, they will change their course and revive the IE6.1 codebase, rushing to add in all the features that other browser users have been enjoying for years.
The question is, will it be too late? Netscape 4.x just got worse and worse as the developers were forced to try and add features like CSS into a codebase that was never designed to support it.
I love Mozilla Firebird - it's probably my favourite piece of software, and I'd gladly pay for it.
I already gave $15 to mozdev.org for the upgrade, but when will the Mozilla Foundation start accepting donations?
The US Army: promoting democracy through unquestioned obedience
Guess what, hotshot? The answer to that question is: Whichever one will not take 4+ years to ship in a working form while the world's largest and most predatory corporation is working overtime to dig your grave.
Please notice that despite the nonstop handwaving from the Mozilla team about how maintaining seperate native interfaces for the assorted Gecko frontends was supposed to be some sort of impossible herculean task that no reasonable person could be expected to tackle, in the time that it took to produce ONE semi-functional version of Mozilla, Opera Software, a company with not even a tenth of AOLNSCP's resources, produced multiple versions of a fully functional web browser, for all of Mozilla's major target platforms. Not only did they produce, maintain and upgrade native Windows, MacOS and Linux versions of Opera, but they increased their market share, and made money doing it.
"We had no choice but to implement XUL/XPFE" is the Big Lie of the entire Netscape saga. The fact that mozilla team members are still stating it with cultish earnestness suggests not that you all came to a reasoned engineering decision, but that your project management was not merely incompetant, but downright pathological. If 1% market share and the firing of your entire development team isn't enough to convince you that somewhere, somehow, you made the wrong decision, you are simply delusional.
Hopefully, some of the core Mozilla developers and managers will use some of their newly acquired free time to read Fred Brooks' "The Mythical Man-Month." When Brooks talks about the Second-System Effect, he's talking about you.
News for Nerds. Stuff that Matters? Like hell.
You could write solid HTML that doesn't depend on the idiosyncracies of ANY browser, including IE.
Sorry, but when I see comments like that, I really have no sympathy for anyone who is stuck coding for IE only. You contributed to the problem youself.
What happens then if Mozilla really does start to gain market share?
How threatened would Microsoft feel if Mozilla's user base hit 10%, 25%, or 50%? How high would the level have to get before they took action? My guess is that the first tactic would be to accelerate the next version of Windows, and provide incentives to make sure that the public upgrades (who says competition is a bad thing?). But if that's not enough, and Mozilla/Gecko use kept rising, how would they respond?
My hunch is that there is some threshold -- and I don't know what it is any more than anyone else does -- above which Microsoft would have no choice but to take IE out of mothballs, and the malarkey about "we can't improve IE without improving the underlying operating system." That's baloney, as should be obvious to anyone that has used any browser that has made a release since IE5/IE6 came out (Mozilla, Phoenix, Safari, Opera, OmniWeb, iCab, CrazyBrowser [which is even IE based!), etc).
So, if the sleeping giant stirs, and independent IE development is reactivated, how long would it take to ramp up work on it? It wouldn't surprise me if a point release (with atrophied features like popup management, maybe tabs) could be out in three to six months, and a full release within six months to a year. At a guess, obviously I don't know how long it would take to allocate people to work on it, get them familiar with the existing codebase, etc, but it wasn't that long ago that Netscape and Microsoft were release major browser upgrades on something like a nine month schedule, and maybe -- just maybe -- some stiff competition from Mozilla (and, to a lesser extent, Safari & Opera) can spur on another round of that.
Rabbits wake up, you know...
DO NOT LEAVE IT IS NOT REAL
For the record, I have nothing against the concept of cross-platform development toolkits. They can be great, time-saving things.
.net, openstep), the job of every project manager in the world is to stand behind that developer's back with a rattan cane, and smack them across the shoulders everytime they start to try it. Netscape's management completely failed in this critical task, and Microsoft's near-total control of a market that 5 years ago they were an also-ran in is the entirely predictable result.
But. Priorities. Opera developed a functional product that could be used by the vast majority of their paying customers first. Then they prototyped and shipped versions for secondary platforms. After they started seeing revenue (or the potential for revenue; I'm not privy to their books, merely aware that they're apparently still in business, unlike the Mozilla team), they then wrote the minimum amount of glue to allow them to ship their releases in lockstep. And they did it in what...a quarter of the time it took to build a functional XPFE browser? An eighth?
Second point: XUL was more than just a cross-platform widget set. If that had been all that it was, Moz 1.0 would have shipped in 1999, maybe even 1998. People write cross-platform toolsets all the damn time, and it rarely takes half a decade to do. No, XUL/XUI/XPFE were the logical result of Netscape drinking its own "it's not a web browser, it's an application platform! " kool-aid. It's an API, it's an application framework, it's a development toolkit, it's an XML parser, it's a widget set, it'll walk your dog and it gets your whites whiter!
Just search for comments from users with mozilla.org and netscape.com addresses on slashdot for the past few years: Mozilla wasn't just going to be a better web browser, it was going to be the foundation for an entire industry of "mozilla-based web applications" that someone, somewhere, was sure to write.
See, as far as I can tell, it's the not-so-secret desire of just about every developer who ever lived to write The One Universal Cross-Platform Middleware Library That Everyone Will Use Forever. Therefore, except in the exceedingly rare instances where doing that is the actual stated and understood project plan from the CEO on down (ie: win32, java,
News for Nerds. Stuff that Matters? Like hell.
It's time to put up or shut up on OSS - let's contribute rather than complain. The O'Reilly books on XUL have been published and the solid featureful codebase (of 1.4) has been finally, truly freed. Phoenix from ashes anyone? ...
... its stock may have tanked but they are doing something useful and making money (barely) now. No reason Mozilla.org can't do the same.
We should also all say THANK YOU to AOL for supporting the development of Mozilla. It could have been killed years ago but AOL visionaries kept it alive until it was "ready" for the wild. The $2 foundation grant should keep the foundation in servers and bandwidth as long as it needs and with a skeleton crew of CVS, bugzilla maintainers, build engineer detritus cleaners and sysadmin staff time the burn rate will be low.
How about mozdev.org and mozilla.org teaming up to share bandwidth and hardware? How about cutting over to SVN and getting tigris.org to collaborate? Bugzilla should be a fabulously attractive project for collaboration.
Sourceforge has focused
Sun and Redhat will provide build environments for weekly builds (nightlies are overkill) and gecko will be honed to the point wher it takes 10 lines of code to embed.
But who the heck will do the windows builds?!!
Netscape Navigator 3.0 made the company famous, but that was long long time ago.
Netscape Communicator 4 gave the company a bad reputation. It was buggy, unstable, and with lots of proprietary "features," oh and the "blink" tag too.
Netscape 5 never existed, because it took too long to develop. And people are begining to forget the Netscape brand name.
Netscape 6 finally released, but it was not ready at all. Scared off even die-hard Netscape fans.
Netscape 7 released by AOL with AOL spyware and craps. Most people would rather use Mozilla.
With all its mistakes and bad reputation, don't you think it is better to get rid of the Netscape brand name?
Ok that's it. Gerv, you need to stop talking utter garbage as if you were some kind of authority on the subject. You aren't.
Let's get some facts straight. First of all, CSS (any version) does not require that you style form controls. That is a myth, perpetuated by people like me, who used to want to see that level of control available to authors (As you can tell from the recently released CSS3 UI draft, the CSS working group is in fact moving away from stylable controls altogether).
Secondly, it is quite possible to develop multiple products for different platforms, and in fact, for some platforms it is the best way. In particular, the Mac. The Mac's UI is SO different from other platforms in key, if subtle, ways (menu bar placement, order of menu bar items, the fact that you can have an application running with no windows, etc) that it is significantly EASIER to write an application specifically for that platform rather than try to continually fix XUL to work on the Mac.
Sure, some platforms (Win32, Gnome) are similar enough that you can use one widget set and a few #ifdefs to support both platforms. But that is by no means a requirement.
So please, get some perspective, get your facts right, and stop posting with "@mozilla.org" in your sig as if it meant anything more than "I used to intern at Netscape and they never took away my mail account". The sad fact is you're only on staff@mozilla.org because the rest of staff are too chicken to ask you to leave.
-- Ian Hickson
(Editor of Mozilla's XBL spec, Mozilla's XUL spec, the W3C's CSS2.1 spec, three W3C CSS3 modules; Invited Expert to the W3C; QA contact for a dozen or more Bugzilla components; Mozilla contributor for 4+ years; Intern at Netscape for 4 times longer than Gerv; and currently employed by Opera software. But no fancy e-mail address.)