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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.
If Mozilla surpasses IE in the next couple years, do you think AOL will try to bail on Microsoft? This could get interesting. The litigation is over for now so the browser wars must begin again... as if they ever ended.
What the hell are all those guys doing there?
All the best,
--Bob
I'm amazed those people still had jobs. What were they doing, anyway?
Software Engineer, AOL/Netscape 1999-2003 : Contributed bloat and bugs to massive failed project. Managed to continue to get paid for years beyond useful function. Perfected art of staring at monitor and 'zoning out' while pretending to work.
As long as Steve Case was there, AOL was never going to cozy up to MS. Now that he's gone, you'll probably see a lot more of this now that AOL has to run themselves as a profit making concern.
$2 mn. for 10 coders for the Mozilla project isn't much, after you consider other expenses. I think AOL is acting as I'd predicted some time back - quick death for Netscape, slow poison to Mozilla, and surrender to the IE devil...
But then, to expect better from a company that settled a lawsuit with MS (for the latter's guilty conduct, mind you) is a bit too far.
-
If you keep throwing chairs, one day you'll break windows....
The Register have an interesting take on this too here
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.
Looks like AOL is trying to untie itself from Netscape and Mozilla as much as possible. By establishing and funding the Foundation, they continue to make the browser possible without tying themselves to it. The seeming hypocrisy of AOL using the IE browser (so they can stay on the Windows desktop) while developing Mozilla is now resolved.
Saddening, but understandable from a business perspective. Hopefully every one of those coders will be rehired by the Foundation so they can continue to do what they do best, with or without AOL's direct support.
I bet Microsoft's happy to see another competitor dying, though.
I heard how you just got screwed by AOL. Please call me next week; I think I may have some work that will interest you!
Signed,
Fred Garvin, Male Prostitute
P.S. Bring a raincoat.
And this really isn't meant to be a troll, I just wanna know...
Does anyone here actually use Netscape as their default browser?
If you do, why? Is it solely for political/moral/whatever reasons, or does it offer some technical feature that you have not found in another browser?
How many people here have Netscape as a browser on their computer NOT as a primary browser, and why did you install it? WHy is it not the primary browser?
Denver Isuzu Suzuki
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.
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.
I'm guessing there are some legal strings attached, but I wonder whether a fully AOL-capable version of Mozilla, distrbuted almost like the original AOL virus itself (in this case, I would, for example, bring over an install CD to help my AOL-using parents to move beyond IE... even better if they could get around AOL 7.0 or whatever they're using). Yes, they can use whatever browser they want, but how about an email client that works?
Is there a legal barrier in place to prevent this, especially from former (and whoafully under appreciated) employees ? Since AOL never followed through while they were there, I think the only real justice at this point would be to let loose better, cross-platform software for the AOL userbase out there. Who knows, maybe some linux users will make the switch to AOL...
As an aside, a few troll comments here and there have suggested that now IE can be the one true client to create web content for... I give such commentary little credence, but is the SCO action on IBM (et al.) and the AOL action on Mozilla just bad timing, or is the fact that Microsoft money flows to both make any more interesting their coincidence?
Just a thought. Posted using Moz 1.4, by the way.
There the proof then, competition is good for jobs because more people work on competing products.
50 Netscape codes go, but no more people are needed to work on IE.
So if you want more jobs, make sure there's more competition, not more retrictive copyright laws.
Simple.
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)
Given the layoff of the 50 programmers at AOL, I think that the newly-formed Mozilla Foundation (the "MF"...heh) should hold a bake sale and use the proceeds to hire 50 programmers from New Dehli to replace them. the MF will need to raise at least $50 or $60 bucks to get started...
GF.
Lots of petrified grits
$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.
I was confused too, I not-so-accidentally, accidentally pronounced it as "mozilla".
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
is going the way of the dinosaur...With mozilla Firebird out, they choose IE ?!?! Game Over AOL, Game Over man
errr....umm...*whooosh* *whoosh* Is this thing on ?
What sort of buisness decision is this that effectively cuts off their potential customer base? Tiing themselves to IE basically limits their customer base to bleeding edge windows systems. That old IE/media player/chat client just won't like that old hardware.
So AOL promised MS to use IE in their next versions (is this only for AOL windows?). How does the future plan of IE not being stand-alone affect this AOL using IE issue? Will MS release a special "IE for AOL" version? Will AOL not include a browser and just use IE APIs straight from Windows? What about non Windows users? Macs?
[alk]
too bad, but not unexpected. Remember, AOL's purpose in life is to make money, not promote alternatives to Microsoft.
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.
-- Slashdot: When Public Access TV Says "No"
50 developers is 10% of the Netscape work force... however, AOL's 'official' position is that they're still supporting the browser & the web portal.
... and Walmart sure is selling a whole lotta Lindows PC these days.
aol official position
AOL is making a *huge* mistake by not using the Gecko engine as the core of their browser/ISP product. Right now they're using Gecko as the core in their Compuserve and Mac AOL product, but still using IE in the Windows product. Seems like they could streamline their internal coding operations by standardizing on one code base, which would ultimately save them more money than letting developers go.
Also, by using the Gecko engine in the product, they could in theory start offering AOL on Linux-based PC's; while that might sound like an unprofitable venture at first, I can't imagine all of those people purchasing Lindows-based PC's at Walmart not wanting AOL as their ISP
where's the time Netscape was a cool company and everyone wanted to work there..
Learn about pinball machines on www.flippers.be
Honestly tho, who fucking cares!? I mean, I'm sorry to those that lost their jobs, definitely - this is not directed at them. But as far as the AOL shitbag goes, you had to see this stuff coming from a mile away. They are not even remotely the same AOL that Case or jwz worked for. They are one of the largest media companies in the world!
All these biz guys understand the M$ biz guys. They're all about numbers and not innovation, so the bloodletting is beginning; nothing anyone can do about it.
Now, that said, Mozilla is the key here. I don't think it will die in the forseeable future. Combined with Linux gaining more and more ground, there must exist a free, open browser. Sure, Konqueror will hang around, but Mozilla will still have a larger user base. And companies that depend on that, like Redhat, IBM, Sun (once they ditch Netscape 4), and others, they will put development efforts into it. And if the Moz Foundation gets really strapped for cash, then just move it to SourceForge or Savannah.
Point is is that there is no use thinking or worrying about AOL or Netscape anymore. They've been goners for some time. Mozilla is the focus and given the 'freeness' of the code, it will continue to live on regardless of cut funding and developers. Granted, it might slow, but no worse than IE.
I for one am sorry my fellow coders are out of a job, but I have all the faith in the world for Moz cuz I think it's a great browser. I mean, c'mon, if the C=64 (long live the C=64!) can still live after all these years, why not Moz?
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
With Netscape circling the drain for so long, it was just a matter of time. Netscape was too far gone to be salvageable anyway. Mozilla has been a much better browser, almost from go, than Netscape ever was, which is a little surprising since they were based on the same code base.
On a related topic, I have fiddled with Mozilla and Opera and compared them, and I think it's safe to say that Opera's claim of being the fastest browser out there is incorrect.
Now that AOL has made a deal with the devil, Netscape's demise went from anticipated to guaranteed. I hate to see Netscape go, as it was a viable alternative at one time and some people out there still prefer it.
Be excellent to each other. And... PARTY ON, DUDES!
...this is just AOL cutting the Mozilla project loose. Yeah, $2 million contribution to the Mozilla Foundation isn't much, but I expect many other companies to contribute. No worries here. In fact, it seems appropriate that the Mozilla project is disconnected from AOL.
--Drunk as in Beer
It is official; Netcraft now confirms: Mozilla is dying
One more crippling bombshell hit the already beleaguered Mozilla community when IDC confirmed that Mozilla market share has dropped yet again. Now it is down to less than a fraction of 1 percent of all browsers. Coming on the heels of a recent Netcraft survey which plainly states that Mozilla has lost more market share, this news serves to reinforce what we've known all along. Mozilla is collapsing in complete disarray, as fittingly exemplified by failing dead last in the recent Sys Admin comprehensive networking test.
You don't need to be a Kreskin to predict Mozilla's future. The hand writing is on the wall: Mozilla faces a bleak future. In fact there won't be any future at all for Mozilla because Mozilla is dying. Things are looking very bad for Mozilla. As many of us are already aware, Mozilla continues to lose market share. Red ink flows like a river of blood.
Netscape is the most endangered of them all, having lost 93% of its core developers. The sudden and unpleasant departures of long time Netscape developers only serves to underscore the point more clearly. There can no longer be any doubt: Netscape is dying.
Let's keep to the facts and look at the numbers.
Due to the troubles of AOL, abysmal sales and so on, Netscape went out of business and was taken over by AOL who sell another troubled service. Now AOL is also nearly dead, its corpse turned over to yet another charnel house.
All major surveys show that Mozilla has steadily declined in market share. Mozilla is very sick and its long term survival prospects are very dim. If Mozilla is to survive at all it will be among OS dilettante dabblers. Mozilla continues to decay. Nothing short of a miracle could save it at this point in time. For all practical purposes, Mozilla is dead.
Fact: Mozilla is dying
(With apologies to the original *BSD is dying troll).
With Netscape, they had AIM support built right-in. All MSIE has is a little taskbar button for Messenger (I dunno if they have one for AIM, too). I'm pretty sure it won't be as easy to create a Netscape profile using your AIM login at the same time though.
And what about Real Player? IE integrates pretty well with Media Player. Actually, if Real Player up and died, it would be no big loss, but I wonder how AOL is still gonna push that stuff, if they don't push Netscape anymore that comes with it all.
Well, not like they were really pushing Netscape anyway. They just made it the default browser, and I'm sure the average AOLer didn't notice anyway. Without Netscape though, I imagine that the other two might have a harder time standing on their own.
I just hope WinAmp doesn't get the axe, too.
So Microsoft has more than enough cash on hand to buy out AOL/TW.
If the marketplace were completely free and unfettered, you'd think that Microsoft would, rather than pour money down the hole that has been MSN, simply buy out AOL with its 30 million subscribers.
But Microsoft won't do this because they know they can't; that the DoJ would immediately ask questions about unfair market consolidation were such a buyout offer made.
So instead MSFT pours money into MSN and leverages its dominant products of Windows, Office and Explorer to subsidize MSN.
As AOL dies slowly over a few years, this will be viewed as "OK", the marketplace in action, and no inconvenient questions will be raised except by AOL management and stockholders.
Since MS can rely upon a steady revenue stream from Windows and Office to subsidize its efforts into taking over new markets they enjoy an advantage that AOL and other competitors simply don't have.
People buy Windows and Office like they're a standard, a necessity, that's no more avoidable than paying gasoline taxes.
Yes, Microsoft has the enviable position of just collecting taxes - like a government. And competing against the government is a no-win situation.
It is a foregone conclusion that AOL will lose. They will wither to nothing, or simply to a marginally-sized pet, like Apple, who would have died long ago if Microsoft had decided to not release Office for Mac.
"Provided by the management for your protection."
And which four would that be?
Firebird, Camino (previously known as Chimera), Galeon and Epiphany.
Gerv
(gerv@mozilla.org)
I perused the article and I'm not sure if it's Mozilla or Netscape developers... they are not the same thing, and I'm sure AOL has developers who take Mozilla and massage it into Netscape. If those are the people getting laid off then I don't feel so bad.
Well, I feel bad for them, but I've always hated the changes AOL made to Mozilla before releasing it as Netscape - like when they removed the pop-up feature, and all the crap they include.
I too, though, find it painful explaining Mozilla to people over and over again.
Stupid sexy Flanders.
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.
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.
Microsoft doesn't need to provide you with competing browsers. They should not prohibit system builders like Dell or Gateway from doing so, however.
Imagine that many drug companies manufactured a similar allergy medicine. One of them also makes a heart medicine that dominates it's market. Then that drug maker goes to all the pharmacies and says "You can't sell my heart medicine unless you only sell my allergy medicine." The pharmacies know that the heart medicine is vital to many of their clients and that if they don't have that heart medicine, the clients will go elsewhere. They cave. The other drug companies lose access to the market for their allergy medications, and the consumers lose choice.
Microsoft doesn't need to provide support for competing products, but they shouldn't user their position as the dominant desktop OS provider (heart medicine manufacturer) to prevent system builders (pharmacies) from also providing browsers (allergy medicines) from other firms.
Bob Slydell: The Netscape developers.
Bill Lumbergh: Who're they?
Bob Porter: You know, squirrely looking guys, mumble a lot.
Bill Lumbergh: Oh, yeah.
Bob Slydell: Yeah, we can't actually find a record of them being current employees here.
Bob Porter: I looked into it more deeply and I found that apparently what happened is that they were laid off five years ago and no one ever told them, but through some kind of glitch in the payroll department, they still get paychecks.
Bob Slydell: So we just went a ahead and fixed the glitch.
Bill Lumbergh: Great.
Dom Portwood: So um, the Netscape developers have been let go?
Bob Slydell: Well just a second there, professor. We uh, we fixed the *glitch*. So they won't be receiving paychecks anymore, so it will just work itself out naturally.
Bob Porter: We always like to avoid confrontation, whenever possible. Problem solved from your end.
--- What
Opera is so much faster on my system. It is also much more strict when it comes to rendering pages, making flaws and bad sgml/xml stand out. Very good when you're writing your own web pages; not so good when you're visiting others'.
Oh, and I really like the ability to easily apply your own style sheets on the fly in Opera, making those pages using green text on orange background readable.
Both have popupblockers and good cookie control.
Did I mention Opera is much faster than Mozilla? :-) (Yeah, I know it's flamebait, but come use my system for an hour and you'll see what I mean.)
"Stop failing the Turing test!" -- Dilbert
Sorry, that was supposed to be:
The letters A O L undergo a shift of +12 +4 +2.
Must...drink...more...coffee! [sigh]
AOL has announced that it will use IE for the browser for seven years. Microsoft has announced that there will no longer be a standalone version of IE. So, if AOL is to still work on existing Windows boxes, then it must remain at IE6. But, it's hard to beleive that they won't want to move to the latest and greatest (tongue in cheek) IE when it ships, but that would force AOL to either maintain separate code bases or drop support for current versions of Windows. If they choose the separate code bases, then using the least common denominator approach, AOL won't be able to include future web features, because they don't exist in IE6. Dropping support for older versions of Windows, is a very calculated risk. There are two possible outcomes. Facing a forced upgrade, either AOL's would switch to a different ISP or shell out the bucks for a new version of Windows (and possibly new hardware). My bet would be to switch ISPs, but I'm sure AOL and MS are counting on people buying a new version of Windows, instead. If they are right, that's not a bad investment for MS $750M to get AOL users to all buy a copy of the next version of Windows. At 35 million AOL subscribers and a $100 upgrade cost, MS stands to gross $3.5 billion dollars. Not a bad return on investment.
Does anyone here actually use Netscape as their default browser?
Mozilla; yes of course.
What's not to like?
Well, according to ex-mozilla employee list one of the coders was:
- Driving an Alfa Romeo Spider, inspired by Dustin Hoffmans drive across the San Mateo bridge in "The Graduate", with a Netscape sticker
- Drinking 8 cans of soda a day and building a freakin replica of the golden gate bridge
- Doing bbqs at 5 Eden Avenue, Sunnyvale
- Kegs of guinness at above address
- Having the police turn up at above address - not to stop the party, but to check out Mike McQues Hummer
- 'Video conferencing' with parents back home in Ireland by sitting in front of Fish Cam!
- Heading with netscapees Tom Pixley and Rob Larrubio to Vegas to see U2 perform on the opening night on the Pop Mart tour, and getting more wasted than he has ever been in his life at 'Manhattan' in the New York New York hotel!
- Nerf gun wars.
- Duke Nuken wars.
- Mario Super Kart wars.
- Being interviewed or filmed once a week, and getting annoyed by it
- Writing a script that spat out random numbers on the screen for the film crews to get excited about
- Touring Be when they had 10 employees - and then getting a BeBox
- Taping up PABs monitor when he screwed up
- Beer Busts, and then going on the piss in Palo Alto with the cute admin girl from his building
Coding not included.
"You should never doubt what nobody is sure about." -- Willy Wonka
Regarding to Opera... if you are comparing it to mozilla... Opera is faster, damn faster.
My experience has actually been the opposite. I have to agree, Opera is plenty fast, but every time I have compared the two, Mozilla has left Opera behind. It very well could be a function of my Windows configuration, though, as I have done some odd things to my system. I haven't tried Opera under Linux (since early beta), so I can't compare there, but I have used Mozilla under Linux and have been most pleased.
Regardless, Mozilla and Opera are both faster than Netscape.
Be excellent to each other. And... PARTY ON, DUDES!
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.
Then again, I don't really have an understanding of the mozilla/netscape relationship, just what I heard--mozilla started when netscape opened its code, aol gives mozilla money, aol gets all the cool stuff from mozilla and reinserts it into netscape. If it's more complicated than that and I'm missing something, please feel free to explain it to me.
Warning: Opinions known to be heavily biased.
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
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.
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!
Welp, I admit it. Looks like I was wrong. An AOL-supported Mozilla is dead.
What does this mean for the OS X AOL client? That's the one thing (Gecko-based OS X client is already out there) that made me think AOL'd keep going. Looks like IE 7 (or whatever) is going to have some really neat stuff. Enough that the MS licensing agreement with AOL makes it a good idea for AOL to kill Gecko as a back-up engine for its software.
Maybe the Safari embeddable engine is easy enough to use that AOL is going that way. Or maybe AOL OS X's engine will just fold up into proprietary software. The MPL allows that.
I don't feel *that* badly. AOL, whether it meant to or not, pulled the plug, strangely enough, immediately after Moz became the best browser on the market. That's good timing from where I'm sitting -- which is in front of a monitor, posting with Mozilla/Firebird.
It's all 0s and 1s. Or it's not.
http://www.joelonsoftware.com/news/20030601.html
668: Neighbour of the Beast
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."
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!
No, you completely misunderstood what I was saying.
Point is, the OS, as viewed by the end user, would include a browser. Someone in the supply chain would include one, however no browser would be forced to be on everyone's desks.
Within your (popular) car-analogy framework, we have:
Today's Situation
You buy your car from a Honda dealership, a Toyota dealership, a Ford dealership, or a used car dealership down the street. From whomever you purchase a car, the situation's the same. Because Exxon made the engine, it requires Exxon gas. Helpfully, they've included Exxon gas with your car. You can use other gas, but Exxon recommends their own gas (and requires you use it at least a little, because of how they designed the engine; heck, you've heard a silly rumor that Exxon engines sometimes turn on the engine warning light if they detect the wrong (i.e. non-Exxon) type wheel, carbuerator, distributor cap, etc., especially the once-popular but now rare DR-DOS wheel, and you've wondered once or twice in your daydreams if this couldn't have also led to some of the problems you experienced with your Exxon engine when you've used non-Exxon gas), so 95% of the car drivers out there buy only Exxon gas. Coincidentally, since the market on gas has collapsed (due to Exxon's monopoly position and abuse thereof? But you're Joe User and don't notice or care about such things), most gas stations only sell Exxon gas. They will serve you Exxon gas, and a few will let you tank up with other types of gas, but the vast majority of users drive their Ford, Toyota, Volkswagen, Volvo, or whatever still using their Exxon engine with the Exxon gas, and blissfully visiting Exxon-only stations.
Oh, yeah. You've vaguely heard somewhere (being Joe User, not the Greenpeace type) that Exxon's not the happy-friendly company they portray themselves to be, but rather reportedly had a bad spill up somewhere in the North, and have been rather rude to Shell and BP recently, the only (minor) competition left to them. You've also heard some rumours (you're still a little more informed than most of the Joe Users out there in some aspects) vague rumblings about problems with Exxon engines and about the number of odd things (insects?) that turn up in the Exxon gas. But, all this didn't make it into the mainstream media, since Exxon also owns a large portion of some major news sites, and since everyone knows and uses Exxon, and they seem such a nice company....
The Proposed Situation:
We still assume that all car manufacturers ship with Exxon engines. However, in this situation, Exxon actually is the happy, friendly company they portray themselves to be. The car dealers or their suppliers are allowed to ship whatever gas they want to in the cars they sell. Exxon might (or might not) require a little Exxon gas now and again, but the other gas is of higher quality and has more features (cleans various things, helps prevent those annoying attackers from effectively using sugar in your gas tank, etc.), so many dealerships and people ship the gas they like to use. Of course, you're free at some dealerships to come with your own gas, or to select from a (sometimes wide!) variety of gas. And the dealerships sometimes also get a kickback from the gas vendors, for giving people a chance to try their gas.
And that's the way I see it.
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Given enough personal experience, all stereotypes are shallow.
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.
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
GTK apeared because they needed a toolkit for gimp.
Analogies don't equal equalities, they are merely somewhat analogous.
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.
I'm exercising my karma-burning perogative baby...
Fuck AOL.
Fuck those cockmunching peabrain shiteating worthless motherfuckers.
Thank you.
StrategyTalk.com, PC Game Forums
I suspect the real reason is money and an understanding of what their real business and goals are. AOL isn't in the software business, it is in the content business. It costs a bunch of money to develop and support a browser. The articles I read said that they had 50 people working on NS. That is a cost of that is probably over $7.5 million a year.
AOL realizes that they compete with MS as an ISP and content provider. They have given up the idea that they are going to be a desktop platform and compete with MS. It never made sense in the first place. The competition is about content and service. AOL wants to leverage MS's development expense, not duplicate it.
MS supports the standards, does a good job rendering and, as was pointed out, handles poorly coded pages much better than NS. 97% of users are using IE. The world has changed. AOL has changed. AOL has realized it and moved on to do what it needs to to be a successful business. They don't need to be in the browser business to succeed. They don't need to fight a religious war with MS about browsers and desktops to succeed.
This may disappoint many who are looking for a champion to fight what they perceive as MS's hegemony. If that is what you want, look to Sun or IBM, it isn't AOL any more. In reality, it never was, because AOL really never threw the effort needed to compete and to win (if that was even possible) into Netscape.
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?