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MozillaZine Celebrates 5th Anniversary

Posted by timothy on from the how-may-picoseconds-is-that dept.

An anonymous reader writes "MozillaZine, the Mozilla news and advocacy site, is five years old today. They've got a fifth anniversary section, containing a message from their founder, a chronology (which makes a pretty good Mozilla timeline generally), some trivia (who's bright idea was Music to Code By?!) and an acknowledgements page. I think it's amazing that a free site like this has provided such a great service to the open-source community for half a decade. Cheers!"

9 of 132 comments (clear)

  1. Hmmm by ewithrow · · Score: 4, Interesting

    From the timeline:

    MozillaZine asks its readers to pay the site's hosting fees. Much to our surprise, you do.

    Not a lot of confidence in their reader base.. ;)

    --
    http://almostsmart.com
  2. Mozillazine deserves kudos... by Fnkmaster · · Score: 5, Interesting
    I know a lot of Slashbots seem to think that all geekdom is required to mindlessly support Mozilla, and that it has always been that way. But I remember a time in days of yore when Mozilla was the project everybody loved to hate. It was _the_ example of Open Source gone awry - here's how not to open up your product, here's how not to manage an open source project, etc. And back then Mozillazine was a quiet place - but Chris kept it running, and a small gang of the faithful hung out, waiting with baited breath for the next Milestone, hoping against hope that it would be faster, better and... oh, never mind, it couldn't get cheaper.


    Anyway, the point is, these days the majority of us - geekdom, that is - use Mozilla or a Mozilla-derived browser (Galeon and Phoenix/Firebird). Mozillazine deserves a lot of credit for keeping the fan base alive during the long, dark period of time when it wasn't really clear that Mozilla was ever going to succeed. Thanks, Mozillazine, for giving me hope and keeping me and a lot of other hopeful users fed with info and inspired to stay involved and keep the project going.

    1. Re:Mozillazine deserves kudos... by alex_ant · · Score: 3, Interesting

      At its primary goal, Mozilla never really did succeed. Opening the Navigator suite's source code was Netscape's last flailing hope against IE's obvious future domination of the desktop, and it didn't work. Netscape had a majority market share then, and has around what, 5% now? Mozilla is a good cross-platform browser and all, so I guess you could say it's successful in that way, but if the Mozilla Project ever wanted to be successful against MS, they should have narrowed their scope and focused on a kickass Windows/Mac Netscape 5.0 rather than reinventing the wheel (in the case of XUL), inventing new wheels (in the case of Bugzilla), and making sure their browser ran on every obscure platform under the sun. (Who the cares whether or not Mozilla runs on HP-UX besides like 23 people on the entire earth?)

      Mozilla: Geekish success, real worldish failure

    2. Re:Mozillazine deserves kudos... by swdunlop · · Score: 3, Interesting

      Mozilla wasn't about money for AOL/Netscape/Time Warner; at least, not directly. It appears to have been a major piece of leverage in AOL's ongoing battles with Microsoft for placement on the Windows desktop. AOL's argument in these negotiations probably ran along the lines of: "Give us what we want, or we'll take Gecko, and drop IE's component, from our app."

      When Gecko was started, Microsoft's greatest fear was that web browsers were going to commodify operating systems; is it any wonder that one of Mozilla's most hyped features was XUL, a cross-platform widget toolkit? (And yes, hype is the applicable term, here.. I've finished a rather sizeable Javascript/XUL frontend to our e-business database. Some permanency in the API's, and some coherent documentation would be a wonderful thing..)

      --
      Weapons of Mass Analysis
  3. 5 years....awesome! by Robowally · · Score: 2, Interesting

    I've been using Mozilla for about 5 years......and happy with it for most of that time. I have used it exclusively for about the last 4 years. I still have no use for 'local folders' in the email client....what are they for? Now looking forward to Firebird and Thunderbird!

    --
    Karma? Sorry, i don't believe in superstition. http://talk.thinkingmatters.org.nz
  4. Re:Firebird by DrMrLordX · · Score: 2, Interesting

    I gotta give credit where it's due. Firebird was about the only modern browser I could install on the stupid win95a box(p54c-100 mhz, 16 megs of RAM, yech) I patched up for my parents so they could use hotmail at home. IE6 wouldn't install, period, and the IE5 autodownloader/installer wouldn't function . . . I didn't even bother trying Opera.

    Sadly, Firebird was still slow as all hell on that machine. Sure beats using Netscape 3 though.

  5. Firebird and Thunderbird by doormat · · Score: 3, Interesting

    I honestly think that these two apps can replace IE/OE on most people's home computers within 6 months. I try to evangelized Firebird with my friends and coworkers and it worked up until the new google toolbar for IE started blocking popups.. I still love it though. Love live the *bird.

    --
    The Doormat

    If you're not outraged, then you're not paying attention.
  6. Re:loving firebird by simon_aus · · Score: 3, Interesting

    I understand what you mean about love, not in a natural way at all.

    A few weeks ago I was building some SAP middleware stuff at a hosting site (full MS) and showed our OS/DB guy firebird 0.6 - he won't touch anything else and this stuff is only supported on IE 5 and up.

    Then I showed the hosting company MD the difference in connecting to our external web mail on MS Exchange. I had been whining about its crap access speed for months. Two (2) seconds to load rather than 120++, nobody really believes it unless they see it. No hidden MS traffic going on there.

    Then add some cool extensions like; quicknote, slashzilla, JavaScript Console, Live HTTP Headers, google bar, MacroEditor. Daylight really is second, by several years. Skin it to look like KDE, whatever.

    Then try typing "about:config" in the address bar. Well, I'm starting to rant :)

    About running in memory (quicklaunch), I'm quite happy to wait 2-3 seconds for it to load - it's worth the wait many times over.

    --
    Stopping myself...Abort (core dumped)
  7. Re:loving firebird by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Interesting

    I run firebird 0.6.1 on a pII/233. It's not fast, but not slow either. It never, ever, crashes (unlike 0.6, which crashed about twice a day for me). Plugin installation hasn't bothered me, but then I run linux and us linux users are more used to stuff actually requiring independant thought before you get it to work. And as for why go through the trouble? Let's see... No security problems (unlike swiss cheese IE), faster page rendering, no popups (in an intelligent manner, unlike most IE popup blockers, which have an all or nothing policy), more intuitive and prettier UI, better extensions, better stability (on my systems at least), better standards support (and by extension prettier page rendering on a lot of sites), easier to design web pages in (thanks to the various developer extensions), and oh yeah, it runs in linux.

    I run firebird side by side with IE on a w2k system too. And guess what, I only run IE for windows update.

    And besides, anyone who says they don't want tabs hasn't actually used them for any mentionable period of time. Tabs rule. I am no longer able to use a tabless browser for longer than 5 minutes.