MozillaZine Celebrates 5th Anniversary

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MozillaZine Celebrates 5th Anniversary

Posted by timothy on Monday September 1, 2003 @03:52PM 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!"

26 of 132 comments (clear)

Hmmm. by MoeMoe · 2003-09-01 15:53 · Score: 3, Funny

Wonder what I should bring as a present to the party.... Lets see, 5th anniversary... Thats paper or wood gifts right?

--
Business \Busi"ness\, n.;
A scam in which all people involved perceive as beneficial...
1. Re:Hmmm. by MrLint · 2003-09-01 16:01 · Score: 3, Funny
  
  ya know its a bit ironic to give paper and woods gifts in a virtual world:)
2. Re:Hmmm. by Joe+Tie. · 2003-09-01 16:12 · Score: 4, Funny
  
  Not to mention that it's to a fire breathing dragon.
  
  --
  Everything will be taken away from you.
3. Re:Hmmm. by bsharitt · 2003-09-01 16:18 · Score: 5, Funny
  
  I was going to send an e-card, but the site said I needed IE 4 or higher.
4. Re:Hmmm. by IvyMike · 2003-09-01 19:21 · Score: 3, Funny
  
  Beavis, I get wood from the internet all the time.
Party Hat! by trolman · 2003-09-01 15:57 · Score: 3, Funny

There was a Reported shortage of Godzilla heads at Spencers this week. Now I understand!
Picoseconds? by rolocroz · 2003-09-01 16:08 · Score: 5, Funny

from the how-many-picoseconds-is-that dept.
5 years = 1.5778463 x 10^20 picoseconds. I love Google's calculator.

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I meta-mod all positive moderation Unfair, because it's abuse of the system.
1. Re:Picoseconds? by *xpenguin* · 2003-09-01 16:22 · Score: 5, Informative
  
  For the uninformed:
  http://www.google.com/search?&q=5%20years%20in%20p icoseconds
I hope for their sake.. by CooCooCaChoo · 2003-09-01 16:09 · Score: 5, Insightful

They're not singing that awful song, "Every walking the dinosaur" ;-)

5 years, small number of donations and it has become the corner stone of the Mozilla advocacy and users groups. 2 years, $40billion in the bank and Microsoft is still trying to creat that "community atmosphere". Maybe we should bottle some "community atmosphere" from Mozilla and sell it to Microsoft ;-)

--
"The difference between pornography and erotica is the lighting" - Woody Allen
1. Re:I hope for their sake.. by The+Almighty+Dave · 2003-09-01 16:22 · Score: 5, Insightful
  
  Maybe we should wish in one hand and shit in the other, then see which one fills up faster.
  Microsoft is a corporation. they are not trying to create "community atmosphere", they are trying to sell a product. If projecting the illusion of "community atmosphere" will help them market that product, then they will try to create that illusion. They care about profits, nothing more, nothing less.
2. Re:I hope for their sake.. by SunPin · 2003-09-01 17:21 · Score: 4, Insightful
  
  Every few months, I've given Mozilla a try just to keep the faith. This summer, 1.5 Beta found a permanent spot on my drive as the undisputed default browser/mail application. I just happened to avoid the sobig disaster because of it.
  
  Firebird looks slick but it's not ready for primetime quite yet. I like Thunderbird as well and I look forward to seeing it fully developed.
  
  The Mozilla Organization is a terrific example of open source producing something much better and even more innovative than commercial competitors.
  
  Internet Explorer cannot hold a candle to Mozilla 1.4/1.5. As people that were sitting on the fence decide to get involved (like myself), IE will have no reason to return even in 2008. It's completely over for IE.
  
  Mozilla is a victory for open source software. It's not a "me too" project that seeks to replicate IE to spite M$. More projects can/will learn from the Mozilla example. Microsoft is running out of time to open its software. Eventually, the OSS options will be better and widely known to the public.
  
  --
  Laws are for people with no friends.
3. Re:I hope for their sake.. by whereiswaldo · 2003-09-01 18:05 · Score: 5, Insightful
  
  Internet Explorer cannot hold a candle to Mozilla 1.4/1.5.
  
  I totally agree. But you know, Microsoft could have added Mozilla's features into IE with no significant technical problems. Why they haven't added advanced features into IE, in part, is because of their corporate agenda. This goes especially for ad blocking. Microsoft is the ad agency's friend. Mozilla is the user's friend. Microsoft pretend's to be the user's friend, but the veneer is wearing off.
Firebird by kgbspy · 2003-09-01 16:10 · Score: 4, Informative

It took them five years to do it, but they've come up with the best web browser known to man: with daylight second, and Opera third.

Here's hoping that the next five years sees the same committed focus to Firebird as has been poured into Mozilla.

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1. Re:Firebird by kgbspy · 2003-09-01 17:50 · Score: 4, Funny
  
  Y'know... when you've been up until 4am debugging somebody else's badly written code, you finally get to sleep, and the garbage truck / noisy neighbour / dog next door wakes you up a few hours later. You get up, open the curtains, and this strange, transluscent, yellow stuff filters into your room.
  
  That's daylight.
  
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Hmmm by ewithrow · 2003-09-01 16:26 · 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.. ;)

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http://almostsmart.com
Mozillazine deserves kudos... by Fnkmaster · 2003-09-01 16:28 · 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 · 2003-09-01 18:04 · 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 · 2003-09-01 20:38 · 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
Simple, you cannot sell or purchase by PotatoHead · 2003-09-01 16:30 · Score: 4, Insightful

people that actually give a shit. Everybody knows Microsoft is here to make their cash pile larger at any cost.

The Mozilla folks are here to make sure we have a good browser that runs on what we choose to run it on.

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Blogging because I can...
loving firebird by planckscale · 2003-09-01 16:52 · Score: 5, Informative

This browser *in use now* is my newest best friend (I know, sad huh). Simple, elegant, tabs, history, caches, privacy, and it's download manager are all that I need. Also, it just performs faster, blocks popups, it's free and just seems to have more for my money. I'd like to see better plug-in support; java, shockwave, Wild tangent and some other plugins aren't exactly mindless installs in some cases. Also I would like to see Firebird run in memory in the background like Mozilla does, and a download "acceleration" with mulitple FTP sites would be a bonus. Otherwise, it's my favorite DEFAULT browser :-)

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Namaste
1. Re:loving firebird by simon_aus · 2003-09-01 18:14 · 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)
What better way to celebrate an aniversary... by rsilvergun · 2003-09-01 17:07 · Score: 4, Funny

then with a slashdotting?

--
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
Re:Nightly Mozilla builds with AA Support compiled by ishmalius · 2003-09-01 17:16 · Score: 4, Informative

ftp to:
ftp.mozilla.org/pub/nightly/latest-trunk

it is:
MozillaFirebird-i686-linux-gtk2+xft.tar.gz
Firebird and Thunderbird by doormat · 2003-09-01 17:46 · 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.

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The Doormat

If you're not outraged, then you're not paying attention.
Music to Code By by YOU+LIKEWISE+FAIL+IT · 2003-09-01 18:40 · Score: 3, Funny

(who's bright idea was Music to Code By?!)
Just as a curio, the linked page features as the second selection Wesley Willis - who sadly passed away just a little while ago on the 21st of August, aged 40. I also used to listen to Wesleys strange stream of conciousness punk rants while coding. I'll miss you, Wes.

-- YLFI

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One god, one market, one truth, one consumer.
Re:In light of Mozialla's excellent baysian filter by Channard · 2003-09-01 23:26 · Score: 3, Informative

That wasn't a spelling mistake, by the way.. I was in fact referring to Mozialla, the splinter browser developed from Mozilla. Honest.
Seriously, kudos to Mozilla for having a spam filter that is better than any of the non confirmation spam-tools I've seen.