Life After Netscape For Mozilla Developers

An anonymous reader submits "MozillaZine has an article up on life after Netscape for Mozilla developers formerly employed there. Several developers are now employed by the non-profit Mozilla Foundation in full or part-time positions, others have been hired by IBM and Daniel Glazman was contracted by Lindows to write web publishing application Nvu. Another group of developers have joined together to form Mozilla Consulting to work on customized Mozilla enhancements. The amount of interest by non-Netscape companies in Mozilla is surely a positive sign for the future of the project."

Comments

Article summary

[Anonymous Coward]

1. Netscape paid Mozilla developers
2. AOL/Netscape pulls out of Mozilla program
3. Mozilla developers get rehired by different companies

Seriously, there's very little "life after Netscape" in the article aside from "X works for Y now".

probably the coolest life after netscape

[cnb]

JWZ

Bio: I used to be a hacker. Now I run a nightclub.

a lot will depend on results

[Fux the Penguin]

While it is good that these people have jobs and can continue to work on Mozilla I think it is a little early to claim that industrial support is well under way. It is certainly very positive that some companies are willing to put their money where their mouth is but I think a lot will depend on the return of this current investment. If nvu doesn't materialize or if other key mozilla components do not deliver on their promises (e.g. calendar is so far mostly vapor ware in terms of interoperability), I think mozilla adoption by industry will not become much better.

Certainly there are some great opportunities: - There is an enormous trend in the public sector (especially outside the US) to adopt open source. Mozilla is part of this trend for non MS platforms. - Internet explorer does not seem to have evolved in the past few years and is unlikely to do so in the coming few years: market share can be gained. - Apple seems to be moving away from MS products, this will stimulate adoption of alternative browsers by both users and developers. Alternative heere does not necessarily mean Mozilla but other than IE.

Re:a lot will depend on results

[sphealey]

I think there is a lot of food for thought in your post. The other issue that bothers me is this: millions of people have posted to various on-line forums over the last 4 years about how much they love Netscape/Mozilla and how much they dislike Internet Explorer. Ok, if there are 1,000,000 people with this level of concern, and they each sent 50 USD to the Mozilla Foundation (not a lot of money for someone in the Western world; just 25 cups of Starbucks coffee), then the Moz Foundation would have 50,000,000 USD available to support development. That would be enough to keep a good team running for 5-10 years.

So - how is Mozilla Foundation's fundraising going? What is their endowment status at the moment?

sPh

Re:a lot will depend on results

[NeoSkandranon]

...and they each sent 50 USD to the Mozilla Foundation (not a lot of money for someone in the Western world; just 25 cups of Starbucks coffee)

Or a week of groceries for a college student. Or two-three tanks for gas for a commuting worker. Or a phone bill. Or...

You get the idea. It's not alot of money, but it's not an amount alot of those 1 mil people probably have to kick around.

Litmus Test

[IA-Outdoors]

The real test for Mozilla, to me, has been on my family. As an IT professional, as many of us are, I get roped into supporting PC's and networks (sigh) for family members. One of the first things I do is install Mozilla for them, import their IE bookmarks and set up mozilla mail to use their hosts mail accounts. I also limit JavaScript, tighten security and configure the pop-up stuff. Together with the anti-spam features now in Mozilla Mail I find my family is truly happier with Mozilla than IE. Sure, from time-to-time I get complaints that website X wouldn't work with Mozilla but for the most part they are happy. To that end, kudos to the folks at Mozilla and I'm glad the OSS community his finding good homes for the folks from Netscape.

Re:Litmus Test

[mcpkaaos]

I get roped into supporting PC's and networks (sigh) for family members

I felt your pain. Then I discovered the solution, and my life has been smooth sailing ever since. Two words: restraining order. Sure, it can make family gatherings a little tense for a while, but after dad spends a few nights in the clink for one too many Windows 95 support calls, things start to settle down.

Re:Litmus Test

[rifter]

More often than not, the problem is due to poor HTML. IE typically renders "what they meant" while Gecko renders "what they coded." Check out The Burning Edge to see all the bugs and fixes in the nightly builds of Firebird. Check out the FB Bugs forum at Mozillazine and see how many of the "This site doesn't work right!" posts are due to coding errors rather than bugs in the rendering engine. Thanks to IE, people have gotten used to non-standard HTML and poor coding. If you write some really bad HTML that IE happens to render properly (the way you want it to look), and Mozilla renders it exactly the way you wrote it (errors and all), the problem is still your code, not Mozilla's rendering engine. Oddly enough, if you write correct, standard code it will work on any browser (disregarding bugs in the browser, which aren't your problem).

You know, I agree with you. Microsoft encourages sloppy coding in every area. This is the secret to their success. It is a scourge on the IT world and we should whip those developers into shape, with whips if necessary.

But, honestly,at the end of the day, will that MCSP/MCSE on the other end of webmaster@stupidbank.com really give a shit that his site using ASP.Net on IIS with FrontPage Extensions does not work in Mozilla because of shoddy code when it works fine and dandy in the browser 99.9999% of the world uses? No, s/he already proved s/he does not care by writing the crappy code in the first place.

Besides, in the world of code and standards "compliant" and "crappy" are in the eye of the beholder. If there is a html spec which a site violates but which IE is able to show properly and Mozilla is not, some might say that the Mozilla people are wrong about what the specification says. This is, in fact, often Microsoft's argument. They claim their reading of a standards document whereas the OSS community tends toward another. But is this wise?

I mean if the goal is adoption of the browser, why deliberately choose a path that means you know it won't work with the data people are actually using everyday? At minimum why not allow a broken implementation that emulates IE in certain respects? It's not like this is the first time this has happened. Lots of standard UNIX tools have historically had multiple defined behaviours including those which were considered broken by maintainers. ( I_WANT_A_BROKEN_PS anyone?)

Also OSS is not perfect in the area of standards and good coding practices, though this is a worthy goal to which most such projects aspire. It is just as prone to the "well it compiles and runs" school of coding and unclear standards documents as anything else. So it is really hard to claim the moral high ground here IMHO.

I hope it does well

[uradu]

Mozilla with XUL is indeed a nice distributed platform, a much richer way of writing "thin" clients than *HTML. You can actually write distributed apps that feel so much like a native local app that most users wouldn't even notice--except for performance, of course. A lot of porkiness and memory leakiness still needs to be removed, and some usability loose ends need to be tied up before everything is peachy. Right now (even with the latest builds I believe) keeping multiple copies of Mozilla up for days eventually eats an incredible amount of memory. Closing them brings the system down with furious swapping activity.

Here's the link to donate

[sphealey]

Should have included this link in the prior post:

To donate to Mozilla Foundation:

http://www.mozilla.org/foundation/donate.html

sPh

Good to see software can be commercial but free

[Realistic_Dragon]

It's always promising to see a vindication of the open source model - and that is what this is.

Companies get what they want (the ability to cut development time and costs with prewritten code they can easily adapt).

Consumers get what they want (a web browser that works at no cost).

Hackers get what they want (a web browser they can hack, where their efforts will be recognised not cause a lawsuit).

Developers get what they want (income from doing something cool).

It's a win win solution, unlike closed development models. No one looses out at all, except the companies that exist to be the middle man. But even they don't loose out, as the shareholders can take their capital and deploy it where it is more worthwhile for the economy, which is the corner stone of capitalism. No more duplicated effort, creating the same product over and over, which by definition can never meet the requirements of all interested parties. Superb!

Slow down...

[Orien]

The amount of interest by non-Netscape companies in Mozilla is surely a positive sign for the future of the project.

I know we are all anxious to see the project have a long-term future, especially with the recent changes, but that is jumping the gun just a bit. There is a big difference in companies having interest in Mozilla employees than having interest in Mozilla. Just because IBM hired Daniel Glazman doesn't mean they have any interest in Mozilla, they just know he is qualified in specific development areas that they want to focus on.

Open source, and getting it right.

[fishlet]

I hope this isn't too far off topic

Mozilla is a prime example of the virtues of open source verses closed propriatary software (ex: IE). When Mozilla was way overdue, people called it dead. From a market share perspective maybe they were right. However because of taking the time to do it right, Mozilla is now the best (if not most popular) browser around. Because of this, those are innovative enough to come up with new features are going to choose Mozilla first to implement their ideas. Some of the guys from Netscape (the real innovators, not the ones who were just there for a paycheck) probably have a few good ideas left in them.

Making progress

[linuxci]

Although it's good to see a lot of Mozilla developers still getting paid to work on Mozilla development, there's also a lot of former Netscape people that have went to work on other browsers but still occaisionally keep up involvement with Mozilla. e.g. Ian Hickson now works for Opera software but still has some involvement in the Mozilla community as does David Hyatt who left Netscape to work with Apple on Safari.

There's also more volunteers than the early days, not just with coding and testing, but with user support too, such as the excellent Mozilla Firebird and Thunderbird Help sites.

But in reality to the end user, it does not matter how many people are developing it, it's the quality of the product that counts, and I think that with recent releases there's nothing that can beat Mozilla in all round usefulness. If you've not tried it for ages then it's worth a try now, features like type ahead find, tabbed browsing and of course pop-up blocking make it an excellent product and make using IE a painful process. The fact is on any platform IE looks like the third rate choice, if you don't like Mozilla then there's always Opera, although personally I hate the interface to it - but others will disagree, choice is good, and having a situation where more people try alternative browsers is good for making sure we don't get tied into a Windows (i.e. IE) only web.

Not much work left on core Mozilla?

[Dr. Spork]

I hate to admit to such a thing, but I'm really greatful for AOL's life support for the Mozilla project. Now Mozilla isn't just good, it's the best browser ever made, and its modular design makes it easy to add extensions to it (which in the end make for its coolest features, like mouse gestures and adblock).

I honestly haven't noticed any really significant improvements in my Mozilla experience in the last 6 months. As far as I'm concerned, Mozilla is done. Sure, it's nice to stomp some bugs and increase performance by ever-diminishing increments, but I think we've passed the point when the average user on a good computer even notices.

That's intended as a huge compliment to Mozilla.

I also think the remaining hackers are doing the right thing in trying to furhter modularize the code. These are the sorts of things that end-users (hopefully) don't notice, but they make the individual components more useable.

But I have to wonder whether Mozilla requires the huge programming push that it has needed two years ago. Is there ever a time when you just basically declare it done and leave it in the hands of some maintainers, like the 2.4 kernel?

What made Mozilla great is that it was a start from scratch, and it was (at least initially) architectured according to sane principles. Maybe the best thing Mozilla developers can do now is to leave it alone and work on Safari. The Konqueror code is where Mozilla was 2 years ago, except much smaller, more readable, and faster (not faster than Mozilla now, but certainly faster than Mozilla 2 years ago). I don't consider it blasphemy for a huge Mozilla fan like me to accept the fact that Mozilla is more-or-less done, and that volunteers who understand it well enough to contribute would make better use of their skills working on something like Konq rather that building angels in the Mozilla architecture (which no one but God can see). Or, go and write good open-source office software. There's a real need for improvement there... as there isn't in Mozilla.

Developers are people also

[jhines]

Given that people with common intests form communities, it isn't unreasonable for this community to be interested in what happens to the people of that community.

That I've never met them in person, doesn't stop me from being concerned about them.

Re:This is good and bad news

[Ice_Balrog]

AOL isn't leeching. First of all, they are donating $2 million to the Mozilla Foundation. Second, they donated a while shitload of hardware to the Mozilla Foundation. Third, they don't even make the branded version of Mozilla (Netscape) anymore.