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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."
JWZ
Bio: I used to be a hacker. Now I run a nightclub.
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.
You never saw a fish on the wall with its mouth shut.
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!
Beep beep.
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.
SCO.com uses Linux
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.
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.