Mozilla's Year In Review For 2003

An anonymous reader writes "Like last year, MozillaZine has published a review of Mozilla's world in 2003. Obviously, the year was dominated by AOL's decision to murder Netscape (though various acts of 'brand necrophilia' will ensure that the Netscape name lives on in one form or another). This, combined with Mozilla Firebird's and Mozilla Thunderbird's steady progress towards replacing the Mozilla suite, made 2003 very much a transitional year for the open source project. Other memories to tell your grandchildren include mozilla.org's fifth birthday, the new roadmap, the Firebird name debate and a new chapter being added to The Book of Mozilla."

Comments

Re:It was a bad year for Mozilla.

[Zontar The Mindless]

> ...they failed completely to incoperate the rising new mark-up technologies like XML-Signature or WebCGM. If this development continues this year, Mozilla might lose it's technical lead to IE or Opera.

Are you just pulling this stuff out of your arse, or what? Neither of these are new (WebCGM has been around since '99), both are fairly irrelevant, and WebCGM is a binary format in any case.

Given the *cough* rapid pace of MSIE development *cough* these days, if Mozilla stood stockstill for the next two years, it wouldn't lose any ground to IE (which still doesn't support all of DOM Level 2), and Opera is also still playing catch-up, although it's farther along than MSIE.

It would be nice if they'd start including SVG support in the standard releases, though. Especially since the Adobe SVG plugin for Moz/NS is broken and appears likely to stay that way for some time.

Re:Thumbs Up, But...

[Zontar The Mindless]

> Mozilla will be a thousand times more useful if it could offer an IE-compatibility mode (Javascript model, plugins) which works on Unix platforms.

NoooOOOOoooOOooOoooOOO!!!!

Then Microsoft wins and standards don't mean anything. The task which must be accomplished is to get site developers to code to standards, in which case 90% of the compatibility issues disappear (and the Web becomes about 75% safer due to the disappearance of ActiveWreX crap).