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Mozilla Foundation Turns 1
antatack writes "It's already been a year since the Mozilla Foundation was created, and it's been quite a year. The Mozilla Foundation has prospered, our products are receiving rave reviews, consumer and enterprise interest in Mozilla products is at an all time high, the awareness of the importance of choice in browser software is growing and our community remains vigorous and energetic."
Considering the amazing success of Mozilla, one can't help but wonder how long it will be before someone attempts to buy it.
So I'm curious, is that even possible? Could some big corporation just come along and buy Mozilla out?
"The dew has clearly fallen with a particularly sickening thud this morning"
What did the Mozilla Foundation do that has made Mozilla such a huge success? Maybe more to the point, why haven't other OSS projects taken off like Mozilla? Any ideas on what can be done on other OSS projects to achieve similar success?
"Ask not what your country can do for you." --John F. Kennedy
It would be nice if some members at the mozilla foundation published a lessons learned paper. The things they have learned about making an OSS application successful.
I know one of the things is user interface. They have done that very well. Better than most people realize. The skins, that type of idea is everywhere from cell phones, to just about everything. Everyone likes to customize.
Evolution or ID?
I have been reading a lot about FireFox (and Opera, to be fair) here on Slashdot lately. Everyone who uses one of these alternative browsers has nothing but good things to say about them, and if someone says something bad about one then they are either attacked as being MS sheep or assaulted by a series of suggestions on how to fix the situation.
My question is this: aside from the obvious security-through-diversity advantage, and the fact that the IE HTML engine is a bit on the slow side, what are the benefits of using FireFox or Opera over, say, Slimbrowser, Crazybrowser, or MyIE2? These IE-based browsers have tabbed browsing, built-in pop-up blocking, mouse gestures, and a host of other features that they probably borrowed (read: stole) from the "geekier" browsers out there. I'm not saying that the 2 advantages I mentioned aren't enough, but if I'm running a firewall and antivirus program, and I don't notice the speed difference between them, why should I switch?
There is no mod option "-1: Disagree" for a reason. "Overrated" is not an acceptable substitute. Post something instead.
But with the lack of info on the Mozilla site, I wonder how many people know this, and download the entire 0.9.2 version, instead of just the patch.
Surely there should at least be a note mentioning the patch on the front page?
I've frequently used Firefox (and the full-featured Mozilla) on a 64MB, 166MHz Pentium running Windows 98.
It's not the fastest thing ever, but it's completely usable. Perhaps it's a little slower than Internet Explorer on the same machine, but it's really not worth bothering about. Firefox is snappy, it doesn't get stuck in endless hourglass-waving pauses, and it starts pretty quickly too.
It feels considerably faster on that PC than Firefox does on my modern iBook, where it takes an age to start and even longer to display dialogue boxes and suchlike - it's why I've stuck with Safari. Maybe there is room for improvement on the Windows version of Firefox, but I'd rather the effort went into other platforms as well.
Tedious Bloggy Stuff - hooray?
How are the finance of the foundation doing ? What have they done with the money ? How many people have they kept employed via the foundation ? Who are the most generous corporate donators (so I can give them my business back) ? Inquiring minds want to know!
<em class="cheerleader"> Go Mozilla ! </em>
:wq