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Mozilla Foundation's Future: No Mozilla Suite 1.8
batb0y writes "The Mozilla Foundation has published its Mozilla Application Suite transition plan, confirming that there will be no official Mozilla 1.8 release. There will be a 1.7.6 release to be maintained by the Mozilla Foundation. All future suite versions from the Foundation will be minor updates only." Don't despair, however, as there is already a community effort underway to continue development.
I guess now we now for sure where the foundanion is headed. The new Netscape can probably take the place of a lot of the suite.
(\_/)
(O.o) This is Bunny. (> <)
Yes. Mozilla as a browser is still much more customizable than Firefox -- or hell, I don't know, maybe it isn't, but its customization works in a way I find instantly understandable, which isn't the case for FF -- and I for one like the interface a lot better. FF, like Safari, looks like it's trying to be IE. People may bitch about how "Mozilla looks like the old Netscape," but you know, it was the old Netscape that popularized the Web. If it ain't broke, don't fix it.
The correlation between ignorance of statistics and using "correlation is not causation" as an argument is close to 1.
Firefox was supposed to be the replacement for the Mozilla suite for a long time now, but I find it a tad lacking because the e-mail client is separate, and is the composer even being maintained any more by anybody? It wouldn't be such a big deal if Firefox had all of that included. (as optional components of course).
I am also still not crazy about some of the new features in Firefox 1.0, but I imagine these will be worked out in time.
Perhaps now that they are officially abandoning the suite and focusing in one direction, there will be more of a push to include or exclude features to make former suite users happier.
But why? Before you mod me down, hold on a second...
Mozilla's suite, speaking just about the browser component, is FAR superior to what Firefox offers. Not only are there many more options for security, cookies, Javascript, saving form data, and many other things... that killing the suite, even if it was just this ONE component, would really be a bad move on their part.
Personally, I don't like Firefox at all. Even though they're both based on the Gecko engine, Firefox renders CSS much differently than Mozilla in some cases. Mozilla tends to be more accurate with placement. Its not as flexible, and it just looks plain ugly (as compared to Mozilla again, even with the same theme).
I can't speak for the other parts, because I only use the browser component of the Mozilla suite (and I'm a full-time, very-pedantic, anal-about-standards, web developer, so I can speak with absolute authority on this; my internal QA/test suite includes 13 browsers before I release a site to a client). Firefox, while great as an MSIE replacement, can't even remotely compare to what the Mozilla Suite browser component offers.
Don't kill the Mozilla Suite, please, and if you do, at least keep the Mozilla Browser component around.
In Douglas Coupland's book "Microserfs", "Seamonkeys" is a term used to describe a project that is never going to be completed.
MOUNT TAPE U1439 ON B3, NO RING
The Mozilla web page editor. I don't actually write web pages using it, but I do like to hit Ctrl-E every now and then to show coworkers the underlying table structure of a page. It's just a handy visual tool. Especially when I'm doing webdev.
The sidebars. I don't know about you, but I love custom sidebars. I have one for MapQuest, one for IMDb and one for Lorem Ipsum.
Edit->Preferences. The only reason Options is under Tools in Firefox is because it's trying to mimic IE. :)
Mozilla Tools:
Translate Page
Cookie Manager
Image Manager
Popup Manager
Form Manager
Password Manager
Download Manager
The File dialog. I'm sure the new open/save file dialog is easier for easily confused users, but I like having all the file managing options ready when the dialog first opens.
I guess you could call Mozilla the programmer's web browser. Feature rich and not ashamed of it.
There is one other great joy about the suite that FF/TB do not have: clear, sharp, crisp fonts.
I realise this is personal, but cannot bear antialiased fonts - they appear blurry and out of focus, and they give me eye strain. Yes, FF/TB let you switch off antialiasing (as configured by the gnome control panel), but then you get the spidery mess that results from scaled, non anti-aliased true type fonts.
BUT, in the suite, (using then non-XFT builds), I can have perfect, sharp fonts using the old fashioned 100dpi (bitmap) fonts. This makes Mozilla so much easier to read!
Other problems with TB/FF: the extensions do not play nice with rpm/urpmi; the keys (Ctrl-[1-5] and Ctrl-N/M don't work (eg no keyboard accelerator in TB to open a new window in FF); less functionality; hidden dependence on the gnome-control-panel (for default browser/fonts); less effective toolbar (google/URL are in separate bars).
yeah, it really comes down to question of "what would you do with it". its all good and well that everybody likes feature "X" that comes from the integrated suite that currently the separated apps can't give (doesn't mean they won't get some form of triggering the other apps as a result of this announcement), but what more do you want besides a browser that stays the way you already know?
Mozilla SeaMonkey drove producing a set of capabilities cloning the original Netscape base it derived from (in a very detached way, of course), with the idea that Netscape/AOL (and others) could take the baseline and produce *standards-compliant* browsers on top of those capabilities.
3 things happened, and one thing *didn't* happen.
1) Netscape 6.x and 7.x were successfully rolled out based on the Mozilla baseline (only now 8.x has already started coming from the Firefox base, and the "Communicator" concept is gone)
2) AOL decided, in spite of their investment, to give up the idea of actually doing an AOL browser based on Mozilla in favor of playing marketting games with Microsoft by supporting IE instead in exchange for not being blacklisted off of Microsoft's illegal (but still practiced) OEM deals.
3) Firefox came out and had a marketting push unlike any other open source project around, including Linux distros themselves. And to top it off, the damn thing actually works (those few slashdotter complaints in this thread notwithstanding).
the thing that didn't happen: other ISPs didn't build their own browsers on Mozilla tech. It used to be in the 90s that all the ISPs followed AOL and Compuserve's lead in taking an existing browser (usually IE) and specializing it to become part of their service. Mozilla was setting up its code base specifically for that purpose -- we provide standards-compliance and ease-of-skinning; you skin it to meet your customer's needs. Only by the time Mozilla's codebase was ready for this to actually happen, the other ISPs stopped distributing their own special browsers entirely.
IE had won the browser wars so successfully that customers were using raw IE in spite of having the special ISP-specific version (of IE) available. So the dialup ISPs stopped doing that, and the broadband dealers had long-since known that people who go broadband have usually already gotten experience with the real browsers and avoided specialized software like the plague. This trend continued as the bugs and security holes of IE became known and the realization happened that one had to go use updated versions of the real IE to be *sure* you had a "fixed" version; with the ISP's version, you could never be sure of what was and wasn't fixed. The ISPs started running out of funds just trying to keep up with the security fixes Microsoft kept putting out all to support a dwindling userbase.
So in the end, why invest money maintaining a codebase of a hacked version of IE that's neither being used nor giving your customers any real value? And if not with IE, then there's nothing to be gained by doing it with Mozilla, even if it is "free" compared to licensing IE.
So the whole point of Mozilla as a means of developing capabilities for others to productize ended. nobody outside of Mozilla was really productizing it (the last straw really being when Apple went with the Konquerer baseline for Safari in spite of the speed improvements from 1.4 to 1.7), and Firefox has branded itself a hugely successful product in its own right.
thus, aside from maintaining a configuration UI that happens to work for a small subset of people, there's little to be gained from maintaining SeaMonkey as a released product. Gecko, Xul, and the other libraries will continue to improve to support Firefox and Thunderbird -- all that's missing is the use of a browser suite to show off their new features before going into Firefox.
and if its going into Firefox anyways, will anybody *really* miss it? The open-source philosophy will keep the Firefox people from writing generic features in such a way as to make it difficult to use them in other gecko-based products that are still out there or that will grow.
"But remember, most lynch mobs aren't this nice." (H.Simpson)
-- Joe
I wouldn't be so sure... the number of critical bugs in the bugzilla for both Firefox and Mozilla reflects the total mismanagement of the projects. New management might be a good thing, and I'd be a hell of a lot more likely to contribute if I didn't have the feeling of total helplessness caused by bugreports ignored for 3-5 years.
A short list:
You can't download more than 2-3 files at once in firefox. Trying to download more causes the dialog to come up when another file finishes.
Mozilla/Firefox store your credit card numbers in plaintext if you don't completely turn off autocomplete. (They closed this one WONTFIX)
Browser blocks a ton of ports for "Security reasons" that no other browser does. (I guess plaintext credit card numbers aren't a security problem, but somehow this is??)
And that's just off the top of my head. All these bugs have been around for at least 2-3 years.
I've had enough abrasive sigs. Kittens are cute and fuzzy.