Slashdot Mirror
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.
Did someone say "fork" ?
Until it doesn't happen
More to the point, the Mozilla foundation is dealing with a whole bunch of products from the original Mozilla suite (Thunderbird, Firefox, Sunbird, and others). What would be the point of pulling Firefox away from that?
It seems like the Mozilla Foundation made a decision that they preferred the Firefox development model. Firefox, Thunderbird, and Sunbird are set to be the *new* Mozilla suite, and the old one is in maintenance mode. It seems like this is comparable to people complaining that Microsoft isn't putting enough development into Windows 3.1.... Well, yeah, it's the old product that they've discontinued.
Now, it's all open source, so if someone wants to work on it, go ahead. But why people are trying to convince the Mozilla foundation to offload their new, exciting, successful, popular line-up of software and head back to what's become a bit of a dead-end, I don't know.
From TFA:
Our primary concern in the short term is with being able to ship a SeaMonkey front end on
top of a Gecko
That doesn't sound like a developer's list, that sounds like a post on alt.sex.zoophilia.
"A door is what a dog is perpetually on the wrong side of" - Ogden Nash
Honest question. What does it matter? Is there some great advantage that I'm not thinking of to having a giant bundled suite of apps, rather than five or six individual downloads?
As long as there's good interoperability -- and I don't see how this decision is going to hurt that -- does it really matter whether there are five apps that each do one thing or one app that does five things?
p
In Korea, long hair is for old people!
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
Mozilla == the successor to Netscape Communicator. It spoke HTTP(s), SMTP, POP, IMAP, IRC and other stuff. It was the original "kitchen sink" wrapper around the Gecko HTML/XML rendering engine.
Firefox and Thunderbird were split off as standalone apps that embedded the Gecko rendering component and a few other goodies from the original Mozilla suite, but they've always been their own critters, from an application standpoint.
So, now it looks like major development on Gecko-based products is going to be on apps that do one small cluster of things well, instead of a large app that does lots of things.
clear 'nuff?
"Oh, I hope he doesn't give us halyatchkies," said Heinrich.
Here is a link to The Book of Mozilla
Can someone please tie this into a Google conspiracy for me? I don't understand /. articles unless they somehow involve Google taking over the world.
I'm a full-time, very-pedantic, anal-about-standards, web developer, so I can speak with absolute authority on this
I just clicked on your link, and you are out of spec. because you serve XHTML as text/html without complying with Appendix C of the XHTML 1.0 recommendation.
Furthermore, your code kicks Internet Explorer and Opera into "quirks mode", where they intentionally go out of spec. in order to cater to non-compliant pages.
If you are going to claim to be an absolute authority on something, make sure you're doing it right, eh? :)
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.
The mozilla foundation, somewhere around 2 years ago, decided replace the Mozilla suite (which has had the codename "Seamonkey") with a group of standalone applications. There were projects already underway to create a standalone version of the browser and e-mail client, and the Mozilla foundation chose these two (which after a couple name-changes became Firefox and Thunderbird) to serve as the base for their development.
Originally, "Firebird" and "Thunderbird" were meant to be code-names for these apps while they were under development, as Seamonkey was the codename for the Mozilla suite. When these products reached version 1.0, they were supposed to be renamed "Mozilla Browser" and "Mozilla E-mail".
However, the development versions of the software had become famous/popular enough that people become worried that changing the name would lose name-recognition (which is bad for branding purposes) so it was decided instead that they'd be called "Mozilla Firefox" and "Mozilla Thunderbird". As far as I can remember, those are now the final names, but perhaps someone who knows better will correct me.
Anyhow, these stand-alone apps were designated to be replacements/upgrades for the old suite, and indeed, most users have stopped using the old suite and are using the new applications. However, many developers still prefer the old suite and are gearing up to start a development group independent of the Mozilla Foundation and branch off from Mozilla 1.7. For this purpose, it has been suggested that they call the software "The Seamonkey Internet Suite" because, no longer being affiliated with Mozilla, they can't use the "Mozilla" name.
Make sense?
Err... I've spent alot of time with users and analyzing how to use their computers. WinXP had the worst learning curve out of all windows releases. Win2000 seems to consistently win out. Also, after users learn WinXP's UI, they still remain highly inefficient in what they do. This extends from the operating system to the Office Suite as well. Interestingly enough, OS X has the least intuitive interface (albeit the highest level of eye candy) yet after learning it, users have a higher level of functionality and ease of use as compared to WinXP. Linux desktops, while requring the highest learning curve and sometimes(depending upon the distribution) theme tweaking to be pleasant on the eyes, almost always result in the user becoming most efficient and capable of utilizing the most functionality (the two kind of go hand in hand). I think thats typical of OSS, developers throw in tons of really great ideas and other things, but often don't know how to properly implement it in an interface. Gnome is really doing quite a job of making the linux desktop experience easy for users of all needs from novices to advanced. (That is not to say anything bad of KDE, its just Gnome focuses more on a strict HIG). Of course the desktop in general is only halfway near the level it should be at and hopefully this will all be fixed within a few years.
Regards,
Steve