Mozilla's First Birthday

The Prognosticator writes "Here's a Wired article about Netscape's Mozilla project at it's first birthday today, 1.Apr.1999. It covers where Mozilla's been and where it's going in a short interview with a Mozilla PR guy and a Communicator Project Manager. "

Comments

Momentum

[HoserHead]

Actually, what you said *was* partially true a little while ago. However, Netscape realised this and said "To hell with it" and started over with raptor, aka nglayout, which, incidentally, *is* a complete rewrite (or as close to it as to render all else pointless).

Lots of independent developers are contributing: if not coding, then by bugfixing. Adam Lock, for example, has created the ActiveX Mozilla control. pavlov@pavlov.net (Sorry, not sure of his real name ;) has also helped a lot with the gtk conversion. And there are plenty of people submitting bugreports, be it with crashes or misrenderings or unsupported stuff; check out bugzilla to see proof.

A real reply

[PhoneMonkey]

Well, I guess I'll post a real reply to this column, this is something I've been following closely, and I am tangentally involved in the sister project Jazilla.

Open source really made a breakthrough with Mozilla. For one point he makes is very true, and only parenthetically referred to: Gecko's engine is only 1.6 Meg. Wow! Forget bloatware, this engine is powerful. If you don't believe me, go to the site and download a nightly build.

It does things that even impress me, in an incredibly small, fast package.

But despite the obvious shuckstering, I'm getting to the point. We are seeing an upcoming big release that turns its back on the Microsoft worldview and say, "We don't need everything in this engine... Let's slim down and get some great features."

And yes, it's taken awhile to get out. But they're trying to make this as *gasp* bug free as possible.

Hooray for Mozilla, and may more developers emulate them.


"Responsibility for my career? I'm just a freakin' phone monkey!"