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Mozilla The Internet

Life After Netscape For Mozilla Developers 254

Posted by timothy from the life-goes-on dept.
An anonymous reader submits "MozillaZine has an article up on life after Netscape for Mozilla developers formerly employed there. Several developers are now employed by the non-profit Mozilla Foundation in full or part-time positions, others have been hired by IBM and Daniel Glazman was contracted by Lindows to write web publishing application Nvu. Another group of developers have joined together to form Mozilla Consulting to work on customized Mozilla enhancements. The amount of interest by non-Netscape companies in Mozilla is surely a positive sign for the future of the project."
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Life After Netscape For Mozilla Developers More

Life After Netscape For Mozilla Developers

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  • Article summary (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday November 17, 2003 @09:42AM (#7492719)
    1. Netscape paid Mozilla developers
    2. AOL/Netscape pulls out of Mozilla program
    3. Mozilla developers get rehired by different companies

    Seriously, there's very little "life after Netscape" in the article aside from "X works for Y now".
    • Of course... people don't ie when they get fired...
      • Of course... people don't ie when they get fired...
        Former Netscape developers probably IE as little as possible :-)

        (Yeah, I know it was a typo, couldn't resist)

    • Left Out Of The Article (Score:3, Funny)

      by Anonymous Coward
      16 developers currently work for McDonalds
      3 developers work at Arbys
      1 developer works for TGIF

      30 developers are currently living in Mom's basement/guest room/crashing on the couch.

      5 developers are living under the River St bridge, 3 in boxes, 2 in old station wagons.

      3 developers "left the reservation" and are currently living in a commune.

      1 developer is a mid level Amway rep
    • What, you expected the editors to RTFA? Haven't been here long, have you?

    • Developers are people also (Score:5, Insightful)

      by jhines ( 82154 ) <john@jhines.org> on Monday November 17, 2003 @10:42AM (#7493033) Homepage
      Given that people with common intests form communities, it isn't unreasonable for this community to be interested in what happens to the people of that community.

      That I've never met them in person, doesn't stop me from being concerned about them.

  • probably the coolest life after netscape (Score:5, Interesting)

    by cnb ( 146606 ) on Monday November 17, 2003 @09:47AM (#7492751)

    JWZ [livejournal.com]

    Bio: I used to be a hacker [jwz.org]. Now I run a nightclub [dnalounge.com].

    • Seeing as how poorly written Netscape was, its probably for the best that he got out of programming for a living.

      Netscape was the whole reason I, personally, switched to using IE. Having the application crash every five to ten minutes and wipe out every browser window wasnt a particularly pleasant experience. Fortunately, their was freedom of choice, and I was able to switch to IE 3.02

      Ive been a happy IE user ever since (well, we'll forgive IE 4)

  • No. 1 in a series.... (Score:4, Funny)

    by Ratface ( 21117 ) on Monday November 17, 2003 @09:48AM (#7492754) Homepage Journal
    Coming soon...

    Life after Worldcom
    Life after Boo.com
    Life after SCO ... etc - ad nauseum.

    Given that ever single developer I know has changed job at least once in the last 3 years this is one nepotistic story!
    • Darl Mcbride lives alone in a studio apt in utah, wasting away dreaming of what might have been...
      • Darl Mcbride lives alone in a studio apt in utah, wasting away dreaming of what might have been...

        Hopefully that'll be the kind of "studio apt" where you get your meals delivered through a small hole in the door three times a day, and have to take a shower with your new boyfriend "Big Bubba" every morning.

        Rich.

    • Well, the difference is that "Life after Worldcom" and "Life after SCO" may (if we're blessed with poetic justice) include an OZ-like documentary of life in prison...
    • I guess that what we should expect next counting:
      • AOL mostly connects customers through modems, ignoring the trend of DSL;
      • AOL supports only Windows, ignoring the trend of Linux;
      • AOL does not use good technology when it owns them and let Mozilla/Netscape go;
      Who wants the bet about when AOL will be a history?
      • Already started they are losing subscripers and AOL is no longer a ticker symbol. I use RoadRunner which is great broadband service from Time Warner why would I need AOL? Time Warner is thinking the same thing in my opinion well they are thinking why did I merge with AOL?.
        • The way I read it AOL bought Time-Warner for $112 billion.

          I'm sure the previous owners of Time-Warner don't trouble themselves with regret too hard.

          • East Meets West (Score:4, Interesting)

            by Tackhead ( 54550 ) on Monday November 17, 2003 @01:05PM (#7494339)
            > The way I read it AOL bought Time-Warner for $112 billion.
            >
            > I'm sure the previous owners of Time-Warner don't trouble themselves with regret too hard.

            Actually, a lot of them do.

            AOL employees (regardless of where they were located) grew up with a west-coast dotcom culture: OMFG, I'm an options millionaire! Call my broker and sell me out the day the options vest, and I've got fuck-you money, meaning that if my boss gets on my case someday, I can say "fuck you!" and walk out the door!

            Contrast that with the east-coast Time-Warner/media culture: "OMFG, we just got bought out by a bunch of n00bz. What is with these kids and that Steve Case guy, and where do they get off selling themselves out like that? Even if I wanted to, I can't really sell my shares, that'd be a demonstration of disloyalty, it's just not the right thing to do. I'll do better by keeping my stock until I retire. After 15 years of leveraging our media properties with the AOL brand, I'll be sitting pretty while those young whippersnappers are all broke. I'm a smart east-coast establishment type!"

            So when East met West, and West walked out the door with $1M, and East held on to see the greatest destruction of shareholder value and the worst merger idea in financial history... yeah, there are a lot of Time-Warner drones who do regret it to this day.

            (Fuck 'em, I says. Any fool could have seen the merger was a Bad Idea. The right thing to do was to sell both stocks before the deal even closed and put your capital somewhere less dysfunctional. But what do I know, I'm a West-Coast type, my loyalty is to my capital, and nothing else.)

      • http://theregister.co.uk/content/6/34015.html [theregister.co.uk]

        T-Online being the suggested purchaser

  • a lot will depend on results (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Fux the Penguin ( 724045 ) on Monday November 17, 2003 @09:48AM (#7492759) Journal
    While it is good that these people have jobs and can continue to work on Mozilla I think it is a little early to claim that industrial support is well under way. It is certainly very positive that some companies are willing to put their money where their mouth is but I think a lot will depend on the return of this current investment. If nvu doesn't materialize or if other key mozilla components do not deliver on their promises (e.g. calendar is so far mostly vapor ware in terms of interoperability), I think mozilla adoption by industry will not become much better.

    Certainly there are some great opportunities: - There is an enormous trend in the public sector (especially outside the US) to adopt open source. Mozilla is part of this trend for non MS platforms. - Internet explorer does not seem to have evolved in the past few years and is unlikely to do so in the coming few years: market share can be gained. - Apple seems to be moving away from MS products, this will stimulate adoption of alternative browsers by both users and developers. Alternative heere does not necessarily mean Mozilla but other than IE.

    • Re:a lot will depend on results (Score:5, Interesting)

      by sphealey ( 2855 ) * on Monday November 17, 2003 @09:57AM (#7492794)
      I think there is a lot of food for thought in your post. The other issue that bothers me is this: millions of people have posted to various on-line forums over the last 4 years about how much they love Netscape/Mozilla and how much they dislike Internet Explorer. Ok, if there are 1,000,000 people with this level of concern, and they each sent 50 USD to the Mozilla Foundation (not a lot of money for someone in the Western world; just 25 cups of Starbucks coffee), then the Moz Foundation would have 50,000,000 USD available to support development. That would be enough to keep a good team running for 5-10 years.

      So - how is Mozilla Foundation's fundraising going? What is their endowment status at the moment?

      sPh

      • Here's the link to donate (Score:5, Informative)

        by sphealey ( 2855 ) * on Monday November 17, 2003 @10:02AM (#7492827)
        Should have included this link in the prior post:

        To donate to Mozilla Foundation:

        http://www.mozilla.org/foundation/donate.html [mozilla.org]

        sPh

        • Paypal and checks.... I'd rather not let Paypal anywhere near my money, and checks, well, around here, they look at you like you whacked a 75-year-old, because those are the only people who are still using them...

          But then, creating a cash-flow is very, very important. The problem is, there is no feasible solution to ship relatively small amounts of money around the globe. If we can solve that problem, and make it easy to send some cash here and there, it would certainly help not only free software devel

        • I'm a poor college student and I sent $2.

          I don't feel compelled to support every free/OSS project. Just the ones I want to see continue and get better. I hope projects keep making it easy to do so, and I hope users feel compelled to pitch in. A bunch of $2 donations can go very far.

      • Re:a lot will depend on results (Score:2, Interesting)

        by Anonymous Coward
        Ok, if there are 1,000,000 people with this level of concern, and they each sent 50 USD to the Mozilla Foundation (not a lot of money for someone in the Western world; just 25 cups of Starbucks coffee), then the Moz Foundation would have 50,000,000 USD available to support development. That would be enough to keep a good team running for 5-10 years.

        That's the problem with OSS. Nobody wants to pay for anything.
      • You must not know your starbucks to USD conversions it is about 10 cups of coffee
      • 50,000,000 USD available to support development. That would be enough to keep a good team running for 5-10 years.

        if they are that mismanaged as to need from 10 to 5 million dollars a year for operating capital then they are horribly doomed.

        50 mill should keep them operating for at LEAST 20 years. 30-50 years if the management had any brains and invested the funds correctly to also work for the company (40mill in a no risk bank CD that matures every year could keep them operating much longer... could ke

      • Re:a lot will depend on results (Score:5, Insightful)

        by NeoSkandranon ( 515696 ) on Monday November 17, 2003 @10:43AM (#7493048)
        ...and they each sent 50 USD to the Mozilla Foundation (not a lot of money for someone in the Western world; just 25 cups of Starbucks coffee)

        Or a week of groceries for a college student. Or two-three tanks for gas for a commuting worker. Or a phone bill. Or...

        You get the idea. It's not alot of money, but it's not an amount alot of those 1 mil people probably have to kick around.
        • Here here .
          I currently go to school .
          If I wanted to donate $50 I would have to without coffee for two months . Given that , I think I'd rather keep my coffee (and be able to go to my morning classes :-)
        • I get some tax relief for donating money to certain non-profits. I've posted before how I donate a few bucks to Mozilla, GCC, the FSF, EFF, etc. You can save quite a bit of money if you fill out the long-form tax return and document your 'charitable contributions'.
      • Ok, if there are 1,000,000 people with this level of concern, and they each sent 50 USD to the Mozilla Foundation

        But, "rational" people wouldn't do that. If you -- individually -- send $50, how much do you think the product will be improved based on your contribution alone? Remember, you can't control how much other people send. Whether of not everyone else sends $50, it is doubtful you will get even $1 of material benefit from your $50 investment.

        People, in general, don't think collectively. (sugge
      • I've always thought the way to fund nonprofits is by getting rich people to leave them a pile of cash in their wills. Think of all the Xxx Memorial Buildings you've seen.
      • Ok, if there are 1,000,000 people with this level of concern, and they each sent 50 USD to the Mozilla Foundation [...], then the Moz Foundation would have 50,000,000 USD available to support development.

        You know what? You're right. A few years ago, I said I never donated to anything because I was broke, and that I would later on. Well, now I have a bit of money, and I've been wondering who I should donate to. I've been thinking about donating to RedHat, since I've used their distro since 8.0 (and I use F

  • Litmus Test (Score:5, Interesting)

    by IA-Outdoors ( 715597 ) on Monday November 17, 2003 @09:50AM (#7492767)
    The real test for Mozilla, to me, has been on my family. As an IT professional, as many of us are, I get roped into supporting PC's and networks (sigh) for family members. One of the first things I do is install Mozilla for them, import their IE bookmarks and set up mozilla mail to use their hosts mail accounts. I also limit JavaScript, tighten security and configure the pop-up stuff. Together with the anti-spam features now in Mozilla Mail I find my family is truly happier with Mozilla than IE. Sure, from time-to-time I get complaints that website X wouldn't work with Mozilla but for the most part they are happy. To that end, kudos to the folks at Mozilla and I'm glad the OSS community his finding good homes for the folks from Netscape.

    • Re:Litmus Test (Score:5, Funny)

      by mcpkaaos ( 449561 ) on Monday November 17, 2003 @10:13AM (#7492878)
      I get roped into supporting PC's and networks (sigh) for family members

      I felt your pain. Then I discovered the solution, and my life has been smooth sailing ever since. Two words: restraining order. Sure, it can make family gatherings a little tense for a while, but after dad spends a few nights in the clink for one too many Windows 95 support calls, things start to settle down.

    • Re:Litmus Test (Score:3, Insightful)

      by zulux ( 112259 )
      As an IT professional, as many of us are, I get roped into supporting PC's and networks (sigh) for family members.

      Make it easy on yourself, do what I do....

      I give free Max OS X and free Linux/FreeBSD support. Everything elses is at my billable rate.

      No need to support toy operating systems - especially when you consider that Microsoft had 50 billion is cash - they should support their crap, not you.

      • Everything elses is at my billable rate.

        You charge your family members for support? I knew times were tough, but that's pretty harsh.

  • I hope it does well (Score:5, Insightful)

    by uradu ( 10768 ) on Monday November 17, 2003 @09:58AM (#7492799)
    Mozilla with XUL is indeed a nice distributed platform, a much richer way of writing "thin" clients than *HTML. You can actually write distributed apps that feel so much like a native local app that most users wouldn't even notice--except for performance, of course. A lot of porkiness and memory leakiness still needs to be removed, and some usability loose ends need to be tied up before everything is peachy. Right now (even with the latest builds I believe) keeping multiple copies of Mozilla up for days eventually eats an incredible amount of memory. Closing them brings the system down with furious swapping activity.
    • Mozilla 1.4 was a memory hog... with either a memory leak, or just the tendancy to gobble up more and more the longer it was open. Since I usually only reboot my WinXP work machine about once every week or two this quickly became a PITA (and I have 512Mb).

      The answer? Switched to Firebird 0.7. It uses a heck of a lot less memory then Mozilla 1.4 and is just as stable. (I usually have 3-5 browser windows open, with 5-10 tabs in each window.)
      • Actually, I was talking about Firebird, since that's the "version" of Mozilla I actually use (who wouldn't?). It's definitely more lightweight, but it still exhibited some of the same memory issues as Mozilla.
      • Why in the hell would you keep 50 browser pages open at once?
        • Usually because I'm doing research on multiple topics at once...

          Window 1 is my work-related browser window and between all of the different intranet apps that I access periodically through the day, it usually has around a dozen tabs open.

          When googling for something, I start a new window and then open each result that looks interesting in a new tab. That means I don't lose my place back on the google search page. I also don't spend time waiting for any one tab to load because I'm loading them in the bac
    • > keeping multiple copies of Mozilla up for days eventually eats an incredible amount of memory.

      In my experience keeping *one* copy of Mozilla open is enough to do that....

  • Good to see software can be commercial but free (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Realistic_Dragon ( 655151 ) on Monday November 17, 2003 @10:03AM (#7492836) Homepage
    It's always promising to see a vindication of the open source model - and that is what this is.

    Companies get what they want (the ability to cut development time and costs with prewritten code they can easily adapt).

    Consumers get what they want (a web browser that works at no cost).

    Hackers get what they want (a web browser they can hack, where their efforts will be recognised not cause a lawsuit).

    Developers get what they want (income from doing something cool).

    It's a win win solution, unlike closed development models. No one looses out at all, except the companies that exist to be the middle man. But even they don't loose out, as the shareholders can take their capital and deploy it where it is more worthwhile for the economy, which is the corner stone of capitalism. No more duplicated effort, creating the same product over and over, which by definition can never meet the requirements of all interested parties. Superb!
    • It's a win win solution, unlike closed development models. No one looses out at all, except the companies that exist to be the middle man.

      I have a bit of a problem with this line of thinking. If a person forms a company to provide software that others want to buy, what's the problem? If I make something you want, and it is worth it to you, then why would you not expect to pay?

      Now, if someone wants to compete with them by creating an open source version of the product, then more power to them, but rememb

  • Slow down... (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Orien ( 720204 ) on Monday November 17, 2003 @10:04AM (#7492837)
    The amount of interest by non-Netscape companies in Mozilla is surely a positive sign for the future of the project.

    I know we are all anxious to see the project have a long-term future, especially with the recent changes, but that is jumping the gun just a bit. There is a big difference in companies having interest in Mozilla employees than having interest in Mozilla. Just because IBM hired Daniel Glazman doesn't mean they have any interest in Mozilla, they just know he is qualified in specific development areas that they want to focus on.

    • Re:Slow down... (Score:4, Informative)

      by linuxci ( 3530 ) on Monday November 17, 2003 @10:55AM (#7493134)
      Just because IBM hired Daniel Glazman doesn't mean they have any interest in Mozilla


      Daniel Glazman isn't hired by IBM, he actually runs his own company [disruptive...ations.com], that's contracted to work on various enhancements to Mozilla Composer, including Nvu [nvu.com], funded by Lindows.com [google.com]

    • Re:Slow down... (Score:3, Informative)

      by cobar ( 57479 )
      All the guys that were hired by IBM were, to the best of my knowledge, brought on to continue working on Mozilla. doron was definitely hired to do Mozilla development. Shortly before the dissolution of Netscape, IBM was running an ad looking for an experienced Mozilla developer to help get their enhancements landed.

  • Comment removed (Score:3, Funny)

    by account_deleted ( 4530225 ) on Monday November 17, 2003 @10:05AM (#7492841)
    Comment removed based on user account deletion
    • To be fair, you don't need much of an advertising budget to put ads on websites you already own.
    • "Switch to Netscape 7.1!"

      As well there should be. I recently switched 'back' to an aging PPC Mac (a 5400/120, eeeek!) as a 'desktop' platform for the living room. The best web browser I have found for it, running MacOS 9.1 in 128 MB of RAM, is Netscape 7.03. The OSS developer crowd, taillight chasers that they always are, have abandoned such an 'ancient' platform. (one of the problems with 'scratching an itch' programmers is they tend to run bleeding-edge hot-dog hardware, not what regular people use

  • Open source, and getting it right. (Score:5, Interesting)

    by fishlet ( 93611 ) on Monday November 17, 2003 @10:06AM (#7492846)
    I hope this isn't too far off topic

    Mozilla is a prime example of the virtues of open source verses closed propriatary software (ex: IE). When Mozilla was way overdue, people called it dead. From a market share perspective maybe they were right. However because of taking the time to do it right, Mozilla is now the best (if not most popular) browser around. Because of this, those are innovative enough to come up with new features are going to choose Mozilla first to implement their ideas. Some of the guys from Netscape (the real innovators, not the ones who were just there for a paycheck) probably have a few good ideas left in them.

  • This is good and bad news (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Gwala ( 309968 ) <.ten.alawg. .ta. .mada.> on Monday November 17, 2003 @10:07AM (#7492850) Homepage
    While it is a problem - that AOL has decided to simply leech of Mozilla (however, I'm unsure about their state in regard to the various contract's with MS over using internet explorer - there's at least 3 contracts about that, that I know of) if you look at it, this can only mean more development of Mozilla & friend's, which is now far superiour than what netscape ever was, and can only get bigger and better (and more popular, considering the next IE's going to be bundled with Longhorn)

    -Gwala

  • Making progress (Score:5, Interesting)

    by linuxci ( 3530 ) on Monday November 17, 2003 @10:15AM (#7492883)
    Although it's good to see a lot of Mozilla developers still getting paid to work on Mozilla development, there's also a lot of former Netscape people that have went to work on other browsers but still occaisionally keep up involvement with Mozilla. e.g. Ian Hickson [hixie.ch] now works for Opera software [opera.com] but still has some involvement in the Mozilla community as does David Hyatt [mozillazine.org] who left Netscape to work with Apple on Safari [apple.com].

    There's also more volunteers than the early days, not just with coding and testing, but with user support too, such as the excellent Mozilla Firebird [texturizer.net] and Thunderbird Help [texturizer.net] sites.

    But in reality to the end user, it does not matter how many people are developing it, it's the quality of the product that counts, and I think that with recent releases there's nothing that can beat Mozilla in all round usefulness. If you've not tried it for ages then it's worth a try now, features like type ahead find, tabbed browsing and of course pop-up blocking make it an excellent product and make using IE a painful process. The fact is on any platform IE looks like the third rate choice, if you don't like Mozilla then there's always Opera, although personally I hate the interface to it - but others will disagree, choice is good, and having a situation where more people try alternative browsers is good for making sure we don't get tied into a Windows (i.e. IE) only web.

    • But in reality to the end user, it does not matter how many people are developing it, it's the quality of the product that counts, and I think that with recent releases there's nothing that can beat Mozilla in all round usefulness. ... The fact is on any platform IE looks like the third rate choice

      I have to agree. I've switched to Firebird exclusively for a web browser on both Linux and Windows. Using IE has become a painful experience.

      On my home system, some adware program installed some search bar an

    • Re:Making progress (Score:3, Interesting)

      by bhtooefr ( 649901 )
      Basically, my top Windows browsers are in this order:

      Opera 7.2x - smallest modern browser, fastest, IMHO best UI
      Firebird 0.7x - small, fast, feature-loaded, however, it's not good at tabbed browsing - good IE drop-in replacement, though
      IE 6.0x - It's already installed, but it's huge, slow, and needs Google Toolbar for popup blocking
      Mozilla 1.5x - Not as big as IE, but VERY slow - making IE better...

      As for e-mail, here's the order:

      Thunderbird 0.3x - Bayesian filtering, easy UI, what else is there to say?
      E
    • {plaintively} Do you know anyone formerly with Netscape, who might know where the NS3.04 codebase is, and who could get it opensourced?? Thankx for any help!!

      (Yes, NS3.04 is still my browser of CHOICE. Moz v0.99 is my #2 browser. Don't like v1.5, tho.)

  • Not much work left on core Mozilla? (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Dr. Spork ( 142693 ) on Monday November 17, 2003 @10:28AM (#7492939)
    I hate to admit to such a thing, but I'm really greatful for AOL's life support for the Mozilla project. Now Mozilla isn't just good, it's the best browser ever made, and its modular design makes it easy to add extensions to it (which in the end make for its coolest features, like mouse gestures and adblock).

    I honestly haven't noticed any really significant improvements in my Mozilla experience in the last 6 months. As far as I'm concerned, Mozilla is done. Sure, it's nice to stomp some bugs and increase performance by ever-diminishing increments, but I think we've passed the point when the average user on a good computer even notices.

    That's intended as a huge compliment to Mozilla.

    I also think the remaining hackers are doing the right thing in trying to furhter modularize the code. These are the sorts of things that end-users (hopefully) don't notice, but they make the individual components more useable.

    But I have to wonder whether Mozilla requires the huge programming push that it has needed two years ago. Is there ever a time when you just basically declare it done and leave it in the hands of some maintainers, like the 2.4 kernel?

    What made Mozilla great is that it was a start from scratch, and it was (at least initially) architectured according to sane principles. Maybe the best thing Mozilla developers can do now is to leave it alone and work on Safari. The Konqueror code is where Mozilla was 2 years ago, except much smaller, more readable, and faster (not faster than Mozilla now, but certainly faster than Mozilla 2 years ago). I don't consider it blasphemy for a huge Mozilla fan like me to accept the fact that Mozilla is more-or-less done, and that volunteers who understand it well enough to contribute would make better use of their skills working on something like Konq rather that building angels in the Mozilla architecture (which no one but God can see). Or, go and write good open-source office software. There's a real need for improvement there... as there isn't in Mozilla.

    • Mozilla could use Free Software/Open Source dropin replacements for Java, Flash, and all that junk. I mostly don't like those things anyway, but sometimes I'd like to have them.

    • Probably not on Mozilla itself (but) there is a real move towards a less monolithic approach with projects like Firebird & Thunderbird.
    • Maybe the best thing Mozilla developers can do now is to leave it alone and work on Safari

      You mean KHTML? Safari itself isn't open source, but all the work that involes KHTML source is, however, I agree that's just picking at slight details.

      But, no, I don't think Mozilla is done - it's currently the best browser around IM (and many others) HO, but there's still a lot of things that could be improved and bugs needing to be fixed. So Mozilla needs to keep on improving, we don't want Mozilla to turn into a

      • Yeah, I did mean KHTML. I'm pretty impressed with what Safari and Konqueror can do.

        Mozilla extensions/plugins already make it very easy to add new features like encryption. So I don't worry about feature stagnation. And I know there are still bugs, but they hardly bite anymore.

        Your point about Internet Explorer is a good one: It has stagnated, and Microsoft is essentially giving up on further development. This kills the most important reason that once made it urgent for browsers to keep changing: new o

        • Mozilla can relax about things like CSS2 for a while. Since IE can't render that stuff anyway, there won't be websites that use it.

          To me that seems like a good idea to get top class support for the standards not supported by IE, it helps make more web developers wake up and realise how useless IE is. I know some people who think they're web developers who still think 'Netscape' is version 4.x and those that tried 6.0 gave up on it altogether. Netscape 7.1 was a fine browser (and probably the last Netscap

    • SVG still needs to be done (Score:4, Insightful)

      by ishmalius ( 153450 ) on Monday November 17, 2003 @11:22AM (#7493363)
      I consider SVG to be the "next big thing" in HTML. It only seems to be stalled for lack of critical mass. People aren't using SVG since no browser supports it natively. No browser supports it natively since people don't use it yet.

      But it is SO tantalizingly close in Mozilla, that it is painful to see it so far away. Checking the progress of SVG in Mozilla, it seems to be stagnating. It really needs some General Patton to force-march it toward a release.

    • I honestly haven't noticed any really significant improvements in my Mozilla experience in the last 6 months. ...

      accept the fact that Mozilla is more-or-less done

      While this may be the case with SeaMonkey, Firebird and Thunderbird are cranking along and breaking new frontiers in speed, features, and usability. When we get to the point that Firebird and Tunderbird are mature, then it could make sense to move resourses else. For the time being though, I'm glad that resourses are being devoted to Mozilla/Fi
    • I thought Apple was already working on Safari/Konqueror..

      Konq needs better CSS. Other than that I'm satisfied with the progress on both fronts.
    • > But I have to wonder whether Mozilla requires
      > the huge programming push that it has needed two
      > years ago.

      If you ever want it to support things like CSS2.1 (with its major change of how style computation and inheritance work), then yes.

      If you ever want it to support CSS3 Selectors, then yes.

      If you ever want to be able to read layout code without losing your sanity, yes.

      If you want to have multiple apps using the same shared code (Firebird/Thunderbird/whatever), then absolutely.

      The list goes
    • Oh, one more thing. Konq is nowhere close to rendering "real-world" HTML like Mozilla did two years ago. Safari is closer, and maybe some of that will migrate back to Konq eventually....

  • jwz (Score:2, Interesting)

    by Knights who say 'INT ( 708612 )
    I will never forget how sad was jwz's communication that he was resigning from his position at Netscape/AOL [jwz.org]. I was just a teenager, but it made me set aside any plans of getting into the computing industry.

    Apparently, he's thrown all away to become a club owner [dnalounge.com].

    • Re:jwz (Score:2)

      by yog ( 19073 )
      Don't feel too sad on Jamie's behalf; in his position, he must have done very, very well financially and doesn't need to work. Anyway, it's typical for people in acquired companies to move on to more interesting and entrepreneurial pursuits, often things they could not afford to do back when they had to work for a living.

      Besides, he was dead wrong about Mozilla, as we have seen. It was not a dying project. True, it didn't take over the world but it's a very solid product that thousands of people use, a

  • So is AOL not using a Moz-based browser? (Score:3, Interesting)

    by hungryfrog ( 624114 ) on Monday November 17, 2003 @11:21AM (#7493352)
    I haven't been following this closely, but there was a ton of buzz a year or so back about AOL switching to a Mozilla-based browser. IIRC CompuServe even tried it for a release or two. So have these plans gone away, or do they just plan to use Mozilla without contributing now?
    • I'd like to know that too. Most people seem to believe they've ditched Mozilla entirely, but I'm not complaining as they did give the Mozilla Foundation $2million [mozilla.org]. It also says in that original press release "We're grateful for the past and ongoing support of America Online, and we look forward to continuing to work with AOL over coming years.", so does AOL still have some plans for Mozilla or was that just usual politeness in press releases. Perhaps they're interested in the technologies but needed to cut
    • My understanding is:

      CompuServe for Windows is Mozilla-based
      AOL for Mac OS X is Mozilla-based
      AOL for Windows is MSIE-based

      AOL kept playing with beta versions of a Mozilla-based AOL for Windows, but as it turns out, it was just a ploy to scare Microsoft into giving them some money and a better licensing deal.
  • I'd have to admit, Mozilla has made some great strides at least as far as its place on my desktop.

    After the demise of netscape in market share, I became a complacent IE user, and my web page development was IE focused, with Netscape being a back-watered to make sure it just looks "reasonable". However...

    When I upgraded to Windows XP, I found IE locking up and having some more general weirdnesses than before. Frustrated I download the latest stable Mozilla (currently I'm still using 1.4). All I could
  • I have a problem with this whole thing. It's the NPL.
    about: still says ''Copyright (c) 1998-2002 by Contributors to the Mozilla codebase under the Mozilla Public License [mozilla.org] and Netscape Public License [mozilla.org] .''
    According to the NPL ''[...] Netscape may choose to reintegrate such code into Covered Code without being required to distribute such code in Source Code form, even if such code would otherwise be considered ''Modifications'' under this License.''
    Correct me, if I'm wrong, because my English skills ma
    • They've only got those 'special' NPL rights for code that they've actually written, all other code is licensed under the MPL (which gives no special rights to Netscape) usually under an MPL/GPL/LGPL tri-licence.

      Even Netscape developers started writing most code under the MPL more recently.

      So even if Netscape don't relicence all their code then it's only a very small percentage of it that's affected, definitely not enough for Netscape to make a whole browser out of.
    • This means, that AOL/Netscape does (still) have the right to use Mozilla code in their own products without the need to release the source of modified Mozilla files?

      Only that tiny proportion of the Mozilla code which is still under the NPL; this right has long been useless to Netscape due to the large amount of MPLed code in the tree.

      Because we don't yet have all the necessary permissions from AOL Time Warner that we would need in order to do so.''

      The Relicensing FAQ is out of date (I'm currently rev

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