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Mozilla Minotaur Project Formally Launched

by SCOTT MACGREGOR | Jason Kersey and I are very excited to announce our effort to build a stand-alone version of Mozilla Mail, currently called Project Minotaur*. We are reviving the project started by Seth Spitzer back in September.

Our goal is to produce a cross-platform stand-alone mail application using the XUL user interface language. We are modeling ourselves after the Phoenix rewrite of the Mozilla browser.

Our intended customer is someone who uses Phoenix (or another non-mozilla.exe browser) as their primary browser and wants a mail client based on Mozilla that "plays nice" with their browser.

In addition, by focusing solely on stand alone mail, we believe we can make some dents in the overall footprint and performance of the mail client by removing components and chrome we don't need. On top of that, the UI becomes much cleaner as a stand-alone application as opposed to being part of the Mozilla suite.

Minotaur has several new features over Mozilla Mail including customizeable toolbars à la Phoenix and a more simplified prefs and menu UI.

We are currently driving towards our 0.1 release which is based off of the Mozilla 1.3 Branch. After we move to the trunk, our long term goals will include: moving to the Phoenix toolkit and developing a theme modeled after the Qute theme for Phoenix.

We hope to start pushing builds on ftp.mozilla.org within the next day or so. For more information, including how to build Minotaur, please see our project page at:

http://www.mozilla.org/mailnews/minotaur

Thanks!
-Scott and Jason

P.S. In case I messed up the follow up, please reply to netscape.mozilla.mail-news.

*As with other Mozilla projects, our code name is subject to change pending approval/blessing from mozilla.org staff.
Phoenix --> ??
Chimera --> Camino.
Minotaur --> ???

=)

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