Tim O'Reilly On Mozilla, and Some Thoughts From MZFriday February 4th, 2000Pete Collins wrote in to say that Tim O'Reilly mentioned Mozilla during his "The New Age of Infoware: Open Source and the Web" conference, saying that he thinks "Mozilla is going to surprise a lot of people". I think so, too. Once developers start the see the incredible possibilities that Mozilla presents, as well as its impressive coverage of not only Web standards, but of platforms and localities as well, I think you're going to see more and more people coming on board. Mozilla has gone beyond browser competitors like IE and Opera. Netscape can make a browser to compete with IE if it wants, but the underlying architecture of Mozilla has the ability to spark a whole new breed of Internet application. That's why I think it's unfair (especially this early in the game) to hold Mozilla to the same old yardstick for usage. Mozilla is big thinking. It's new. It's ambitious. It's shooting for the moon. We should not be restrained by what came before, but instead should be inventing what is to come. At the same time, we can't expect everything to fall into place immediately. We can expect Mozilla to be great, yes, but we can also expect that it will get even better. As more people get involved, it will get better. Its usage will expand, and more people will get involved, and it will continue to improve. Hopefully this will become a never-ending cycle. To succeed, Mozilla needs you - whether finding bugs, or contributing code, or just spreading the word. Stick with it. Each Milestone is an improvement -- another step down a long path. It's been fun so far, but it will only get better. Moz will own all but the desktop world almost immediately. Desktops will come along, though, I think. Go Moz! When people realize "Hey, I can create internet apps that look exactly the same in all platforms w/o Java & w/o major programming skillz," they'll freak.. I mean, mozilla is more than a browser, it provides a way for developing cool new Internet applications simulataneously for multiple platforms. So many engines for layout, user interface, networking, etc. all in one easy place. I think we'll see some cool tools & net-apps using the base Mozilla environment. And they'll be small too :) W Tim has always been a supporter of Mozilla. And its great to hear him speak about. I think on of the most important thing about Mozilla is its internationalization ability. there are so many lnaguages out there and no OS supports them all or even most. |