Pretty lame try of trolling.

> Why should it matter what he's fallen in love with?

Because he's not only a valued Netscape employee, he's also an energetic and creative contributor of code in his own spare time.

> In a managed software project he'd be spending his time on what the project needed, not on his latest infatuation.

If by "managed software project" you mean "project where companies dictated everything their employees did, ever", you would be correct. Fortunately, this is not the case. > Right now what it needs is bug fixes, footprint reudtcion, and performance improvement. So I have to assume that's what he's working on.

Which he is presumably working on in his capacity as a Netscape employee, as which he undoubtedly has a list of bugs to work on and a manager to report to. The fact that he's working on Chimera as a private individual is not particularly germane to this, although it's relevant to the original topic in that his spare time is going there rather than to XBL/DOM improvements that would help the link toolbar.

You're mistaken about the relationship between Carbon and Cocoa. Cocoa is for Mac OS X only applications. Carbon is for applications that can run on either Mac OS X or Mac OS 9. Please note that this is also what the links you gave say. As for performance, there is no reason a Carbon UI can't run at a more than acceptable speed on both Mac OS 9 and Mac OS X.

There already being a Carbon-based Mozilla, there's obviously no pressing need for a Cocoa version right away. This is a side project, which may be why it lives at mozdev.org. Meanwhile, Mozilla itself is desperately in need of bug fixes, performance improvements, and footprint reductions as it approaches 1.0. Why am I reminded of jwz saying that when he was at Netscape, the engineers just did whatever the heck they wanted to? Weren't the people across the hall building a robot instead of coding on Netscape?

As I've said before, the most interesting thing to me about this side project, Chimera http://chimera.mozdev.org/ , is this: "The cross-platform UI will be replaced with native Cocoa widgetry (such as customizable toolbars and a drawer for the sidebar). The plan is to produce only a browser (no other apps!), and to keep the UI as simple and as clean as possible. " In other words, the plan is to completely abandon two critical but controversial architectural features of the Mozilla project, cross-platform UI and an application suite (including mail, composing, etc.) instead of just a browser. It appears that internal opinion within the project may have come closer to the views of those of us who've been raising hard questions about these features all along.