Actually, the Build Bar is done by Asa. Being both a member of mozilla.org staff and drivers, he's very busy right now with the upcoming 1.0 release. Hopefully he'll be able to update the comments more regularly again after 1.0 comes out.

Alex

I'm pretty sure that's Asa who compiles all the info for the build bar, and he's undoubtedly busy doing drivers-stuff for the 1.0 branch. The Builds Forum is kinda useful sometimes; what I miss is Asa posting the list of all the bugs that have been fixed. I know I can do it myself, but I'm lazy ;)

I'm writing what will be the raw material for the Mozilla 1.0 Startpage FAQ.

There's a news and advocacy section featuring quite a few sites ;-)

n/t

Well... it takes alot of memory and it takes some time to start. But if you compare to IE it's pretty much the same. The main difference is that alot of IE functionality starts in the background when windows starts.

And there is a fact that Mozilla:s GUI isn't the fastest in the world. But on the other hand is Mozilla:s GUI very easy to develop in, to maintain etc...

"So Alex, would everyone except a small fraction of users been better off had Moz focused on the browser and scrapped mail, news, chat and compose?"

Well, personally I find the non-Navigator components to be quite useful. And if you're implying that 1.0 would have arrived quicker had mozilla.org just concentrated on Navigator, I don't necessarily agree. Many contributors were attracted to the project because it offered a full suite. People who work on implementing the IMAP protocol probably aren't great layout engineers. And Netscape would have probably cut back their work-force proportionally had the non-browser projects been cancelled (more on that later).

"Had to be pretty dense to think that anything beyond gecko would go into AOL."

Who ever said that anything beyond Gecko would go into the AOL client? And in any case, the point of Project Seamonkey isn't just to make a browser for AOL. It's to make a set of embeddable components for use by many different vendors.

"Or is the party line that Moz *had* to produce a full suite in order to carry on from Communicator?"

As far as I'm concerned, there is no party line. Netscape wanted a successor to Communicator when they released the code. If mozilla.org had abandoned that aim, Netscape probably would have continued working towards it. I believe the policy of mozilla.org is to accept any code that's contributed. Therefore, if Netscape had started working on Mail & Newsgroups and Composer etc. and licensed the code until the MPL, it would have been accepted into the tree (much like Calendar was) and others could have started working on it.

Alex