There is a very small number of engineers involved in the Phoenix project. A number of them are in university or are employed by companies other than Netscape. I don't see any problem with these folks working on different solutions. Phoenix is built off the daily Mozilla codebase (from what I recall), so Phoenix will at least be keeping up with the changes in Mozilla's basic functionality.

I think that innovations/changes that occur in Phoenix would probably make their way into the Mozilla codebase on a case-by-base basis. Either that, or the Mozilla team will evaluate the Mozilla/Phoenix situation at a later time and decide to make a wholesale change to system revolving around standalone components. I think there are a lot of positive aspects to the Phoenix model that's developing. The Mozilla engineers seem to be a practical lot, and I doubt that they would discriminate against changes that were beneficial simply because they first found a home in a different branch of the Mozilla codebase.

As a Netscape employee I'd love pointers to any tests where N7 comes out better than Mozilla. Hard to believe it could be true, though, since both are built on the same build machines at the same time from the same source. If anything you'd expect the added Netscape components and overlays to have a slight negative impact on performance.

We can't really say yet what the future will bring. What will happen with Minotaur? We don't know yet, we'll have to see how much attention it gets and what the results are before we can make long term plans. Same with Composer. To date, I'm not aware of an analagous effort to make it stand-alone and small. Right now we want to see what happens with Phoenix, and hopefully Minotaur. When there is more data we can do more planning.

Mitchell