AOL Cuts Remaining Mozilla HackersTuesday July 15th, 2003It has been learned through public and private sources that AOL has cut or will cut the remaining team working on Mozilla in a mass firing and are dismantling what was left of Netscape (they've even pulled the logos off the buildings). Some will remain working on Mozilla during the transition, and will move to other jobs within AOL. The news isn't all doom and gloom, folks. I've been informed that the number of volunteer Mozilla hackers started eclipsing the number of Netscape hackers last month, and that a number of folks have already been snatched up by other organizations. Stay tuned for updates. UPDATE: Looks like folks are starting to post to ex-mozilla.org. UPDATE: I was told to stress that Mozilla will continue, and that many of the folks let go today will continue to devote time and energy to it. I'd like to wish all the best of luck, and I'd like to thank everyone for the amazing contributions that they have made over the past five years. UPDATE #3: Some changes made to the main text above. I think this was expected when America Waits On Line signed that deal with Microsloth. AOL never understood what Mozilla actually is. Bastards. Your assessment is short-sighted and motivated by hatred and fanaticism. When AOL bought Netscape, it bought nothing but a chip to play. It played that chip in negotiating a deal with Microsoft. From a technical perspective, Mozilla was an architectural nightmare that did not satisfy AOL's basic need of an embedded browser. Therefore when playing the political chip, the necessity to retain ownership of the Mozilla project was obviated. I don't think it was great judgment to cut many of the high-caliber engineers that AOL employed, but I think it was a very sound decision to let the project go. It will give Mozilla more freedom -- which should be of interest to you -- and reduce AOL's continuing liability. In other words, you are saying the exact same thing simifilm said: that AOL never really understood the value of Mozilla (since if it did, it wouldn't discontinue support for this awesome project). You are just saying it's fine that they didn't. What is "the value of Mozilla"? Is the "value" that it is an "awesome project"? Is there any purely objective evaluation? Of course not. The value of Mozilla to AOL is entirely different than the value of Mozilla to you or me. I used to believe that the value of Mozilla to AOL was as follows: AOL's primary business interest is to push content to their subscribers, and having to force that content through the "pipes" of Internet Explorer was disadvantageous; therefore Mozilla was valuable in that it provided tighter control over how AOL members experience AOL's premium content. I also believed, to some extent, in the idealistic viewpoint that just having a browser out there that supports web standards forces page authors to conform to the standards, which might also have some value to AOL. However I just don't think those were compelling enough, when you consider the sheer cost of employing hundreds of high-paid engineers to build a piece of software over a drawn-out, five year timeframe. I'm not saying at all that AOL didn't understand the value of Mozilla, I'm saying that Mozilla was not valuable enough to AOL. The value of Mozilla includes what you mentioned, the fact that AOL could have a browser of its own and not have to deal with its archrival microsoft in this regard. After all, I believe that this move will prove disadvantageous to AOL. Who knows better how to really tweak IE than Microsoft? That's right, no one. So, with IE as the base browser for both MSN and AOL, who do you think will do better in the ISP market? Duh! Remember, since AOL and Time Warner merged, they ain't been doing too well. If AOL's value is to cling to oldy goldies (such as a very late and incomplete transformation to broadband and now kicking it with IE), that's their choice. If AOL thinks they can beat MSN by shaking hands with microsoft, that's their value. I don't think that's value. Nothing you say makes AOL look smart. They bought Netscape at much too high a price and the $750Mio from MS don't even nearly repay the investment. They bought a technology and they didn't know what to do with it. They invested time and money in Mozilla and were never able to really benefit from it. It seems to me that AOL at no point had a clear strategy what to do with Moz. That looks like stupidity to me. I'm not trying to make AOL look smart. The Netscape business owners absolutely oversold the business and their capabilities to AOL, and indeed AOL never got their money's worth. The settlement cash is essentially cutting AOL's losses, at a time when it was clear that AOL would never get more than a $750M value out of Netscape. That's my personal opinion, anyway. However, AOL did have a clear strategy of what to do with the browser. Plain and simple, they wanted to embed it in the AOL client. IE was, at one point, an utter nightmare in terms of embedding. It crashed frequently, killed the quality of experience for AOL members, and generated a whole lot of call-center costs. The trouble is, the software quality of Mozilla was so poor -- due to being overloaded with unnecessary features -- and the engineering process so slow -- due in no small part to the screaming unwashed hordes of Mozilla "contributors" -- that Gecko never made it into anything besides the CompuServe client. The embedding project was in the works for almost three years, and not a damn thing ever came to fruition beyond that. Simply, they had a plan and they tried to execute on it, but because AOL tried to play nice with Netscape CPD rather than instilling some decent process and setting higher expectations, it failed. Call it stupidity, call it what you will. In my opinion, AOL got shafted by Netscape and much of the apparent errors in their planning was due to the constant dawning realization that they didn't get what they had paid for. "The trouble is, the software quality of Mozilla was so poor -- due to being overloaded with unnecessary features -- and the engineering process so slow -- due in no small part to the screaming unwashed hordes of Mozilla "contributors" -- that Gecko never made it into anything besides the CompuServe client. The embedding project was in the works for almost three years, and not a damn thing ever came to fruition beyond that. Simply, they had a plan and they tried to execute on it, but because AOL tried to play nice with Netscape CPD rather than instilling some decent process and setting higher expectations, it failed." Since the big bulk of Moz developpers were paid by AOL, this is just another sign for their stupidity IMO. BTW, what you do you call "unnecassary features"? Tabbed browsing, popup killing etc.? These are the main reasons people use Moz today. "In my opinion, AOL got shafted by Netscape and much of the apparent errors in their planning was due to the constant dawning realization that they didn't get what they had paid for." As I said in my first post: AOL never understood what Mozilla was. Don't Blame AOL, blame the Time Warner part of AOL/Time Warner. AOL, the pre-merger company had reasons to view Microsoft as Competition and maintain funding of Mozilla. Time Warner (the part that is running the show since the AOL part is flopping) has reasons to view Microsoft as a partner whom they need a good relationship with. Time Warner has a huge ammount of valuable IP in the form of Music, Movies and TV shows. A Partnership with Microsoft on tough Digital Rights Management in Windows will help protect the value of that IP which brings in a lot more revenue than Mozilla ever could. Archiving latest project releases... Dude, there's no need for that :-) Mozilla isn't going away. That's what the Mozilla Foundation is all about. Gerv Perhaps one mistake Netscape 6/7 made was that the browser felt just too "similar" to Mozilla. Yes, I know it's the same codebase with some proprietary additions, but the average users firing them up side by side (particularly with the same skin) would only spot minor cosmetic differences between the two. Ironically, Netscape 7.1 seemed to be the first time that a Gecko-based Netscape was released at about the same time as its codebase sibling (Mozilla 1.4) - prior to that, it had lagged by many months. There's also the question of the monolithic suite vs. the separate apps - would AOL have prolonged the life of the former to the detriment of the development of the latter ? I guess the only surprise about today's news is that it took AOL so long (several months) between the final nail hitting Netscape's coffin (the MS deal to use IE for AOL users for many users to come) and AOL dumping the Netscape brand. It's a sad day in the "browser wars", but Mozilla lives to fight another day. However, what is going to replace Netscape as the most well-known "end-user browser" based on Gecko ? Mozilla.org constantly reminds us that it's for developers/testers only and not for end-users, but unless the new Firebird/Thunderbird combo steps up to the plate as an end-user browser, aren't we going to be left without an end-user Gecko browser to promote ? >>It's a sad day in the "browser wars", but Mozilla lives to fight another day.<< How's that, excatly? Glazman's blog entry didn't sound too encouraging. > However, what is going to replace Netscape as the most well-known "end-user browser" based on Gecko ? Mozilla is. The Mozilla Foundation will be moving towards aggressively (as in keenly, rather than menacingly ;-) marketing stable releases of Mozilla to end-users. Gerv Well, at least *something* positive comes out of all of this. Finally, sanity comes to Mozilla marketing! Sorry to hear the other sad news, however. Been there enough times, really sucks. Best of luck to all in their job search. AOL obviously sees some value in Mozilla. AOL has seeded $2mil to the Mozilla Foundation. Is this the end of AOL's involvement with Mozilla? My intuition says no, but we will have to wait and see. Does this news mean that Gecko has lost any change of being the engine to drive AOL software? I don't think so. Remember the agreement with Microsoft gave AOL the right to use IE for seven years. The important point is that the agreement never mandated that AOL MUST use IE. As MS further integrates IE tightly into future versions of Windows it may become harder for AOL to use IE to power its software. Sure Microsoft is under obligation to allow AOL to use IE to power its software. How will this be done? Will AOLers be provided with an inferior version of IE? Will MS claim that all of IE's features cannot be provided to AOL when powering AOL user software. I still believe AOL has plans to use Gecko beyond Compuserve and MacOS X. By depending so heavily on IE AOL is giving over a lot of power to a competitor. All MS has to do to screw AOL is to claim some future "must have" feature can not be used with AOL software as it will only work with the embeded browser. You may think that MS would not do this? Look at the example of the Windows Media plug-in for Mozilla? MS will only ship a crippled version which cannot be scripted and is broken on many sites. This is simply one example, but MS has a history of creating "MS standards" which lock out competitors and previous standards. Java is another such example. Back to the topic of the Mozilla Foundation. This is not a bad thing at all. I definately do not view the creation of the foundation as Mozilla being abandoned by AOL. I view it as just the opposite. AOL, until recently, was in litigation with MS with the Netscape unit. Because of the litigation Mozilla had to remain closely tied to AOL and to have paid Netscape employees working on Mozilla. If AOL had helped set up the Mozilla Foundation before the anti-trust case with MS over Netscape was settled, AOL would have lost much of its leverage in the cases outcome. But now the Anti-trust case with MS has been settled and AOL can now sponsor the setting up the Mozilla Foundation. I beleive AOL is doing this for the good of Mozilla, and for the good of the internet and the future of the Mozilla web browser. I don't believe this will spell the end for AOL's involvement in Mozilla. The Mozilla project needed more freedom from AOL. Mozilla need to control its development apart from AOL and Netscape. This lack of freedom has been holding Mozilla developmemnt back. For a long time Mozilla needed this freedom, but AOL still needed to retain control by funding Netscape employees to work on Mozilla. Now Mozilla has been set free it can be like a butterfly and emerge from its chrysalysis. Beautiful things will emerge. The Mozilla Foundation may pick up other sponsors beyond AOL/Sun/IBM. This can only be good. Now that Mozilla has become more independent of AOL will some who previously overlooked Gecko, such as Apple, return and take a second look? Possibly...this is my hope. With the foundation all is not gloom and doom. I read somewhere (maybe Mozilla.org or someother news site) that most developer laid off will become employees of the Mozilla Foundation. I hope this is correct info. I view this news as very good news. Mozilla has matured to the point where it was being held back by AOL and needed to be set free. With freedom Mozilla now has an opportunity to reach its full potential. I believe it will. BTW for those who claim that 7.1 may be the last version of Netscape...Maybe...maybe not. Could AOL simply drop an udated gecko engine into 7.1 and call it 7.2? Could 7.2 simply be a customized Netscape skin with a few extras which would be very easy to program? My biggest hope (maybe more wishful thinking) is that the end of Netscape (awaiting offical announcement) may signal that AOL is readying a version of its AOL software which will run with Gecko? Final thought -> Did AOL finally realize that many end users wanted Mozilla/Firebird/Thunderbird and not Netscape? Is this the reason AOL ended Netscape? I believe with the end of Netscape (if indeed this is true) it does not follow that AOL has given up supporting the Mozilla project. I believe that in the future AOL will still support Mozilla while giving the Mozilla Foundation the freedom it needs. What are you smokin' dude? The writing is on the wall, take off those rose colored glasses and read it already. This was purely a $$ decision on the part of AOL. With Steve Case out of the picture, the bean counters were running the show (Steve Case was the only ace Netscape had in it's hand). All they wanted was to stop the hemmoraging of $$ from the Time Warner coffers. What better way than to strike a deal with MS for $750 Mil (and a guarantee of free MSIE support for 7 years), cut loose the Netscape unit, and grant a $2 Mil "severence package" to the Mozilla folks. That's a nice way of saying, "I had a good time, I'll call you soon". Sound familiar dude? Now the new mozilla.org website design makes sense. As soon as I saw it I thought it looked very consumery for mozilla. More like the Stardock website - http://www.stardock.com/ (a company which specializes in what is basically eye candy + gadgets for windows) Maybe I'm in denial, but I didn't see anything quite this drastic coming. Does this mean that Netscape 7.1 will definatly be the last release? Are there any AOL-employed staff still working for mozilla.org or the mozilla foundation (cuts could mean all or some)? Are all the servers etc being donated to the mozilla foundataion, or will they continue to be run by AOL? Ian My understanding is that a month ago they were planning not to release a Netscape version at all. Buffy was cancelled. But I guess they figured that since Mozilla was so close to releasing a build anyway, they might as well finish. I'm guessing they were synchronized because Netscape didn't want to waste the time and money doing extra QA, etc. etc. "I fell on...BLACK DAYS" -Soundgarden ... just like you. ================================ No, that was not meant for anyone to take personally, I'm just singing the song in my head right now and thought I'd croon for all the rest of you. I read your post, got confused, then saw the bottom portion. Glad you weren't referring directly to me, since I've been totally optimistic about the whole deal. My friends say I'm in denial, but I just toss those comments in the Trash. Maybe I need to set a junk rule to catch all that negativity. :) My friends, family, and coworkers who are Mozilla converts (which is most of them) are unconcerned if they are even aware of the change. They have their Mozilla 1.4 with pop-up blocking, tabbed browsing, and spam filtering. Those are in order on how quickly they will sell someone on switching (from my experience) and spam filtering is only last because my coworkers are stuck on Outlook, so I can only sell that feature to the home-user people. I say "No pop-ups" and people ask where to get it. Tell your negative friends the following: The worst-case scenario people seem to be batting around is that Mozilla will have a marked development slowdown without the dedicated people AOL was providing. However, with all the volunteers already in place and so many ex-Netscape people (whether still at AOL or not) continuing to donate time and energy even a minor slowdown is fairly unlikely. On the flip side, marketing Mozilla to companies like Earthlink and Juno just got easier. No matter how things go from here, we have Mozilla 1.4 which is PlentyGoodEnough(TM). The ongoing development now consists mainly of changes to make it ever better (break up App Suite for greater flexability and performance, create/polish GRE and XRE to make an awesome new devel platform, rewrite Gecko for modularity and performance), so this is all just gravy. Mozilla 1.6 or 1.7 should compete spectacularly with IE (which is now standing completely still), Opera, Safari, and Konquerer on every level, but Mozilla 1.4 already competes on enough levels to be very compelling. Pros: Perhaps a new champion of Mozilla can rise from the ashes. AOL's distribution mostly took features away, AFAIK. We need someone to distribute a shiny end-user product based on Mozilla's code. (Personally, I think Mozilla is almost there all by itself anyway -- great job guys & gals!) Perhaps with AOL gone, there will be more money flowing in from smaller companies that compete with AOL *AND/OR* Microsoft. Cons: 1. Less people paid to work on Mozilla code. Condolences to anyone laid off. :-( 2. Less exposure for the Mozilla codebase / no chance for AOL/Gecko. 3. Naysayers and the clueless media will conveniently lump Mozilla in with Netscape. The fact is AOL, the internet company, is not doing well. They were probably pressured to shed some things, maybe as a precursor to a spin-off from AOL/TW? > no chance for AOL/Gecko. How so? AOL still has a reason, assuming they intend to continue offering AOL for the Mac. With no more IE for the Mac, AOL could use the gecko engine so they only have to code to a single rendering engine across all platforms. And gecko is still available for all to use, including AOL. Of course, given how different IE for the Mac was from IE for Windows, they've had the incentive all along... What are you smokin' dude? The writing is on the wall, take off those rose colored glasses and read it already. This was purely a $$ decision on the part of AOL. With Steve Case out of the picture, the bean counters were running the show (Steve Case was the only ace Netscape had in it's hand). All they wanted was to stop the hemmoraging of $$ from the Time Warner coffers. What better way than to strike a deal with MS for $750 Mil (and a guarantee of free MSIE support for 7 years), cut loose the Netscape unit, and grant a $2 Mil "severence package" to the Mozilla folks. That's a nice way of saying, "I had a good time, I'll call you soon". Sound familiar dude? Maybe sun could create OpenBrowser as addition to there office range? It could be the end-user product mozilla needs #123 Re: re: Bugs that make Mozilla business-unfriendlyby Makali Wednesday July 16th, 2003 10:38 AM Huh, when was the last time Sun produced something that was a winner with end-users? OpenOffice is not an MS Office beater, Java succeeds only in annoying the average user (at best they don't notice it's there, which is hardly a positive endorsement). Christ, you remember their last web browser? No way man. They can take the code if they want - they'd by quite within their rights - but don't expect great things on the popular front. *Moment of Respectful Silence for the death of one of the true Web-Pioneers* Like others I'm surprised they even waited this long. I mean I've posted here many times about how AOL was never interested in marketing or support Netscape/Mozilla. At least now Mozilla won't have the tant of AOL hanging over it anymore. I do give them credit for paying people for work on Mozilla for so long though. Oh well, at least the code isn't going anywhere I do feel sorry for those laid off and I hope that they can manage to continue to contribute in some form or another. Thanks for all your work. Netscape is dead, Long Live Mozilla. A nuclear bomb has been detonated on the Mozilla community and it has the words "AOL" written on it. >:( > A nuclear bomb has been detonated on the Mozilla community and it has the words "AOL" written on it. Yeah, and it's showered Mozilla with $2,000,000 in cash. Which is a whole lot better than a poke in the eye with a sharp stick. Gerv For software, $2M over two years is very little. That basically employs five to (at the very most) ten people and gives them office space and hardware... very little else. I suspect the role of the Mozilla Foundation, with its funding, will not be to provide a core of hackers, but just to give the project either a slower death or -- at the very best -- a modicum of organization for the screaming masses of unwashed, would-be hackers. "For software, $2M over two years is very little. That basically employs five to (at the very most) ten people and gives them office space and hardware... very little else. I suspect the role of the Mozilla Foundation, with its funding, will not be to provide a core of hackers, but just to give the project either a slower death or -- at the very best -- a modicum of organization for the screaming masses of unwashed, would-be hackers." It's already considerably more than $2M (plus all of the tinderbox, build machines and server hardware we're currently using and some that's new and will be set up soon) and other parties will be contributing to the Mozilla Foundation besides just AOL. Mitch Kapor has already contributed $300K. Other leading technology companies have expressed interest in supporting the foundation too. For quite a while we've had many not-Netscape key code contributors working on Mozilla. The last few months have seen as many or more not-Netscape people contributing code to mozilla than Netscape people. People that were contributing for free or in the pay of other organizations haven't gone away. Many of the people that were being paid by AOL haven't gone away. We're still building and shipping great software. Our open source community, paid (by companies like IBM and Sun) and volunteer, is strong and we continue to attract new contributors all of the time. With this initial money to launch the Mozilla Foundation and the contributions that other parties will make in the future, we should not only be able to sustain our momentum in developing award-winning applications but also improve existing products, create new products and reach out to new consumers with marketing and distribution efforts we've (for lack of resources) explicitely avoided in the past. --Asa This sounds a lot like a "trust us, it'll be fine" press release. Having said that, I hope to god you're right. I've certainly got some gripes with Mozilla (yes, they're all in Bugzilla in one form or another) but my professional life would be a living hell were it to go away. Crap, this has got me wondering if I shouldn't take some C++ classes. I keep having these visions go through my mind of some of the scenes in the Martian Chronicles (black flakes blowing in the wind... maybe it's just too much Bass Ale...) It's certainly nice that various parties are donating money, AOL included. And I recognize that the composition of the engineering core of Mozilla (drivers, etc.) has become largely non-Netscape-affiliated. To be clear, I don't think the way the Mozilla organization operates will change too drastically in its practices or principles. However, I don't believe any of that matters. My thesis (and please excuse me for my thoughts and arguments being a bit ill-formed, since this is totally off the cuff) is: Mozilla is not special. What do people consider "special" or unique about Mozilla? Mostly attributes pertaining to its status as a framework (as opposed to a browser), such as: - XPToolkit (XUL/XBL, or whatever you want to call it). But the idea of a cross-platform skinning system is not unique. Skinning has been implemented in numerous other products using XML and custom-built scripting languages. Other products have done a perfectly reasonable job doing the same thing as the XPFE without doing the web-standards song and dance that makes Mozilla's front end so slow. And judging by the shifting focus of the Mozilla organization from developing a fully-featured browser suite to developing a tight runtime environment for embedding purposes, it seems the negative tradeoffs in having such a heavyweight front-end are well-understood. - XPCOM. This has also been done over and over again. XPConnect, to be fair, is a beautifully-engineered technology which does a far better job at bridging language boundaries than COM's IDispatch. But the generally pervasive use of XPCOM throughout the codebase, especially in the layout engine, is a nightmare. I still have flashbacks to nsCSSFrameConstructor... Regardless, it seems like the majority of what XPCOM is used for and built for is to have ownership semantics inherent in the programming model. A better solution to this would be to use the full features of C++, rather than using crippling coding conventions in order to support legacy compilers, and to use smart pointers (i.e., std::auto_ptr, boost::shared_ptr, etc.) in the cases where ownership is complex. - Netlib. How many times does the software community have to reimplement the core set of networking protocols before it is satisfied? The only thing that makes Netlib special is that it's XPCOM-based and thus integrates better with the rest of the framework. - Gecko, and standards compliance, in general. Two points to be made here: firstly, there are an increasing number of standards-compliant browsers out there, some of which have true commercial viability (e.g. Safari, as it is to be a part of MacOS X). So compliance alone doesn't make Mozilla special. Secondly, what does it matter to implement the XForms standard, for example, when not a single human being on the planet cares about it? The W3C is quickly losing its relevance to the development of the web-at-large, and Mozilla would do well to adapt by innovating. My point is this: You say, "we're still building and shipping great software." I don't dispute that the Mozilla community continues to march forward, but my question is, for what purpose? To what end? Until any true innovation is made in the internet arena -- that is, until an entirely new paradigm of publishing information and creating applications is developed -- browsers have been done, and there is nothing left to do. Mozilla purports to be far more than just a browser, so does it mean anything to be "award-winning" when all you're being compared to is other browsers? As a user, my perspective is: whether it's IE, Safari, Opera, Konqueror or Mozilla on my desktop I absolutely do not care as long as it works. And as a business my set of concerns would be no different, with the exception of cost as an added consideration. You can "reach out to new consumers" all you like, but unless Mozilla does something new and spectacular -- and I don't mean "browsing the web" -- nobody will be impressed. They get a lot done without one single giant megacorp supporting them. I see no reason why Mozilla can't thrive in a similar fashion. Any sadness I have is for the individuals effected by the job losses at AOL. The Mozilla project itself should be fine. Friend, I think you missed a point. GNOME is kind of backed by Sun and RedHat etc. KDE is backed by SuSE etc. Take a look at their page. They have companies behind them other than just "pure" volunteering. Of course, I'm not saying that they can't do anything without companies behind. I'm just saying that your "without one single giant megacorp supporting them" is not totally valid. GNOME and KDE are both supported by a variety of corporations and individuals. The corporations are all about more that just GNOME and GNOME is much bigger than any one companies involvement. I hope that Mozilla will operate successfully in a similar fashion now that AOL are no longer having such a huge involvement. I also hope that the technology Mozilla continues to produce will be useful to AOL and that they will have reason to continue to contribute in the future. With any luck perhaps a more independent mozilla.org will proove to be a more dynamic and healthy open source environment in the long term. Yeah but at the cost of the remaining engineers including myself. I'm sure the money will come in handy but I wonder if it will make up for having so many less pairs of eyeballs working full time, guiding, shaping and improving the code. While I'll still be working on the ActiveX stuff, the new situation means I won't have the time or the inclination to do nearly as much as did before. Actually, it is more like someone who has been supplying you with food for the last 10 years saying "that's it, nice knowing you, here's some to keep you going for a bit longer." My main disappointment here is not that AOL are dropping out, I believe mozilla can survive without them (although obviously it would be much better with them). More important is that Gecko in AOL now will almost certainly never happen. I was one of the people who believed the IE in AOL deal was an insurance policy for AOL and they were still planning to switch to Gecko. Mozilla is gaining respect from the webdesigners, but there are still too many designers with the opinion that 'no one uses mozilla/netscape and those who do are techies who can fix any problems they find anyway'. AOL had the power to change that. First of all, I must admit that I never was a fan of the netscape browser. For a long time I stayed proud using my internet explorer. One year ago I had a look at Mozilla again and fall in love. Strange feeling when reading now what happens to netscape. However standing on which side (now or in the past) netscape was the real pioneer in web development and everyone who worked on it, can be proud of it... even in this worth situation. Good luck guys! The Mozilla Community shall not fall in depression now, it can be a big change to get Mozilla more popular. AOL is for sure not the best company, but microsoft is IMAO more dangerous and I want to see Mozilla at the top! So work as hard as you already do and do not look back to long! They just said there is more volunteers than aol employees, plus they got 2 mil. just from aol and more money from others. Also the dozens of companies like redhat/suse which rely on mozilla and openoffice to sell their software will pick the slack. Other companies like collabnet will donate hardware and bandwidth resources. im surprised that aol funded netscape for so long and that people are surprised at aol dropping a money losing division. ... at the very worst it might hiccup the development a bit until everything gets re-organized. Netscape is dead, mozilla isnt. So what else is new? what concerns me is that there is no longer a end-user supported distribution for the less technically inclined. I of course meant "there is no longer a traditionally supported distribution aimed at end users". My first answer is that Mozilla WILL be the new end-user distribution, though perhaps not "traditionally supported". We have had some sniffs of this change from the Mozilla Meetings Minutes (mmm...), and this is also borne out by what Gerv has been saying plus the revamp of the front page to look more like a "distribution" page and not a "project" page. It's just a browser, after all, and the Mozilla/Firebird tips pages set up by enthusiasts or Moz-hackers in their spare time are already very useful for newbies. Why not community supported? It already is. Off-topic: I love how the Mozilla releases (with screenshots!!!) are front and center on Mozilla.org now! My second answer is that there is nothing stopping RedHat, Sun, IBM, or any number of others from releasing a supported, even commercial distribution of Mozilla. I could see IBM or Sun or even RedHat doing customized and Mozilla rollouts for companies who have service agreements with them. Maybe they won't offer end-user support to non-customers, but then again did AOL really do that? Free end-user support has always mainly been what one can find on the web. Who is going to pay per-instance charges for web browser support? I'm not certain AOL ever really "traditionally supported" Netscape. Don't get me wrong: they paid for development for quite a long while, which is *really* cool especially for an ultra-evil Old Media company that fused with an ultra-evil Dot-Bomb to create Voltron's arch-enemy "Twaol" (no idea how to pronounce that). I'm just saying they never sold Netscape, never signed software distribution contracts with corporate clients for it (not really a services company anyways, are they?), and never really pimped the releases up. The first web browser I ever used was Netscape 2.0 at the age of 13. I remember being chosen as a beta tester of Netscape 3.0 and being so excited receiving the CD with the beta on it. I think I still even have that CD somewhere. I stuck with Netscape (with brief defections to IE but was never satisfied) until Mozilla became usable. Now I'm a proud user and tester of the best browser around, Mozilla Firebird. Rest In Peace Netscape, we all will miss you and have memories (good + bad) for the rest of my IT career (graduating from my university next year). Condolences to all of the employees that lost their job, I hope you continue to work on Mozilla with whatever time you can devote to it and hopefully there is enough donations that most of you can be rehired by the Mozilla Foundation. "hopefully there is enough donations that most of you can be rehired by the Mozilla Foundation" that might be a little optimistic - we're talking a lot of people here. To hire all of them, must be at least a couple of hundred thousand dollars a month - I don't think the donations are going to cover that... "So, paradoxically, it may be that it is in the best interests of mozilla (as a platform not a product) for AOLTW to reduce their funding of moz" -- from a post (http://tinyurl.com/h1nw) I wrote over a year ago, as part of a thread (http://tinyurl.com/h1mq) in which I tried to explore what mozilla should do given that I thought AOL might withdraw some funding. -- ralph Grr. It mangled my URLs!! I'll try again by dropping the http:// bit -- so you'll have to cut and paste, I guess. Won't know if it will work until I submit... "So, paradoxically, it may be that it is in the best interests of mozilla (as a platform not a product) for AOLTW to reduce their funding of moz" -- from a post (tinyurl.com/h1nw) I wrote over a year ago, as part of a thread (tinyurl.com/h1mq) in which I tried to explore what mozilla should do given that I thought AOL might withdraw some funding. I like Netscape, I got involved through Netscape, I will miss it and the wonderfull people like dbradley, Stephend and many other people... I hope Mozilla will survive this (I think yes but with a UI disaster [FB] ) And the SeaMonkey UI is brilliant, right..? Firebird is a major improvement in UI simplicity and usability. The Seamonkey is far away from be perfect but the FB UI is worse. yeah... not only the FB UI is worse... I think almost everything is better in Seamonkey :) Not only is the SeaMonkey UI worse... I think almost everything is better in Firebird :) --Asa Then what about the appaling lack of development tools for Firebird in comparison to SeaMonkey? > Then what about the appaling lack of development tools for Firebird in comparison to SeaMonkey? JS Debugger and DOM Inspector are now working on Mozilla Firebird, last I heard. And as time goes on, other tools will get ported. In the mean time, there's nothing stopping people continuing to use Mozilla to develop websites. Gerv Actually, I believe DOMI is broken with the most recent Firebird nightlies. But it does work usually - there's a third-party build from a couple of weeks back of Firebird + DOMI. There's nothing stopping people from using Mozilla if they can get past the "Mozilla/Netscape has no future" stuff. I mean, when people in the forums threaten to switch browsers because a bug in the Firebird nightlies hasn't been fixed for 4 weeks, that's a little crazy, but it happens. Netscape has reached the end of the line, and most people don't know the difference between Mozilla and Netscape (if they've heard of Mozilla at all...) What FireBird lacks in features, it makes up in speed. But I swear by the 'Search' tab on the Sidebar. Along with the SeaMonkey/XPFE sidebar itself. I won't use FB full time unless it's implemented in FB. #124 Re: re: Bugs that make Mozilla business-unfriendlyby Makali Wednesday July 16th, 2003 10:43 AM Wait, are you *high*? You think that because Firebird is targetted toward normal people and not developers (and is consequently actually /usable/), it's got a worse UI? You need to try a different flavour of crack, man, this one's making your head wrong. ;) I would like to thanks all the person at now old-netscape for their first browsers (I begun with ns1). And the release of the source who permit the mozilla project. Philippe I mean, would it be sold off to someone like IBM or Sun if they were interested in it. Would anyone buy it if it was? Its such an icon that the landscape will be changed forever. I can't believe this happened so sudden. Was there any news or warning about this previously? Is AOL going to continue support for their gecko-based Mac client? I can imagine they might move to Safari eventually but since there is no more MSIE for the Mac what are they going to do for now? Will there be more Netscape branded released? What will happen to www.netscape.com? Will it eventually wind up redirecting to aol.com or go 404? Nothing can kill Mozilla and there are certain advantages to this, but without the Netscape brand named distribution or the backing of AOL (more than just throwing money at it) there might be less corporate acceptance. What can be done about this? If Mozilla is going to be a brand on it's own then it could really use an official CD and manual that could be purchased or perhaps to be given in return for a donation. Like someone on slashdot mentioned, a plushie Mozilla doll for a significant donation would be kind of cool. Oh, bumper stickers! Got to have Mozilla bumper stickers. Summary from what I have read to prevent everyone from going crazy: 1. Netscape the web browser/suite is dead. RIP 2. All Netscape employees have either been laid off or reassigned to another AOL TW division. 3. There are no longer any AOL employees directly paid to work on Mozilla 4. The non-profit and independent Mozilla Foundation has been started and will control Mozilla development. Notice the new web site at www.mozilla.org 5. Mozilla is NOT dead, far from it. 6. AOL TW will donate $2 million over the next 2 years. Since the Mozilla Foundation is non-profit, companies (including AOL TW) can continue to donate money basically for free since they can use it to reduce their taxes. AOL will also continue to support Mozilla in areas such as domain names, servers, bandwidth, etc. 7. IBM and Sun, among other companies, have said they will continue to support Mozilla. 8. A good portion of the former Netscape developers will continue to work on Mozilla. Some have even gotten hired by companies like IBM and Sun to continue to work on Mozilla. Depending on donations, the Mozilla Foundation will be able to keep some Mozilla developers on full-time pay. Finally... 9. MOZILLA IS NOT DEAD 10. MOZILLA IS NOT DEAD 11. MOZILLA IS NOT DEAD Hmm this is interesting, new information from the article: http://msnbc-cnet.com.com/2100-1032_3-1026078.html 1. AOL has laid off 50 Netscape employees that have been working on Mozilla. 2. Cuts are less then 10% of Netscape staff 3. AOL will continue to support current Netscape versions and the Netscape.com web portal 4. "Mitchell Baker, who will be president of the new Mozilla Foundation, said the group would use part of its seed funding to hire "a core group of people," which would include project managers and "key technical contributors" to the open-source project. Some of those people are expected to come from Netscape's ranks. A broad group of independent volunteers and staffers at other companies are expected to continue working on the open-source browser effort, however." 5. "As part of the agreement with AOL, the Foundation will also receive all the trademarks and logos associated with Mozilla." That article plays some number games, sadly. There is no such thing as "Netscape staff." Netscape is a brand. I repeat: NETSCAPE IS A BRAND. When the statement "less than 10% of Netscape staff" is made, that should translate to "less than 10% of AOL's Mountain View campus." The bottom line is, 100% of former Mozilla developers in the employ of AOL are no longer working on Mozilla. I don't know of any exceptions. "The bottom line is, 100% of former Mozilla developers in the employ of AOL are no longer working on Mozilla. I don't know of any exceptions." Not correct. In addition to the financial and equipment contributions that AOL has made to the Mozilla Foundation, it continues to employ a small team of "Mozilla people" (myself included, as well as developers and infrastructure people) to assist in the transition. --Asa Immediately after reading the headline on Mozillazine, I went straight to news.com to see what was going on. They are cutting 10% of their browser development staff. But more importantly, I think it is a great idea that Mozilla is now going to be the product of non-profit Mozilla Foundation. Many corporations, including AOL and other M$ rivals as well as Linux developers are continuing to support it. With independence for a big corporate big-daddy such as AOL, the Mozilla foundation can finally be more focused on the browser itself. And since it is non-profit, it doesn't have to watch wall street to decide if it's a good idea to continue working on this awesome browser. By the way, the same Cnet News.com report also stated that AOL will continue to support current Netscape browser versions and the Netscape.com portal. Good idea. Long Live Mozilla the king of all browsers! "They are cutting 10% of their browser development staff" Don't put too much trust in the cnet article. It's not 10% of browser development staff, it's 10% of "Netscape" staff - that's AOL's positive spin on it. It was pretty much 100% of the browser development staff - all the people that were working on the Mozilla code are gone. As you say, they'll support current versions - that just means taking critical patches from Mozilla (the stuff going into 1.4.1, for example), and making 7.11, 7.12 releases. The fact that they're offering the $2m and some other resources is better than nothing, but it's not a huge amount when you think of the value of having dozens of Netscape staff working on the Mozilla code full time, which was happening until yesterday. >>It was pretty much 100% of the browser development staff.<< Asa, in a prior post http://mozillazine.org/talkback.html?article=3422&message=49#49 has confirmed that this is not the case. Some staff of Mozilla, Asa included, continue to be on AOL's payroll. Well I did say "pretty much". When I said "browser development staff", I meant actual developers - I'm not sure who exactly is left, but it's a handful, and they are not all developers. Assuming there's 2 or 3 of them, that'd be 95% rather than 100%. And even they are only there for a couple of months transition. Of course the other people are essential to the project too, and AOL could have done a lot worse than the 'severance package' they've given Mozilla. I keep hearing these 95%, 100%, almost all, all kind of figures, but I have yet to find a report (not online posting or blogs) by a credible source affirming this. The Mozilla.org site ANNOUNCED that it was seperating from AOL http://www.mozillafoundation.org/press/mozilla-foundation.html but nowhere do I see any confirmation of any of these figures. Does anyone have a link? I am not trying to discredit anyone; I just want to see these figures. But this probably just means that it's time for more of us to start learning about the Mozilla code, so we may be able to contribute. Is there a "getting started on Mozilla hacking" guide? If not, there probably should be. You mean like: http://mozilla.org/hacking/coding-introduction.html ? There is also: http://mozilla.org/hacking/ which covers all the steps of the process, including review, etc. Finally, questions on the #mozilla channel on irc.mozilla.org are always welcome from people trying to get into the code. First of all, I feel sorry for the devs who got laid off for no fault of theirs. Its never easy. My thoughts go out to them. Surely, they'll land excellent jobs at other places, but such times are hard emotionally. Second, here's what i think of the whole situation: - The cuts were planned from day one. It was a verbal part of the AOL-Microsoft settlement. - Microsoft WAS aware of the rising status of gecko based browsers, and acted quickly to kill it, not by competing, but by using its hordes of cash. - AOL has had a change of guard, with TW executives returning to the helm. They realise what a fool they made of themselves by getting acquired for loads of worthless AOL stock. They hate the online division, and have pretty much nothing to do with software. - For the AOL old guard, netscape served its purpose by getting microsoft to pay $750m in cash. They have absolutely no interest in competing against microsoft or anyone else in software development. - A verbal part of the settlement was killing netscape compeletely, and orphaning mozilla. Given the above, no wonder Parsons agreed. It was delayed just so microsoft could escape the prying eyes of antitrust lawyers. Where does mozilla go from here: - They have $2m promised - They have patrons who can raise $10K for mozdev - They have volunteer hackers But is this enough to keep churning out excellent products? I dont know. I think a lot will depend on if SUN or IBM are interested in funding the new mozilla foundation. Maybe Lindows CEO Robertson will be interested too... I'm keeping my fingers crossed.
What is that new Mozilla Firebird icon supposed to be? http://www.mozillafoundation.org/frontpage/downloadIconFirebird.png Is the icon picture composed of two objects or one? Or is it just abstract art? It is an abstract form of the letter Q, if I remember correctly. It stands for "Qute" which is the new default Firebird (Tee hee. I mean Mozilla Firebird. Naughty!) theme, replacing the Orbit theme variant of older releases. I think that djst uses it for his personal sigil/symbol. I don't think he meant it to be used like that. I could be wrong, but I thought the current firebird icon was the duck-looking thing. Now, I'm going to plug my logo http://komodo.nique.net/~grayrest/firebird.png to be used instead. ;] well i hope not, http://www.mozillafoundation.org/frontpage/downloadIconFirebird.png, this icon is a well known logo for QUAKE, the game. http://www.idsoftware.com/games/quake/quake/images/boxshot-quake.jpg http://www.denken.com/dzone/nav_quake1.jpg On a sense the logo is diferent but some negative feedback can came out from this aproach and I fear more legal actions could arise and the project doesnt need that at this moment. "ah but its a game", well the other was a DB either.. well drop using it from the beginning is the best solution to overcome this. And i like the mozilla project, and im in love with Mozilla Firebird but i think i wouldnt go so further http://www.bmezine.com/tattoo/A21104/high/znj4fi52.jpg I think the two are sufficiently different. However, I also think the Mozilla Firebird logo looks too much like a Soviet sickle. Take that with Mozilla's red star and one might be led to think that Mozilla embodies the Communist/Soviet mindset. Regardless of the accuracy of that thought, I think the icons do nothing to endear Mozilla in the public arena here in the U.S. This brings up an interesting problem. Icons hold strong psychological power, and the same icon may represent different, conflicting concepts in various parts of the world. Since mozilla already supports internationization, perhaps icons could be chosen appropriately based on that. Eg: us/english users get the lizard, ru/russian users might get the star, and chinese users could have something that makes sense in their culture - all based on internationization settings. http://vccslitonline.cc.va.us/sonnet116/sickle.htm Being a longtime linux user I'm actually used to being called a commie ;) Regarding the sickle/throbber I've never really liked it anyway. Not because of the sickle thing, but because nobody knows what the hell it is. Hopefully it will get changed one of these days. The first impression most people are going to have when they see the new mozilla.org redesign is "what the hell is the thing in the Mozilla Firebird Picture?". If it realy stands for "Qute" then it should be changed anyway. ANY throbber for the Firebird browser should stand for Firebird not the name of the theme its running. The purpose of Firebird is not to advertise what theme its running. Having a big "Q" makes zero sense since there is no Q in Mozilla or Firebird. <i>I also think the Mozilla Firebird logo looks too much like a Soviet sickle.</i> That's exactly what I first thought! See the resemblance here: http://www.departments.bucknell.edu/russian/ru125/sicklelf.gif Here you see two symbols that Mozilla has now used, the red star and sickle, in Soviet flags: http://www.vik-lomancov.narod.ru/e_USSR.htm I was trying to figure out what tool they had replaced the hammer ( http://autoopencas.sourceforge.net/images/sflogo-hammer1.jpg ) with to represent the Working Class. The sickle imagery was retained, I speculated, as a tribute to Communism's heritage. Thankfully, they have already replaced this logo on the web page with the flame logo: http://mozillafoundation.org/frontpage/downloadIconFirebird.gif Thank you, Mozilla.org! > this icon is a well known logo for QUAKE, the game. Um.. Not exactly. It's the throbber for the Qute theme that became Firebird's default theme a while back. In both cases, it's just a stylized 'Q'. Nothing special about that. If you look at it with an open mind, you can sorta picture it as a bird (blue part as the wings, red as the body). Not that it makes me think "firebird," but "bird" can be seen in it. I do have to agree that the throbber makes me think of the game quake. Yeah, it's a little different (turned on its side a little and a different color), but basically it's the same. I have thought this ever since the first time I saw the new throbber. Also, for the default theme, you need to have a throbber that makes people think "mozilla" either consciously or unconsciously. the ie throbber looks like a windows logo, which makes sense... the netscape throbber was the netscape "n" which made sense, and the mozilla seamonkey throbber is a "m" and a lizard, both of which associating with mozilla. i'm just afraid new users will see the "Q" throbber and wonder what does "Q" have to do with mozilla? the letter doesn't even appear in the name of the application or even the theme any more for that matter. the theme is simply called "mozilla firebird." so that makes me wonder, where did the "Q" come from (from a new user's perspective -- not knowing the theme used to be called qute....) anyway, just my 2 cents... The new mozilla.org start pages shows it: Mozilla doesn't need AOLTW, even more I think is has more changes without - without a specific ISP in the back and without the damned name "Netscape" hanging on it. Now the Mozilla community has the chance to show, that it can make Mozilla something to beat MSIE even on average users desktop! I don't think, we need to do that much for that, here's a short list: - see votes a "the communities voice" on bugs. If a bug has many of them, the community wants this fixed. - Mozilla is a very stable browser, and it should be this even more - so if you don't have something to do, don't write another useless feature - fix some crashers! - many people dislike that Firebird has to few prefs, or has the wrong prefs - somebody knowing about should take a look aboud an ideal solution. Don't forget, that Mozilla's power is to have all the things as tabs or popup blocking "out of the box" - if people need to install something additional, they will install it upon MSIE. - we all know, that there's more than enough bloat inside Mozilla, especially since many of the codebase got removed for Firebird - here everybody can help! Every byte counts, so help - maybe with optimising images, or reordering the CSS files. - never forget, we need users to be a real alternative, so don't piss off people with "if you don't like this use MSIE!". I think, we can beat Microsoft and the MSIE now more then ever, just because there's nobody, who want's to make money with a next version, which might work better ;) not that votes ever carried a lot of weight, but if anything, I think the situation can only go in the other direction. Netscape staff were a bunch of people paid to do what Netscape wanted to do with the browser, and work on the core stuff. Now (AFAICS), there's going to be a lot less work done by a coordinated group, and more done by independent contributors doing what they want for themselves. To have people working on code "for the community" (e.g. doing stuff with most votes), you would have to pay them, and the Mozilla Foundation doesn't have the resources to pay a bunch of coders for any length of time (assuming the whole $2m went on that, it would pay the equivalent of the Netscape coders for maybe 4 or 5 months) AOL have done a lot more than they had to when effectively stopping work on Netscape, there was no need to give the Mozilla Foundation $2 million, there was no reason to continue hosting mozilla.org and there was no reason that they had to keep key mozilla.org staff like Asa in employment over the transition period. They didn't even have to give the mozilla trademarks away although this would have created very bad press. It's a shame that AOL laid off a lot of staff, but they've set the foundations for Mozilla.org to continue successfully. There's a lot of open source projects that are very successful without the levels of cash already donated to the Mozilla foundation, and hopefully once they do need other donations people will respond in a positive manner like they did for mozdev.org Other things to consider: - Removing the connection between Netscape and Mozilla will stop people thinking of Netscape 6.0 - Some ISPs may have been wary using a product that was tied to a rival ISP in their eyes, when Fire/Thunderbird are ready and use the GRE then they'd make a great product to offer to ISPs, I believe there's good business model in selling customised browsers to isps that want to offer something a bit different. - People pay for Opera (ok they have to, or suffer ads), but the reason they pay for it is because they consider it worth the money, so I can see people happily donating to mozilla development (particularly if it can be used as a tax write off in the US). Totally dropping Netscape/Mozilla would have created bad press for AOL. At least now they can say 'well we gave them a helping hand'. $2,000,000 isn't that much money to a company like AOL, who has just got $750,000,000 for microsoft's past actions and spent god knows how much on Netscape in the first place. We mustn't forget what AOL have provided for Mozilla in the past though. Let's hope that this will turn out to be just another day in history. Let's... Thank God! Another useless browser is dead. Since the latest statistics show 97% of the browser traffic is Internet Explorer I applaud this. Also being a HTML programmer IE rocks, all the problems with HTML and JAVASCRIPT give me such headaches in other browsers. IE Rulez Mozzilla just die! I'm really interested in seeing how your webpages are. I've written quite a lot of web applicatiosn before, and I never really have problem with cross platform html and javascripts. Espeically for html, I learned html from w3c's spec. Those stuff just works everywhere. I do need to mension that IE's css support is giving me some problem. I always like to keep my pages clean with all "looks and feels" code in css. But IE doesn't support some of those css and hence forced me to dirt my web pages with styles. I hate that. =( Good troll though. I mean IE's ability to accept any POS code is exactly the reason you are what you are - not sure if that was their intention.... -bZj <i>Another useless browser is dead. Since the latest statistics show 97% of the browser traffic is Internet Explorer I applaud this.</i> How can someone like you, applaud if both hands are beeing used to close "IE windows" with popups adds that are all over your taskbar? <i>Also being a HTML programmer IE rocks</i> Please dont go further, I think you just said all about yourself. Thank God! Another useless browser is dead. Since the latest statistics show 97% of the browser traffic is Internet Explorer I applaud this. Also being a HTML programmer IE rocks, all the problems with HTML and JAVASCRIPT give me such headaches in other browsers. IE Rulez Mozzilla just die! go away troll. on a side note: i would assume the reason your 'code' gives you problems in mozilla/netscape is because you in fact do not know how to properly code.. Thank God! Another useless browser is dead. Since the latest statistics show 97% of the browser traffic is Internet Explorer I applaud this. Also being a HTML programmer IE rocks, all the problems with HTML and JAVASCRIPT give me such headaches in other browsers. IE Rulez Mozzilla just die! Thank God! Another useless browser is dead. Since the latest statistics show 97% of the browser traffic is Internet Explorer I applaud this. Also being a HTML programmer IE rocks, all the problems with HTML and JAVASCRIPT give me such headaches in other browsers. IE Rulez Mozzilla just die! (Yeah, yeah, I shouldn't feed the troll... but...) But if you actually knew anything about HTML/CSS/JavaScript/DOM, you'd know that there's tons of stuff (as in "W3C standards") that Mozilla (and Opera for that matter) supports that takes a single line of code in Moz, and 30 lines of workarounds in MSIE. Sort of like the situation with MSIE4 and Netscape 4, only in reverse. What comes around, goes around, eh? Well, you know troll, most people on this site use Mozilla or a mozilla based browser. Hence, posting it once is enough for us to see. Although, I concede for someone using IE, the result could be different (IE can eat up the first few posts). Check out the new mozilla.org. Now that's an improvement that'll quiet some who have wanted the original layout scrapped. Way to go, mozilla.org!! OK, it's not terrible, I am just going to be the dissenting opinion. I was fond of the old one. But with a new image, a new homepage is in order, I suppose. It just seems so /busy/ now. -bZj First, all the best to those of you who have been caught up in the AOL reorganisation. You've done a sterling job in the 5+ years that Mozilla has been an active project. MozFans such as myself owe you an enormous debt for producing the best damn browser this side of the International Date Line. Hopefully, the transition works out and you all go on to bigger and better things! With a bit of luck, some of the former AOL employees will get a chance to take up residence with other Mozilla advocates like Red Hat or IBM. Maybe all that will really happen with this announcement is that the Mozilla pay packet gets spread around a little more. Linux, in particular, has a lot to lose if a cross-platform browser like Moz goes the way of the dodo. One big thought occurs to me, however: The creation of the Mozilla Foundation removes one of the largest schizophrenic aspects of the Mozilla project -- namely, that despite having clear benefits over the 'commercial' Netscape browser (eg. for non-AIM users), Mozilla.org was presumably "advised" by AOL not to position itself as an end-user browser. Now that the Mozilla Foundation is independent, Mozilla can (and Gerv says will) advertise itself *exactly* as countless people are using it already -- as a stable, feature-rich, customizable Open Source browser. How good is that?!? I might also point out that even though AOL is putting Mozilla at arms-length, this doesn't automatically mean that Mozilla is off the cards ... AOL can become a Mozilla brander/embedder just like any other third-party developer. In fact, the project with most to lose from this announcement appears to be Beonex. I wonder what they plan to do? You forgot the part of netscape being the main distributor - with netscape gone, marketshare may go down, as more companies drop it as there is no development. No more browser support! Or is the mozilla foundation goin to setup something? "Or is the mozilla foundation goin to setup something?" just did :) http://www.mozilla.org/press/mozilla-foundation.html No they didn't - that link mentions nothing about what Doron was talking about, which is providing support to users. As in a big corporate being able to come along and say "we're thinking of rolling out mozilla onto 2000 desktops, can you help us do that? and we also need help fixing up our intranet pages to work in Mozilla", or Joe User being able to email support@mozilla.org and get a useful response from someone to their question (although that bit can probably be largely achieved user-to-user). Telling people they can post a message in a forum and someone might be able to help them out doesn't cut it (many users would be fine with it, but lots of companies won't go for it...) Isnt this beisade towards AOL because of this action, but AOL never liked the netscape browser, ever since they used IE as their favorite browser. And they, can have a dominant position on US. But not in the rest of the world. Now the doors are open, with mozilla foundation mozilla can have a steady grow beside the stocks market or any other risk inherint to a company like AOL. I think this was a relief for mozilla people, and both to AOL. Unfortunetly people in the middle did surfer, NEtscape employees. But i hope soon they get a better and deserved luck finding new positions and work. What would be nice on the following week or two, would be a BIG company showing up and do the desire support in the MARKETING field promoting and selling Mozilla Technology all Over WOrld. Something like a SUN or IBM or anyother major Big company. The thing that I'm most concerned about is browser plugins. Will Macromedia and others continue to provide Linux plugins? For that matter, will they continue to provide "Netscape" plugins on Windows and Mac? HTML and HTTP standards are mature. It's the add-ons that could become a problem. I am wondering what the fate of http://devedge.netscape.com/ will be as a result of the AOL direction. This site has a lot of good information that is useful to a developer using mozilla, I hope the information stays there even if AOL decides to cut this staff also. AOL is keeping the netscape brand and netscape.com running, it'll stay open for a while. Nopw - Slashdot has a copy of af a netscape emplyee indicating that devedge.netscape.com people were let go/transfered. Wonder what the fate of the content will be. hopefully the mozilla foundation will get at least the site contents and right to use. What grayrest wrote is still correct. Devedge will be around for a while. However, you're also right, in that there won't be any new content there. As with the 7.1 browser, they're going to support what they have for a while, they just won't be doing anything new. Apparently at least some of the content up on Devedge wasn't handed over to Netscape, and is under an open license, so it could be put up elsewhere if devedge goes. As you say, it would be nice if AOL/Netscape handed the content over to the Foundation if and when they don't want to maintain devedge any more... We need some Fan Stuff. And it would be great to get a Mozilla Soft Toy :-))) Hehe... I've always wanted there to be Mozilla t-shirts and other sappy merchandise like that... I'd definitely buy. Will AOL finally relinquish the AIM sidebar as a stand-alone that can be 'ported', so to speak, for use with Moz/Tbird? It's the one feature of Netscape (vs Mozilla) that I actually liked. Of cours,e it was never enough to get me to use NS over Moz. Please AOL, don't kill the AIM sidebar w/NS. -bZj Considering the closed-ness of the AIM protocol, I'd guess that AOL won't let it go open-source. A shame, I guess. I'm sure this has been said before, but if you're a Mac OS X user, I suspect you could be "over-spoiled" for choice of browser on the new http://www.mozilla.org/ home page. Lemme see - the most prominent browser promoted, quite correctly, is Mozilla 1.4. But what's this? Just directly below it is a "lean, mean browsing machine" called Mozilla Firebird 0.6 (complete with an imploring "read why you should switch today" (so Moz Firebird is already competing against Mozilla on all the platforms - "download Mozilla 1.4 and then download Mozilla Firebird 0.6 cos you've been told to 'switch today'" :-) ). Scroll even further down the page and poor old Mac OS X users get to download a *third* Web browser (Camino 0.7) to add to the melting pot. Now *we* know that Mozilla Firebird is to eventually replace the current main Mozilla browser, but the home page doesn't say that. And what about Camino? For the Mozilla Foundation to continue to offer two Mac OS X browsers after Firebird becomes the new main Mozilla Foundatiom browser will surely be confusing? #113 Re: Multiple browser offerings possibly confusing?by nhamblen Wednesday July 16th, 2003 9:08 AM Hey, it's a heck of a lot better placement than Camino has gotten in the past at Mozilla.org. If the pile of programs there is confusing it's only because the Mozilla browser situation is that confusing right now. I think Camino is in a precarious situation, just because there aren't a slew of work-for-free programmers for it. Firebird, compartively, has an army, and there's no hiding the fact that it will compete with Camino fairly soon on Mac. Firebird has more features (some of them even useful), and that gap will widen. Throw in a Firebird pinstripe theme, and Mac-looking widgets (the code is there already) and it may be all over. It's not that there isn't room for a Cocoa-wrapped gecko browser, I just don't see enough motivation to work on one. #119 Re: Multiple browser offerings possibly confusing?by pbreit Wednesday July 16th, 2003 10:09 AM Would energy be best spent continuing Camino development or tuning Firebird for MacOS? I think Mozilla needs to get to one core product before it can hope to penetrate the market. It's way too fragmented at this point. It would look good in those ex-netscape guys CV to say that "Microsoft paid AOL $750M so they would fire me" :) If netscape has gone, what will happen to the newsgroups currently under news://netscape.public.mozilla ? On a more positive note, hopefully the end-user releases will be still kept lean, but with good add-on support, rather than becoming bloated like netscape. I don't know why dissenting opinion is dismissed as having come from a troll. I, for one, would like to offer a voice of support to the gentleman who suggested that IE should be the unified browser. The fact is that the Netscape and Mozilla browsers have been poor efforts from the get-go. IE established overwhelming superiority a long, long time ago, not just in installed base but in technical execution. Continued effort by this small handful of hangers-on will merely be thrown in the bin when this lame, hobbled machine sputters and rolls to a stop. One would think that ostensibly bright people would prefer to spend their time building things that other people will actually /use/. Somehow I expect this entreaty will fall on deaf ears, however, so whatever. Have at it, smart guys. *One would think that ostensibly bright people would prefer to spend their time building things that other people will actually /use/.* Kind of like you should've spent your time making a point people would actually listen to. However, you're entitled to your opinion so I'm not saying you're wrong. It just beggars belief why anyone would post such an anti Mozilla comment on a Mozilla news site. Don't you have better things to do? PS I don't have better things to do, I'm avoiding doing as much work as possible. Which leaves me plenty of time to write ineffective and pointless replies to comments like yours. Then you know what I was doing and have answered your own question, dimwit. Sheesh. This is precisely what I was talking about. i use it. and i know how crappy IE is to code for compared to Moz. IE sucks from a developers point of view. we could easily cut out alot of javascript in many sites just with css menus. but can ie do them? heck no cuase it sucks. and its old. and it costs as much as an OS. a well designed piece of software wont need HACKS to make pngs work. dude you need to hang out in the css-d mailing list and you will see just how crappy IE is. the dumb thing has the hardest time with lists. such a simple thing but not with ie. <sigh> > The fact is that the Netscape and Mozilla browsers have been poor efforts from the get-go. Hey, latecomer, Netscape 0.6 *was* the original browser after NCSA Mosaic, long before IE existed. For me, Mozilla started to be "quite something" around 0.9.6, and has been leaping forward in quality ever since. > IE established overwhelming superiority a long, long time ago, not just in installed base but in technical execution. And now Mozilla and Firebird have established substantial superiority, read the reviews and awards. Things change. > Continued effort by this small handful of hangers-on will merely be thrown in the bin when this lame, hobbled machine sputters and rolls to a stop. You completely misunderstand Open Source development. The code will advance so long as someone is motivated to work on it. > One would think that ostensibly bright people would prefer to spend their time building things that other people will actually /use/. With 400M people on the Internet, even a 1% market share translates to 4,000,000 users. And the Mozilla users are the cream of the crop, the ones smart enough and interested enough to find and use a better browser, and many of them have the skills to improve the code. It benefits an illegal monopoly not to have competition, but what are you getting out of pissing on the Mozilla project? Hence you seem to be a troll. <sighing louder> I'll take your post point by point so that I may sugically remove the indoctrination from your brain... >Hey, latecomer, Netscape 0.6 *was* the original browser after NCSA Mosaic, long before IE existed. For me, Mozilla started to be "quite something" around 0.9.6, and has been leaping forward in quality ever since. This is totally irrelevant to my point. Just because something is original doesn't make it good. Netscape and Mozilla have been poor efforts from the get-go. I guarantee that I've been around this game longer than you have, punk. >And now Mozilla and Firebird have established substantial superiority, read the reviews and awards. Things change. Political tripe. Reviews and awards? Give me a break. IE has a massive lead on all counts. >You completely misunderstand Open Source development. The code will advance so long as someone is motivated to work on it. Right. I don't misunderstand open source. This is precisely my point - it won't be long before no one is motivated to work on it. >With 400M people on the Internet, even a 1% market share translates to 4,000,000 users. And the Mozilla users are the cream of the crop, the ones smart enough and interested enough to find and use a better browser, and many of them have the skills to improve the code. What a joke. First, there aren't many Mozilla users. Some of the posts on this topic attest to this fact - it's been advanced that many, many developers aren't even aware of Mozilla. Second, Mozilla users aren't the "cream of the crop" by any positive measure; they are notable in that they are disaffected and pissy - as opposed to talented or skilled. Mozilla's junk and the development community knows it. >It benefits an illegal monopoly not to have competition, but what are you getting out of pissing on the Mozilla project? What are you getting out of pissing on IE/MS? MS is simply not monopoly, illegal or otherwise. I guess Tiger shouldn't be allowed to play, huh? Read the history of antitrust to see how the rules have changed from addressing actual monopolies to protecting companies that aren't capable of competing. Ellison should have been running his company instead of hanging out on his yacht, and Barksdale should have figured out a way to offer something of value. But instead, these guys run off to D.C. to get their dirty work done. Doesn't matter. MS moves too fast. >Hence you seem to be a troll. OK. And you seem to be incapable of addressing dissenting opinion. Whatever. Calling me a troll seems to be in keeping with your attitude in general. 3 years from now you'll be in a bar, weeping in your beer, muttering to anyone who'll listen about the days when Mozilla and Netscape existed and how it just isn't fair. It's interesting to read this thread these few years later, now that Netscape has quit support. Firefox now has 10% of the market by conservative estimates. Sure, it took them forever to get there, but I'm sure they knew that good things would come if they didn't hastily put together a bad browser. In other words, your prognostications of the fall of Mozilla in a few years: false! is this ironic or what? Twice now I've tried to view the http://ex-mozilla.org/date.html site and twice it's completely hung up mozilla... Perhaps it's just *really* slashdotted and I'm not waiting long enough for the timeout... still, it was pretty funny... considering the topic and url. ;-) #120 Re: Ironically, the ex-mozilla site hangs mozillaby mlefevre Wednesday July 16th, 2003 10:24 AM If it's any help, it's rather screwed up in IE too. Works for me in Mozilla, it just takes a long time because the page itself is very large and it loads hundreds of images from a whole bunch of different servers. The page code is a mess - many of the chunks have their own <html> and <body> tags inside the <p> tag for the chunk. There are also generator tags from several versions of Netscape HTML editors, Microsoft Frontpage and other crap. Basically it's a load of HTML chunks created by the each person in question, all run together. Not a good way to create pages, but I don't suppose they really care... #125 Re: Ironically, the ex-mozilla site hangs mozillaby jwilkinson Wednesday July 16th, 2003 10:49 AM oh well, guess I won't be looking at it soon... I'll live. The irony is still funny though, the ex-mozilla people making a page that hangs it... As I explained to a friend as to why Mozilla is where it is and AOL is divorcing. "AOL could have been the driving consumer force to shape and mold the future of Mozilla, but they never became that." "AOL, if they have any interest in their investments, should have provided leadership and management to their newly acquired development houses. Instead, they figured things would magically happen if they periodically throw cash their way." This was a response to him accusing Mozilla of being a failure after reading this harsh article at The Register on AOL/Netscape, http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/4/31765.html The fact of the matter is AOL went on a shopping spree and has never utilized Netscape, ICQ, and Nullsoft to their potential. These companies were never fully integrated into their plans for the consumer market. AOL, you make me sad. I hate to say it, but I agree wholeheartedly with The Reg on this. Mozilla (as a BROWSER) had tremendous potential to be a gold-standard alternative to Internet Explorer and its one-OS-centric world. After all this talk of turning Moz into a "platform," whatever the hell that means, I confess that as an end user I can't see how this matters. Nobody wants to play in a one-vendor sandbox, and Mozilla used to be the best hope of staving off complete MS dominance, but without Netscape I don't see why anyone (web developers) should care. AOL is to blame for sitting on their hands and playing nice with Microsoft, while they had the potential for a far superior product right under their noses, waiting for someone to make proper use of it. The Mozilla Organization is to blame for disappearing up their own backsides and spending ages whittling away at the perfect interface to an interface to an interface, while they could have been taking a great browser and making it phenomenal. No doubt someone will chime in and say something to the effect of "your comments don't matter, you're not a developer." Which has been the Mozilla attitude all along. Which pretty much proves my point. So before you shout "troll," just remember: the only reason I even care enough to post this is because I think Mozilla is/was the best browser on the face of the earth, and I want it to matter to the Internet at large, not just a few lone nuts somewhere. I've read somewhere that someone had already hired the ex-Netscape coders. Who is the company and how many of the coders were hired? May someone share the information? I've read somewhere that someone had already hired the ex-Netscape coders. Who is the company and how many of the coders were hired? May someone share the information? So, what version of Netscape will be it's last? 7.0 or 7.1 or what? NS7.1 is out already, so I expect (taking into acct the suddenness of this announcement) that it may be the last NS release. There may be something along the lines of a NS7.1.x, for security reasons, but I don't see AOLTW putting much effort back into a browser that is dead. -bZj Best of luck to the Mozilla foundation, and all involved. To me, Mozilla.org looks much better now. Although I currently look forward to the slow death of the Mozilla project, I suppose being free from America Online will force the project's members to return to righteous goals. Maybe they will even make a good web browser, at least for Linux. Death of Mozilla? Didn't you read the article that said AOL, IBM, Red Hat, Sun, etc. had already pledge support in Mozilla Foundation. Perhap meaning they no doubt would become part of the organization for Mozilla. What this mean to people is the continuous growth of Mozilla around the world and it surely ain't going to die out for the next few years or anytime soon. Responding and replying to Tanyel isn't worth the time or effort. Tanyel is a troll. The kind whose computers you wish would just die. There are no dead computers in the news, only dead web browsers. My main problems with the Mozilla project are their use of the Firebird name and their complete disconnection from reality. Every comment I've posted about Mozilla is probably related to those issues. The comments are not senseless attacks. I'm glad that AOL shit canned it. Mozilla and its little birdy friend, Firebird, were always just half-baked atrocities anyhow. Now, the works of mozilla.org can stew and fester in the linux world, right where it belongs, as a mass of digital blasphemy. Do people like wasting their time hoping to get a rise out of others? I guess I'm satisfying this person's need for attention by responding, but his comment (and others above) isn't making me angry or upset, it just makes me feel sorry for him... take your digital religion somewhere else the rest of us have work to do and we get it done better/faster/cheaper with mozilla. dont like it? too bad. its like aol burned all the bridges that the trolls were hiding under...... Yes. Exactly. Thank you so much for taking a stand against the Moz/NS hype. You're not alone in your reasoned opinion - see my other posts here. It won't be long before we're all done with this tiresome debate. Um, reasoned opinions usually include facts. For example, quoting actual developers who feel the same way you do. I admit, you speak more eloquently than the average troll, which leads me to believe you are perhaps a misguided devil's advocate. The simple fact of the matter is that Mozilla passes far more specifications than IE will ever attempt to support. Perhaps you're right that some of the people who were working on Mozilla full-time for Netscape will not contribute anymore, but there is evidence in Bugzilla that the people who have been most prolific in terms of checkins over the last few months have been migrating to outside email addresses, implying they knew the axe was going to fall and wanted to be prepared. The large majority of Mozilla checkins have been done by a relative few for some time (as it probably should be; design by committee is rarely good). Perhaps you have something concrete which supports your supposition that Mozilla and Netscape have been poor from the get-go. Puffing up one's chest and saying things louder than the opponent will intimidate some, but it still does not prove anything. Ooh... thats quick.. They have removed the commercial link from the Tinderbox ( http://tinderbox.mozilla.org/SeaMonkey/ ). Even though we couldn't access it (it was under the 'private' m(osaic)com(munications).com domain at NS, along with bugscape. Damn.. I couldn't see that link in bug #20000.) lol. aol. http://www.yougetalife.com/aolsux.htm http://forums.mozillazine.org/viewtopic.php?p=99385 Read it. Build it. Once you get Mozilla as a attach-to-anything universal gui-building device, it'll be embedded-in and standing-alone-alongside-of... all sorts of odd (and even) stuff. Entrench in everything, and Mozilla Gorilla (self-appointed name for the new app) will be paving all sorts of new, indestructable trails thru IT land. Do it! No, I can't. Not bright enough. But I'll cheer! |