NewsForge Interviews Chris HofmannWednesday December 10th, 2003koody wrote in to tell us that NewsForge has an interview with Mozilla Foundation employee Chris Hofmann. Chris discusses the establishment of the foundation and how the Mozilla project is prospering in a post-Netscape world. He also cites several examples of the extensibility of the Mozilla platform and talks about some of his favourite add-ons. In addition, Chris reveals some interesting information about the use of Mozilla technology on cellphones and handheld devices, including the revelation that a major cellphone vendor is funding development in this area. Doh, all the links (to extensions at least) don't work! Doh, all the links (to extensions at least) don't work! Minimo sounds great. I'd love to use something Gecko-related with the Treo 600. Or even older PocketPC devices. It seems like I can't find many newer programs that will run on my slightly aged Jornada with PocketPC 2000 - I'd love to have a Moz-based browser on that, since PocketIE is so limited. -bZj I thought Fb and Tb are codenames for projects that would eventually take over from the suite. >> Our preliminary thinking on this is that 2.0 is really a version number for the core gecko components, and a collection of many applications that are built on top of it. Those applications would likely include the latest update to the Integrated Suite, Firebird, Thunderbird, and many more. My conclusion* is that the birds will not replace the monkey, but coexist with it. *Based on the two articles referenced to in my blog entry at: http://weblog.wlkr.net/2003_12_01_wlkr_archive.html#seamonkey Seriously, if they will not replace the suite, we're seperating our force here. See, in open source projects, you cannot force others to write code for a certain product instead of another like how youc an do in a business. But people got to realise that we have limited resource and should not be wasted. If we're really still providing a "Suite" that's build seperately from the apps, we should move the Suite's interface to the apps interface (i.e. use the new library) etc. Then we can probably lower the cost of GUI maintanence etc. Or may be we can creat a "hard link + full" version of Mozilla Suite, and the "lite" version as those seperat apps? Anyways, I do not think we should waste our man power. Should minimise the duplicated works as much as possible. I don't see how the "force" is being seperated really. Pretty much all the front-end/GUI work that's happening is happening on Firebird and Thunderbird. The work on the back-end code applies equally to the separate apps and the suite. There would only be a duplication/split of work if there was work being done on the UI for the suite, and there's been hardly any work done on that since Mozilla 1.4. Aside from some tweaking of tabbed browsing and a few small bug fixes, the changes in Mozilla 1.5 and 1.6 are back-end things, which also apply equally to Firebird/Thunderbird. You are reading too much into this. There is nothinbg in that statement that says the integrated suite wil not be using the Firebird and Thunderbird front ends at that point, (of course it does not say it will be either). No one has ever said the suite will cease to exist, just that the browser front end of the suite will eventually be the Firebird front-end and that the mail/news front end will eventually be the thunderbird front-end. There may (or may not) still be both suite and stand-alone applications being packeaged and distributed. There has also been talk about having the components of the suite each being seperate so you could install a suite that is only a browser which may (or may not) mean that a standalone broswer is not longer required to be supported maintained. This is all future stuff and when we get closer then a more reasonable discussion can occur on what makes sense. If they can make the download size for he suite with broswer only be within 5% or so of the standalone size, and there is no speed degradation, then supporting 2 would be kind of dumb. On the other hand if the suite version is significantly larger and/or slower then there will probably always be both. |