Here's what I get from both articles: we need that browser out _very soon_ with no more distractions. Therefore maybe it's for the best that the extremely cool but unnecessary IM feature be dropped by Netscape and focus on a shipping product. On the other hand it's a great idea for outside developers oh btw how come nobody mentions that NT 5 (now called W2k) has been delayed a zillion times?

oh great, Cnet linked to mozillazine.com, which doesn't exist

cnet - no surprise, instant journalism at work. i'm sure that wired and zdnet will be running similar stories, if they haven't already.

businessweek - refreshing. what i came away with is that the author actually went to efforts to understand just what mozilla is all about and actually tried to convey that feeling to readers who may not know anything about it.

Businessweek is a good rag, though they had a typical Netscape exodus article awhile back, but that was an opinion column. Businessweek had fantastic coverage of the Microsoft trial and still has all the evidence up. CNet needs to do more research, but I like them better than ZDNet.

As far as no more distractions go, I think that is long as people don't stop working on the main code for these side projects everything is fine. If they don't finish their projects before M9 then it can wait. But Beta has to be in July, if at all possible.

And yes, Windows 2000 was due out May 1998 originally. But when you are talking about 30 MILLION lines of code, I guess that's to be expected. I like MSs theory, let's make it bigger and it will work better!

Actually I don't think that W2K's lateness would be actually *relevant* to cite as a reason for Mozilla being late, it's kind of like saying: "They did it, so so can we!", really childish .... and besides it's dragging Mozilla down to their level of excuses, at least the excuses that the Mozilla team has are completely valid.

Oh and I'd have to agree about IM/ICQ/IRC support -- if it doesn't make M9, don't worry about it! Issue out a 5.5 release with it in, it's not worth delaying the entire project for. Or maybe send out a 5.5 beta with the 5.0 final, the 5.5 beta would have limited chat support.

Keep it up, guys!

-=Yusuf=-

Windows 98 (Memphis) and NT 5.0 (Cario) were originally planned to be released at the exact same time.

Windows 98 work started 3 months after Win95's debut, and was originally going to be called Windows 97 and released in October of 1997.

Thus, NT 5.0 / "Windows 2000" is going to be about 2 years late.

I'm not looking at W2k's lateness as an excuse. However there are some who feel that mozilla will be so late that Microsoft will be able to turn the entire internet into something that's MS only. On the other hand, linux and solaris are taking advantage of w2k's lateness and the DOJ case.

Linux will *never* displace Windows as the client-side OS of choice.

Mozilla will *never* displace IE... if Mozilla even gets the damn thing done.

Netscape failed... not because of Microsoft... but because the *fucked* up.

They came out of the gate cocky, arrogant, and boasted of Netscapes threat to Windows. Give me a break... Netscape?... a threat to Windows? They fucked up by buying into all of McNealy's hype about Java.

I'll keep my fingers crossed... but I sure as hell aren't going to hold my breath!

Cheers,

-Bruce

Hey Brurey baby,

You some kind of reverse-psycology freak? or just a passive-agressive blowhard?

you posted the same basic message in the "Evaluating Commercial Open Source Projects" talkback; then posted some lame-ass butt-kisser right after MozAdmin shot you down.

I may be opinionated, but I don't usually post messages just to see someone respond.

Well I do...

Cheers,

-Bruce

The Business Week article is one of the few articles I have read on Mozilla that actually mentions the NGLayout switch. Nearly all the articles seem to think/intimate that the switch to Gecko never existed and that Mozilla has been using the same approach/code base since Netscape 4.

Maybe some PR from those outside the web development community could help? But then most people who read C|Net/ZDNet probably don't care anyway.