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AOL Lays Off 50 Netscape Coders
Posted by
timothy
on Wed Jul 16, 2003 09:30 AM
from the but-mozilla-is-resilient dept.
from the but-mozilla-is-resilient dept.
xcable points out a CNET story which begins "America Online on Tuesday said it has laid off 50 employees involved in Web browser development at its Netscape subsidiary amid a reorganization of its Mozilla open-source browser team," and offers a reminder that "AOL recently made a deal with Microsoft to use IE in future AOL releases." This adds a bit more detail to yesterday's (updated) story about the establishment of the Mozilla foundation.
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AOL Lays Off 50 Netscape Coders
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If... (Score:5, Interesting)
(http://soukyan.com/)
Re:If... (Score:5, Insightful)
That won't happen unless Microsoft drops IE and starts shipping Mozilla.
Re:If... (Score:5, Interesting)
MS may lose ground in the browser market because they have frozen IE at version 6 SP1. The next version, 7 will only be available on the next Windows OS. With that a few years away, then the adoption of the new OS and browser taking another few years, the other browsers out there, Mozilla and Opera mainly, will make gains in the market because of standards, constant updates and new features being added, support for new technologies that may emerge in the next few years, etc.
In other words, IE will become the rabbit, taking a siesta under a tree while a bunch of turtles slowly creep by.
You can't simply dismiss the possibility with a wave of the hand.
- keith
Re:If... (Score:4, Interesting)
your a fool to belive that M$ is just sitting back and waiting 2-3 years to release IE 7, right now they have an update ready to go for IE 6.5, and should some "new technologies" come out before the next OS, rest assured that M$ will release a patch with most of the other stuff they were plannig on releasing anywayse.
this is a simple tactic to lull other development teams in a sence of security. please next time think before you post [amazon.ca]
Re:If... (Score:5, Insightful)
aside from that, new features and standards are only added by web developers when the critical mass of the target market has access to them. I doubt any 2nd party browser can pick up critical mass to get significant developer support - let alone in the span of time between MS OS releases.
MS just isn't offering IE as a free standalone download. No doubt it's to escape legal backfire from their declaration that it's an integral part of the OS (if it really is - then you can't offer a free download as they do.)
i'm not going to dismiss the possibility that something else might eclipse IE - but i am willing to dismiss the possibility that it'll happen as a result of lack of development and extension by MS.
Re:If... (Score:4, Interesting)
Microsoft is moving on from peddling IE as a separate application because people take browsing capability for granted. Unless they're ideologically driven, they will need a strong incentive to take the risk of installing a separate program just to do something they can already do.
Re:If... (Score:5, Insightful)
(http://www.plone.org/ | Last Journal: Monday January 05 2004, @04:45PM)
Main features, desired first of all by 90% of browser users, to add to Mozilla and Opera will be feature already in IE: (1) *stable* support of *all* plugins that needed to display a plugin-based content that is already on the Web and (2) simulating IE to display a IE-oriented content that is already on the Web.
Let me try it in few small logical steps. Why do people use browser? To access online content. What content? The one published for existing web users. What do people use now to surf? IE. So, what is the main feature they need? IE-compatibility. What about W3C standards? leave for academicians. IE is the real standard.
Personally I hate IE way of standard ignorance. I love W3C standards. But when I develop my content I develop it not for myself, but for other people, 90% of them are IE users.
Mozilla (and/or Opera and/or KHTML) can surpass IE only if it will work *exactly* (including all standard problems) as IE *plus* it will have some additional useful feature, (like tabs, gestures and smart bookmarks) many of them all non-IE browsers already have.
Re:If... (Score:4, Insightful)
Ask the average Joe off the street what web browser he uses, and you can expect either a blank look or "uh...AOL?" to be the answer. Do you really expect them to have the skill to go download another browser and install it? Why should they?
It's the principle of Path of Least Resistance. If you want Mozilla to take over, get Dell and Gateway to make it the default browser, and AOL to replace IE in its client. They won't. That would piss off MS. Hey, maybe that's why they say monopolies stifle change?
You know what? I'm a victim of this too. That little E is sitting right next to my start menu. Want to bet which browser gets used most? From a technology standpoint, both browsers show web pages almost identically, and the differences are only visible on pages where people consciously use the latest-and-greatest. You know, the ones that any sane company wouldn't use because it doesn't work with the Lowest Common Denominator.
Re:If... (Score:4, Interesting)
An excellent point, and one that tends to get overlooked. Not only do most people use IE because it's already there; believe it or not, most people use IE because they don't even realize that they have other options. Don't get me wrong - I've done more than my fair share of Mozilla advocacy. Or rather, "attempted to do." This is how it usually goes down:
Them: "Hey, what's that? That's not Internet Explorer."
Me: "Nope, it's a different browser, called Mozilla. It blocks popup ads, and see how clever the tabs are? I can have several different websites open at once, but my taskbar isn't all cluttered."
(Long silence.)
Them: "More than one website open at once?"
Me: "Right. Like say I opened one website, and I read half of it, and I wanted to come back later, but in the meantime I decided to go to another website. See?" [clicks tabs to demonstrate]
Them: "I never do that."
Me: "You've never opened more than one website at a time?"
Them: "No."
Me: "Oh. Well... then... err... but surely you'd rather use a browser that blocks pop-up ads, right?"
Them: "Pop-ups are kind of annoying, but I don't like to download software and install it and stuff. I'd rather just live with the pop-ups."
Me: "Okay. Um. Well. As long as you're happy, I guess that's the important thing." [weeps quietly]
(I'm not kidding. I've had this exact same conversation with three different people in the last two weeks alone. Except for the weeping. I was kidding about the weeping.)
Re:If... (Score:4, Insightful)
(http://devers.homeip.net:8080/blog/ | Last Journal: Tuesday April 12 2005, @08:34AM)
What happens then if Mozilla really does start to gain market share?
How threatened would Microsoft feel if Mozilla's user base hit 10%, 25%, or 50%? How high would the level have to get before they took action? My guess is that the first tactic would be to accelerate the next version of Windows, and provide incentives to make sure that the public upgrades (who says competition is a bad thing?). But if that's not enough, and Mozilla/Gecko use kept rising, how would they respond?
My hunch is that there is some threshold -- and I don't know what it is any more than anyone else does -- above which Microsoft would have no choice but to take IE out of mothballs, and the malarkey about "we can't improve IE without improving the underlying operating system." That's baloney, as should be obvious to anyone that has used any browser that has made a release since IE5/IE6 came out (Mozilla, Phoenix, Safari, Opera, OmniWeb, iCab, CrazyBrowser [which is even IE based!), etc).
So, if the sleeping giant stirs, and independent IE development is reactivated, how long would it take to ramp up work on it? It wouldn't surprise me if a point release (with atrophied features like popup management, maybe tabs) could be out in three to six months, and a full release within six months to a year. At a guess, obviously I don't know how long it would take to allocate people to work on it, get them familiar with the existing codebase, etc, but it wasn't that long ago that Netscape and Microsoft were release major browser upgrades on something like a nine month schedule, and maybe -- just maybe -- some stiff competition from Mozilla (and, to a lesser extent, Safari & Opera) can spur on another round of that.
Rabbits wake up, you know...
Re:Which they should! (Score:4, Insightful)
(http://slashdot.org/ | Last Journal: Wednesday October 23 2002, @05:38PM)
Two things, though.
First, IE and Windows help to provide a mutual lock-in, while bundling Mozilla with Windows would permit easier migration away from Windows because users would no longer have to confront Something Different as a browser.
Second, security holes have afflicted Microsoft for long enough that they simply shrug them off, claim that they'll be fixed in the next update, that premature open notification of vulnerabilities is Bad, and that Hackers are responsible for Evil.
The cumulative problem of security holes will be used as evidence for the need to have TCPA instituted as a standard, which will also cut down on Terrorism and Pedophiles as well as Bad Hackers.
No need for MS to adopt Mozilla and compromise a perfectly useful leveraging tool in IE, that now has over 90% of the market.
It's about coverage (Score:5, Insightful)
(http://www.5vs1.com)
AOL will stop using IE when Windows starts to lose it's market share (by a LOT)
Re:If... (Score:5, Insightful)
(http://www.gerv.net/)
So, Mr. Know-It-All Anonymous Coward, pontificating from on high, here's a pop quiz. If you have to implement an entire widget set in your browser to have any hope of supporting styleable form controls etc. (as outlined in CSS2 and above), is it better to:
a) Write one user interface for all platforms using those same controls, and use that UI as another testbed for them
b) Write five or more separate user interfaces, and have to keep them all up to date and in sync?
Without XUL, there would have been no Netscape help in doing Mozilla for Linux, Mac, BSD etc. because there would have been no incentive to chase such a small part of the browser market.
Gerv
(gerv@mozilla.org)
Re:If... (Score:4, Interesting)
(http://www.gerv.net/)
Don't be fooled. I'm pretty sure the form controls in IE are not native Windows form controls. And check Dave Hyatt's blog [mozillazine.org] for details of the contortions he's had to go through to get even some of this stuff working with the Aqua widget set.
Besides which, Gecko + the old Netscape codebase applications
Have you seen the old codebase? I'm told that getting Gecko into it just wasn't possible. It was too much of a mess.
Gerv
(gerv@mozilla.org)
Re:If... (Score:5, Informative)
(http://www.gerv.net/)
I wasn't in on that decision, as it was before my time, but I can make a guess. Back in October 1998:
- QT wasn't free
- GTK wasn't ready (although we do use bits of it)
And anyway, like I said, you need to have control of the widget set if you want to be able to modify it to allow animated GIFs on buttons, and other stuff you need to support CSS2 styling.
Gerv
Re:If... (Score:5, Informative)
- QT for Windows isn't Free.
- GTK for Windows still doensn't work 100% correctly and doesn't integrate well with the environment.
Re:If... (Score:5, Interesting)
(http://2130706433/ | Last Journal: Thursday July 19, @10:29AM)
The "pile some more pasta on the heap and hook up to whatever ends are sticking out" isn't a good programming design. Even if it covers a 5 lb XUL meatball.
I don't mean to troll here, but there ARE different methods of approaching projects, and I don't think the model of Mozilla is as good as, say, the Linux kernel model. Not because of lack of control, but because of a lack of a predefined API. Sure, XUL has it's own API, but it's more volatile than liquid nitrogen, and all the inconsistencies and lack of enforced limits make up a HUGE portion of the bugzilla bugs, causing delays and a product that's less than it could have been.
Personally, I'd like to see NO middleware layer, but a well-defined API that anyone can use, but so well defined that it can't be ABused, letting people write the frontend in anything they like from Motif/C to Tcl/Tk. Don't abstract the engine by layers of self-glorifying pork, but define the interfaces narrowly and specificly.
Finally, I'm sorry to see the job cuts, but as a business decision, I can fully understand why AOL decided on this. Much as I love Mozilla and Netscape, taking 7 years to produce something that's only marginally better, and only capturing a couple of percent of market share -- it's not really a project that's done well, and the same amount of money might buy other improvements for AOL.
As I see it now, 1.4 might be the last major release -- the firebird/mozilla integration will undoubtably take place, but with 50 developers and monetary support gone, I doubt it will be to its full potential, and only be a footnote in the history of browsers. But I may be wrong. I hope I am wrong.
Regards,
--
*Art
Re:If... (Score:5, Insightful)
(http://www.gerv.net/)
What, like this [mozilla.org]? The doxygen server is down right now, so some links don't work; but we do have an excellent embedding API - used by Galeon, Epiphany, Camino, and many other projects.
the firebird/mozilla integration will undoubtably take place, but with 50 developers and monetary support gone, I doubt it will be to its full potential, and only be a footnote in the history of browsers. But I may be wrong. I hope I am wrong.
People are already raving about, and switching to, Mozilla Firebird, and it's only at 0.6.
Anyway, if you sit there and watch, you are more likely to be right than if you come and give us a hand
Gerv
ask a stupid quesiton... (Score:5, Insightful)
(Last Journal: Tuesday March 25 2003, @04:35PM)
Guess what, hotshot? The answer to that question is: Whichever one will not take 4+ years to ship in a working form while the world's largest and most predatory corporation is working overtime to dig your grave.
Please notice that despite the nonstop handwaving from the Mozilla team about how maintaining seperate native interfaces for the assorted Gecko frontends was supposed to be some sort of impossible herculean task that no reasonable person could be expected to tackle, in the time that it took to produce ONE semi-functional version of Mozilla, Opera Software, a company with not even a tenth of AOLNSCP's resources, produced multiple versions of a fully functional web browser, for all of Mozilla's major target platforms. Not only did they produce, maintain and upgrade native Windows, MacOS and Linux versions of Opera, but they increased their market share, and made money doing it.
"We had no choice but to implement XUL/XPFE" is the Big Lie of the entire Netscape saga. The fact that mozilla team members are still stating it with cultish earnestness suggests not that you all came to a reasoned engineering decision, but that your project management was not merely incompetant, but downright pathological. If 1% market share and the firing of your entire development team isn't enough to convince you that somewhere, somehow, you made the wrong decision, you are simply delusional.
Hopefully, some of the core Mozilla developers and managers will use some of their newly acquired free time to read Fred Brooks' "The Mythical Man-Month." When Brooks talks about the Second-System Effect, he's talking about you.
Whaaa???? (Score:5, Interesting)
(http://myhomepagewaskilledbychinesehax0rs/ | Last Journal: Monday August 04 2003, @12:07PM)
What the hell are all those guys doing there?
Re:Whaaa???? (Score:4, Funny)
Re:Whaaa???? (Score:5, Informative)
Subject: Netscape is dead
Resent-Date: Tue, 15 Jul 2003 14:14:05 -0700 (PDT)
Resent-From: champions@netscape.com
Date: Tue, 15 Jul 2003 14:13:27 -0700
From: Daniel Veditz
To: champions@netscape.com
well, the final whackage happened this morning... No more Netscape client.
Of the handful of apps people left three I know of (Seth included) were
transfered to Photon (AOL Communicator), the rest laid off. The Gecko team
(backend), which mostly survived the December cuts, was dismantled. A lot
were cut, a few found other jobs in AOL, none are going to be working on
Gecko.
Mozilla development is now going forth under a new "Mozilla Foundation" --
see the mozilla.org site for details. AOL's kicking in a chunk of change
and some machines to get it started, and then it's on its own.
The evangelism team was cut in half and disbursed, so the revamped
devedge.netscape.com site is now dead.
There will not be any more Netscape releases. When asked about security
firedrills execs said they'd assemble a "SWAT team" to address it and
possibly push out a bugfix, but I'm guessing the PR would have to be
pretty bad for them to go to that expense.
Dunno what happens to the newsgroups. I suspect they're already unofficial
and function only because Markus makes time for it every once in a while.
Good luck to us all,
-Dan Veditz
P.S. I'm still employed, folks already working on the AOL client were not
affected. But there's rumors of another layoff/reorg after the next AOL
client ships so my time may still come
Re:Whaaa???? (Score:4, Interesting)
(http://www.lp.org/)
Me thinks Sun should pick up Mozilla as a Sun ONE Browser product or something, so they have a product to bundle with Solaris 10 and Mad Hatter. Solaris 9 got Netscape 6 and Netscape 7, Solaris 8 had Netscape 4.7x, so they will need to have something to give customers as a standard component with the next release.
However, I wonder how many software engineers Sun has left to spare? The number of Sun-branded packages going in their Orion bundling is breath taking at first glance. Sun must be a much bigger company than I thought.
Re:Big Deal (Score:5, Funny)
Meh, just like Microsoft Office, this can be placed on anyone one of our resumes.
Re:Big Deal (Score:5, Funny)
(http://slashdot.org/)
The parent post should be modded down.
If we can't retain a degree of levity at times like this, then the terrorists have already won.
Re:Big Deal (Score:5, Funny)
(http://slashdot.org/)
Re:Big Deal (Score:5, Informative)
(http://www.stevenchan.us/)
Failed in the sense that it never dug Netscape, as a browser and company, out of the hole. But I'm sure glad to see that Mozilla rose out of all that effort.
As to what they were doing, you should check out ex-mozilla [ex-mozilla.org], a list of all the ex-employees that have accumulated over the past --- decade? --- and a little description each wrote up of what they did and what they're now doing. Bittersweet.
You see, grennis.. (Score:5, Funny)
(http://www.emopirates.com/ | Last Journal: Wednesday July 16 2003, @10:46AM)
Bill Lumbergh: Who're they?
Bob Porter: You know, squirrely looking guys, mumble a lot.
Bill Lumbergh: Oh, yeah.
Bob Slydell: Yeah, we can't actually find a record of them being current employees here.
Bob Porter: I looked into it more deeply and I found that apparently what happened is that they were laid off five years ago and no one ever told them, but through some kind of glitch in the payroll department, they still get paychecks.
Bob Slydell: So we just went a ahead and fixed the glitch.
Bill Lumbergh: Great.
Dom Portwood: So um, the Netscape developers have been let go?
Bob Slydell: Well just a second there, professor. We uh, we fixed the *glitch*. So they won't be receiving paychecks anymore, so it will just work itself out naturally.
Bob Porter: We always like to avoid confrontation, whenever possible. Problem solved from your end.
Maybe this shouldn't be a suprise.... (Score:5, Interesting)
(http://sanghahost.com/ | Last Journal: Wednesday March 23 2005, @08:47AM)
They've sort of laid off Mozilla as well... (Score:5, Interesting)
(Last Journal: Monday August 22 2005, @11:02AM)
But then, to expect better from a company that settled a lawsuit with MS (for the latter's guilty conduct, mind you) is a bit too far.
-
Re:They've sort of laid off Mozilla as well... (Score:5, Interesting)
(Last Journal: Monday August 22 2005, @11:02AM)
Therein lies the tragedy - AOL has already made up it's mind to kill Netscape - why not disband the entire team?
Why have 45 Netscape developers for 1 Mozilla developer, when Mozilla users are more than 100 per Netscape user?
It's pretty clear AOL is just caving to the MS arm-twisting; doing that to Netscape, the one good American software that really scared the shit out of MS is - well, unpardonable. It's the exact opposite of freedom, and standing up to be counted.
Long Live Netscape!
-
I don't really understand the relationship, but... (Score:5, Interesting)
Then again, I don't really have an understanding of the mozilla/netscape relationship, just what I heard--mozilla started when netscape opened its code, aol gives mozilla money, aol gets all the cool stuff from mozilla and reinserts it into netscape. If it's more complicated than that and I'm missing something, please feel free to explain it to me.
Re:They've sort of laid off Mozilla as well... (Score:5, Informative)
(http://www.gerv.net/)
There appears to be a lot of confusion about this. "10% of the Netscape workforce" doesn't mean "10% of the people working on Netscape-the-browser."
As I understand it, excepting the "transition team" who are helping to set up the Mozilla Foundation, they've laid off almost everyone who was paid to work on Netscape/Mozilla for AOL.
Gerv
(gerv@mozilla.org)
Re:They've sort of laid off Mozilla as well... (Score:5, Informative)
Re:They've sort of laid off Mozilla as well... (Score:5, Informative)
(http://www.gerv.net/)
Not at all. Mozilla will continue, overseen by the new Mozilla Foundation.
And if a gift of $2M is "slow poison", then perhaps we should get them really annoyed - they might shower us with even more money.
Gerv
(gerv@mozilla.org)
The Register (Score:5, Informative)
(http://www.davidrickard.net/)
Re:The Register (Score:5, Insightful)
(http://plan99.net/~mike/)
Would people really be praising Netscape/AOL instead if they had constantly hacked the limping, near dead Communicator codebase? Would we really be pleased that the two most popular browsers BOTH sucked at standards compliance? Is a 20%/80% market share split OK, when they are both as bad as each other?
The fact is that the moment Microsoft decided to kill Netscape, they were dead. I've seen many suggestions about what they should have done, but the fact is that none hold water. If they hadn't started over, they'd have still lost, because IE was better engineered, had more resources and so on. If they had started over but not used XUL, XPCOM or NSPR Mozilla would have been Windows only. It would have minimal marketshare on Windows, as opposed to having nearly 100% marketshare on Linux.
As it is, they started over, and took their time about it, and made something good.
I'm not convinced that they'd have more market share even if they had carried on using the old 4.x codebase really, at least this way Mozilla/Firebird has legions of geek fans who are spreading the word, as opposed to dumping all over it like they used to.
Poor old Netscape - put in a lose/lose scenario, they lost. You have to give them some credit for making the best of a bad situation. That's something most journalists won't say though, it's realistic and therefore boring.
Re:The Register (Score:5, Insightful)
I guess they missed the memo where users decided that Communicator sucked. The whole premise seems to have been that there was some sort of giant secret Netscape fanbase out there that was only concerned about standards compliance issues. Quite the opposite -- in the laundry lists of bitches about Netscape, for most users compatibility was very low on the list.
It seems like they had this arrogant, obsolete Rule The World independant platform strategy left over from the Netscape Communication days and it just did not fit either AOL or mozilla.org. Not to mention the just plain arrogant decisions about compatibility that was not befitting a browser with 1% marketshare.
Even when you go back to old slashdot discussions about Mozilla, the concerns were being echoed -- Why make the mailer run in the same process space as the browser? Why not lightweight and modular like IE? Why so bloated? And the answer was "Because the way Netscape does things." Well, end users looked at it and just said "Netscape? Bleck." They were dead from the get-go.
It wasn't until the writing was on the wall and the pinkslips were in the mail did mozilla drop their Party Line of "When In Doubt, Copy Version 4". Firebird is what Mozilla should have been since the beginning -- a fresh new platform that had a chance at attracting users and devs.
Re:Huh? (Score:5, Interesting)
(http://www.isolani.co.uk/blog/)
Re:As always, more proof of the old saying: (Score:5, Funny)
(http://sinoc.org/denis/)
Wrong. MS does not support alpha chips anymore. Hey, even Compaq/HP does not support them anymore!
AOL != Netscape anymore (Score:5, Interesting)
Saddening, but understandable from a business perspective. Hopefully every one of those coders will be rehired by the Foundation so they can continue to do what they do best, with or without AOL's direct support.
More bad news... (Score:3, Interesting)
(http://gaim.guifications.org/trac/)
I bet Microsoft's happy to see another competitor dying, though.
Re:More bad news... (Score:4, Informative)
(http://www.gerv.net/)
Thunderbird [mozilla.org] should be right up your street.
Gerv
(gerv@mozilla.org)
I have to ask... (Score:3, Interesting)
(Last Journal: Thursday April 05 2007, @09:47PM)
Does anyone here actually use Netscape as their default browser?
If you do, why? Is it solely for political/moral/whatever reasons, or does it offer some technical feature that you have not found in another browser?
How many people here have Netscape as a browser on their computer NOT as a primary browser, and why did you install it? WHy is it not the primary browser?
Re:I have to ask... (Score:5, Informative)
(Last Journal: Thursday August 05 2004, @01:40PM)
Netscape comes bundled with AIM, but besides that is more or less identicle to mozilla. Firing netscape coders translates to firing mozilla coders.
yes, but it's spelled M-o-z-i-l-l-a (Score:5, Interesting)
Does anyone here actually use Netscape as their default browser?
Mozilla; yes of course.
What's not to like?
Re:yes, but it's spelled M-o-z-i-l-l-a (Score:5, Interesting)
(http://uncensored.citadel.org/ | Last Journal: Sunday November 23 2003, @03:10PM)
Count me in -- I've been faithfully using both the Netscape branded browser and the Netscape portal for the last couple of years. Mainly as a way to thank them for funding the development of the single most important application on my desktop -- to say "This strategy is sound and you have my support."
Now that they've fired everyone, I'm not so sure about it anymore, and I may simply drop back to stock Mozilla (and choose a different home page).
This whole ordeal has made me do some thinking, though. I've talked to some people who simply won't even look at Netscape. The lackluster Netscape 4 and the disastrous Netscape 6 stick too much in their minds, even though Netscape 7 is a world-class browser that simply wipes the floor with IE, hands down. I wonder if Netscape is a dirty word at this point in time? Perhaps Mozilla is the name to push now. Certainly with users
Thank you AOL for the initial $2 million in funding (but to Dick Parsons, I hope you rot in hell next to Bill Gates). Now it's time for others in the industry to both fund and push the Mozilla effort. IBM in particular ought to be assigning a boatload of developers to Mozilla, especially in the light of recent developments (such as Munich) in which they are partially responsible for the well-being of an increasing number of desktop Linux users. Without a world-class browser, the Linux desktop simply cannot exist. It's time for everyone to step up to the plate and make Mozilla not only replace Netscape as the brand everyone recognizes, but take the role of a well-liked brand. The name "Netscape" seems to be as poisonous as "WordPerfect" now.
Re:I have to ask... (Score:5, Informative)
Yeah. (Mozilla, that is.)
1) Tabbed browsing. Easier/faster to repeatedly click "X" in the corner than to wave over one of 20-30 windows. I let pages load in the background while reading one.
2) With Prefs Toolbar, easy image/Java/Javashit/cookie control. All off by default. Re-enabled only when required. One click in a checkbox. Proxy is on by default, hooked into Proxomitron. Turned off if and only if a site requires it, for the duration of that site view. One-click (well, one-pulldown) control of User-Agent. For dumbfuck web designers that see "What? Not IE? No HTML for you! No, we're not even going to send the HTML and let your browser try to render it, we're just going to tell you to go away because we don't want your business."
3) Security. No ActiveX, no other dumb misfeatures, less integrated with the OS so that as-yet-undiscovered dumb misfeatures are less likely to affect an entire system.
In short - Mozilla offers me control over my browsing experience (in terms of feature #2, a level of control I haven't seen since Netscape 3. Netscape 4 was a downgrade in terms of burying/hiding the Javashit and image autoload options to make them less accessible.)
In comparison, IE offers me virtually no control over my browsing experience. So I use Mozilla, not IE. If the job is "viewing web pages", Mozilla is the better tool for the job.
AOL in bed with MS (Score:4, Insightful)
(Last Journal: Friday February 04 2005, @10:11AM)
Not only could it provide many more chances for opportunistic middle managers to use layoffs to make it look like they're Doing Something, but the thought of putting Time Warner's clout behind its longstanding efforts at being a multimedia content provider must make MS salivate. (MSNBC? Zzzz.)
Can AOL users finally get better software? (Score:5, Interesting)
(http://www.danhugo.com/)
I'm guessing there are some legal strings attached, but I wonder whether a fully AOL-capable version of Mozilla, distrbuted almost like the original AOL virus itself (in this case, I would, for example, bring over an install CD to help my AOL-using parents to move beyond IE... even better if they could get around AOL 7.0 or whatever they're using). Yes, they can use whatever browser they want, but how about an email client that works?
Is there a legal barrier in place to prevent this, especially from former (and whoafully under appreciated) employees ? Since AOL never followed through while they were there, I think the only real justice at this point would be to let loose better, cross-platform software for the AOL userbase out there. Who knows, maybe some linux users will make the switch to AOL...
As an aside, a few troll comments here and there have suggested that now IE can be the one true client to create web content for... I give such commentary little credence, but is the SCO action on IBM (et al.) and the AOL action on Mozilla just bad timing, or is the fact that Microsoft money flows to both make any more interesting their coincidence?
Just a thought. Posted using Moz 1.4, by the way.
Competition good for jobs (Score:3, Interesting)
50 Netscape codes go, but no more people are needed to work on IE.
So if you want more jobs, make sure there's more competition, not more retrictive copyright laws.
Simple.
Confusing article... (Score:5, Insightful)
(http://dylanfreak.djeaux.com/ | Last Journal: Thursday February 12 2004, @09:39PM)
Regardless, this is sad news. Sad, but not unexpected. Here's hoping some far-sighted investors will pick up Netscape/Mozilla -- it would probably be the bargain of the week, especially if MSIE really is dead in the water until Longhorn is finished.
Maybe this is Larry Ellison's chance to show us once again how badly he hates Bill Gates.
Re:Confusing article... (Score:5, Insightful)
(http://plan99.net/~mike/)
* The number of volunteer Moz hackers eclipsed the number of Netscape hackers last month.
* Quite a few of the core hackers are already being picked up by IBM, Sun and Red Hat.
I expect Moz will mature into a true open source project - heavily funded by a variety of sources, with a strong community of volunteers to back it up. This is for the best - I'm never comfortable with projects dominated by corporate hackers. Do you think OpenOffice would survive if Sun dropped it tomorrow? No, it has no community.
Mozilla has, and that's really amazing. It's gone from corporate product, to a projec truely owned and developed by society. It'll be OK.
Bake sale for Mozilla (Score:4, Funny)
(http://wolf.cheats4u...st/index.php?ref=893 | Last Journal: Thursday January 08 2004, @10:14PM)
GF.
$2 milllion over 2 yrs? (Score:5, Insightful)
And, if that 50 was only 10% of the Netscape workforce, and we split that $2 mil over 500 users, that's a Christmas bonus, not a salary.
So, $1 mil/yr for the Moz Foundation is chump change. An earlier statement that "5 coders is plenty for Mozilla" seems kind of silly to me. I wonder how big the IE team is.
Thanks for the good time, honey, I'll call you. Here, buy yourself something nice.
Now we get to see how Moz survives as a *real* open-source project (i.e., w/out funding). At least it's got a good code base (right?).
John.
just another sign AOL (Score:3)
(http://slashdot.org/ | Last Journal: Friday August 20 2004, @12:38PM)
IE (Score:5, Interesting)
(http://www.loconet.ca/)
Netscape Probably Hurt AOL Sales (Score:5, Interesting)
Tieing yourself to a browser more than 9 of 10 people don't want to use seems like a good way to cut sales, not increase them.
Re:Netscape Probably Hurt AOL Sales (Score:5, Insightful)
(http://www.byzantinecommunications.com/adamhoward | Last Journal: Wednesday May 25 2005, @02:26PM)
That's a little more harshly stated than I think the reality is. What survey has shown that 9 out of 10 people don't want Netscape/Mozilla? And if that survey exists, did people get to try the advanced features that these browsers have that IE lacks?
I think it's more an issue of 9 out of 10 people don't know there's a better browser out there, so they use what comes with their computer.
Re:Netscape Probably Hurt AOL Sales (Score:5, Insightful)
Personally I'd say it's more like 9 out of 10 people are perfectly happy with what they have and don't want to move away from something they're comfortable with.
Which is exactly the same as saying 9 out of 10 people don't want Mozilla.
(after all, if they did want an alternative, they'd have downloaded it - which is what we all did)
AOL's folley (Score:5, Interesting)
aol official position [com.com]
AOL is making a *huge* mistake by not using the Gecko engine as the core of their browser/ISP product. Right now they're using Gecko as the core in their Compuserve and Mac AOL product, but still using IE in the Windows product. Seems like they could streamline their internal coding operations by standardizing on one code base, which would ultimately save them more money than letting developers go.
Also, by using the Gecko engine in the product, they could in theory start offering AOL on Linux-based PC's; while that might sound like an unprofitable venture at first, I can't imagine all of those people purchasing Lindows-based PC's at Walmart not wanting AOL as their ISP
Re:This isn't entirely bad... (Score:4, Informative)
As one of the laid off employees I can assure you that Mozilla is going to be a shambles for at least six months. I have a ton of bugs and while I'll help where I can I'm certainly not going to have the chance to fix these things, what with looking for a job and earning a wage somewhere else. Therefore they'll sit in a heap with a zillion other bugs that no one wants to touch because they are not sexy enough to fix. Mozilla will survive and as open source it can't die, but suggesting AOL axing paid developers is not all bad is like saying the same of a mugging victim who spends half a year in hospital recovering from a beating.
With that said, Mozilla 1.4 is an awesome browser. It destroys IE in almost everyway and hopefully its stability will be enough to win new converts while the transition and recovery happens.
When will we see this regularly? (Score:3, Funny)
One more crippling bombshell hit the already beleaguered Mozilla community when IDC confirmed that Mozilla market share has dropped yet again. Now it is down to less than a fraction of 1 percent of all browsers. Coming on the heels of a recent Netcraft survey which plainly states that Mozilla has lost more market share, this news serves to reinforce what we've known all along. Mozilla is collapsing in complete disarray, as fittingly exemplified by failing dead last in the recent Sys Admin comprehensive networking test.
You don't need to be a Kreskin to predict Mozilla's future. The hand writing is on the wall: Mozilla faces a bleak future. In fact there won't be any future at all for Mozilla because Mozilla is dying. Things are looking very bad for Mozilla. As many of us are already aware, Mozilla continues to lose market share. Red ink flows like a river of blood.
Netscape is the most endangered of them all, having lost 93% of its core developers. The sudden and unpleasant departures of long time Netscape developers only serves to underscore the point more clearly. There can no longer be any doubt: Netscape is dying.
Let's keep to the facts and look at the numbers.
Due to the troubles of AOL, abysmal sales and so on, Netscape went out of business and was taken over by AOL who sell another troubled service. Now AOL is also nearly dead, its corpse turned over to yet another charnel house.
All major surveys show that Mozilla has steadily declined in market share. Mozilla is very sick and its long term survival prospects are very dim. If Mozilla is to survive at all it will be among OS dilettante dabblers. Mozilla continues to decay. Nothing short of a miracle could save it at this point in time. For all practical purposes, Mozilla is dead.
Fact: Mozilla is dying
(With apologies to the original *BSD is dying troll).
Sigh (Score:5, Interesting)
(http://slashdot.org/ | Last Journal: Wednesday October 23 2002, @05:38PM)
So Microsoft has more than enough cash on hand to buy out AOL/TW.
If the marketplace were completely free and unfettered, you'd think that Microsoft would, rather than pour money down the hole that has been MSN, simply buy out AOL with its 30 million subscribers.
But Microsoft won't do this because they know they can't; that the DoJ would immediately ask questions about unfair market consolidation were such a buyout offer made.
So instead MSFT pours money into MSN and leverages its dominant products of Windows, Office and Explorer to subsidize MSN.
As AOL dies slowly over a few years, this will be viewed as "OK", the marketplace in action, and no inconvenient questions will be raised except by AOL management and stockholders.
Since MS can rely upon a steady revenue stream from Windows and Office to subsidize its efforts into taking over new markets they enjoy an advantage that AOL and other competitors simply don't have.
People buy Windows and Office like they're a standard, a necessity, that's no more avoidable than paying gasoline taxes.
Yes, Microsoft has the enviable position of just collecting taxes - like a government. And competing against the government is a no-win situation.
It is a foregone conclusion that AOL will lose. They will wither to nothing, or simply to a marginally-sized pet, like Apple, who would have died long ago if Microsoft had decided to not release Office for Mac.
Not sure what's going on... (Score:3, Interesting)
(http://free-usa.blogspot.com/)
Well, I feel bad for them, but I've always hated the changes AOL made to Mozilla before releasing it as Netscape - like when they removed the pop-up feature, and all the crap they include.
I too, though, find it painful explaining Mozilla to people over and over again.
Netscape was just a bargaining chip (Score:5, Insightful)
Microsoft paid what is pocket change to them to deliver the final blow to the stake in the heart of what was once their biggest competitor in the browser arena. AOL/TW got badly needed cash, Microsoft got another seven years of IE dominance amongst the mouth-breathing internet user set. Web pages will continue to be designed so they'll look good for AOL retards instead of being designed to comply with established standards so they look good in all standards-compliant browsers.
As usual, Microsoft wins, the other party to the agreement thinks they won but will later realize they didn't, and the internet-using public loses.
Does this mean that AOL will abandon pre-XP users? (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Does this mean that AOL will abandon pre-XP use (Score:5, Informative)
(http://slashdot.org/)
Windows ships with an HTML rendering engine as a COM object. Internet Explorer (IE6) uses this rendering engine to render pages. So does the Windows shell, so does the Windows help system and so do many 3rd party apps, including AOL. This is the main reason that AOL used "IE" It was a componetized "browser" long before anyone at Netscape even understood the concept.
Windows will ALWAYS contain an HTML rendering engine that will ALWAYS be available to third party vendors. Even if there is no wrapper in the form of a stand alone browser ("IE") from MS itself. The interface to the engine is multi- layerd as well, always supporting the older protocols, so new version of the engine will still work with older versions of software written for it. (It is currently on it's 2nd API)
BTW if you want to see what is available to third parties, check out the "MyIE2" browser. A tabbed, mouse gestured, popup blocking alternative to IE built using the windows HTML rendering engine. It's still mssing a couple of more advanced features which I hope get added soon, but it just shows that the lack of a MS branded "IE" is no loss to anyone, in fact it's an incentive for 3rd party developers like AOL!
It's an IE web (unfortunately) (Score:5, Insightful)
Don't throw away the Netscape name!... (Score:5, Insightful)
(http://localhost/I/Own/Your/Computer.html)
Though Netscape has been increasingly marginalized, I think from a sheer brand name recognition point of view, if Mozilla, or Mozilla Firebird become Netscape, they will have a much easier time entering the collective conscious of many more people out there.
I tried Mozilla Firebird 0.6 for the first time yesterday and have to say I was very impressed! It was Netscape and Mozilla minus all the bloat, as advertised. If a Netscape 8 label is thrown on this and the usual barrage of AOL advertisements doesn't install with it, it could have a great chance of siezing some market share from the stagnating Explorer 6.
Of course, AOL will likely keep the Netscape trademark and simply let it get full of dust bunnies (as a portal web site no one will go to) to the point where no one remembers it anymore.... but if they'd only donate it to the Mozilla Foundation... it at least seems like a reach around for the current and future rounds of Netscape employees being fired.
Since Mozilla 1.0 (Score:3, Insightful)
I think that it would be best for Mozilla to throw everything they have at tweaking Mozilla as is. New features are great, but if you want more people to switch from IE, Mozilla will have to be polished so that there aren't little quirks that frustrate IE users experimenting with Mozilla.
Not only that, but you can keep those experimenters by further improving Mozilla's performance and stability.
It might be next to impossible, but if Mozilla could load faster than IE, without Mozilla being pre-loaded in the background, you would win a big chunk of converts with that alone.
Page rendering actually seems faster in Mozilla, with version 1.4 on Windows. So startup time should still be the big focus, but improving rendering time is still good
Some other people also recommend making Mozilla a complete and total IE replacement on Windows. I agree. It should become something like the Coke/Pepsi test. They should look, feel, and smell the same to the user. All menus should be laid out the same. All icons should look the same. All widgets should behave the same.
I know there are IE skins for Mozilla, but someone needs to go further with that idea and redo the entire browser interface, pulldown menus and all!
What about AOL OS X? (Gecko-based) (Score:5, Interesting)
(http://myfreakinname.blogspot.com/)
What does this mean for the OS X AOL client? That's the one thing (Gecko-based OS X client is already out there) that made me think AOL'd keep going. Looks like IE 7 (or whatever) is going to have some really neat stuff. Enough that the MS licensing agreement with AOL makes it a good idea for AOL to kill Gecko as a back-up engine for its software.
Maybe the Safari embeddable engine is easy enough to use that AOL is going that way. Or maybe AOL OS X's engine will just fold up into proprietary software. The MPL allows that.
I don't feel *that* badly. AOL, whether it meant to or not, pulled the plug, strangely enough, immediately after Moz became the best browser on the market. That's good timing from where I'm sitting -- which is in front of a monitor, posting with Mozilla/Firebird.
Wow! Just like Joel Predicted! (Score:3, Interesting)
(http://www.instascreed.com/)
Financial contribution? (Score:3, Insightful)
I already gave $15 to mozdev.org for the upgrade, but when will the Mozilla Foundation start accepting donations?
So what if this is a troll? (Score:3, Funny)
(http://www.turtlepop.com/)
Fuck AOL.
Fuck those cockmunching peabrain shiteating worthless motherfuckers.
Thank you.
This is not the end ... (Score:3, Insightful)
(Last Journal: Saturday May 31 2003, @11:05AM)
We should also all say THANK YOU to AOL for supporting the development of Mozilla. It could have been killed years ago but AOL visionaries kept it alive until it was "ready" for the wild. The $2 foundation grant should keep the foundation in servers and bandwidth as long as it needs and with a skeleton crew of CVS, bugzilla maintainers, build engineer detritus cleaners and sysadmin staff time the burn rate will be low.
How about mozdev.org and mozilla.org teaming up to share bandwidth and hardware? How about cutting over to SVN and getting tigris.org to collaborate? Bugzilla should be a fabulously attractive project for collaboration.
Sourceforge has focused
Sun and Redhat will provide build environments for weekly builds (nightlies are overkill) and gecko will be honed to the point wher it takes 10 lines of code to embed.
But who the heck will do the windows builds?!!
Re:fuckin whatever (Score:5, Interesting)
All these biz guys understand the M$ biz guys. They're all about numbers and not innovation, so the bloodletting is beginning; nothing anyone can do about it.
Now, that said, Mozilla is the key here. I don't think it will die in the forseeable future. Combined with Linux gaining more and more ground, there must exist a free, open browser. Sure, Konqueror will hang around, but Mozilla will still have a larger user base. And companies that depend on that, like Redhat, IBM, Sun (once they ditch Netscape 4), and others, they will put development efforts into it. And if the Moz Foundation gets really strapped for cash, then just move it to SourceForge or Savannah.
Point is is that there is no use thinking or worrying about AOL or Netscape anymore. They've been goners for some time. Mozilla is the focus and given the 'freeness' of the code, it will continue to live on regardless of cut funding and developers. Granted, it might slow, but no worse than IE.
I for one am sorry my fellow coders are out of a job, but I have all the faith in the world for Moz cuz I think it's a great browser. I mean, c'mon, if the C=64 (long live the C=64!) can still live after all these years, why not Moz?
Re:Netscape? (Score:5, Interesting)
(Last Journal: Thursday December 06, @06:10PM)
With Netscape circling the drain for so long, it was just a matter of time. Netscape was too far gone to be salvageable anyway. Mozilla has been a much better browser, almost from go, than Netscape ever was, which is a little surprising since they were based on the same code base.
On a related topic, I have fiddled with Mozilla and Opera and compared them, and I think it's safe to say that Opera's claim of being the fastest browser out there is incorrect.
Now that AOL has made a deal with the devil, Netscape's demise went from anticipated to guaranteed. I hate to see Netscape go, as it was a viable alternative at one time and some people out there still prefer it.
Re:Too late, too late, & other thoughts. (Score:5, Informative)
(http://infofiend.com/)
Evidently you're not a very advanced browser user. I don't mean this as an insult, if Safari does everything you need, great. For me, and many others, despite the bloat, Mozilla has necessary features that other browsers lack.
Let's start with cookie handling. There are a handful of websites that I want to accept cookies from. With Mozilla I can have it prompt me every time a site wants to set a cookie and if the cookies really are necessary I'll accept, otherwise I'll reject. With Safari you don't have that degree of fine-grained control.
Keyword bookmarks. Sure, Safari has the "Google" bar at the top. In mozilla I get the same feature by typing "g Search Terms" in the address bar, and mozilla knows to expand "g" to the full google search URL, placing the search terms in the appropriate place. But I also have keyword searches for IMDB, dictionary.cambridge.edu, google groups, google images, amazon, a w3 validator... In Safari there doesn't appear to be a way to do that.
More complete proxy control: I can say I don't want a proxy for 10.0.0.1/8 and have my entire internal network unproxied. There simply doesn't seem to be a way to do that in Safari.
Anyhow, I could go on and on about the features that Mozilla has that Safari doesn't, but I think I've made my point.