AOL Lays Off 50 Netscape Coders

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.

If...

If Mozilla surpasses IE in the next couple years, do you think AOL will try to bail on Microsoft? This could get interesting. The litigation is over for now so the browser wars must begin again... as if they ever ended.

Re:If...

>> If Mozilla surpasses IE ...

That won't happen unless Microsoft drops IE and starts shipping Mozilla.

Re:If...

It could happen. As Peter-Paul Koch theorized in this article [evolt.org] (slashdot thread [slashdot.org]).
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...

your a fool

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...

IE will continue to be developed and extended by MS army of coders. they're just going to lock the browser major version to the OS and not supply a standalone download. if you're thinking that IE is on feature freeze, you're greatly mistaken.

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...

Possible, but very unlikely. Any goodies that an alternative browser might offer can be adopted by Microsoft. If it is a goodie that won't work on Windows, why would they care?

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...

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

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...

The problem with this argument is that you're looking at it from the standpoint of someone who has at least a partial clue. 90% of the people in the world that use a web browser only use it because that's what browser was there for them to use.

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...

90% of the people in the world that use a web browser only use it because that's what browser was there for them to use.

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...

Microsoft is a lot of negative things, but stupid isn't one of them. So, for the sake of argument, let's consider that IE as a freestanding product has been not discontinued, but mothballed. No one seems to be working on it, no new versions are forthcoming, there is no roadmap for future development.

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!

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

The reason that AOL uses IE is to that MS will have AOL pre-packaged on the computers with a nifty shortcut link to install the software. This way a user doesn't have to download the software online, or worry about how they are going to get online. Most users are still using a modem, and have no way to get online unless they first contact an ISP. This way, AOL is already on the computer, and they don't have to call anyone. It's just there. That is why they use IE. And MS wants them to use it, well, because they are the largest ISP and they all use IE.

AOL will stop using IE when Windows starts to lose it's market share (by a LOT)

Re:If...

if they had worked on the portable Gecko completely and forgotten (Or at the very least, pushed right back) things like XUL and skined interfaces, they could have written a handful of application shells for their supported platforms and dropped in an excelent browser engine.

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
([e-mail])

Re:If...

but it seems that other browsers engines have managed this amazing feat without building an entire cross platform application framework from the ground up.

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
([e-mail])

Re:If...

What was the choice to go with XUL instead of a cross-platform toolkit like Qt or Wx?

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...

On top of that, even in 2003:
- 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...

You don't have to build a monolithic do-it-all middleware language parser in order to support stylable front-ends. What you DO need, and which Mozilla totally lacks, is a well-defined and specced down API.
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...

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.

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...

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?

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????

They laid off 50 workers and the article claims that to be less than 10% of the Netscape workforce?????

What the hell are all those guys doing there?

Re:Whaaa????

Trying to stuff as many AOL icons in as possible.

Re:Whaaa????

---------- Forwarded message ----------
Subject: Netscape is dead
Resent-Date: Tue, 15 Jul 2003 14:14:05 -0700 (PDT)
Resent-From: [e-mail]
Date: Tue, 15 Jul 2003 14:13:27 -0700
From: Daniel Veditz
To: [e-mail]

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????

There will not be any more Netscape releases.

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

Perfected art of staring at monitor and 'zoning out' while pretending to work.

Meh, just like Microsoft Office, this can be placed on anyone one of our resumes.

Re:Big Deal

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

Hey! Without my job at Netscape, I would never have the free time to post this comment!

Re:Big Deal

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..

Bob Slydell: The Netscape developers.
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....

As long as Steve Case was there, AOL was never going to cozy up to MS. Now that he's gone, you'll probably see a lot more of this now that AOL has to run themselves as a profit making concern.

They've sort of laid off Mozilla as well...

$2 mn. for 10 coders for the Mozilla project isn't much, after you consider other expenses. I think AOL is acting as I'd predicted some time back - quick death for Netscape, slow poison to Mozilla, and surrender to the IE devil...

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...

Wait a minute, there are 10 coders working on Mozilla and 450 (down 10% from 500) working on Netscape

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...

Seems to me this has nothing to do with caving to MS...if I had "45 Netscape developers for 1 Mozilla developer", and virtually all of the new features came from Mozilla, I'd figure that I'm wasting a lot of money paying all those lazy Netscape developers too.

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...

450 (down 10% from 500) working on Netscape

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
([e-mail])

Re:They've sort of laid off Mozilla as well...

According to wheezy's post on Mozillazine [mozillazine.org]:

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.

Re:They've sort of laid off Mozilla as well...

slow poison to Mozilla

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
([e-mail])

The Register

The Register [theregister.co.uk] have an interesting take on this too here [theregister.co.uk]

Re:The Register

Like a lot of journalists, lacking a take on a juicy story, they have to steal one from elsewhere. The "it took too long because they started again" line has been done to death. The fact is, that they had no choice.

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

Netscape killed themselves with their own hubris and irrational reverence for Communicator 4. The rewrite might have been justfied, but the goal of making an exact clone of the old version was just a terrible management decision.

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?

I thought AOL was going to be using Netscape as their browser, the whole point in buying them?

Probably just to get the rights to sue Microsoft for monopoly practises. Now the court case has been settled (much in Microsoft's favour) there's no need to hold on to an ex-$4.2 billion dollar company.