stuuf's Journal: Who still uses Mozilla?

I've been using Mozilla for my web browsing, email, and occasional WYSIWYG HTML authoring needs since I decided that the Netscape 4 layout engine was too out-of-date at around the time of the 1.0 release of Mozilla. I switched because it offered modern rendering capabilities in a microslut-free open source package, and had the feel of Communicator that I grew up with. Now I don't know how I could live without extensions like tabs and mouse gestures.

Meanwhile, a project called Phoenix started to pop up on the mozilla website. It was a stripped-down version of mozilla, including only the browser component, with a lightweight GUI. The project was renamed because of a trademark issue to Firebird, and by the time it hit 1.0 was called Firefox, now a household name. Firefox started taking market share away from Internet Explorer and has now dwarfed the popularity of mozilla.

I continued to use mozilla happily, not thinking that Firefox people would ever get in my way. Then I started installing more extensions, and began to see compatibility issues. For instance, one of the things that allows mozilla to be extended and still kept under control is the preferences dialog box, where extensions can add their own pages into a hierarchical menu without having to put their own shortcuts in the main application menus. Firefox's prefs window is extremely simplified and lacks this expandability. As a result, extensions that are now mostly designed for Firefox have to put their configuration systems somewhere else, usually launched from the Tools menu, creating an extremely inconsistent interface.

The mozilla platform, while being criticized for being bloated and slow, is cool because applications like an email client, calendar, IRC client, games, and a javascript debugger can easily be plugged into the same program. I'm all for more people converting to standards-compliant browsers (be it mozilla, firefox, konqueror or anything else) and forcing web developers to stop coding to MSIE, but I hope the mozilla suite will continue to be available for the power users who want it.