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Mozilla Foundation's Future: No Mozilla Suite 1.8 486
batb0y writes "The Mozilla Foundation has published its Mozilla Application Suite transition plan, confirming that there will be no official Mozilla 1.8 release. There will be a 1.7.6 release to be maintained by the Mozilla Foundation. All future suite versions from the Foundation will be minor updates only." Don't despair, however, as there is already a community effort underway to continue development.
stick a fork in it. (Score:5, Funny)
I won't believe it (Score:5, Funny)
I use imap (Score:3, Informative)
I suggest you migrate to it as well. I have an archive back to 1999 accesible anywhere I have Thunderbird, Mozilla, or a web browser (thanks to Squirrel mail).
How to import Mozilla Mail into Thunderbird (Score:3, Informative)
After some searching I came to the Thunderbird FAQ that says: "you can import your Mozilla Mail settings", but it doesn't say how. It turns out that ONCE during after the install of Thunderbird you get an option to import settings from Mozilla Mail, but the option then disappears from the "Import" dialog box.
The solution is to open the Thunderbird Profile manager (on windows it's a shortcut in the Thunderbird Start Menu group) and d
Firefox forever! (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Firefox forever! (Score:2, Funny)
Congratulations, you completely bastardized the intelligence of the typical mid-twenties slashdotter by defecating all over our spelling and grammar rules with a single sentence.
yo (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Firefox forever! (Score:3, Funny)
Re:Firefox forever! (Score:2, Funny)
Re:Firefox forever! (Score:2)
Re:Firefox forever! (Score:4, Funny)
s/<regex for strings to replace>/<replacement string>/
Re:Firefox forever! (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Firefox forever! (Score:5, Funny)
You mean "all-too-true," but you get extra points for proper use of hyphens.
There's more to life than grammar jackass, try getting laid some day.
A few problems here: one missing comma ("grammar , jackass": direct address), and one comma splice (before "try getting laid": should be its own sentence). Also, you mean "someday," not "some day."
P.S. I get laid plenty, my friend, though I don't mean that to sound egotistical or ... asswipey. The copyediting thing is just for fun.
Re:Firefox forever! (Score:3, Funny)
Re:Firefox forever! (Score:3, Funny)
Not that there's anything wrong with that.
Re:Firefox forever! (Score:5, Informative)
That sucks (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:That sucks (Score:2)
Re:That sucks (Score:5, Informative)
> Firefox?
One thing I like is searching or entering URLs in a single large bar. By default, Firefox has separate search and URL bars on the same line, which mean you can see less of the search term/url you're entering.
My wife says that it's easier for her to open tabs with the mouse from mozilla (the new tab button is immediately obvious to her in Mozilla, but not in Firefox).
Re:That sucks (Score:2)
Re:That sucks (Score:2)
Re:That sucks (Score:2)
Re:That sucks (Score:2)
Whats wrong with middle mouse button? It works on bookmarks as well as links.
Re:That sucks (Score:3, Informative)
Just edit keyword.URL to http://www.google.com/search?q=
about:config is a lovely thing. Rather like things such as TweakUI for Windows, the defaults are fine for most people, but there are few little extra enhancements that can be easily made, and which appear in plenty of hints & tips guides.
I agree... (Score:5, Interesting)
The Mozilla web page editor. I don't actually write web pages using it, but I do like to hit Ctrl-E every now and then to show coworkers the underlying table structure of a page. It's just a handy visual tool. Especially when I'm doing webdev.
The sidebars. I don't know about you, but I love custom sidebars. I have one for MapQuest [mapquest.com], one for IMDb [imdb.com] and one for Lorem Ipsum [subterrane.com].
Edit->Preferences. The only reason Options is under Tools in Firefox is because it's trying to mimic IE. :)
Mozilla Tools:
Translate Page
Cookie Manager
Image Manager
Popup Manager
Form Manager
Password Manager
Download Manager
The File dialog. I'm sure the new open/save file dialog is easier for easily confused users, but I like having all the file managing options ready when the dialog first opens.
I guess you could call Mozilla the programmer's web browser. Feature rich and not ashamed of it.
Re:I agree... (Score:4, Informative)
Re:That sucks (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:That sucks (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:That sucks (Score:3, Insightful)
That's the point, create an open source browser that looks similar to IE and then do a better job than MS. That's the real strength of the Firefox team. They've made the Windows version the primary development product over the Linux and Mac versions. Once the Window version is at an acceptable level work on the others (not that the Linux version is worse, but the same can't be said of the Mac version).
Once the common home users start making the switch
Re:That sucks (Score:4, Insightful)
Second, the idea that ordinary users can't learn to switch interfaces is absurd. People have gone through DOS, the MacOS, and Windows; through WordStar, WordPerfect, and MS Word; through Mosaic, Netscape, and IE. A product that looks like the MS equivalent but isn't quite the same thing isn't the way to get people to switch.
Which leads me to my third and most important point: if you build a product that looks almost exactly like the MS equivalent, but acts just a little different, people aren't going to say, "This is almost as good, and it's free, so I'll use it." They'll say, "This is a cheap knockoff." You can replicate every widget, every menu item, every weird behavior -- but all you'll do with that is lull people into a false sense of familiarity, so the first time something doesn't behave exactly the way it does in Windows/Word/IE, their reaction will be to assume that the F/OSS app they're using is broken, and that by extension, F/OSS is broken. And where will that send them? Right back to Bill.
Nobody will ever be as good at being Microsoft as Microsoft is. Instead of trying to be almost kinda sorta just as good, we should try to be better -- and "better" implies "different."
Re:That sucks (Score:5, Informative)
Think again. Microsoft has spent a lot of time and money refining their UI. It may not be as clean as Mac OS, and there are definately some rough edges, but after seeing how new users pick up on Windows XP's new features, I have no doubts that their product is "easy to use".
Re:That sucks (Score:3, Insightful)
For example, in WindowMaker (and a few other X11 window managers that I've used) you can move a window by holding down Alt, grabbing anywhere in the window (with the left mouse button) and moving the window around. Likewise, to resize a window, you can hold hold down Alt, and drag any one of the four quadrants of a window. As far as I am aware, you still
Re:That sucks (Score:5, Informative)
Regards,
Steve
Not to mention... (Score:5, Insightful)
It seems like the Mozilla Foundation made a decision that they preferred the Firefox development model. Firefox, Thunderbird, and Sunbird are set to be the *new* Mozilla suite, and the old one is in maintenance mode. It seems like this is comparable to people complaining that Microsoft isn't putting enough development into Windows 3.1.... Well, yeah, it's the old product that they've discontinued.
Now, it's all open source, so if someone wants to work on it, go ahead. But why people are trying to convince the Mozilla foundation to offload their new, exciting, successful, popular line-up of software and head back to what's become a bit of a dead-end, I don't know.
Re:Not to mention... (Score:2)
Re:Not to mention... (Score:2)
No problem. (Score:2, Offtopic)
Uuh... (Score:5, Funny)
Our primary concern in the short term is with being able to ship a SeaMonkey front end on
top of a Gecko
That doesn't sound like a developer's list, that sounds like a post on alt.sex.zoophilia.
So? (Score:5, Insightful)
As long as there's good interoperability -- and I don't see how this decision is going to hurt that -- does it really matter whether there are five apps that each do one thing or one app that does five things?
p
Re:So? (Score:3, Funny)
You get it in one giant download, instead of five or six measly, unsatisfactory ones...
Re:So? (Score:2)
Re:So? (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:So? (Score:4, Informative)
Re:So? (Score:3, Informative)
As others are pointing out, Mozilla.org hasn't componentized the backend ("GRE") of the applicaitons yet. That means that Firefox and Thunderbird share very little compiled code, which is not good because they aren't very lightweight programs to begin with.
I guess Mozilla was designed from the beginning to be one big monolithic application , so discontinuing that application seems a little odd.
Un-bundling Good/UI Bad [Re:So?] (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:So? (Score:4, Informative)
It's not that, it's that Mozilla's behaviors and interface are much, much smoother compared to my experience with Firefox 1.0.0. Some key UI examples:
* When I download from Mozilla, it automatically allows me to choose where it's going, instead of defaulting to what it thinks is best.
* The address and search bar are combined - not separate, which means extra keystrokes to do what previously took one.
* Searching from the
* Removing features so that we get to play whack the mole with multiple extension downloads, installations, and configurations.
* If you separately download Firefox, Thunderbird, and the components which give you the same functionality as Moz 1.7.x, they take up more space and have a larger memory footprint than the "kitchen sink" suite.
There are other annoying issues to boot, but listing all of them is just kicking a baby. For now, IMO, Firefox is nowhere near as nice as Mozilla 1.7.x.
Let me get this straight. (Score:5, Insightful)
1) Mozilla (suite) is dead. Long live Firefox.
2) Gecko lives as the main development focus.
3) Mozilla (suite) will be born again as Seamonkey, but won't be high visibility.
From a development point of view, this may make sense. From a branding point of view, it seems odd. It appears that the Mozilla "brand" is being de-emphasized in favor of the individual component names. While Firefox is a memorable name, it seems like a loss not to take advantage of the Mozilla name recognition.
Re:Let me get this straight. (Score:2)
Re:Let me get this straight. (Score:2)
There was plans to rename them as "Mozilla Browser" and "Mozilla Mail".
And lo and behold, my hunch is correct.
From the branding strategy [mozilla.org]:
Use the names "Mozilla Browser" and "Mozilla Mail" to describe the Firefox and Thunderbird projects after the 1.4 release.
So there will be Mozilla Firefox 1.4, but 1.5 and so on will be called Mozilla Browser. Firefox's popularity might change these plans though.
Re:Let me get this straight. (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Let me get this straight. (Score:3, Insightful)
Sorry, minority opinion here. (Score:2)
Re:Let me get this straight. (Score:3, Informative)
You: Oh yes, Mozilla, of course itself a name pun on Mosaic, when Marc Andreesen couldn't call it Mosaic anymore what with it being connected to UIUC and all, so he started developing a new commercial browser, calling it "Mozilla". Well, of course that didn't make a respectable brand, but if you look in the old Netscape readme files, you'll see "It's spelled N-E-T-S-C-A-P-E but it's pronounce
Re:Let me get this straight. (Score:5, Informative)
The mozilla foundation, somewhere around 2 years ago, decided replace the Mozilla suite (which has had the codename "Seamonkey") with a group of standalone applications. There were projects already underway to create a standalone version of the browser and e-mail client, and the Mozilla foundation chose these two (which after a couple name-changes became Firefox and Thunderbird) to serve as the base for their development.
Originally, "Firebird" and "Thunderbird" were meant to be code-names for these apps while they were under development, as Seamonkey was the codename for the Mozilla suite. When these products reached version 1.0, they were supposed to be renamed "Mozilla Browser" and "Mozilla E-mail".
However, the development versions of the software had become famous/popular enough that people become worried that changing the name would lose name-recognition (which is bad for branding purposes) so it was decided instead that they'd be called "Mozilla Firefox" and "Mozilla Thunderbird". As far as I can remember, those are now the final names, but perhaps someone who knows better will correct me.
Anyhow, these stand-alone apps were designated to be replacements/upgrades for the old suite, and indeed, most users have stopped using the old suite and are using the new applications. However, many developers still prefer the old suite and are gearing up to start a development group independent of the Mozilla Foundation and branch off from Mozilla 1.7. For this purpose, it has been suggested that they call the software "The Seamonkey Internet Suite" because, no longer being affiliated with Mozilla, they can't use the "Mozilla" name.
Make sense?
Firefox needs Moz suite components (Score:4, Interesting)
I am also still not crazy about some of the new features in Firefox 1.0, but I imagine these will be worked out in time.
Perhaps now that they are officially abandoning the suite and focusing in one direction, there will be more of a push to include or exclude features to make former suite users happier.
Re:Firefox needs Moz suite components (Score:5, Informative)
Thunderbird is the replacement for the e-mail part of the Mozilla suite. Nvu is (arguably) the replacement for the editor part of the suite. Et cetera.
Re:Firefox needs Moz suite components (Score:4, Informative)
The current version is 1.0-Beta, and it's much better than any alternative I've seen in the OSS world, much better than mozilla's equivalent. Take a look [nvu.com] or download [nvu.com] it.
Isn't Mozilla a repackaging of Firefox et al? (Score:3, Interesting)
Does this announcement mean that bundles of all the Mozilla suite pieces will no longer be created, or is the old architecture of the Mozilla browser going away? Is some other group or project going to do the bundling instead?
Thanks for answering my questions!
Re:Isn't Mozilla a repackaging of Firefox et al? (Score:5, Informative)
Firefox and Thunderbird were split off as standalone apps that embedded the Gecko rendering component and a few other goodies from the original Mozilla suite, but they've always been their own critters, from an application standpoint.
So, now it looks like major development on Gecko-based products is going to be on apps that do one small cluster of things well, instead of a large app that does lots of things.
clear 'nuff?
Comment removed (Score:4, Informative)
Good thinking! (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Good thinking! (Score:2)
Not a major issue (Score:3, Insightful)
Reading everything, this looks like a minor issue. They're just saying "Mozilla-the-suite is going away. If you want a browser, use Firefox. If you want mail/news, use Thunderbird.". The code isn't going away, if I read it right, just the one-big-suite front-end as a product on it's own.
Makes sense, but (Score:3, Interesting)
But, it was nice having an integrated suite. Perhaps they could offer a suite of firefox/tbird/sbird/composer? Preferably they would all share common code like Gecko.
The Death Knell (Score:3, Interesting)
But why? Before you mod me down, hold on a second...
Mozilla's suite, speaking just about the browser component, is FAR superior to what Firefox offers. Not only are there many more options for security, cookies, Javascript, saving form data, and many other things... that killing the suite, even if it was just this ONE component, would really be a bad move on their part.
Personally, I don't like Firefox at all. Even though they're both based on the Gecko engine, Firefox renders CSS much differently than Mozilla in some cases. Mozilla tends to be more accurate with placement. Its not as flexible, and it just looks plain ugly (as compared to Mozilla again, even with the same theme).
I can't speak for the other parts, because I only use the browser component of the Mozilla suite (and I'm a full-time, very-pedantic, anal-about-standards, web developer, so I can speak with absolute authority on this; my internal QA/test suite includes 13 browsers before I release a site to a client). Firefox, while great as an MSIE replacement, can't even remotely compare to what the Mozilla Suite browser component offers.
Don't kill the Mozilla Suite, please, and if you do, at least keep the Mozilla Browser component around.
Re:The Death Knell (Score:3, Informative)
The latest version will be fully integrated in 1.1 and will in fact be one of the major upgrades of 1.1
As far as I know, this is the reason FF renders differently, so it should be the same as Seamonkey by then
Re:The Death Knell (Score:3, Informative)
Re:The Death Knell (Score:5, Insightful)
I'm a full-time, very-pedantic, anal-about-standards, web developer, so I can speak with absolute authority on this
I just clicked on your link, and you are out of spec. because you serve XHTML as text/html without complying with Appendix C of the XHTML 1.0 recommendation.
Furthermore, your code kicks Internet Explorer and Opera into "quirks mode", where they intentionally go out of spec. in order to cater to non-compliant pages.
If you are going to claim to be an absolute authority on something, make sure you're doing it right, eh? :)
Re:The Death Knell (Score:3, Informative)
MSIE doesn't support XHTML, at all. I know all about the issues with text/html [hixie.ch], but this allows the site to function for those using a crippled browser (MSIE).
That main page was a tes
Re:The Death Knell (Score:3, Interesting)
this allows the site to function for those using a crippled browser (MSIE).
No, you misunderstand. I'm not saying that serving XHTML as text/html is wrong, I'm saying that serving XHTML that doesn't comply with Appendix C is wrong. RFC 2854 doesn't permit it. You are violating the text/html specification.
How Fitting: (Score:5, Interesting)
Don't put too much hope in the community effort. (Score:3, Informative)
The Mozilla Foundation has been looking for people to work on the Mozilla Suite for a while now. Nothing prevented people from doing work on it.
That it was killed indicates there just wasn't enough support to continue it.
Thus, the help for the community is limited to those who either were not aware help was needed, or are willing to work on a rebranded Mozilla Suite (it's trademarked, isn't it?) but not on the original Mozilla Suite while the Mozilla Foundation drove it.
In short, new developers and people who fork for the sake of forking.
Re:Don't put too much hope in the community effort (Score:4, Interesting)
A short list:
You can't download more than 2-3 files at once in firefox. Trying to download more causes the dialog to come up when another file finishes.
Mozilla/Firefox store your credit card numbers in plaintext if you don't completely turn off autocomplete. (They closed this one WONTFIX)
Browser blocks a ton of ports for "Security reasons" that no other browser does. (I guess plaintext credit card numbers aren't a security problem, but somehow this is??)
And that's just off the top of my head. All these bugs have been around for at least 2-3 years.
Camino (Score:2)
Josh [mozillazine.org] (one of Mozilla's recent hires) posted what sounded like great news about Camino's short and medium term release cycle back on March 5. But these latest revelations may have raised some employment questions for guys like h
What about Firefox? (Score:3, Interesting)
Google Conspiracy? (Score:5, Funny)
They should keep the brand (Score:5, Insightful)
Fumble at the goalline (Score:5, Insightful)
All their announcements (posted by different people, linked to other websites for "clarification") talk about a failure to communicate expectations to developers, consumers, members of the team. Well, this announcement is confusing, and exactly the reason why corporations continue to consume inferior Microsoft crap: because Microsoft clearly communicates what will be released, so corporate IT can plan around it. Even when Microsoft lies about releases, they give a clear communication for PHBs to use in their management jobs. Which is the number one priority for success in corporate environments.
This transformation might very well produce a continuing improvement in Internet client apps, as the project team members claim. (Though the separation of the Internet Search field from the Get URL field from Mozilla -> Firefox will surely cripple my own productivity
Composer (Score:3, Interesting)
I want my Mozilla 1.8 (Score:5, Insightful)
say "oh we never intended to put out a Final 1.8"
BULLCRAP...and they KNOW its bullcrap!
You have a 1.8 that is 99% done, FINISH IT!.
This is not Windows 3.1...This product had a new beta put out LAST MONTH! The nightlys say "Beta 2"
Take out the unimplemented features, fix the bugs release 1.8 and call it a day.
vote on it (Score:4, Insightful)
I have still yet to see a single, solid reason on why Firefox is supposedly better.
end rant, commence modding
Re:vote on it (Score:3, Informative)
As a (primarily) OS X user, the Mozilla suite's preferences window OFFENDS me. It is repugnant. I cannot fathom how any human being with even a rudimentary grasp of proper user i
Re:vote on it (Score:4, Insightful)
1. You seem to be making the very common mistake to think that you are representative of the general population (potential users). The IQ is distributed normally, that is, it follows a bell curve. That entails that on average, people have an IQ of 100, and the largest number of people have exactly 100. (It's not their fault, and it's not a problem. No need to pity them, no need to be arrogant about it.)
2. Even as people gifted with an above-average intelligence, I'm not sure if we want to waste our time learning about configuration options of our applications. We're not the boy scouts. Your browser is a tool. It's not a goal in itself. That's essentially why I like OS X, and it's a criticism that applies to a large proportion of open source software coming from Linuxland.
Re:vote on it (Score:3, Insightful)
mozilla's speed (vs firefox) (Score:3, Informative)
Amazing how few realize Mozilla browser != Firefox (Score:4, Insightful)
No. Actually, the Mozilla browser and Firefox are quite different. This is the main reason that many people (myself included) don't want Mozilla to be discontinued. We prefer the Mozilla browser over Firefox. To some of us, Firefox feels like a "dumbed down" version of the Mozilla browser. Now, I understand the intent is for Firefox to appeal to a much wider audience, and that is fine. Believe me, I am behind the Firefox effort 100%, and I install it for people all the time when trying to wean them off IE. But many of us still vastly prefer the Mozilla browser for our own personal use.
There are many other reasons I prefer the Mozilla browser over Firefox, as well as many reasons I enjoy the full Mozilla suite. But that is not really the point of this post. The point is that the Mozilla browser and Firefox are two different things.
Fonts (Score:4, Interesting)
I realise this is personal, but cannot bear antialiased fonts - they appear blurry and out of focus, and they give me eye strain. Yes, FF/TB let you switch off antialiasing (as configured by the gnome control panel), but then you get the spidery mess that results from scaled, non anti-aliased true type fonts.
BUT, in the suite, (using then non-XFT builds), I can have perfect, sharp fonts using the old fashioned 100dpi (bitmap) fonts. This makes Mozilla so much easier to read!
Other problems with TB/FF: the extensions do not play nice with rpm/urpmi; the keys (Ctrl-[1-5] and Ctrl-N/M don't work (eg no keyboard accelerator in TB to open a new window in FF); less functionality; hidden dependence on the gnome-control-panel (for default browser/fonts); less effective toolbar (google/URL are in separate bars).
Re:Fonts (Score:3, Informative)
http://oceanic.wsisiz.edu.pl/~kosmowsk/misc/sla s hd ot1.jpeg
I really feel let down by this one. (Score:3, Interesting)
I'm sure Firefox is nifty, but it sound like it's not all that mature yet, and I don't want to regress, yet again. I definatly am not ready to trust thunderbird. I'm still pissed from when I experimented with a maturing balsa, just to have it mangle my mail files, hose it's indexes, and start deleting the wrong messages.
My desktop is not a toy and there are certain function that should not be in constant beta. Email is one of them. Now I have to find a way to migrate, yet again, to something stable and functional for a mail and news reader.
And yes, I know there will probably be a community project that takes over. There will be a question of migration since we already know they can't use the same name, it's safe to say the dot directory will change and probably some of the files there in. And then there is a question of how smooth the transition will be. Will the software stay stable through all the churn. Will it stagnate like the old netscape suite? Do I want to bet another mailbox on it?
If there's going to be a migration, I want to at least be sure that the there is a stable program at the other end of the migration. Right now, the suite soon to be formerly known as Mozilla is an unknown.
This Really Sucks (Score:4, Insightful)
I really like Mozilla. I was just thinking last night how irritating it is to use Firefox.
I have used many browsers in the past (Firefox, Galeon, Opera, Konqueror, IE, Netscape, NetFront, Lynx... you name it), and I keep coming back to Mozilla. Every time I get frustrated with another browser, Moz has a way to solve the problem. Sure, it is not perfect, but it is way better than most I have used.
Re:Mozilla Suite is Dead! (Score:4, Funny)
Re:Mozilla Suite is Dead! (Score:5, Funny)
To quote Firefox's "about:mozilla" URI:
- from The Book of Mozilla, 7:15
Re:Mozilla Suite is Dead! (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Mozilla Suite is Dead! (Score:3, Insightful)
Um... looks like we need a new entry in The Book of Mozilla.
Re:Mozilla Suite is Dead! (Score:3, Insightful)
And what did the bird (Phoenix/Firebird) do? He:
Re:Mozilla Suite is Dead! (Score:3, Informative)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Book_of_Mozilla [wikipedia.org]
No... (Score:3, Insightful)
If Mozilla Suite had community enough to support it, they would have been integrated into the Mozilla Foundation to begin with. That it's been dropped like this shows there are plent of people willing to talk about supporting it, but not enough people willing to actually do it.
Mind you, maybe this will shake some supporters out that didn't realize things were in such rough shape.
Re:No... (Score:4, Interesting)
Mozilla SeaMonkey drove producing a set of capabilities cloning the original Netscape base it derived from (in a very detached way, of course), with the idea that Netscape/AOL (and others) could take the baseline and produce *standards-compliant* browsers on top of those capabilities.
3 things happened, and one thing *didn't* happen.
1) Netscape 6.x and 7.x were successfully rolled out based on the Mozilla baseline (only now 8.x has already started coming from the Firefox base, and the "Communicator" concept is gone)
2) AOL decided, in spite of their investment, to give up the idea of actually doing an AOL browser based on Mozilla in favor of playing marketting games with Microsoft by supporting IE instead in exchange for not being blacklisted off of Microsoft's illegal (but still practiced) OEM deals.
3) Firefox came out and had a marketting push unlike any other open source project around, including Linux distros themselves. And to top it off, the damn thing actually works (those few slashdotter complaints in this thread notwithstanding).
the thing that didn't happen: other ISPs didn't build their own browsers on Mozilla tech. It used to be in the 90s that all the ISPs followed AOL and Compuserve's lead in taking an existing browser (usually IE) and specializing it to become part of their service. Mozilla was setting up its code base specifically for that purpose -- we provide standards-compliance and ease-of-skinning; you skin it to meet your customer's needs. Only by the time Mozilla's codebase was ready for this to actually happen, the other ISPs stopped distributing their own special browsers entirely.
IE had won the browser wars so successfully that customers were using raw IE in spite of having the special ISP-specific version (of IE) available. So the dialup ISPs stopped doing that, and the broadband dealers had long-since known that people who go broadband have usually already gotten experience with the real browsers and avoided specialized software like the plague. This trend continued as the bugs and security holes of IE became known and the realization happened that one had to go use updated versions of the real IE to be *sure* you had a "fixed" version; with the ISP's version, you could never be sure of what was and wasn't fixed. The ISPs started running out of funds just trying to keep up with the security fixes Microsoft kept putting out all to support a dwindling userbase.
So in the end, why invest money maintaining a codebase of a hacked version of IE that's neither being used nor giving your customers any real value? And if not with IE, then there's nothing to be gained by doing it with Mozilla, even if it is "free" compared to licensing IE.
So the whole point of Mozilla as a means of developing capabilities for others to productize ended. nobody outside of Mozilla was really productizing it (the last straw really being when Apple went with the Konquerer baseline for Safari in spite of the speed improvements from 1.4 to 1.7), and Firefox has branded itself a hugely successful product in its own right.
thus, aside from maintaining a configuration UI that happens to work for a small subset of people, there's little to be gained from maintaining SeaMonkey as a released product. Gecko, Xul, and the other libraries will continue to improve to support Firefox and Thunderbird -- all that's missing is the use of a browser suite to show off their new features before going into Firefox.
and if its going into Firefox anyways, will anybody *really* miss it? The open-source philosophy will keep the Firefox people from writing generic features in such a way as to make it difficult to use them in other gecko-based products that are still out there or that will grow.
Re:No... (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Wait...what?? (Score:3, Informative)