Mozilla — Tag

In the dramatic season finale, the folks at Netscape Blog have announced that Netscape is no longer supported.

If anything, it is about time. This browser has been long dead since Netscape 6 tried to revive it. It is so full of crap, bloatware, and AOL that it made it an unfriendly out-of-the-box experience. Internet Explorer was the better browser at that time.

If you read the blogs at Mozilla, you’d be told of how AOL tried to break the Mozilla-browser in many ways just to please themselves that it is just as well they said “screw you” and forked Firefox.

Asa Dotzler gives a bit of an insight,

They drained every penny they could out of the browser until finally giving up in 2003 and closing down browser development at Netscape. Future versions were outsourced efforts built on Mozilla and Microsoft technologies and offering pretty awful user experiences and even further tie-ins to AOL and AOL partner services. Combine that with Netscape and AOL web services tanking and you’ve got a pretty clear death spiral.

So no more are we going to see awful attempts by AOL to create a web browser to drive themselves forward.

In a very disappointing announcement, Scott MacGregor has announced that Thunderbird is going to leave Mozilla in favour of a different set up. Thunderbird is the spin off from Mozilla Mail, as part of the Mozilla Suite.

The Mozilla Suite is being developed by a community group still, and is known as Seamonkey. Firefox was itself born from the Mozilla Suite.

Scott says that this has come about because of Mozilla’s mission statement, to create an open web, and that a mail client has no place in this. Thunderbird has unfortunately been the outcast, always in the shadow of Firefox, despite being a great, simple mail client. It has got to pick up its game though for Microsoft is already working on the next version of Outlook Express/Windows Mail, known as Windows Live Mail, which is admittedly quite nice.

I cannot see how this can benefit the email client, and surely an open source community as large as Mozilla’s can work on two projects? Apache has managed it (and works on many projects at once), however it seems to be the only one that I can think of at the top of my head.

Firefox 2 was released last Tuesday to a flurry of internet excitement - perhaps more than the IE7 release the week before.

And the download numbers prove it. Microsoft was pleased in announcing three million downloads in four days. Now, this is not “forced” download numbers - it is still to reach Windows Update (this will happen in a couple of weeks, most likely in the next update rollup).

Mozilla one-upped them the next day - 2 million downloads in one day.

Good work to Mozilla. Remember, no matter what browser you use, you should upgrade. If your main concern is extension compatibility with Firefox, remember that a lot of extensions have already been indicated to work with Firefox 2, and you won’t have to do anything.

A lot of extensions work out of the box anyway. Here’s how,

• Type about:config into your address bar and press Enter.
• In the Find box, type checkCompatibility.
• Double-click the lone option to read “true”.

Now it will ignore compatibility information in the extensions. Be careful though, this can break your browser!