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acroyearin slashdot tonight there's been a discussion about the announcement from mozilla.org that they won't be maintaining the "Mozilla Suite" (the Mozilla-based integrated browser/email/composer/chat system that came from Netscape Communicator and is the basis for Netscape 7's Communicator suite) anymore. All focus in the underlying technologies will be solely to support Firefox, Thunderbird, and Sunbird (though kept focussed on the libraries that build those products just as a point of good architecture).
it really comes down to question of "what would you do with it?". its all good and well that everybody likes feature "X" that comes from the integrated suite that currently the separated apps can't give (doesn't mean they won't get some form of triggering the other apps as a result of this announcement), but what more do you want besides a browser that stays the way you already know?
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.
it really comes down to question of "what would you do with it?". its all good and well that everybody likes feature "X" that comes from the integrated suite that currently the separated apps can't give (doesn't mean they won't get some form of triggering the other apps as a result of this announcement), but what more do you want besides a browser that stays the way you already know?
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.
