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July 16, 2003
Mozilla
Mozilla has redesigned their main page. I actually like the new redesign, but find it slightly humorous. Underneath the splash page, everything still looks like the old site. A metaphor for the new Mozilla Foundation and it's completeness? I certainly hope not.
With the whole Mozilla Foundation change, I've learned just how little people really don't believe in Mozilla. Having worked on embedding it for interactive television for awhile (in the pre-1.0 headache days), Mozilla gained a special place in my heart. Not just for being a nifty browser, but also for being one of the biggest headaches to work upon, a constantly moving target, and most importantly with some talented people who REALLY know their C++. I still follow a lot of the work, despite the fact that I don't commit code back. I especially like Camino and the work that Mike Pinkerton and company are doing on that.
Oddly enough, it seems that I will be rekindling my torrid love affair with Mozilla development in the near future. My current job has me working towards adding some functionality in the EROS operating system. One of the eventual goals is to prove that a web browser can and will work in a system developed through strong security and capability authorization. It's so far proving to be a daunting task, especially when the tools needed to use (i.e. OpenCM) aren't fully operational all the time.
Back to the original point, JD and I had a brief conversation over the effects of AOL dropping Netscape, and the creation of the Mozilla Foundation. The viewpoint from someone who doesn't follow the development is really interesting, in that the public perception seems to be that AOL is funding Netscape which is funding Mozilla. While not entirely false, it's not completely true either. Much of the Mozilla development team has slowly moved from paid employees over to volunteers like any other open source project. I guess this is going to be the first big hurdle for the MozFo to overcome, the perceived death blow to the Mozilla browser.
The second big hurdle is, of course, gaining a substantial foothold in the browser market. The fact that IE 6 is the last free IE, won't hurt this cause. The $200-$300 upgrade price for a browser will be a good bit of a slow down on all things IE releated, but doesn't really address the next problem. Do consumers really care what browser they use? Initial guess, nope they don't. The challenge here is to now make websites standards compliant that will break in IE, but not Mozilla (or potentially Opera/KHTML). A few early adopters might follow this, but getting big companies to buy this idea and cross the chasm will be near impossible. Biggest advantage right now, IE won't be update for another 1+ year(s). Lets hope the MozFo doesn't drop the ball on this oppertunity.
Posted by Dan at July 16, 2003 08:49 AM