News about the yet-to-be-released version 5.0 of Netscape browsers
News about the yet-to-be-released version 5.0 of Netscape browsers
There's been a lot of press attention given to the recent departures of some long time Netscape employees but around here in client development we view it as no big deal. Not to diminish Jamie Zawinski's and John Giannandrea's past contributions, but their impact on the Mozilla code base is nowhere near as significant as the news media implies. Jamie's primary role for Mozilla was PR and John, while I don't know what his role actually was, doesn't appear as a factor in the discussion or development of Mozilla.Yes, the 5.0 development process is taking longer than we would have liked. This is due in no small part to the decision late last year to essentially throw away the old code base and rebuild Navigator/Communicator around the new Gecko layout engine. It's very rare that someone has the opportunity to look back at 4 years of product development and decide to build the new version from scratch. While painful this provides the best course for future versions, especially from the standpoint of reducing the cost of cross platform development by using the layout engine and XUL to build the application.
Has Mozilla failed? Depends on who you ask. For those of us still here working hard to bring out a new browser the answer is no. These departures, while they may appear to be 'high profile', will have no impact on our plans.
For a more detailed analysis of the first year of the Mozilla open source effort, including the highlights, the lowlight and the lessons we've learned, I refer you to this Mozilla web page.