Thu, 03 Apr 2003

The Phoenix Rises

Phoenix rises from Mozilla's ashes. Three months after Apple Computer bypassed it for a smaller, faster Web browser, Mozilla.org refocuses its coding efforts on a smaller, faster version of its own product. [CNET News.com]

Well, isn't this grand news? I've just transitioned all my machines to Mozilla, got my mail and web clients all set up with various addons in XUL and now they decide to redirect the project to some "lightweight" varient. I guess my anger will be proportional to the degree to which this new direction maintains the diea of plugins and addons, but still... I mean ....

Good grief: I'm 46 years old and no lightweight! Is this not just "fat fear" in disguise? It's not like RAM, processor power or hard drives were rare and precious by the byte and cycle, as they have been in the not too distant past.

And all because Apple based Safari on KHTML? Plezzzze - Konqueror failed me utterly and completely once upon a time (in KDE 2x) and I was not happy. Safari itself seems to be somewhat better, but I still use Mozilla on the Mac and the wife, after seriously trying to use Safari for a few days, went back to IE.

The Gecko engine has it's occassional glitches, but it doesn't transmit virii like IE or Outlook. And it runs the same on Mac, Linux and Windoze - gimme a break! It's quite a piece of work.

I guess if they can maintain backward compatability with the "general direction" of Mozilla development, towards XUL (which the article implies - alledgedly it's XPFE being abandoned) then perhaps it'll work out in the long run. It just upsets me when I see this happening to something that isn't really (from a users standpoint) broken.

Curiously, I use all of Mozilla except the IRC client, and have found it, performance wise, to be equal or better than IE/Outlook. Tabbed browsing is great, as are the addons that let me spoof my browser ID (some idiot bank I use required IE - so I spoofed it and it worked just fine with Mozilla).

The lack of "useless" features in Phoenix concerns me as well - as a programmer, I've learned not to try to second guess the end user as to what's useful or not. Alot of my stuff has ended up being used in some very unique and creative ways because I built some "useless" and usually undocumented feature into the code.

I suppose I'd better go get a copy of this thing and take a look/see. Sigh. As if I don't have anything better to do.

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