Mozilla's First Birthday

The Prognosticator writes "Here's a Wired article about Netscape's Mozilla project at it's first birthday today, 1.Apr.1999. It covers where Mozilla's been and where it's going in a short interview with a Mozilla PR guy and a Communicator Project Manager. "

Off topic: Nothing!

[Xamot]

Anyone else notice there is nothing on everything today?

Real news?

[Evangelion]

We aren't. This isn't real news. It's just an elaborate setup by Rob and Wired to trick us into thinking that subsequent posts are true.

It's all one big AFJ.

Another article

[Lev Grossman]

... that says basically the same things (I know, I wrote it):

http://cgi.pathfi nder.com/time/digital/daily/0,2822,22429,00.html [pathfinder.com]

Another article

[Lev Grossman]

Why not?

So...

[Fandango]

Who's going to the party [mozilla.org]?

Yeah Right! APRIL FOOLS!!!

[burnsbert]

Mozilla is a hoax!!! It's all an elaborate April Fools joke!!! Post some REAL NEWS!!!

-Eric

Re:

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

And there's always the party tonight

["Zow"]

This article seems like a good time to remind people that the Mozilla party [slashdot.org] that was reported on about a month ago is tonight. Wish I could go but I have to catch a plane in the wee hours tomorrow morn. Oh well, there's always next year.

Finally! Real NEWS!

[Signal 11]

Wow! At long last... real news!

No april fools!


Hoorrraaayyy!!!





--

THE GREAT "GAS OUT"

[gdiehl]

it's not the price of the gas itself, it's the $.64 or more taxes on it!!!

If that's the 1st birthday, where is the child???

[Fizgig]

I think this shows something else about opensource development, that isn't talked about as much: you don't want to be embarrased by bad source. When they opened up the source, thy tried to build on that, till the developers said, "Forget that, we're starting over" (which is the reason it's taken so long and it's so much better). Opensource development does not like cruft, and that's why it's taken so long.

Oh, Come ON, Guys!

[joekool]

look again--the HTML rendering engine is only a small piece of the overall code

how big was Mosaic?---why would the HTML part need to be big?

Real news?

[FroBugg]

I didn't know we were allowed to have real news today.
--FroBugg

Momentum

[HoserHead]

Actually, what you said *was* partially true a little while ago. However, Netscape realised this and said "To hell with it" and started over with raptor, aka nglayout, which, incidentally, *is* a complete rewrite (or as close to it as to render all else pointless).

Lots of independent developers are contributing: if not coding, then by bugfixing. Adam Lock, for example, has created the ActiveX Mozilla control. [e-mail] (Sorry, not sure of his real name ;) has also helped a lot with the gtk conversion. And there are plenty of people submitting bugreports, be it with crashes or misrenderings or unsupported stuff; check out bugzilla [mozilla.org] to see proof.

A real reply

[PhoneMonkey]

Well, I guess I'll post a real reply to this column, this is something I've been following closely, and I am tangentally involved in the sister project Jazilla [jazilla.org].

Open source really made a breakthrough with Mozilla. For one point he makes is very true, and only parenthetically referred to: Gecko's engine is only 1.6 Meg. Wow! Forget bloatware, this engine is powerful. If you don't believe me, go to the site and download a nightly build.

It does things that even impress me, in an incredibly small, fast package.

But despite the obvious shuckstering, I'm getting to the point. We are seeing an upcoming big release that turns its back on the Microsoft worldview and say, "We don't need everything in this engine... Let's slim down and get some great features."

And yes, it's taken awhile to get out. But they're trying to make this as *gasp* bug free as possible.

Hooray for Mozilla, and may more developers emulate them.


"Responsibility for my career? I'm just a freakin' phone monkey!"