RSSRest in Pieces, Mozilla Browser Suite
By Nate Mook | Published March 11, 2005, 12:15 AM
The Mozilla Foundation is calling it a day and officially putting to rest the Mozilla Application Suite, known as Seamonkey. No further development will be done on old-man Mozilla, as focus shifts entirely to newcomers Firefox and Thunderbird. But the legacy browser will live on with a new name and independent community.
Although phasing out the Mozilla suite has been a longstanding plan for the Mozilla Foundation, it wasn't clear when it would actually occur. Version 1.7 was referred to on project roadmaps as the "final stable branch," but officials also stated, "We are not retiring the Seamonkey application suite, or its XPFE front end, in the foreseeable future."
Adding to the confusion, alpha and beta releases of Mozilla 1.8 suggested that development would continue. Thus, programmers kept coding and translators kept translating.
Concern peaked this week following a summary of a February 28 Mozilla Foundation staff meeting. Under the heading of "Mozilla 1.8 final" the notice read, "To be discussed tomorrow whether we do one."
On Thursday, a transition plan confirmed what many had speculated: "The 1.7.x line will be the last set of Seamonkey products released and maintained by the Mozilla Foundation."
Officials were quick to quell fears that work on Mozilla was simply lost time, reassuring developers that a community could take over the project. "The Mozilla Foundation will provide infrastructure for those interested in working on the 1.7.x releases, which we expect will include a number of vendors who provide these products to their customers."
The Mozilla Foundation recognized, however, that some contributors have devoted a significant amount of time to improving version 1.8 and apologized for the miscommunication. "There is no doubt that the series of 1.8 alpha and beta releases have caused some confusion about whether there would be a 1.8 product."
"This has been a error on our part. These contributors have reason to be unhappy with us. We can only apologize, at the same time recognizing that apologies only go so far and can't fix the error."
Mozilla developer Asa Dotzler chimed in on his Web log, admitting, "We've done a poor job at communicating our product roadmap. Our focus, too often, has been on technology roadmaps and project management, and not on product management."
"We're hard at work trying to remedy some of that," Dotzler said.
Does anyone remember that Netscape was shipped with Netscape Composer.
I miss that in Mozilla.
Amit
http://labnol.blogspot.com
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I wanted to mention that the Firefox Development Roadmap / Tree has been changed.
At one point, v1.1 (Deer Park) was intended to bring the Firefox Browser closer to the main tree from SeaMonkey.
Check out the up-to-date wiki:
http://wiki.mozilla.org/wiki/Firefox:Home_Page
And of course, Ben Goodger's blog:
http://weblogs.mozillazine.org/ben/
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It's open source. Any group can pick up where they left off. If the desire and drive is there it'll continue on. Lots of corps use Mozilla suite, and I'm fairly certain IBM will want to continue that trend and the trend of free software, expensive services, to keep their cash-cow moving right along.
No worries.
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I've read stuff that places Firefox's market share at 5-10%, but what about the Geko engine in all it's incarnations? It's the basis for several other browsers like Netscape Navigator(duh), KMellon(old fav), etc. Anyone know?
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See http://www.upsdell.com/BrowserNews/stat.htm
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Nuff' Said.
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Will there be a standalone Composer application, or equivalent? I know several internet-flakies who use that as their web site update tool.
Otherwise, this announcement is very anti-climatic for me. It was useful at one time, but seems fair to retire it.
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NVU is like a standalone composer. There are builds for every type of linux imaginable, windows, and mac. It's actually a lot nicer than composer, though, with FTP connectivity built in. IMHO NVU is a very good tool for making pages and getting them on the web.
www.nvu.com
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I still don't understand why Mozilla maintains Firefox and the Mozilla Browser.
What is the difference between the two ?
AMit
http://labnol.blogspot.com
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The reason they're dropping Seamonkey is that Firefox and Thunderbird (and the other seperate components) all add up to do what the original suite wanted, but do it better than Seamonkey did.
Mozilla originally announced this move almost 2 years ago, but didn't put a timescale on it. Yes, the communication on this has been bad, and some of the version numbers can continue to be confusiing (see below) but overall, the move to the seperate products is a good thing.
[Version numbers are confusing because TB and FX use a Mozilla (suite) version number in their version string ((it's actually the Gecko version used, but some people don't realise that)) - here's an example from FX 1.0 - Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.0; en-US; rv:1.7.5)
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First, Mozilla is a suite, whereas Firefox is a browser only. Some people prefer the suite, e.g. because its components are integrated, and because it easier to update one product than two or three or four.
Second, Mozilla has user features that Firefox lacks: the Firefox developers went for ease of use, but in doing so they dropped features used by so-called power users.
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*The reason they're dropping Seamonkey is that Firefox and Thunderbird (and the other seperate components) all add up to do what the original suite wanted, but do it better than Seamonkey did.*
This isn't really true, in any sense. Seamonkey is far more polished and does a lot more than Firefox/Thunderbird/N|Vu/Sunbird can do even in combination.
It's heavy - as in takes up disk space, but really, the interface is tons better, and it has many features used in the enterpise and on the computers of geeks that the separate apps will likely never have - all in the name of being light and simple.
Firefox is a light featured, cool but unpolished IE replacement.
Seamonkey is one of the most full featured, polished web browsers available, which has a different target audience than Firefox.
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"Seamonkey is far more polished and does a lot more than Firefox/Thunderbird/N|Vu/Sunbird can do even in combination." ... "It's heavy - as in takes up disk space, but really, the interface is tons better, and it has many features used in the enterpise and on the computers of geeks that the separate apps will likely never have".
Umm, I think you've got it backwards, especially with that whole interface thing. Firefox is the one that has a nice interface; the suite is inconsistent and cluttered. (But you're more familiar with it, so that's why you like it. It's OK. I was a long-time suite user, too.) But as far as drawing in new users, everybody hated the suite like everybody hated Netscape. Firefox was really the first majorly successful product, and there's a reason.
Seamonkey's interface--in fact, the whole product--was kind of arbitrarily decided by whoever was the last to check in or what the owner of some component wanted. That, and you had to REALLY like the default theme, otherwise it was quite ugly--and different from what you'd expect (because it's not native-looking).
Yes, some of the managers and things are missing. I guess I never used them. But Firefox also does actually have more features in other ways. How do I customize my toolbar in Seamonkey? Preferences let you add and remove a few buttons, but you can do almost *anything* in Firefox. I've combined my personal toolbar folder and the menu bar to save space.
Yes, there are a few power-features left out, but that's why they developed the extension mechanism.
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I disagree
Seamonkey is far more polished.
Firefox/Thunderbird are more customizable, but far less capable - even with extensions, many of the features of Seamonkey aren't available.
Seamonkey is primarily a testbed application, so it has everything + the kitchen sink... it might be overkill, but for people who want that, Firefox/Thunderbird just don't cut it.
The Suite has millions of users... they're not arbitrary, and neither is the effort that's gone into building it into a polished, stable, highly useable product, despite the kitchen sink.
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The bottom line on this is that some like the suite, and some like the standalone products: there is a demand for both, and if mozilla.org had enough resources, it should IMO offer both ... though perhaps the UI's could be more similar to make it easier for people to migrate one way or the other.
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As much as I love Firefox (which may have been obvious in the past) this little gaffe costs the Mozilla Foundation a great deal of credibility with both those who put huge amounts of energy helping them develop the suite, and those who have standardized on the suite.
Hopefully, as they seem to have done in the past - they'll learn from their mistakes, and find a way to bridge the gaps created by this mess...
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But is a suite that is used by less than 2% of Internet users worth the time and effort that could be direct toward a browser that has three times the market share and by all accounts should be approaching 10% market share by years end? I think this was a smart idea. Focusing on Firefox is crucial now with IE 7 beta on the doorstep. Think about it.
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Agreed- they have a limited amount of development manhours and they should put them towards their most viable product. The growing popularity of firefox is a rare opportunity to gain some ground and focusing is absolutely the right decision. I think most agree it would have been better if they told developers before that there will be no 1.8 release- but the writing was on the wall that official development was coming to an end.
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These clowns literally rode on the back of the support given them by the roughly 40 million Mozilla Suite users world wide, all the time harboring a plan to stick it to their initial client base in favor of the new, crappy browser firefox.
Let's be absolutely clear...there was NEVER any announced plan to stop production of the Suite. It was never ever presented that way...else the
howls of outrage would have been heard long ago...possibly spoiling their little firefox party.
And make no mistake...any future firefox users need to be aware. If this cabal can toss aside Mozilla suite, actively promoted for years to enterprise users, they can, and likely will do the same to firefox,
when the next flavor of the month comes along, which is really all firefox is.
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So you ignore 2% of internet users? that's what, 10-20 million people?
Some Firefox users would inevitably migrate to the full suite after discovering it's the better product...
The suite is supported in enterprises, which provide much of the funding and programming team to Mozilla...
AND... they don't have to do much to keep suite development moving forward - they just have to keep the browser engine up to date, which they're already doing. It uses the same engine - they just have different interfaces...
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It WAS announced almost 2 years ago. I'm just surprised it took so long. I guess they were just waiting on Firefox 1.0 but the plan to move away from Mozilla to Firefox was announced back when Firefox was called Phoenix.
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No, the demise of the Suite was never announced.
Despite how some may try and spin it now, for reasons
only they would know, it was always presented
that the suite would continue, just that it would
no longer be the primary. No one envisioned that
the suite, and by extention, it's users, would be
tossed aside. Especially since firefox is such an
inferior product.
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Quite right. One has to wonder if fraud is involved.
Obtaining money under false pretenses is a felony.
Companies using the suite, and donating money to the
foundation were clearly believing that they were
donating toward the suite. That is fraud, pure and simple.
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Yes, it was. Look through the site.. as early as 2003 they were talking about moving away from the suite as a foundation project.
People calling this betrayal are in my opinion way off the mark.
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40 million? Where are you getting these numbers from?
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They never said they were abandoning the suite, just that it was being relegated to the secondary product.
They did say they thought 1.7 would be the last stable branch, but then they started releasing alpha and beta version of 1.8, which led both the developer and user communities to believe there would be a 1.8 product... there has already been a huge investment in building it, and they just cancelled it.
It's a massive slap in the face to those who made time and financial investments in that development.
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The roadmap was modified so that 1.7 would be the last but the original roadmap had 1.4 as the last. If anything they dragged on for way too long. It was originally understood to mean that development of Mozilla would cease. When it dragged on longer than expected, people started to think that maybe Mozilla would stick around. It was poorly conveyed but this was their original plan.
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They conveyed that it was their plan, but they acted as if they were going to provide a 1.8, right up until a few days ago.
After many months of development effort going to that 1.8 release, it turns out it's "wasted time", along with a big slap upsaide the head.
Of course, if the project is adopted by the OSS community and continued, the work will live on (and this is highly likely)... but it was an insult not to release 1.8 when so many people put so much work into it.
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If they had released 1.8, in the future fewer people would have interest in the community builds. This way, where officially they only have 1.7.x, more people will want to try Seamonkey 1.8 and 1.9, etc.
So if you want the suite to go on in some form, this will likely benefit you.
Or lets say you or a company is not satisfied by community builds. If they had released 1.8 and said they would only support that and not 1.7.x, you/the company would be basically forced to upgrade to a potentially less stable version. That wouldn't have made people happy either.
Supporting both would have been a use of resources that could be applied toward the future instead of the past. And releasing 1.8 but not supporting it is not a logical option.
This was the best decision, but it would have been far better if they had never called anything 1.8, or had said clearly long ago that "1.8 will never be released".
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Depends on the wording of the contract when the donation was made. It could be, but I suspect that their lawyers were way ahead of that game.
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