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Mozilla is dead; long live SeaMonkey
Back in April, 2003, the Mozilla Project stirred
things up by announcing a set of changes to its development model and
roadmap. Rather than continue to develop one huge suite which did
everything, the project would shift its efforts to the creation of smaller,
standalone applications. In particular, future development would go into
the browser then known as Phoenix, and the mail client called, at that
time, Minotaur. The full Mozilla suite was expected to fade away.
Over time, as the project continued to make new Mozilla releases, it seemed that the suite might stay around for some time after all. The project made several Mozilla 1.8 alpha releases, and one beta, leading some users to believe, reasonably, that there might just be a Mozilla 1.8 final release afterward. So the February 28 staff meeting summary surprised a number of people with this brief item:
*Mozilla 1.8 final*
- To be discussed tomorrow whether we do one The ensuing discussion was long and noisy. The suite still has a large and dedicated user base, even if it has been somewhat overshadowed by Firefox and Thunderbird. Some developers had been working on Mozilla 1.8 and now wonder why. It seems that, over the last couple of years, the big-picture plan had faded from view, and the Mozilla Foundation didn't go out of its way to remind people of where it was going. That ended on March 10, when the Foundation posted its transition plan for the Mozilla suite. According to that plan, the "alpha" and "beta" 1.8 releases were intended simply to test out the Mozilla backend code. There will be no final, stable, supported Mozilla 1.8 release. The Foundation does seem to recognize that not everybody will have expected this decision:
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 released by the Mozilla Foundation. In addition, a set of
people have done a non-trivial amount of work on 1.8 features,
thinking this would be part of an official Mozilla Foundation
release. This has been a major error on our part.
The confusion was also clearly to be found within the project itself, as can be seen by the fact that the question of whether a 1.8 release would happen or not was left as an open item for discussion at the February 28 staff meeting. In any case, the decision has now been made. And that decision is consistent with the project's stated long-term goals, even if people did have reason to believe that things would happen differently. The interesting question now is: what happens next? What's next, it seems, is that the Mozilla suite gets a new name (almost certainly "SeaMonkey," its longstanding name within the Mozilla Project) and is developed and maintained by a group of volunteers. That group is already organizing itself, and has posted a plan of sorts on the SeaMonkey home page. The first priority will be to get a real 1.8 release out, but the developers are already looking beyond that milestone. A commonly-mentioned longer-term goal is moving over to XULRunner; porting back some of the better Firefox and Thunderbird features is also on the list. The Mozilla Foundation claims to support this course of action. So SeaMonkey will be able to use the Mozilla support infrastructure - CVS, BugZilla, etc. It also appears that it will be able to use the SeaMonkey name, though it appears that there may be a significant debate within the new project about naming before this is all over. The Mozilla Foundation's primary concern, it seems, is that the SeaMonkey releases cannot appear to be an official Mozilla product. The Mozilla Foundation's motives in making this decision are easy to understand. The Foundation's resources are limited, so it wants to concentrate those resources on the standalone applications which are at the core of its stated plans - and which, it must be said, have been rather more successful (in terms of user adoption) than the full-blown Mozilla suite ever was. That suite is free software, however, so it can survive abandonment by its creator as long as there are developers with the time and interest to maintain it. The fact that the Foundation is providing the support infrastructure (and, of course, Gecko engine and the rest of the support code used by the Mozilla suite) is an added bonus. There is every reason to expect that both projects will thrive; in a year or two, this decision may be seen as a good thing by all parties involved. (Log in to post comments)
Mozilla is dead; long live SeaMonkey Posted Mar 17, 2005 2:57 UTC (Thu) by horen (subscriber, #2514) [Link] Since the late 1980s, when Microsoft Windows was first introduced, there have been two paradigms for user applications:
In a Unix-y world of Free Open-Source Software, where Elm/Pine/Mutt are still standards for email MUAs, and the same for USENET readers, Mosaic begat Netscape, which begat Mozilla, and it was good. But Firefox and Thunderbird are more in-keeping with the Unix-y way of doing things and, IMHO, are both stable and sufficiently robust to allow us -- as developers and users -- to get back on-track. I moved from Mozilla to Phoenix/Minotaur from the start, with their shortcomings and bugs, and I've never looked back. Today, if/when either Firefox or Thunderbird crash/lock-up (and that sometimes happens), the one doesn't take the other down with it. (Sea)Monkeys would have to fly out of my "you-know-where", before I'd go back to Mozilla.
Mozilla is dead; long live SeaMonkey Posted Mar 17, 2005 5:37 UTC (Thu) by set (guest, #4788) [Link] Just a small note that the mozilla 'suite' can be built without all thecomponents. eg. I run Gentoo, and my mozilla is *just* a browser. I use mutt for my mua. Ive tweaked mozilla exactly how I want it; Firefox is nice, but I havent been able to eliminate all the things that annoy me with it, but Ive altered in mozilla, so I look forward to mozilla in its new form;) I agree though, that the mega-app that does too much is distasteful.
Mozilla is dead; long live SeaMonkey Posted Mar 17, 2005 5:49 UTC (Thu) by TwoTimeGrime (guest, #11688) [Link] That's all fine and dandy save for the fact that the interface to Seamonkey's browser and Firefox are different. I use the suite, although I only have the browser installed. I prefer the browser in the suite over Firefox.
> But Firefox and Thunderbird are more in-keeping with the Unix-y way of
The unix-y way of doing things has more to do with being able to chain together small programs that act as filters than it does to large GUI-based applications. I have yet to see a GUI-based application that I can use as a filter in a data pipeline like I can with a tool such as sed.
> IMHO, are both stable and sufficiently robust to allow us -- as developers
As a user I don't think anything was ever off track. There are millions of people in the world who use web browsers. Expecting them to all like a single type of interface is short-sighted. The track I prefer to stay on is Seamonkey's track. There's plenty of other alternate interfaces to the gecko engine such as Epiphany and Galeon that both have their strengths and weaknesses and people who prefer them. They're not off-track either.
Mozilla is dead; long live SeaMonkey Posted Mar 17, 2005 7:29 UTC (Thu) by khim (subscriber, #9252) [Link] The unix-y way of doing things has more to do with being able to chain together small programs that act as filters than it does to large GUI-based applications. Back in 1970th ? Yes, for sure. 15-20 years later ? Not at all: programs are still not overbloated but you actually need connectors, pipes are thing of the past. You can not pipe Maya to anything, but you can connect it with other software via plugins - just like Firefox. I have yet to see a GUI-based application that I can use as a filter in a data pipeline like I can with a tool such as sed. And this means exactly what ? Total unsuitability of old pipelite paradigm for GUI world ! Nothing else. It does not mean we should try to make GUI programs usable with pipelines - we must develop some other ways to plug GUI programs together. Plugins are not very good, but it's better then nothing and certainly more unix-y then monolite behemoths like OOo.
Mozilla is dead; long live SeaMonkey Posted Mar 17, 2005 14:43 UTC (Thu) by coolian (guest, #14818) [Link] What's a 1970th?1/1970th of something? Firefox is 1/1970th as large as Mozilla?
Mozilla is dead; long live SeaMonkey Posted Mar 17, 2005 17:37 UTC (Thu) by bronson (subscriber, #4806) [Link] khim meant 1970s, as in "Back in the 1970s."
Mozilla is dead; long live SeaMonkey Posted Mar 17, 2005 15:58 UTC (Thu) by rgoates (subscriber, #3280) [Link] A trivial correction here ...
The sought after "killer app" of olden days was a program that would be a "must have" for a large number of software buyers and would also stimulate the sale of PCs. The canonical "killer app" was the first spreadsheet program. Sad, but I can't remember its name.
Mozilla is dead; long live SeaMonkey Posted Mar 17, 2005 16:47 UTC (Thu) by knobunc (subscriber, #4678) [Link] VisiCalc?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Visicalc
-ben
Mozilla is dead; long live SeaMonkey Posted Mar 18, 2005 1:44 UTC (Fri) by paulusbd (subscriber, #6253) [Link] Forgive my ignorance of under-the-hood operations, but there are some subtle differences between the two Browsers from a UI and controllability standpoint.
I've been using FireFox since .8, but I've kept Mozilla around too, for many reasons. Mozilla still has a few controls that make it nice, such as setting the web-cache directory and setting the "When do I check for a stale cache" options that are missing from FireFox. I do understand that FireFox is still in development, but Mozilla has a bit more polish. I think that polished feel and comfort is what keeps people using it.
When FireFox matures some more, and development starts focusing on more subtle nuances vice cool new features, it will get up to speed.
I hope Mozilla, or whatever they choose to call it in its new form, sticks around.
Mozilla is dead; long live SeaMonkey Posted Mar 17, 2005 12:11 UTC (Thu) by KaiRo (subscriber, #1987) [Link] Thanks, as always, a good, insightful view of what's going on.
Actually, as a member of the project management team of this newly founded project, I can't add much more to this :)
Just one thing: Of course some people might have reservations about this application (being too little unix-ish or whatever), but they don't need to use it. The great thing about Open Source is that the user has the choice.
Robert Kaiser, SeaMonkey project
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