GNOME and Mozilla Foundations announce cooperation [LWN.net]

From:		Vincent Untz <vuntz-AT-gnome.org>
To:		foundation-announce-AT-gnome.org, foundation-list-AT-gnome.org
Subject:		GNOME Foundation and Mozilla Foundation join forces
Date:		Tue, 4 Mar 2008 22:13:38 +0100
Message-ID:		<20080304211338.GF14407__7910.63328874788$1204666309$gmane$org@vuntz.net>
Archive-link:		Article, Thread

GNOME Foundation and Mozilla Foundation join forces
===================================================

The GNOME Foundation and the Mozilla Foundation announced today that
they will increase their collaboration to improve developer support and
user experience of desktop applications on GNU/Linux and other free
software systems.

The partnership has three aspects:

  * The Mozilla Foundation will join the GNOME Foundation advisory
    board, helping set the long-term direction of the project.
  * Mozilla reaffirms its commitment to integrating with the GNOME
    platform for the XUL development platform, and for Mozilla Firefox.
  * The Mozilla Foundation announces a grant of $10,000 to the GNOME
    Foundation, to be spent on the improvement of the accessibility of
    the GNOME desktop environment via the "GNOME Outreach Program:
    Accessibility" program.

"GNOME and GTK+ have been our environment of choice for years. As we
move from desktops into the mobile market, we will continue to work with
GNOME to ensure that Mozilla and Firefox users on GNOME platforms will
have the best experience possible", according to Mozilla evangelist
Chris Blizzard.

"Mozilla and GNOME people have been collaborating for nearly a decade.
Together we've been able to make contributions to the foundation of each
other's platform - from GTK+ to Cairo to browser desktop integration",
says GNOME Foundation Director Vincent Untz. "But the real story is
about two organizations sharing many common values including our shared
commitment to innovation and bringing freedom to our user base."

Both projects actively support open standards and formats. Mozilla
contributes to the W3C HTML5 working group and WHATWG working group, in
order to ensure an open web platform for all future Internet users.
GNOME is a member of the ODF Alliance and works with other desktop
projects under the freedesktop.org umbrella to offer the best user
experience to desktop users. These involvements aim to create space for
innovation and to give freedom to the user.

Read the full announcement at:
http://www.gnome.org/press/releases/2008-03-mofojoins.html

-- 
Les gens heureux ne sont pas pressés.

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GNOME and Mozilla Foundations announce cooperation

Posted Mar 5, 2008 20:57 UTC (Wed) by oak (subscriber, #2786) [Link]

Well, there's also the thing of WebKit being part of new Qt, in Android, 
Symbian, iPhone and OSX...  Besides Firefox, Gecko is used in settop 
boxes, in N800/N810 etc, but I guess Epiphany starting to include WebKit 
was indeed a wakeup call for Mozilla.

GNOME and Mozilla Foundations announce cooperation

Posted Mar 6, 2008 5:45 UTC (Thu) by jordanb (subscriber, #45668) [Link]

> but I guess Epiphany starting to include WebKit 
> was indeed a wakeup call for Mozilla.

And so did they choose:

A) Try to make their software start sucking less or

B) Pay GNOME to keep using their crap

Now what company does that tactic remind you of?

GNOME and Mozilla Foundations announce cooperation

Posted Mar 6, 2008 10:45 UTC (Thu) by njs (subscriber, #40338) [Link]

From their ongoing development efforts (cf. the firefox 3 betas) and the contents of the press
release, the answer seems to be (A).

HTH, HAND.

Actually they did both A) and B)

Posted Mar 6, 2008 10:48 UTC (Thu) by khim (subscriber, #9252) [Link]

I was almost ready to drop Firefox in favor of something WebKit-based but then I've tried Firefox 3 beta 3... and now I'm not so sure. The fact remains: WebKit is still better then Firefox if you don't need XUL but Firefox3 does have XUL and is much better then Firefox 2.

Of course Firefox3 is not yet ready so choice B) look reasonable. If we'll see that Mozilla Foundation will stop doing A) - that's when we should be worried...

Actually they did both A) and B)

Posted Mar 6, 2008 18:00 UTC (Thu) by superstoned (subscriber, #33164) [Link]

I don't really see the advantage of XUL. I mean, firefox3 has a great 
interface, but you could build such an interface based on WebKit as well. 
And as renderingengine, WK is the better one...

GNOME and Mozilla Foundations announce cooperation

Posted Mar 6, 2008 10:52 UTC (Thu) by Los__D (subscriber, #15263) [Link]

What's wrong with

C) All of the above?

(Except B is utterly wrong about Firefox being "crap")

GNOME and Mozilla Foundations announce cooperation

Posted Mar 13, 2008 9:31 UTC (Thu) by renox (guest, #23785) [Link]

>C) All of the above?
>(Except B is utterly wrong about Firefox being "crap")

Well given that:
- a plugin crash can crash FF.
- a freeze in one tab can freeze the whole browser (poor threading because 0.01% of websites
have a child window which communicate with the parent window with Javascript, so *of course*
everything must be in the same thread)

I disagree about your vision of FF.