Root of the problem is Mozilla.org is Windows centric

Posted Jun 7, 2006 22:25 UTC (Wed) by h2 (guest, #27965)
In reply to: Root of the problem is Mozilla.org is Windows centric by jmorris42
Parent article: The problem of Firefox in Ubuntu Breezy

While not disagreeing with your points, it's also important to keep in mind that firefox basically singlehandedly kept the internet free. MS was VERY close to forcing us into an active x powered web, with MS created standards, vbscript, you name it. We went from there to the new msn search site being done in xhtml 1.0 strict, quite a leap in my opinion.

So I have to cut mozilla some slack in these areas.

The enterprise points are true, but will evolve over time I think, realistically, linux on the desktop is still at a very early phase in most parts of the world, despite many well publicized victories.

I know at least one major issue with 1.5 on linux came because the main developer worked on gnome, not kde. And it shows. Hopefully the portland stuff will standardize the external features like file dialogues etc to the desktop that is running it.

I also know that firefox and thunderbird made my switch from windows to linux much easier, since my most commonly used apps were there, with the same extensions and bookmarks etc, it wasn't nearly as big a jump as it would have been.

So it's improving.

Given the current cash flow of mozilla firefox, it might not be a bad idea to start putting some of those resources towards things like paying people do to really boring work like patching old versions. That's just not something most volunteers have any interest in doing.

Re the enterprise, also keep in mind, msie, while very well supported version to version over time, made massive jumps, from 3 to 4 to 5 to 5.5 to 6, in about 5 years. Each was a huge change, especially 4 and 6. It was only because MS believed that they had locked in the market that they stopped active development until competition from firefox forced them to reluctantly restart the ie team for ie 7. Which will also break a lot of compatibilities.

Given the speed of change of the web, and the fact that security vulnerabilities can and will be found, it might be that the stable distros and mozilla might need to bend a little bit towards each other.