A Mozilla year-end report

[Posted November 19, 2008 by corbet]

Mitchell Baker reports on the state of Mozilla. Income continues to rise, and continues to come mostly from Google. Beyond that: "Our community remains healthy and vibrant. The percentage of code contributed to Firefox by people not employed by Mozilla remained steady at about 40% of the product we ship. This is true despite a significant amount of new employees in 2007."

A Mozilla year-end report

Posted Nov 20, 2008 16:08 UTC (Thu) by jengelh (guest, #33263) [Link] (7 responses)

>Our community remains healthy and vibrant.

Only due to lack of viable alternatives.

A Mozilla year-end report

Posted Nov 20, 2008 19:17 UTC (Thu) by flewellyn (subscriber, #5047) [Link]

That's a bit harsh, don't you think? Mozilla may not be a perfect project (show me one that is!), and Firefox may not be a perfect browser, but there's hardly any coercion involved. Plus, Firefox really does offer a good browsing experience.

Granted, there are ways in which the browser could definitely use improvement (process separation a la Google Chrome, for one), but every non-trivial piece of software could use improvement. So, whence your criticism?

A Mozilla year-end report

Posted Nov 20, 2008 22:53 UTC (Thu) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link] (3 responses)

On Windows you are probably right (although, Safari, perhaps?)

On Linux, Konqi is definitely viable (I'm using it right now without any
trouble at all).

A Mozilla year-end report

Posted Nov 20, 2008 22:57 UTC (Thu) by jengelh (guest, #33263) [Link] (2 responses)

Does it support firefox add-ons? I kinda don't want to miss out on Adblockplus and Firebug, which is what, er, keeps me in FF's realm.

A Mozilla year-end report

Posted Nov 20, 2008 23:28 UTC (Thu) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link] (1 responses)

No, no firefox add-ons: it's not XUL-based, so FF add-ons are kind of a
non-starter (unless someone writes a XUL implementation for Konqueror, a
*large* project).

I can easily live without them. If you can't, you are indeed stuck.

A Mozilla year-end report

Posted Nov 22, 2008 1:21 UTC (Sat) by alecs1 (guest, #46699) [Link]

You made me curious, I try from time to time Konqueror and it's nice, but I find it lacking features and go back to Opera all the time.
Good example: it is the only browser where Flash is almost guaranteed not to crash.
Bad examples: it draws the page late if there are big images to load, I have found no flashblock functionality so it will download all the flash.

Any Konqueror tips and trick wiki around?

A Mozilla year-end report

Posted Nov 22, 2008 13:45 UTC (Sat) by sbergman27 (guest, #10767) [Link]

The winds of change are coming. I expect to see, for the first time, real competition in the FOSS browser market within about a year's time, as browsers like Epiphany complete their switch to WebKit, and Google Chrome becomes more popular on Windows, and becomes available for Linux.

A Mozilla year-end report

Posted Nov 29, 2008 15:44 UTC (Sat) by gerv (guest, #3376) [Link]

By community she means "development community". Are you suggesting that all these people are volunteering their time to work on Firefox, Thunderbird etc. "due to lack of viable alternatives"? If they hated the product, then surely the "lack of viable alternatives" would just be a second reason to leave the community and go and work on something else.

Then again, "Who can refute a sneer?" -- William Paley.

Gerv