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Mozilla: Final Wars
Mar. 12th, 2005 11:05 pmThere are more passionate fans of the old Mozilla suite than I thought.
Some people have, I think, legitimate complaints about the Mozilla Foundation dropping the suite as an official product. It seems to have gradually gained popularity in institutional environments as a supported non-MSIE product that you can install with a single installer; "Mozilla" has effectively become a trusted brand name like "Netscape" once was. Handing it over to a new group and renaming it "Seamonkey Suite" or some such would cause lots of FUD to fly about and pain for the people who spent years evangelizing a move away from IE/Outlook to Mozilla. They could stay with the 1.7.x bug releases that the Foundation says it's continuing to support, but it's likely that this will one day go the way of all end-of-life products and become incompatible with the real world. This is a genuine problem, and given that the Foundation doesn't feel it has the resources to support further major suite releases, I'm not sure what the solution is.
But the people who actually find the old browser's user interface superior to Firefox's boggle me. I guess that whatever you're used to is superior. Also, its profusion of obscure controls appeals to people who like lots of controls. Most of the complaints seem to be along the line of "Firefox/Thunderbird is unusable crap because it doesn't have feature <foo>", usually some keystroke combo or specific UI interaction.
Which I can sympathize with, because a lot of what keeps me in Safari much of the time is that it has this or that extremely specific feature I'm used to (e.g. close widgets in backgrounded tabs). Flash-triggered popup ads may be enough to drive me over anyway...
Some people have, I think, legitimate complaints about the Mozilla Foundation dropping the suite as an official product. It seems to have gradually gained popularity in institutional environments as a supported non-MSIE product that you can install with a single installer; "Mozilla" has effectively become a trusted brand name like "Netscape" once was. Handing it over to a new group and renaming it "Seamonkey Suite" or some such would cause lots of FUD to fly about and pain for the people who spent years evangelizing a move away from IE/Outlook to Mozilla. They could stay with the 1.7.x bug releases that the Foundation says it's continuing to support, but it's likely that this will one day go the way of all end-of-life products and become incompatible with the real world. This is a genuine problem, and given that the Foundation doesn't feel it has the resources to support further major suite releases, I'm not sure what the solution is.
But the people who actually find the old browser's user interface superior to Firefox's boggle me. I guess that whatever you're used to is superior. Also, its profusion of obscure controls appeals to people who like lots of controls. Most of the complaints seem to be along the line of "Firefox/Thunderbird is unusable crap because it doesn't have feature <foo>", usually some keystroke combo or specific UI interaction.
Which I can sympathize with, because a lot of what keeps me in Safari much of the time is that it has this or that extremely specific feature I'm used to (e.g. close widgets in backgrounded tabs). Flash-triggered popup ads may be enough to drive me over anyway...