Now that Firefox has begun to gain significant market share, web site developers will be motivated, if not forced, to design sites that function and appear consistently in multiple browsers. Hopefully this will be done by coding to W3 standards, and not simply by resorting to browser sniffing to accomodate the new contender. Not being a web developer, and thus not particularly familiar with tools like Frontpage and Dreamweaver, I wonder if developers are beginning to ask how best to do this. Go back to creating pages with a text editor? Edit out the IE-specific code from pages produced by current tools?

Now seems like an opportune time to renew development efforts on the stand-alone Composer application and be able to offer a tool that will lower the barriers to entry (to coding to standards) for web developers, as Firefox lowered the barriers to entry for end users. Has there been any discussion at the Mozilla Foundation about this recently? Any thoughts on this, Asa?

Charles,

Efforts on the standalone composer application are continuing with the Nvu project.

Nvu has a lot in common with Dreamweaver (in that it produces good code that generally validates. Unlike Frontpage, which generates pretty ugly code that generally doesn't validate)

It's amazing how oblivious/generic Microsoft's answers seem sometime. This is one of those times. :)

Charles: Standalone Composer is called "Nvu" and is available from http://www.nvu.com/ - it's not an official Mozilla.org product, it's officially a Linspire one, but it's written by Daniel Glazman, author of the original Mozilla Composer. Nvu 0.70 is currently based on the same codebase as Firefox and Thunderbird 1.0 codebase.

Just to stick up for Dreamweaver - it does a good job of creating valid code based on the W3C's Web Standards IF you select "Use XHTML" when creating a new document. This option is not on by default.

My hope is that Macromedia decides it will be wise to enable the XHTML option by default in their next release of DW, thus herding the masses towards the golden light that is Web Standards.

I didn't get it, how come Firefox is safer if it is impossible to be sure people are installing securely signed exes? Without a digitally signed exe, firefox is as safe a virus itself. Denying this fact will only make it worse.

"We are providing choice"

That may be the most significant fact in itself. How many IE users actually chose it? How many new they even had a choice? Every new Firefox user is someone that's going to be tough customer in future.

"We are providing choice and innovation for customers" = True
"and providing products that are better" = True
"faster," = False
"and safer" = Unknown (it's just less of a target)
"We have a powerful and capable community" = True (among developers... it's piss weak amongst users)
"and an open development model that's just better." = False

"We will continue to provide choice and innovation, a better, faster, and safer browsing experience, and we will grow our community and continue to lead open source software into the mainstream."

...here's to that! Cheers.

Jing Yu:
Most EXE files on the Internet aren't signed anyway. Signed executables just say that you can be sure that someone wrote whatever you're downloading. While this is certainly better than not knowing at all who wrote a file, it's doesn't mean much -- virus writers can sign their executables too. I'm sure the Firefox executables will be signed in such a way that IE will recognize them as such sometime soon. (I'm pretty sure the current executables actually *are* signed, regardless what you've heard, but IE doesn't recognize the current format of the signature.)

IMO, real web developers don't use WYSIWYG editors like Frontpage and Dreamweaver. :-P Get yourself a real text editor!

unfortunately, mozilla is becoming a consumer driven, market driven business organization with a complete grip-loss on technological innovation and spirit. i will have to still continue to use mozilla suite 1.7.5, because its predecessors have security vulnerabilities. microsoft "takes care" of its customers by "going to them". mozilla dot org is vacillating.

Here is the only appropriate response to Bill:

http://www.grafhp.ch/bilder/Illustration/Redaktions_Jobs/Feuerfuchs.htm