Off-topic question, how come your blog isn't on planet.mozilla.org?

Jonas, posting off-topic commentary on blog replies is really annoying. Nevertheless, the answer is that Asa asked for it to be removed because of the large amount of non-Mozilla content on his blog.

Asa, as for the Seamonkey version number thing, I think you're going to be stuck either way. Call it Seamonkey 1.9 and people think it's an upgrade to the Suite. Call it Seamonkey 1.0 based on Gecko 1.9 and it looks like a direct competitor to Firefox 1.0 based on Gecko 1.9...

- Chris

I translated Mozilla Suite to the Czech language. I prepared translation Mozilla Help for Mozilla Suite 1.8 and some innovations. Now MoFo said that "no Mozilla Suite 1.8". One question: why didn't you say this in time??? This verdict demaged my hard work. Maybe i go to work on another project where they will respect my work.

Chris,

The second part of your statement is true. "Seamonkey 1.x based on Gecko 1.9" would indeed be a direct competitior to "Firefox 1.x based on Gecko 1.9".. isnt that the whole point of forking off? (except that it is more than just the browser).

What I have yet to see clarified in all this is the future of the product that embedding applications are expected to use. GRE, MRE, libxul... Whatever it's being called these days, when will it be a product? I'm not asking for a specific date, or even a vague one. I'd just like some idea of where this is on the overall roadmap.

This is important in the context of the "demise" of the suite. Because for many practical purposes, the suite currently is the deliverable used by embedding applications (e.g., Epiphany).

Pavel, your work is not wasted. The press release states that there will be no more official releases, but Mozilla will be released under a different name by a community effort. I suggest you wait to see how things pan out!

I am a university system administrator and have nearly 300 Mozilla Suite 1.7.x users. At first, I was really disappointed at the decision to stop official development on the suite. After all, there are a couple significant reasons why we depend on the suite rather than Firefox and Thunderbird:
1) It is a single product to install/update. Since the Mozilla products require uninstallation/reinstallation to update and sometimes have quirks with using old profiles, having to do this for two separate applications doubles the amount of work.
2) The breadth and flexibility of the Seamonkey preferences is second-to-none. This is important since software is easier to use when it can be configured to work with you rather than being forced to accept the standard behavior or use a different product.

However, I thought about it more and realized that if the future is with Firefox and Thunderbird, then perhaps the best move would be to create a new pseudo-suite to combine Firefox and Thunderbird. This could (naively) be as simple as having a different installer which allows Firefox and Thunderbird to be installed as easily as choosing the Mozilla suite with or without Mail and Newsgroups. This semi-solution would hopefully be much simpler than maintaining a separate, orphaned Seamonkey suite (with an unprofessional name which end-users wouldn't understand).

Of course, that would still leave the huge issue of preferences. I'll admit I haven't tried the individual apps recently, but in the 0.8-0.9 era, the preferences were unbelievably few in number and flexibility. While the idea of extensions is nice, I'm not aware of a method to reduce the effort needed to install and configure numerous ones on every PC in a medium-sized organization.

Bad news. I like the Mozilla Suite, there are a lot of got options, wich are missing in Firefox.

E.g. FAYT for links only, STRG +Enter to open new tab and of course Mozilla's sidebar.
The Mozilla installer is much better than Firefox installer, try to install Firefox in a custom folder, then you know what I mean.

Also I don't agree with some decisions from the main devs, take a look at Bugzilla, many Firefox bugs are marked as wontfix, very often without any comment.

Guest: FAYT works in Firefox just fine in linksonly mode, you just need to adjust a pref in about:config.

Braden, it's definitely high on the priority list. Darin and others are hard at work on this. I think an interim solution would probably be to make a non-static Firefox build and use the available components from that (though I readily admit that I don't know much about embedding.) I suspect there are several choices for these apps, use the stable 1.7 Gecko components from the stable 1.7.x Seamonkey releases, use the Gecko ≥1.8 from the community-supported Seamonkey application, use a custom build with a not statically linked Gecko from the latest Firefox release, or wait on us to get our XUL Runner / libXUL story in order (hopefully soon, sooner with more help).

Then again, I'm clueless about most serious technical issues so I could be totally wrong here.

--Asa

Braden, I share the same concern. With this news I'm curious of the future of the gecko sdk. It definitely would be nice to know where it falls on the roadmap (if at all).

I am not a Suite user and never have been, but how it continues is important.

There are already a lot of people confused about the differences and reasons for Firefox, Phoneix, Mozilla Suite, and Netscape. Adding more to that list can't be good. By going with a new name how are Suite users going to know what is going on? The current 1.7 suite is going to be maintained, yet real development is going to continue with something under a totally different name.

I don't really think the name Seamonkey is that good for the product name. It is well known among people who regularly follow Mozilla happenings, but outside that the name means nothing. Many of the users of the suite seem to be businesses. Seamonkey just doesn't seem like a name of a program a corporation is going to take seriously. Maybe calling it Mozilla Suite Classic would work. That would leave room for a FF and TB based suite, though it seems its going to have to drop the Mozilla name since its no longer official. The new suite is not likely going to have a large support Seamonkey campaign. Firefox has begun to overcome its brand identity problem but its unlikely to happen with Seamonkey. And that would only cause more confusion too.

The versioning of Gecko has always seemed confusing to me. Most of the time when I see reference to another program using Gecko its not given the Gecko version number, its given the equivelant FF or Suite version. That is more meaningful to people. Unless you really follow Mozilla and Firefox development the Gecko version number doesn't tell you much. Maybe by FF 2.0 it can catch up with the Gecko version number and things will be a lot less confusing.

I have recently completed a two year professional development plan that helped our K-8 teachers transition into using Mozilla Composer to edit and update their classroom web pages. I don't know how Mozilla Composer fits into these new plans. I am fearful that we have just spent two years training our staff, only to find out that the application platform that they are trained on (and that our classroom web site strategy is based on) is now about to be killed. Can someone please tell me what the future is for Mozilla Composer?
Please and thank you.
Chris

Asa,

I have some questions I hope you (or someone else) can answer:

1. Despite the fact that there won't be a 1.8 final, will the Mozilla Foundation continue to use the suite as a "testbed" for changes in Gecko for Firefox?
2. If not, what will your organization use as a "testbed" for changes to Firefox's backend?
3. Would it be infeasible for Firefox development to be done as it has been done in the suite, that is with a Firefox "trunk" and branches for stable releases? Especially since the Mozilla back-end is used for other Foundation products besides Firefox. (I don't even know if that makes sense, I'm not a developer, sorry.)

As a user of the suite and as the person responsible for its usage and maintanance in my organization, I can't say I'm happy with this turn of events and wish that the announcement regarding 1.8 had been made sooner. However, I do understand why you're moving towards Firefox/Thunderbird and appreciate your willingness to donate sources to help continue development of the suite. For that, I thank you and the foundation.

I agree with Joe, however, I doubt the management of my organization will be very impressed about having "Seamonkey 1.0" on our computers. I would like to suggest the name, "MozSuite 1.x" or some variant.

Thank you,
Jordon

Chris:

My organization also makes extensive use of Mozilla Composer. However, don't despair.

An "advanced" version of Mozilla Composer is available as a stand-alone program called "Nvu," available from www.nvu.com. It is currently still in beta and has a slightly different feel than Mozilla Composer but both have the same Mozilla base and work almost exactly the same.

For the time being, I'd suggest sticking with the Mozilla suite as it will be maintained by the Foundation for at least another year. By the time that year ends, I'd suggest switching to Nvu. My guess is that Composer users could be taught how to use Nvu for most general purposes in under an hour, given how similar the two programs operate. If you take a look at http://www.nvu.com/features.html, you'll notice how similar the interface of Nvu is to that of Mozilla Composer. The only major difference is that Nvu is not integrated into the Mozilla browser, however, I don't think that will be that large of a problem.

I hope this helps. Feel free to reply or e-mail me (by clicking "Jordon" below) if you have any addition comments.

-Jordon

I will be more than happy to move from the Suite for Firefox/Thunderbird/Sunbird... But before that happens, I'd need to be better "trained" on how to make them interoperable much like the Suite already is.

Either way, this is big news for Mozilla and MoFo in general.

Chris, I see three obvious choices for your organization. They can standardize on and ride the 1.7.x releases for years to come, they can take their chances with the community-supported Seamonkey application, or they can transition to N|vu, the standalone HTML composer application (based off of, but vastly improved from Mozilla Composer).

I realize that none of these are without some difficulty or other. Perhaps there's a fourth way I'm not considering.

--Asa

Whilst it's understandable that the Mozilla Foundation needs to focus its energies on "the future" with Firefox/Thunderbird, just looking at the browser component for the moment...

The browser in Seamonkey (Mozilla app suite) easily outshines Firefox - as many have already indicated on various Web sites, this is sometimes as simple as being able to search from the address field rather than having a small (and useless) separate search field; this goes all the way to the various preference options/capabilities that exist in Seamonkey but are nowhere to be found in Firefox (don't even both saying something like, "use about:config" - clearly this is not intuitive and is not part of the UI and is plain inefficient for the majority of _end-users_ as opposed to developers).

If Firefox could do everything Seamonkey could, then shutting down new development on Seamonkey would make sense - alas, Firefox can't and therefore this is a dangerous decision more likely to send people back to MSIE than forcing them to migrate (downgrade) to Firefox.

Don't get me wrong - some aspects of Firefox are clearly better than Seamonkey, but it's not yet a replacement for Seamonkey.

Saying the Mozilla Foundation will still release security fixes for Mozilla 1.7.x doesn't really fool anyone because if resources have all gone to Firefox, then any security problems will be fixed in Firefox first and then, maybe, if someone gets around to it, in Moz1.7.x, perhaps, eventually...

Essentially it's the death of Mozilla 1.7.x, before Firefox is ready to take Seamonkey's place. So sad.

Jordan,

1. Despite the fact that there won't be a 1.8 final, will the Mozilla Foundation continue to use the suite as a "testbed" for changes in Gecko for Firefox?

No, I don't believe we will. We will most likely start using Firefox and Thunderbird as our primary testbeds for Gecko changes.

2. If not, what will your organization use as a "testbed" for changes to Firefox's backend?

I suspect it will be called something like "the Mozilla browser testbed" or something similarly unfriendly to end users but it will essentially be Firefox.

3. Would it be infeasible for Firefox development to be done as it has been done in the suite, that is with a Firefox "trunk" and branches for stable releases? Especially since the Mozilla back-end is used for other Foundation products besides Firefox. (I don't even know if that makes sense, I'm not a developer, sorry.)

Yes, that is what we'll be doing going forward.

As a user of the suite and as the person responsible for its usage and maintanance in my organization, I can't say I'm happy with this turn of events and wish that the announcement regarding 1.8 had been made sooner.

We certainly could have done better here. The writing's been on the wall for about two years now and we're finally fulfilling the plans laid out in the Mozilla Roadmap which we've been making incremental progress on for the last two years. But, yes, we could have been more explicit sooner.

I agree with Joe, however, I doubt the management of my organization will be very impressed about having "Seamonkey 1.0" on our computers. I would like to suggest the name, "MozSuite 1.x" or some variant.

I'd recommend that you continue to use the Mozilla Foundation supported Mozilla 1.7.x series until you are ready to migrate to a Firefox and Thunderbird solution. The name of the community-manged project is probably the least important thing to be concerned about.

--Asa

Asa, in your reply to Chris you said one of his options is to "take their chances with the community-supported Seamonkey application..." I am sure you don't mean it, but that sounded like you think there is little chance its going to be a good product. It will take a lot more organization than there is at the moment, but there is a lot of potential. Just because its not run by the Moz Foundation doesn't mean it will be of lower quality. We will just have to wait and see.

The name is obviously less important than getting organized and enough developers, otherwise there will be nothing to name. But its not something that can just be ignored. Look at the previous naming problems the foundation has been through and the community backlash and confusion it caused. Refering to it as Seamonkey will do for a while. Once it gets a community going they can work out the name.

How is this change going to impact those of us building applications that embed the Gecko engine? I'm concerned that the FireFox focus is going to lead to a situation where code will be optimized for FF without considering how the code changes impact those of us not using XUL or the FF interface. In the past, developers have attempted to keep embedders in mind when code changes have been proposed. Will that still be the case?

Andrew, the suite was a XUL application. I don't see how this changes anything. We remain committed to the Gecko platform and core technologies. The same people that were working on Gecko last week will be working on Gecko next week. No big changes there.

--Asa

My perhaps flawed understanding of the roadmaps for quite awhile has been that the suite would not be eliminated but migrated from the old 'seamonkey' codebase, to a modular packaging of firefox, thunderbird and others.
"Deliver a Mozilla 1.4 milestone that can replace the 1.0 branch as the stable development path, then move on to make riskier changes during 1.5 and 1.6. The major changes after 1.4 involve switching to Phoenix and Thunderbird, and working aggressively on the next two items." (lines 75-77)http://cvs-www.mozilla.org/webtools/bonsai/cvsblame.cgi?file=mozilla-org/html/roadmap.html&rev=1.88&root=/cvsroot

In all the discussion and controversy lately, very little has been stated as to the customer demand (or lack) for a suite. Instead all the controversy seems to be over the continuation of the current suite codebase named "seamonkey".
As BretJ suggested above, there may be customer demand for a suite packaging of the independent components.

- MS Office for example is available as that or individually as Word, Excel, ... The products are the same either way. I am glad that they are independent and not a large monolithic application. Yet I prefer to install them as one, not four seperate apps.

Thanks for listening and all your hard work

Duh. The name IS important. I can't believe they've just abandoned "millions of users" as quoted in one post.

I recently tried Mozilla 1.7, and while I haven't switched back from Firefox... because of extensions and skins.... (eye candy sucks people in)... I must say I was astounded at how much _Faster_ Mozilla rendered than Firefox. I had been thinking of switching at work, but now....

I'll be looking for good things from the new SeaMonkey Team.

Might I suggest: OpenMozilla.org

Someone could get really spiffy and bundle it with OO.o. :-) Just a thought.

Hello Asa,

I am not writing to argue with the corporate decision on Seamonkey, I can see where Mozilla is going with Forefox and Thunderbird. I will say that I am very disappointed in the timing of this decision. Why in the world did the Corporation chose to kill Seamonkey just before the 1.8 final release? This does not make economical sense in how you have invested your human resources in the development of Seamonkey.

Some personal thoughts on the decision. I have been using Mozilla 1.x (Seamonkey) since version 1.4 became stable because it was much better than Netscape 6x. I personally prefer the suite of applications because they interact with each other. The ability to have Navigator open for research, Messenger monitor my incoming mail, and Composer to update web pages is far better with the one Seamonkey program running than having to open three independent programs.

I am sure that I have missed some critical discussion on the competitive issues with Microsoft Internet Explorer and Outlook Express and how those two applications work together seamlessly for browsing and e-mailing. How can Mozilla.org expect to be truly competitive with Microsoft IE and OE when Firefox and Thunderbird are not interactive?

Personal opinion. The least Mozilla.org could have done for its faithful and loyal supporters would have been to complete Seamonkey Mozilla 1.8 final before shipping it off to another group of developers.

Respectfully,

Michael Gordon

I am pretty disappointed how MoFo handled/handles the whole issue. Providing a single installer that would include ff, tb, nvu and chatzilla would have cut the air supply of any seamonkey project. Even if it has 5 gecko's inside and is huge. Providing customers a good upgrade path and making the transition as painless as possible is good style and keeps the loyality of the customer base. In addition to the bad external handling comes the problem that arises from the development capacity that is split. The MoFo should ask themself whether they did work good enough to switch the people with cvs to the new apps. IMHO they did not. One key argument has been the review mechanism. As a backend dev, I favour a stricter review scheme than checkins by single devs without any review. The groundwork for the new apps has been laid, where such a review scheme has definetely advantages, so it might be time to reconsider the working mechanisms.

Its a shame that we could not lure all devs to the new apps and take into account their points like review scheme, toolkit API stability and also that they have the feeling that their oppinion will influence the decisions.

Asa, I hope you and the MoFo will fight for the devs to switch to the new apps and provide them a good harbour so that they also feel comfortable. Project management is also human relathionship and not only technical stuff.
Fork in a OSS project is a defeat for the project management.

Bernd

Asa,

Thanks for the response. I recognize that the Mozilla Suite is/was XUL-based and most of the changes in that regard don't effect our work. I just want to be sure that as coding shifts exclusively to supporting FF, the needs of embeddors don't get lost in the process. One of the benefits of the need to support multiple applications was that it forced developers to recognize the impact of their changes. I hope that those leading the development efforts at Mozilla recognize that while FF will be the exclusive focus for browser development, there are many of us out here who will have needs that don't necessarily match those of the FF development team.

Honestly, this looks like a serious SNAFU from this end.

Just the mere act of releasing alpha releases and beta releases signalled to the community of users AND developers that there would be a Mozilla 1.0, and so many of the reasons they prefer the suite are justified.

Certainly, Firefox and Thunderbird are a good counter to IE and OE - they provide comparable user experience, improved security, and the sort of simplicity that allows someone switching to do so comfortably.

However, The Suite is a far more complex, configurable, polished animal than Firefox is, or likely ever will be. Firefox may catch up on polish, but that which some call bloat, others prefer... having the 2 options (suite or individual applications) seems an ideal compromise.

At the very least, The Mozilla Foundation would put the effort and polish into a final 1.8 suite, and live up the what they've implied. Taking 1.8 from beta to a stable branch, given the amount of work put into it by both the Mozilla Foundation and those who volunteer their work?

Not doing it is a serious blow to the credibility of Mozilla.org, and the leadership of Mozilla.org. The suite may not be the future of the organization, but it's certainly a big enough deal to follow through what's begun.

Additionally, the major work going into the suite is Gecko tuning anyways - freeze the interface to bug fixes only, and release new versions with an updated engine in step with Firefox updates? Why not - choosing what people want to use on their behalf isn't something that is going to win Mozilla any new friends, and is likely to run off quite a few of those currently loyal.

"Just the mere act of releasing alpha releases and beta releases signalled to the community of users AND developers that there would be a Mozilla 1.0, and so many of the reasons they prefer the suite are justified."

oops... Obviously I meant 1.8, but I do feel foolish :/

Asa, I think this plan makes great sense. I liked 'Seamonkey' and used it, but was excited by the 'Firefox' announcement a couple of years ago, and am delighted with how it turned out. Yes, it would've been better if you'd let 'Seamonkey' devotees know about this earlier, but it does sound like a good plan.

One of the reasons why I'm so unsympathetic to the 'Seamonkey' supporters is that the detail of the arguments often falls down. For example, "Anon" posts above:

The browser in Seamonkey (Mozilla app suite) easily outshines Firefox - as many have already indicated on various Web sites, this is sometimes as simple as being able to search from the address field rather than having a small (and useless) separate search field;

You can search from the address field in 'Firefox'; by default it uses Google 'I'm Feeling Lucky', but this is customizable. I agree with you that the separate search field is useless, so I've removed it (and use bookmark keyword searches for various search engines). You can hardly complain about having to customize it to get the behaviour you want, given your next point:

this goes all the way to the various preference options/capabilities that exist in Seamonkey but are nowhere to be found in Firefox

But this is a massive improvement! There are a ridiculous number of obscure preferences in 'Seamonkey', which most users haven't a hope of dealing with. Largely they exist because 'Seamonkey' was designed without an extensions mechanism in mind -- meaning that if a feature was to be available to anybody then it had to be available to everybody. Clearly this leads to bloat. The 'Firefox' extension mechanism is far superior, as it enables you just to include features you use -- and, as can be seen from the hundreds of extensions developed, it encourages imaginative people to come up with useful (to some) features that didn't have a chance of getting into the core.

(don't even both saying something like, "use about:config" - clearly this is not intuitive and is not part of the UI and is plain inefficient for the majority of _end-users_ as opposed to developers).

But the 'Seamonkey' pref UI can not be described as "intuitive" either, especially for end users -- there are simply far too many options. Most users do not want to have lots of confusing (and sometimes quite similar) options to choose from: they want their software to work sensibly by default. Yes, power users like options, but power users are perfectly capable of using about:config or installing extensions as required.

Why two browsers from the same guys - Firefox and Mozilla ?

Asa, could you please answer a few simple questions. Nobody has stated the answers, but they should be clear.

1. As Mozilla Foundation IS NOT some kind of PRIVATE COMPANY and it IS open source project, WHO is responsible for the decision? Can the managers make a decision which interfere with the project history and aim from POV of great number of users and developers at all? What is the principle of decision making? May be I'm too rude, but it's not the "own" product of MoFo.
Has you provided some voting between Gecko developers? Has it been some kind of voting between Gecko users? Who is the person who can throw out the main product being so for many years and for many people (not considerable less then FF+TB)?
It is Open Source, so the things should be clear.

2. There should be a honest comparison of features of FF+TB vs Mozilla suite. As MoFo IS responsible for the product, there must be cleary stated: the lost features will be integrated into the future products of MoFo. With the schedule. MoFo IS responsible to Mozilla users. In other case MoFo IS NOT fulfilling its aims.

3. Why should the community change the name of the suite? Who is the owner of the name? MoFo management or the number of suite developers?

P.S. It seems MoFo is not the OS company at least in behavior. It acts as a 100% private company which main aim is profit (cheap popularity in this case) with no respect to its customers.

Asa,

Thank you for your response. I will be sticking with the Mozilla Suite for the forseeable future as my organization uses it daily. However, as I've been messing around with Nvu for a while, I've seen the potential of the stand-alone programs. Also, because my organization will be going through a series of hardware upgrades starting in two weeks, I might see if I can do a pilot migration program to Firefox/Thunderbird/Nvu. However, I guess the only thing holding me back on that right now is that because we rely so heavily on Composer, I'm hesitant to use Nvu right now since it is still in beta. Thus, any permanent switch isn't likely to occur until after Nvu hits 1.0 which I assume/hope will happen before the Mozilla Foundation ends support of the 1.7 branch.

Anyway thank you again for your response and please keep up the good work at the Foundation.

Setting aside my own concerns about the demise of the Mozilla Suite, I'd like to comment on the lighter issue of the name for the new community based suite. While I understand some people's concerns about how Seamonkey is going to be received by the corporate world, I have to say that Mozilla itself had its problems. Would your Pointy Haired Boss have willingly adopted an application whose name was halfway between Godzilla and Magilla Gorilla?
(see http://www.toonopedia.com/magilla.htm)

Anyway, my own proposal is Maximo 3.0; the inhouse joke should be obvious and the release number should remove all unwanted connections with Firefox's or Gecko's.

For the italians it is also a double, hidden reference to a good movie and a great comedian, see http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0081427/

Lastly, its grandeur is sure to appeal to any PHB's around.

Prognathous wrote in http://weblogs.mozillazine.org/asa/archives/007532.html

The reason this change of focus irks Seamonkey users, is because Firefox has become a WONTFIX-bonanza for many thing that are simply more usable in the Suite:

Firefox' URL autocomplete is buggy (Bug 246237).

Its tabs need a visual redesign (Bug 206175, INVALID).

It has no site navigation bar (Bug 187488, WONTFIX).

Bookmark notifications were actively removed with Bug 253478.

Filing groups of bookmarks is unpolished (Bug 257311).

You can't place the New Tab button in the correct place (on the tab-bar) without extensions.

Its Ctrl+Enter functionality is inconsistent between links and the URL bar (Bug 177498, WONTFIX).

No support for changing file associations (Bug 216501, WONTFIX).

Handling of the Find bar is inconsistent with other toolbars (Bug 250587, WONTFIX).

The installer makes things needlessly difficult compared to Seamonkey's excellent installer, especially for those who are used to specifying a new installation folder by merely changing the path (Bugs 280195, 254961, 251735, 229343, 241282).

Opening a folder in a group of tabs is slow compared to Seamonkey groupmarks (Bug 172675).

The Find toolbar makes Find-As-You-Type annoying (Bug 250309).

Links-only-FAYT is buried as a hidden pref and is no longer available for user of the Find toolbar (Bug 250924, WONTFIX with nary a comment to explain why).

You see, it's not just that Seamonkey is quicker, it's also more usable for many of us. You can read many similar comments by other disappointed Seamonkey users in mozillazine forums.

Alexander,
I know that I am not Asa, but I would like to answer nevertheless, as you stated some common misconceptions about open source that bug me.

"Open Source Software" is a name for software which is released under an "open source software licence" e.g. the GPL, LGPL, BSD-Licence, etc. This is the *full* definition of open source. Open source isn't anything more than that. So there is a software called Seamonky by the developers which was branded the "Mozilla Suite" by the Mozilla Foundation, which is realeased under an open source licence. This means that everybody can change the source and republish the changed source.

It does not mean that the "Mozilla Foundation" has any obligation to fulfill your very personal wishes. Not legally and not morally. Nada. Why is that? Because you do not have a contract with the Mozilla Foundation. YOu did not buy any product from them. You do not have a support contract which states the intention of the MoFo to produce future releases of the suite. You have nothing. There are many developers who have contributed there valuable time to the suite. This effort is not lost. The source code still exist and may be used and enhanced by them as they like.

What is the intention of the Mozilla Foundation then if not to serve the open source community? The intention of the MoFo is to serve the open source community. However, YOU are not the community! You are simply a very very extremely tiny fraction of the community. Your opinion matters. But you are only one of thousands of developers or one of tens of millions of users. In this case, the MoFo has decided that they have a very fine product (Firefox and Thunderbird) which serves more than 25 Million people already and which has the prospect to serve many tens of millions more in the future, but they also realized that they only have limited resources. So the MoFo decided to serve the tens of millions of Firefox and Thunderbird users and in order to do this properly they decided to do what they announced two years ago - to drop the suite development.

MoFo is probably perfectly aware that there is Alexander Rabtchevich, along with other suite fans. But you and the other fans are only an extremely tiny fraction of the whole Gecko user base.

To your questions:

1. I know very little about the Mozilla Foundation. But I do know that the Foundation is an Organisation with some statutes written down somewhere which provide the legal basis for the decisions to be made. The MoFo will surely have members and MoFo-bodies which are entitled to make such decisions in the name of the MoFo. The fact that you are asking this questions suggests that you are not a member of the MoFo and surely not a member of any decision making body. You are completely right: The Mofo does not own the source code of the Suite in the way a closed software company owns their source code. So this means that the Mofodoes not have to do anything with the source code: They do not have to produce any more releases. They do not have to do some voting among developers or users as the MoFo cannot dictate the developers not to develop Seamonkey any further. Also, the developers cannot demand the MoFo-staff to develop Seamonley any further as the MoFo is not an organisation formally supporting the interests of the developers. Furthermore, it is evidend that there are more Firefoy users than Suite users. The MoFO hasn't got the ressources to support both. So they drop the suite. They do not have to poll the users: It is evident that the users would rather like to have a Firefox/Thunderbird than a suite. There will be a board (or something like that) at the MoFo which decides such issues. Asa will surely be a member. You are not.
As you stated: it is Open Source, so the things are *very* clear.

2. The MoFo stated that they will support 1.7.x for some time to come. So
MoFo is responsible to the suite users.

3. I think that the MoFo is the owner of the name/brand (however this is legally called) Mozilla and Mozilla suite. The suite developers are *not* owner of the brand as there are no "suite developers". I have never heard of a "Foundation of the suite deveopers" - so there isn't even a sound legal body who can claim rights against the MoFo. Only single persons like Alexander Rabtchevich. I do not htink you have the rights on the Mozilla brand. So the MoFo is entitled to say if a third party (like a new developer group) may use the name or not. They have forbidden to use the name. So the situation is very clear and nobody can complain.
Yes, the MoFo aims at popularity which does mean that they are doing whatever they can to give their users products they like. This means that the MoFo IS fullfilling its responsibilities against their product users (see 2.). They have very much respect to their users (which are users, but no customers as they do not pay anything).

So Alexander, why are you not founding a "Foundation of the real open source browser developers"? The answer is: You have no money and no other ressources. Why is this? Because nobody wants to give you money. Ask any big company like AOL or other companies that have donated to the MoFo: They will still donate lots of money to the MoFO, but not to you. Because the Foundation is constantly checking what their broad user base wants and needs (Firefox/Thunderbird at the moment). So the money is spend to help many people to be able to use non-microsoft products (which is what the donating companies want as they are microsoft rivals). Your seamonkey foundation will get no or very little money, as seamonkey is useful for some uber-geeks any more (as lynx or dillo).

MoFo isn't bad - they are nice:
- They do what most of their users want.
- They are supporting 1.7.x for at least a year to come.
- They are helping the remaining semonkey-developers.

But in order to do what most of their users want they also have to be efficient. Which is why they made this decision.

Hello watchman,
thanks for fleshing out my guts feeling that FF usability is - crap
(at least when you have "suite-experience").

From the usabiltiy point of view, using FF is to me like downgrading
to IE, except that this can't happen on my Linux box. Also, FF
is much less suited for central management - there's no way to
centrally install and distribute extensions, for instance. There's
no Chrome Manager or Registry viewer to the best I know, making
bug-finding and fixing in the cooperation of extensions even more
difficult. The argument about 25+ million downloads may be good
from a marketing viewpoint, but it's rather the "billions of
flies..." type of argument from where I stand. And please note,
good usability is a long-winded process, so it's very unlikely
that FF will catch up any time soon, esp. when I see the list
of bugs posted by watchman which I just thought were negligent
omissions or omissions due to developer time starvation.
Looks like FF may be in need for a new project lead if these
were political decisions and it's still meant to shine
someday. =8-((

Get permission to call it Netscape. Then make sure it keeps running just as fast and lean and mean as the Netscape 7 I use. (Yes, I know that it doesn't support remote scripting, but I'm not giving Netscape up for the crap I'm reading about here.)

rd

Hi watchman and Toni Mueller,
Maybe some points of your wishlist will be implemented in Firefox in 1.5 or 2.0?

I am not a Mozilla/Firefoy developer or MoFo member but these insults to the MoFo leadership bug me a lot. To Tonis suggestion about a leadership change:

You *can* fork the project. In fact it isn't a real fork as the MoFo will not produce a 1.8 any more. So the Seamonkey 1.0 (basing on Gecko 1.8) developers can do what they like with the source code. And this will also be the only Semonkey branch - so there will be no competition of the MoFo.

So why all this excitement?

You, Toni, and Alexander are complaining about the abandonment of the mozilla suite because you know exactly that there won't be a high quality Seamonkey 1.0/1.x release any more. You are perfectly aware of the fact that there are only few developers left who are enthusastic about Seamonkey. So it isn't sufficient for you that Seamonkey is open source and that everybody who wants to donate work to seamonkey can do so and that the MoFo is donating the technical ressources. No - you know that there is not enough developer power behind Seamonkey.

So you are complaining that the MoFo isn't putting ressources (i.e. paid staff) behind seamonkey. Who donated the money to pay the staff? Big companies. Not some free time developer geeks. What do these big companies who donated the money want? They want that money to be spend on the development of an open source mass market browser. Which is Firefox (together with Thunderbird).

So the MoFo can do two things: Don't care about their main donators and spend the money on the Suite AND the Firefox development: Soon the donators wön't donate any more or far less money. Mofo will be dead. Seamonkey AND firefox will be on their own (like Seamonkey is now).
Or they do what the donators want and develop for a mass market: Seamonkey will be abandoned in the long run, but Firefox will flourish.

So the decision seems not to be whether the MoFo supports Seamonkey and Firefox in the long run, but whether the MoFo supports Firefox/Thunderbird alone in the long run or will support nothing in the long run.

(I do not know who has donated, but I know of AOL at least and maybe there are some contracts or agreements or negotiations with Google going on right now, so that there will be a Google mass market browser? It would be the ultimate IE rival!!!)

On the topic of user numbers:
There are far, far, far more Firefox users than there are Suite users. In the forums like those of mozillazine there might be many suite users. But it would not be fair to do a poll in mozillazine whether to keep supporting the suite: Suite users are more geeky than Firefox users. So Suite users will read web sites like mozillazine far more often than the average firefox user. Firefox users only want to browse the web. They just want to use their browser and not to spend many hours on web sites like mozillazine. So a poll whether to focus ressources only on firefox or to also spend money on the suite will be heavily biased to the suite fans.

To sum it up:
I think that the decisions made by the MoFo are mostly about money. And you know that. The MoFo has collected much money (and employment contracts) so thex have the ressources to develop a very fine product. They were able to collect the money, because they could convince the donators, that they would spend the money in order to break the IE monopoly on the browser mass market.
What you want to do is to push the MoFo leadership into investing the money for something it was not intended wo be invested for: Some geek tool (the suite).
Some time ago the suite was the state of the art for the mass market, now firefox is. The suite is becoming merely a geek toy (like dillo or lynx).

You are perfectly entitled to put time and money investments into Seamonkey. You do not want to. You want to rob the money from the donators for your own agenda, which you do not want to fund yourself.

Oh, my bad. I see Netscape still makes a browser. I thought it all went to Mozilla, but instead Netscape now bases it on Gecko, yada yada.

So that's yet another front end to Gecko. Maybe getting Firefox right is the best answer.

rd

Mike, I'll try to be brief.

Don't you find some absence of logic in the next statements:

>It does not mean that the "Mozilla Foundation" has any obligation to fulfill your very personal wishes. Not legally and not morally.
What is the intention of the Mozilla Foundation then if not to serve the open source community? The intention of the MoFo is to serve the open source community. However, YOU are not the community! You are simply a very very extremely tiny fraction of the community.

So, you stated: you are not the community so you can not make the decision. Has I sad something contrary? No.
But MoFo is NOT the community either. Has anybody asked the opinion of community? No.

>MoFo is probably perfectly aware that there is Alexander Rabtchevich, along with other suite fans. But you and the other fans are only an extremely tiny fraction of the whole Gecko user base.

Can you state this? I have seen site statistics shown about 50/50 shares of Mozilla/FF users. Even if the common statistics differs it doesn't differ much.

>3. I think that the MoFo is the owner of the name/brand (however this is legally called) Mozilla and Mozilla suite. The suite developers are *not* owner of the brand as there are no "suite developers".

The MoFo inherited the name from the community didn't it?

------------------------------------------
I've skipped other considerations.
------------------------------------------

I'm glad the MoFo is going to provide help to further development of the suite. I hope the Suite will survive and will not be killed by the current decision. And the foundation should be aware of the fact that a great number of people like the suite over the FF+TB for objective reasons (a lot of them have been written here and in other places). That means that FF+TB miss this functionality .

>You want to rob the money from the donators for your own agenda, which you do not want to fund yourself.

Mike, do you want to offend somebody? Please, choose the correct words.

> But MoFo is NOT the community either. Has anybody asked the opinion of community? No.

No. Who is 'the community'. How can you ask 'the community'? There is no formal body. And you cannot make a poll at mozillazine, as this would produce biased results (geeky, not mass market). Furthermore, the voters would not consider factors like the interests of donators/ possible future donators. OK, you can ignore the interests of the donators, but then you have the same situation as now with Seamonkey, only that the Firefox development isn't funded either.

> Can you state this? I have seen site statistics shown about 50/50 shares of Mozilla/FF users. Even if the common statistics differs it doesn't differ much.

I have seen statistics 4:1 (Firefox : Mozilla 1.x)

> The MoFo inherited the name from the community didn't it?

I don't know. I am merely a common consumer of the suite and Firefox. But I suppose that MoFo has got the brand from Netscape in 1998. Internally Netscape has always been called Mozilla, I think.

>>You want to rob the money from the donators for your own agenda, which you do not want to fund yourself.
> Mike, do you want to offend somebody? Please, choose the correct words.

I think it was an appropriate response to the statement of Toni, which I found insulting, as I think that Asa and the other people of the MoFo leadership are doing a really excellent job:

"Looks like FF may be in need for a new project lead if these
were political decisions and it's still meant to shine
someday. =8-(("

All the developers who are testing the products and who are committing patches are doing a really great job. Most of them are doing that in their spare time - for free. I salute them.

But it is also important not to underestimate the job of the Mozilla Foundation. There are many, many small open source projects, in which there are developers who are doing really great work. But the products are not used by many people.

The Mozilla Foundation does an extremely good job in marketing the product, getting the resources (money to pay developers/drivers) and to build an environment, which huge corporations find comforting enough do switch from IE to formerly Netscape (based on the Mozilla Suite) and now Firefox. It is the same like OSDL and the Linux Kernel.

It seems that Mofo is listening at developers and users, but is not merely making a web poll in which everybody can click as often as he likes to the points "dump the suite" or "keep the Suite".

The Mofo leadership seems to inform itself and then make a decision based on the information they gathered and based on the intention to build a perfect mass market browser.
The MoFo leadership decides about the whereabaouts of the Mofo. The 'community' can decide about the 'community' affairs as they whish. Whoever 'the community' might be.

Oy-vey, so much foolishness.

It would take millions and millions to of dollars in advertising to build the brand-name recognition that 'Mozilla' (as the suite is and has always been known) now has. And now you want to throw it away? To start over with "Seamonkey"??? (OpenMozilla sounds good though)

And to throw away 1.8, which is days or weeks away from release because you don't want to support it?? (But will continue to support 1.7?) Not even allowing a graceful retirement for the old lizard.

It sounds like the Firefox contingent is acting out of spite. It really does.

I think it's great the Mozilla Foundation have realised that they'll be spread to thin to develop Gecko, Firefox/Thunderbird and the Suite all at the same time.

Forcing a spin off is one of the best, and bravest, things they could have done.

I feel community as a whole wins. The Mozilla Foundation now have more resources to develop Gecko and Firefox/Thunderbird, while the Suite Project can have it's own focus, which will be a big boon to their (potential) developers.

Then I use Opera. I don't trash my harddrive with 2 geckoengines.

watchman, all you've said is true. Also take a look at the new Firefox options (I don't like it, but it dosn't matter), there are no more advanced javascript options.

I think MoFo is tries to create a mom and dad browser, with every new release less options.

@Sebastian Brocks

Yes, you can enable FAYT for links in about:config, but this is no solution, explain a new user, what about:config is.

Then all the Firefox installer bugs, custom install is a mess, take a look at the bugs listed by watchman. Why has Ben created a new installer, there was already a working installer for Mozilla Suite.

MoFo goes one step forward and three steps backward.

I use Mozilla suite since 0.9x.

Asa,

While this can not be unexpected to anyone who follows Mozilla, I must say that how MoFo announced this was rather poor, and I think you realize this. Although the roadmap stated this would happen, the milestone chart continues into 1.9, and implies that Seamonkey would continue that far.

I think it's irresponsible to kill Seamonkey in the middle of the 1.8 release cycle. Mofo may have lost some credibility in the F/OSS community because of this, and I'm sure vendors the rely on Seamonkey are nervous.

As much as the foundation may cringe at it, I think 1.8 final should be released. It would give its users a lot of features that we're been waiting for, and would give any community effort to continue it a clean start.

You spoke of product and project management, but what about Mozilla as a platform? It seems that the end user products have blossomed while the underlying technologies that make them possible are ignored. Firefox may have caused Microsoft to develop SP3 (aka IE7), but Mozilla technologies are a direct competitor (and I believe the inspiration) for XAML and Avalon. There is a window of opportunity to make lessen the impact of XAML by making XUL more portable. What is the status of things like Gecko Runtime Environment and other tools for developers to strengthen the platform?

I would say after reading all this that it possibly makes more sense to have distro of FF, TB, etc. with extensions that do such things as provide a GUI options panel and every other thing that brings FF up to Navigator standards, even patches that FF WONTFIX like CTL-ENTER preference to match Navigator.

They should bundle the distro as the equivalent of Mozilla Suite (with a different name) with all extensions included and tweaked, which is the whole point of a distro.

This makes much more sense to me than the more massive effort required to maintain and enhance SeaMonkey.

rd

Mike Says:
"It seems that Mofo is listening at developers and users, but is not merely making a web poll in which everybody can click as often as he likes to the points "dump the suite" or "keep the Suite".

The way the popularoty is being presented by MoFo is based on "downloads" Is that supposed to be a more accurate measure?

With all the hype and zealotry around Firefox it wouldn't surprise me if half of those 26 million downloads weren't bots set up to crank the numbers.

Not that I care about that, but I do know that for 3 years I have downloaded the Suite *once* and installed it on 200 computers.
Likly true for anyone supporting Mozilla in an enterprise environment.

You know, I always be a Mozilla fan.

My first browser was Netscape 1.1. I had IE 1.0 but it was a very crappy browser. I've been using Netscape until 4.3 version, in 1999, where using Netscape as a default browser was being pretty hard: every page was design for IE 4 and all Java Applet just crash Netscape. When Netscape was acquired by AOL and AOL didn't anything for Netscape, just owned a name. I felt alone. I felt I was borged and forced to use IE.

When I've discovered Mozilla.org, I've been using it since from the early beta (I think my first beta was 0.4). Some page were not working so well, but who cares? It was Mozilla suite, rising from ashes. There where some nasty bugs, but in every Mozilla release, it was being a great revolution. A lot of bug fixes, a lot of tweaks, faster browsign and good support. On 1.0 stable released, I was assured I never need to use IE anymore, for any reason. I've becamed a Mozilla speaker, introducing Mozilla World for every friend, publishing some personal articles about Mozilla, safe browsing and HTML support. People was encouraged by me and started using Mozilla as a primary Internet suite (Browser, E-mail and IRC sometimes). Even Mozilla.org was producing Netscape 6 and 7 for AOL (since those bastards where never good enough to maintain the Netscape name.... geez, they don't, because it's not updated anymore and any developtment for it is stopped forever).

I know Firefox is a great browser. It's simplier and user friendly than Mozilla. You know, I don't like Firefox. Sorry, but I think everytime I open Firefox, it's like I'm using IE, and not a Mozilla product. I know Firefox is well accept by the community, I know Firefox archived more downloads than Mozilla Suite... but who cares? I love Mozilla, the old Netscape look, all menus and other things. I KNOW FIREFOX SUPPORTS SKIN AND I COULD BE USING A MOZILLA SKIN FOR FIREFOX, but it's still not the same thing! I love using CTRL+1 for Browser and CTRL+2 for mail. I don't need to open 2 different program for 2 simple internet tasks, and now with Firefox and Thunderbirs I will need it. Geez, I know Mozilla will be updated from Mozilla Foundations, but I'm really assured this is only for some months and this project will be entirely buired. I think I'll be orphan again, and be Borged again.

We all are orphan again. We;'re all being borged.

IN MOZILLA, WE TRUST! MOZILLA FOREVER!

Never Ping

I thought I was done commenting but I came back to add this. From the two slashdot threads I've read in the last few days and all the links to Mozilla dialogue, I thought Mozilla/Firefox defenders did a good job explaining how to soup up Firefox to do the things being complained about as missing, sometimes with a config text file option, sometimes an existing plugin, and sometimes just a setting from an FF menu.

What little that couldn't be done was attributed to Firefox UI decisionmaking frustrating thoe who wanted to add professional features, along with some dislike for people having to piece together all these tweaks and plugins and redo it on every update, and even then not having some patches in there that they would want.

So I posted the blurb at bottom here this afternoon, but I wanted to add another thought. The distro would have -

all the config settings, UI changes such as pulling the little searh field off the UI, classic skin, etc., and everything else described as how to implement what was wanted,

with all plugins installed and configured that add the Mozilla Suite functionality and usability desired,

and all the patches implemnted to this branch that FF WONTFIX to add all the advanced keyboard behavior and such for desired Suite functionality. My understanding from reading is that most of those patches are already done or not that hard but just refused to be implemented in FF.

This would be a CVS branch of FF, TB, the new composer, etc. where only these functionality patches have to be reapplied to new releases. Most seemed to be triggered by keyboard shortcuts or additional menu options so seem fairly external and addon to core code.

In addition, with a classic skinned, UI tweaked FF and TB then create a shell menu control that FF, TB, and other Mozilla apps plug into, who knows, maybe a defined plugin interface that allows Suite users to plug other interoperable browser related apps made available for it by third parties. At that point you should have essentially classic Mozilla Suite (I'm a real classic Netscape 7.02/Mozilla 5.0 user, I'll have to be dragged kicking and screaming from it) with only an outer menu shell and mostly keyboard triggered functionality tweaks to merge to current Mozilla components FF and TB.

That's a distro that should be able to ship with each new release. However, in my opinion if that is done by Mozilla Suite advocates my opinion is that Mozilla Foundation should put their stamp of approval on that and call it Firefox Classic.

I would even upgrade off of 7.02 for that.

rd

My previous post:
"I would say after reading all this that it possibly makes more sense to have distro of FF, TB, etc. with extensions that do such things as provide a GUI options panel and every other thing that brings FF up to Navigator standards, even patches that FF WONTFIX like CTL-ENTER preference to match Navigator.

They should bundle the distro as the equivalent of Mozilla Suite (with a different name) with all extensions included and tweaked, which is the whole point of a distro.

This makes much more sense to me than the more massive effort required to maintain and enhance SeaMonkey."

In anticipation of one concern I saw raised repeatedly, that is the concern of memory usage from multiple instances of the Gecko engine in each Mozilla component versus apparently one being shared in Mozilla Suite.

These concerns are likely to have been raised by non-programmers with it being seemingly sort of obvious that duplicated code is unnecessary bloat, or perhaps from loading and looking at memory resources and seeing more taken.

An operating system only pages into memory from disk that which is being used. We would have been in big trouble throughout the history of computing if memory had to hold the whole program, although nowadays such huge amounts of memory are required that people may think that.

It is more the case of large amounts of memory being allocated by programs and the operating system for data, not code. We used to have to work with small data buffers too, but with hardware now allowing nearly infinite amounts of memory at a shot to be accessed by programmers, ever approaching infinity amounts of memory are being accessed by programmers. It's painless to them now, and makes for much easier programming.

But in reality, only the code being executed is pulled into memory by the operating system as its needed. The redundant Gecko engine code will sit in multiple .exe's on disk, so if disk space were a concern then there'd be a legitimate concern. We used to have to worry about disk space too, but that is something that really has reached infinity, so no problem there.

One may then point out that more memory has been observed to have been acquired, and the multiple Gecko thing is a pig. Again, this is more data than code. Even with a single instance of code, if you use it for multiple things it's going to grab multiple sections of memory for each use.

So in reality, in theory, because I haven't tried this at home, there's really not that much difference between a single Gecko engine grabbing two memory areas for FF and TB, or two Gecko engines grabbing an area apiece from FF and TB. It's mostly data work space needed to do the job on a web page and email.

And not only is there really no memory difference, but there should be faster performance and less possibility of internal data conflicts with two clean instances of Gecko working FF and TB versus a shared instance, not that there is any conflict in working, debugged code. Someone may very well say that a bunch of Gecko code it is spawned off for each use, and then it becomes clearer that it really doesn't matter if it starts off as two or is spawned off a couple of times from one.

And lastly, the Firefox Classic distro will be able to take advantage of any Mozilla FF, TB, etc. component integration with the Gecko engine that will conditionally compile and bring in focused Gecko code for the component at hand, versus one monolithic engine shared by all. Whether done or not now, there is certainly postential for focused integration with each component that Firefox Classic would inherit on each release.

So the response that two Gecko engines is a liability is that, actually, no, it's a plus.

rd

I too am a long time user of Mozilla, back to the early Netscape days. I'm a huge fan and supporter. I've installed endless amount of computer systems with Mozilla Firefox, Mozilla Thunderbird and Mozilla Suite. Saying this, I'm very disappointed in this decision to drop Mozilla Suite. I understand resources are limited and it does make sense to focus on one product package instead multiple. However why drop a product when the primary products (Firefox / Thunderbird) are not a replacement for the Mozilla Suite product. There is so much more features, control and network capability in Mozilla Suite. I will wait and see how this turns out. I still trust in the Mozilla Foundation and believe they will hopefully see this lack that Mozilla Firefox and Mozilla Thunderbird have and resolve it. I just hope this happens sooner then later. I would love to see IE7 do little impact to the strong growth of Mozilla Firefox and Mozilla Thunderbird. It's nice to see and I hope to see Mozilla go further into the market. It's about time a product is here for the people and developed by the people. Let's continue this trend.

Asa,

I think Mr. Daugherty has some good points, and I would like to respond from the position of a long time (pre .6 Suite) user.

I think the major issue is
1) MoFo shook things up so quickly, with so little public warning, and so ham-handedly. Irregarldess of what they say, there was no warning of this action to the general public. I'm a VORACIOUS reader of technical news on the web, and I have never seen it mentioned once in the 30 or so different sites I visit each day. Yes, MoFo may feel bad about the decision, and they wish they could have done it better, but it seems very suspicious to some of us us that the "knifing" of the suite happened so abruptly, with so little pre-planning for the firestorm. I mean just look at the Mozilla website to see the absurdity of their position.

"We suggest Mozilla 1.7 if you are looking for an all-in-one solution when using the Internet. Large organizations that require an integrated suite (past Netscape Communicator users) should consider moving towards Mozilla 1.7. All others should consider upgrading to Firefox and Thunderbird."
"
Why are they pointing the "large organizations" to a program they damn well knew they were officially ending? Which leads me to point 2:

2) There seems to be little to no recognition of the fundamental differences between a FF/TBird combo and the suite, and it seems that MoFo doesn't care in the slightest. The quote from Mr. Daugherty is quite telling:

"all the patches implemnted to this branch that FF WONTFIX to add all the advanced keyboard behavior and such for desired Suite functionality. My understanding from reading is that most of those patches are already done or not that hard but just refused to be implemented in FF."

I'll lay money that there wouldn't be this kind of outrage if MoFo had come out and said, "We are stopping development of the Suite, however here are our plans to ease the transition from the Suite to FF/TBird". Suite users aren't stupid, and we knew that FF/TBird is the wave of the future. What is galling is that there are features of the Suite, bug related, that FF/MoFo REFUSES to fix. So in truth MoFo is telling us that we have the choice of using a product they no longer support, or switch to an inferior, buggy product (it sounds like something M$ would tell it's users). It doesn't take a genius to know that there are fundamental structural differences between the products; significant enough to at least warrant a plan for proceeding to the future. From the vantage point of many Suite users, it's something that doesn't even appear to be considered.

I personally can't think of anything more damaging to the image of the MoFo than this kind of spastic, reactionary, ill-conceived decision. It shows bad judgement, ill-considered actions and uncertainty for the future, at the worst time because M$ is releasing 7.0 of IE. Confusion in the ranks of it's opponents is something M$ knows how to take advantage of. Lastly, it has poisoned the atmosphere between MoFo, FF/TBird users and the large, ethusiastic group of users that has supported MoFo over the years. What a disaster.

I'm sorry but as a individual long-time user of Mozilla, a Thunderbird user who has advocated Firefox for many others but also as a Mac user working in the corporate world I have to agree with Dave's comments above. I have seen how decisions get made that can condemn a program or platform to irrelevance and just when it seemed a compnay might consider alternate solutions I would imagine this will be a very bad signal about the stability of the Mozilla Foundation. An emotional reaction perhaps, but the expalanation about the 1.8 development is unconvincing to layman's ears.

Exactly the wrong signal at the wrong time.

Chick Foxgrover

Ditto the above 2 comments.

I would have liked to have seen y'all take another year and transition / market the 2 products into a combined new V2.0 product that would be based on an interoperable set of the Aviary products that are finished, cleaned up with some of the above issues resolved, maybe some installer options, etc.
i.e.; Mozilla Suite 2.0, featuring: Mozilla Firefox, TB, SB, NVu, etc.

It seems so simple and sane and obvious to do that.
It's actually what I was expecting to see happen.
In one year we would all be getting united on fully mature birds without this current strife. (or very little - there are always hardcores)

I hope you guys know it's a lot more than the hardcore "Seamonkey Fringe" whom you've alienated here. Especially Corporate & Institutional users.

Firefox would rule the day, "Suite" people could have a new suite.
Goodwill could abound.
Sure, you wouldn't be able to cut back on resources for another year, but it would be very do-able and resources well spent. I think Mozilla is one of the best funded and supported open source projects going, isn't it?
- John

Does anybody read these messages when they are so far down?

Hate is a disease; I won't be a carrier. That said, I'm starting to hate foundations:

http://home.iae.nl/users/lightnet/world/awaken/rewritinghistory.htm
http://www.theforbiddenknowledge.com/hardtruth/rewriting_history.htm
http://www.sweetliberty.org/shadow.htm

Tax-exempt foundations have been taking over the world for as long as there have been taxes.

Expecting a corporate-backed foundation to continue to provide We The People with great free open-source software is like expecting pigs to continue to fly.

The Mozilla Foundation has revealed its true colors.

fascism (fash'iz'm), n. [It. fascismo] - the merger of corporate and government interests and power

Now I find myself hoping nobody does read this far down.

I've been using Mozilla Suite since 2001, and I have advocated it's use to a lot of people. At my current job, I have been working to implement Mozilla/Firefox extensions for our fantasy sports games (which is now going to be cancelled because of the announcement). When I heard Mozilla Foundation was cancelling the Mozilla Suite, I was and still am, very dissappointed. In some ways, I feel very cheated. My feelings must pale to someone who has contributed any code or documentation to the product. Will I use Firefox? No. As for the community based Suite, I have no time to go back to beta testing. I am switching to Opera. Mozilla no more aside from QA testing. I have no time to promote a platform and foundation that has brought down the hammer on the very people who supported them.

Dropping Mozilla Suite is a good decision, because only Firefox has a chance of getting critical-mass market share. Mozilla has been a good and mature product for two years but made hardly any impact,and what we need is > 10% market share that will guarantee we non-IE users are too many to ignore.

I think like the Seamonkey spinoff exactly because the new team might be more eager to listen to proposals of advanced features.

I.e. I've missed the Images button from Netscape 4.x badly. I now use Konqueror because of it. Would love to use something Gecko-based, but the "Opera-line" switch plugins are just not what I need; I want a button to just load images on one page, not toggle them for the next page loaded in the same window.

I lost hope on MoFo doing this a long time ago (it was in Bugzilla even before Mozilla 1.0! It's bug 61710). But perhaps the Seamonkey team will do it? (I'll still want to use another email app, but that theam might even agree to allow an external default mailer...)

Always the same. A community/product that was mainly kept alive by the Mac users for many years develops a Windows version. Ofcourse initial download numbers of Windows users outnumber the Mac-users by at least tenfold! But - for how long? The responsible people smell $$$$$ and abandon the Mac community (Why should a Mac user use Firefox and Thunderbird as there are Safari and Mail?). The big (and only) advantage of Mozilla on the Mac was the All-In-One strategy. There is no alternative to this. Kill this advantage and you'll loose the Mac community.

Bill Gates will respond to Firefox. Once he does the Mac users are gone and the Windows users go back to their beloved monopoly - and mozilla.org is dead!

Great decision, very clever!

I think on of the biggest points of confusion is that these were to be Mozilla.org's premier applications, but there was no mention that the suite was going to be completely cut. When I read "premier," I think this is what's going to be promoted the most, ("First in status or importance"), and not the only application. Also, the roadmap mentioned (and still mentions) releases for 1.8, 1.9a1, and 1.9a2; this does not imply that the last release is 1.7.1 or 1.8B4.

I think transitioning from the Suite to FF/TB is the only thing to do, for all of the reasons stated here and other places. Sure, there's a lot of things that I would like to be fixed with FF and a lot more things I would like to get fixed with TB (is mscott totally alone?), but that's not an argument for the Suite. Neither is the number of WONTFIX bugs. As mentioned it's mostly key-bindings or fixes exist, just not checked in to the core. My own dream is that MoFo would find resources to put into the Lightning project but I guess that has been difficult.

But the decision to drop 1.8 seems very, very strange (almost forced). The reasoning behind choosing this moment to cut the Suite for FF/TB is very flaky if it exists at all. The logical, reasonable thing to do would have been to release 1.8 and drop support for of of the older releases (1.4.x or 1.7.x). Or is 1.8 not even close to good enough to keep supporting? Or is there other reasons not published?

Oh, and I've been using Netscape since 1907, jumped to telnet in -63 and been advocating Mozilla since M12 (mostly on n.p.m.mail-news, n.p.m.seamonkey and to my pet cat). I'm also a system admin in a hospital with 16000 employees and I've been trying to introduce Nvu for three years instead of our current CMS, so I know what every user wants, trust me.. :) (Sorry could'nt resist)

/Kallisti

I have used the Netscape suite and then the Mozilla suite for more than 8 years.
I won't have a problem using Firefox and Thunderbird instead of it, as long as these two work a bit better together, let's say you click on a link inside an email with the right mouse button and there is an option "open in new firefox window". I think it is nothing more than these small things of interoperability between mailtool and browser that made the suite so attractive.

GreetinX and carry on with your good work !
Dom

I posted this on Neil Deakin's Blog and thought it fit:

The compartmentalized approach is nice and I love FireFox for its media attention. It is a good browser as well it should be, look at its parents. The Death of SeaMonkey is a highly dangerous idea in that it is creating a rift in the community. My greatest concern is the damage this whole argument can have on taking away from the OSS browser momentum. Do you think that IE 7 will care whether it tries to snuff out a burning fox or drowned a monkey in the sea? I think this argument needs to be settled quickly and quietly the idea of a “thin” browser FireFox and a suite of tools SeaMonkey joining together is the right path. The community should define the code difference and like comments already posted join Thunderbird, Sunbird and FireFox (with a basic extensions pack) and release as _________ 2.0 you fill in the blank FireFox or Mozilla. If “thin” is what you want in the installer offer the option

“Thin” -- just the browser
“Full”-- the kitchen sink
“Custom” -- what every developer chooses

The argument for FireFox is the press coverage and marketing hype that surrounds that flavor today so an argument could be made that FireFox 2.0 might be just the ticket to take the air out of the IE 7 release. Purest and domain name registrants, I am speaking to you Mozilla____.org/com/biz/us, Developers/Hackers/SourceForgians and the like all know the truth and you have no need to re brand your sites every one will know that at its core this 2.0 browser is Mozilla.

I think the group focus on Firefox and Thunderbird is correct, although the Mozilla 1.7.x roadmap still continue, there are almost bug fixes from Firefox. In my opnion, they could stop the suite development now until Fx and Tb is muture enough. And I hope someday soon the new suite based on Fx and Tb would be back as Mozilla 2. For a East-Asian, Tb, Nvu, and even Fx still have some character problems, as these couldn't happened on Mozilla Suite. As I always use Fx, the Suite still in my computer.

I use whatever I need to get my work done, which has included most versions of IE, Netscape up through 6, Opera up through 4, and Mozilla from .9 to current. As I have over 3 gigabytes of email, I have never been able to find anything other than the messenger component of the suite that would handle it. I will eventually get around to testing TB, but it will take as much as a week to thoroughly test, and I find it difficult to cut out that much time for the purpose. I have tried FireFox repeatedly, and it is a pale shadow of the Mozilla browser, at least for a user like me.

In my almost 4 decades in this business, I have seen a lot of stupid stunts, but this cutoff of the Mozilla Suite ranks right up there with the stupidest. There is absolutely nothing in FF that could not have been implemented from the Mozilla base. If you want a better set of defaults or fewer user options, then send out a version with those defaults and that set of options. Put on a skinning mechanism or create an overall better extension interface. All those things are possible. What is not possible is to throw away the base and the stability on which corporate acceptance is based in favor of an incompetent and immature product, easily knocked off by M$. A consumer version of a mature and continuing product is an entirely different thing from what we have with FF. M$, with all their distribution advantages and monopolistic base, can barely get away with large jumpshifts. XP was a large meal that took the "snake" a while to digest. Now, M$ knows that there are or will be millions and millions of users who will not care much what OS supports the browser of their preference, so they will strike hard at the consumer version of any alternative browser. What they cannot so easily strike at is the investments that corporations make in development based on a myriad of details in a product. All the integration work done to hook the browser into what they do elsewhere in their development work will insure that they have their employees using the browser with which they have integrated. Those people will use that browser at work and at home, and so will their families and possibly many of their friends. Those affinities will not waver very much with whatever is the latest "hot" item. FireFox has about hit the top of it's "craze phaze". I do not think that the FF developers can keep pace with M$ if IE 7.0 is followed by further "tactical" releases designed to feature match or exceed. IE will still come with the OS, and most people, regardless of their access to higher bandwidth, will still not download and install anything that they don't have to, and certainly nothing like the current FireFox non-install. Consumers are fickle or uncaring, and either spells death to those who pursue them without a long term strategy to spread their base market. FireFox is a bit of spring growth that violates the topiary. It will be trimmed back. If there is nothing left underneath, the plant will die.

My vote would be to leave FireFox out there to die while building whatever changes to the base needed to feature capture it. FireFox is too weak to stand on it's own and it's lack of legacy support will kill the base. Dump it.

The comparison of downloads of Firefox vs downloads of the Mozilla Suite seems a bit misleading to me.

For one thing, MoFo has been promoting the hell out of Firefox. The Mozilla Suite has never been given that level of promotion. Never.

For over a year now, when you go to Mozilla.org to download Mozilla, you are presented with a bunch of hype on Firefox and an easily accessible download link. The average person does not realize that Mozilla has produced multiple browser products. If I verbally recommend that someone download and use the Mozilla Suite, more than likely they are going to end up downloading Firefox because MoFo has made it seem like Firefox is the only Mozilla browser option.

Millions of people are currently using various versions of the Mozilla Suite; not everyone upgrades their Mozilla Suite installation every time a new release comes out. Yet somehow, MoFo thinks it reasonable to compare the number of Mozilla Suite downloads to the Firefox 1.0 downloads.

Also, people like me who have been using the Mozilla Suite for years have downloaded Firefox in order to check it out, but I still VERY MUCH prefer the Mozilla Suite. Firefox is on my laptop, but I do not use it. However, the Mozilla Suite is on all of the computers at my office and all of the computers at my house. One download of the Mozilla Suite installed dozens of times and used daily compared to one download of Firefox installed once and not used at all.

Firefox may be getting more converts from IE right now than the Mozilla Suite, but how many of those converts were ever made aware of the Mozilla Suite? If MoFo presented the 2 equally on the mozilla.org website and gave users a clear choice, who knows how many would choose which?

Ever since phoenix was first conceived, it has been clear that it was preferred by certain MoFo powers that be and thus the favored child was given the spotlight. Mozilla was better than IE, so of course, even the early betas of Firefox were also better than IE, but Firefox still has a whole lot of growing up to do before it can truly compete with the Mozilla Suite.

I find the whole situation to be rather sad.

Probably pointless, but I feel the need to try and redress the balance of comments at least slightly.

I used to alternate between Opera and the Suite. Opera is smaller, lighter, and faster. I was using the suite from ... about 0.6 onwards, I think.

I can't think of anything the suite had which Firefox doesn't which I actually miss, or use. Some things I'm actually actively glad aren't there any more.

As a result, I haven't started Opera now for months.

So while there may be a number of suite fans bemoaning Firefox's lack of options, or lack of feature X, I actually think that Ben (and the others) generally took out the *right* options - the ones that most people won't use.

This isn't to deny that Firefox development does have issues. More patch reviewers would be highly useful, as would an equivalent to the 'kernel janitor' or KDE's "junior jobs" - something where people can start working, knowing that the job has been judged about the right size for someone to get familiar with the project.

It is clear to me that the focus at MoFo is the hacker hotshots who do not understand markets or continuity in a product. I can see a need for something that does what FF does, but not FF. As a result, I will gladly do anything in my power to destroy FF until the MoFo folks start to understand that the way forward is not to emasculate a good product for a piece of consumer junk. If they want to put forward a release of the suite browser that looks and acts like FF, I will be happy to use that in many of my accounts if they wish it, but until something like that comes forward, I will install only Mozilla in my machine and any accounts of mine. In addition, I will continue to give FF the bad report it deserves. Since I have tested it several times, giving it that bad report will be honest and heartfelt. I suspect that there are a lot of us out here who will do the same. Nasty surprises like this deserve only nasty responses.