It seems like a lot of relative new-comers to Mozilla (and a couple of old-timers) believe that my only goal in life is to kill Seamonkey, seemingly because either I think it sucks or I think it threatens Thunderbird and Firefox. I thought I'd spend a few overly-defensive minutes and recount some of my history on this project with the hope that folks will see that's just not the case.
In the spring and summer of 1998 I was downloading binaries of the Mozilla Classic code. Back then, you couldn't get any binaries from mozilla.org so I had to hunt them down at a few ftp repositories that hosted semi-regular "pre-compiled binaries." (Anyone else here remember Mike Wynholds's FTP and poking npm.general posts nearly every day to see if he had a new binary?) Soon, Jason Kersey, now of Mozillazine fame, had started a very cool site called mozBin that attempted to maintain links to the latest of these early community builds, including Mike's, so me and the handful of other early "community testers" could get new builds pretty frequently.
I was a huge fan of the (now "classic") next-generation Communicator that was being developed and I spent more hours than I can count downloading binaries with my US Robotics Sportster 28.8 modem onto a Dell P100 with 32 MB of RAM. Not only was downloading a painful task but running the builds, even when I could score non-debug builds, was an exercise in both faith and patience (45 second start-up times :| When mozilla.org started providing binaries toward the end of 1998 and the transition to NGLayout and XPFE was starting to pick up steam, I was downloading at least a half dozen builds a week.
I loved Seamonkey. I loved the idea of XPFE and even the hard to love early Apprunner implementation. I spent hours and hours talking on IRC with developers about XPFE problems and trying to get early Messenger to work so I could wean myself off of 4.x completely. By M3 or M4 I was fully migrated to Apprunner nightly builds for browsing (not a great experience, let me tell you) and by M9 or M10 I was fully migrated to MailNews nightly builds. I don't think that anyone but a couple of Netscape Mail engineers had made that move as early as I did.
You couldn't have found a bigger fan of Seamonkey anywhere. You couldn't find a more staunch defender of XUL and XPFE (except maybe Chris and the one or two others that would take on Bruce at Mozillazine :-) I devoted the entirety of my evenings and weekends the following year working to build an open source community around the Seamonkey project -- Seamonkey had become a true labor of love.
By the time M16 and M17 rolled around, I had been hired and was working full-time for mozilla.org and it was becoming clear that the time had come for the Netscape 6 product and the mozilla.org 1.0 release to part ways. I became one of the original drivers@mozilla.org to help define the requirements for Mozilla 1.0 and to help drive releases on the road to 1.0 and beyond.
Since then, I've spent a significant amount of my time at Mozilla working long weeks and late nights, busting my butt to ship about 70 Seamonkey releases. Yes, 70 release cycles of building buglists, driving those buglists, assembling testing, shipping, collecting feedback and building the next buglist. I have been devoted to shipping high-quality Seamonkey releases for almost 5 years and I couldn't have done that if I didn't believe in Seamonkey, if I didn't love it.
Two and a half years after the release of Mozilla 1.0, most estimates of of marketshare put Mozilla 1.x between 2% and 3%.
I was very involved when Firefox was born (then m/b) and saw the potential for this new application to take the Mozilla project, the standards-based Gecko rendering technologies, and Open Source much further than Seamonkey had been able. I was quick to step in to help with project management and releasing and by the time we got to Phoenix 0.5, it was clear to me that this app was going to deliver Gecko to more desktops, doing more for the Mozilla project and our goals of preserving choice and building an open, standards-based, web than anything we'd done to date. I've spent the last three years working to make that potential into a reality -- while still fully committed to delivering great Seamonkey releases on a regular basis.
Firefox 1.0 shipped about 30 million downloads in the first 4 months it's been available and is achieving market penetration at about 15 times the rate that Seamonkey did over the last two and a half years. While Seamonkey leveled out at around 2-3%, Firefox has already gained about 6% and clearly has a momentum that Seamonkey never had and I don't believe could ever have.
I well understand that there are some long-time contributors and a non-trivial number of Seamonkey users who haven't yet made the migration to Firefox. I plan to do what I can to support them with regular security updates to the 1.7 release for users and assistance to the new team of contributors who want to take Seamonkey forward.
Like probably everyone else working on Mozilla projects, I'm already overloaded but that's never stopped me before from taking on additional work so I'll be doing what I can to work with the new team Seamonkey to help them get off the ground and develop their project and release planning.
I'm here to help all of the Mozilla efforts and that includes Seamonkey just like it includes Minimo, Camino, Bugzilla, and all of the other projects. My primary focus is on the Firefox and Thunderbird applications, but I put in lots of evening and weekend hours doing Mozilla work that isn't directly related to my primary responsibilities. I've talked with several of the folks emerging as early leadership in the Seamonkey project and as long as they want my help, and as long as I feel like it's appreciated, I'm here to give it.
If you still want to curse me in the comments or elsewhere, maybe you should consider whether it benefits Seamonkey to turn away one of it's oldest and most ardent supporters -- and the guy that knows more than probably any one else about how to ship successful Seamonkey releases.
Posted by asa at March 13, 2005 03:46 PMYou forgot to mention the BuildBar at mozillaZine. :) That must’ve taken up a lot of time each day. Your (almost-) daily reports are what gave me the confidence to start using the SeaMonkey nightlies.
Posted by: Minh Nguyễn on March 13, 2005 07:18 PMI understand why the org decided to put their focus on Firefox. I was my concerned with having my cool Suite than having a browser with a marketshare, although I see the importance of having a program with actual users.
I have always laughed that somebody should start a "Mozilla - Back in the Day" forum. People seem to have a nostalgic feeling with the Suite. I have seen several people go.. "I've been using the suite since build ###" I think its just nice to know that a open source project has remained popular for so many years.
*hugs*
Posted by: larfnarf on March 13, 2005 08:41 PMI totally and completely agree with everything you say here, Asa. People need to realize that times change, the world changes, etc. Seamonkey served a great purpose, but Firefox is obviously what the majority of the market prefers, and with limited resources, the Foundation has to make tough choices. Seamonkey isn't being killed, it's being put up for adoption. If the community can't come up with the people to take care of it, then maybe it's time really has come. It's very easy to say "take care of this," but it's always easier said than done.
Posted by: Grey Hodge on March 14, 2005 12:17 AMI don't think anybody could deny your commitment to seamonkey and the Mozilla project in general.
I too also followed the project from the beginning but never had the time to get involved to the extent that you did, it was great when we heard that Netscape were paying you to work on the Mozilla project full time and even though Netscape were paying you you still did a great job representing the community.
Your buildbar was to Seamonkey what the burning edge is to Firefox, in fact in those days it was more important because the stability of Gecko could fluctuate on a day to day basis.
Just like you I seen the early potential in Mozilla despite the fact most people around me were saying how bad it was, I struggled by with the early milestones knowing that my talkback crash reports and occaisional bugzilla report would do something to improve the quality of the product.
Eventually by the 0.9.x releases I had a limited success converting people to Mozilla, some of them prefer the suite to this day others (like me) mostly use Firefox.
To keep the people happy that still use it I'd like to see the suite survive (and may try to help make that happen if time permits), but I do believe that Firefox is the best choice for the majority of people. Some of those people that I failed to convert to mozilla had already heard of Firefox before I even recommended it to them. For a number of reasons Firefox is just an easier sell.
But just like some people would prefer to pay for Opera as they consider that the best browser, other people prefer the suite to Firefox or on the Mac Camino to Firefox, choice is good and as long as it's a standards compliant choice then they should be encouraged.
Posted by: Dave on March 14, 2005 01:07 AMI think that shifting development focus to FF/TB is well justified (even though I am a convinced user of the suite), since MoFo must cope with their limited resources. Given Asa's large contributions to seamonkey, we definitely should not blame him for shifting his attention to even more promising projects.
However, I found that this transition was announced with a somewhat unsettling timing. A more proper moment of discontinuation of seamonkey would have coincided with creation of a new stable branch, e.g., with the release of Mozilla 1.7. Looking at the release notes http://www.mozilla.org/releases/mozilla1.7/, nothing indicated that this was going to be the last stable branch. (But, of course, this was before the huge success of Firefox.)
How about the following solution? MoFo releases a version 1.8 of Mozilla suite and defines it as the new (and last) stable branch, replacing 1.7. This would have the following advantages:
* Little extra support work for MoFo, since 1.7 could be phased out,
* Developers contributing to 1.8beta would be happy,
* Timing of discontinuation matches release cycle,
* Provides a well-defined point to hand over development lead to community,
* A prominent message could be placed in the release notes, defining it as last official release.
This would require only one additional release (apart from maybe a very urgent security update to 1.7) and would not require any additional long-term commitments.
Yeah, the only mistake to do if you're finding out you're running low on resources is to keep developing sucky versions of Seamonkey AND Firefox. You obviously only have resources for one, and I'm very happy you keep using a good judgement when developing web browsers. It's less about stopping to develop Seamonkey for me, but moving on. However, I know it's normal among many people to become angry when their favorite software is abandoned, that's normal. BUT it's not normal to react like the world is falling down on them; so please discuss the matter like adults. :-)
Posted by: Jugalator on March 14, 2005 12:08 PMHansres: "MoFo releases a version 1.8 of Mozilla suite and defines it as the new (and last) stable branch, replacing 1.7"
The trouble with that is that they had/have already committed to maintaining 1.7 as a stable branch - to break that promise and force people relying on 1.7 being an updated stable branch to move would also cause problems. Anyway, it is too late to propose solutions now - they have now made the decisions and announcements, to do something different now would again cause problems. The decisions and communication should have been handled better, and we can continue to hope that those things will be better in future, but for this particular issue it's best for everyone to move forward rather than focusing on what has already happened.
Posted by: michaell on March 14, 2005 12:29 PMmichaell: Thank you for your comments!
I thought there was the following pattern of long-lived ("a year minimum") stable releases.
So a Mozilla 1.8 June 2005 release would perfectly fit into this pattern. But you explained that there are additional commitments to 1.7 that I was not aware of...
Further, I assume that Asa will help the newly forming team to release seamonkey 1.8. So additional benefits of my above suggestion are (regardles of a continuation of 1.7) that
* MoFo invests resource into releasing 1.8 anyway, so they could make it official, and
* MoFo would endorse 1.8 of the release team, which would increase the acceptance of the new team.
Some people (including Asa perhaps?) think that I'm one of those 'and a couple of old-timers' but I'm clearly not. Sure, I use the suite/seamonkey every day, and I'm not alone, and we hate to see the *official releases* go away.
Sure, the Seamonkey is not death and the Mozilla Foundation supports a group of volunteers that like to continue to work on it, which is really great, but some people still associate the lack of official releases with a death sentence for Seamonkey, that's what I was trying to address!
/HJ
Posted by: HJ on March 15, 2005 02:30 AMI too remember the early Milestone builds...what a trainwreck some of those were!
I was pretty fanatical about Mozilla (just around my friends and irc circle, not actually involved like you :)), and was sure that it would become a huge movement...however, nobody but me ever seemed to get into the Suite like I did :(
Eventually, I lost touch with the suite, trying it when a new milestone or point release came out and using it for a little while, but I always switched back to IE and Konqueror (and sometimes Netscape 4.x when I was running linux). Firefox seemed to gain a lot of steam very early, it had a lot more support, it just plain looked good and felt new. It really made it a pleasure to browse the web again, something the suite never did to me. If it wasn't for Firefox, I'd still be a netscape guy trapped in IE land, which wasn't very comfortable because IE just doesn't feel right to me.
Posted by: Byron Roush on March 15, 2005 12:27 PMMozilla has been a wonderful bit of work, it is very sad to see it being "dropped" but thank you for getting it this far.
The take up of Firefox is stunning, congratulations, so I can understand the resources argument, sort of. Surely the seamonkey team will hit the same resources problem?
Has there been any debate about fund raising? I donated a tiny amount a while back but not since as I sort of thought things were stable and the big boys were helping out. I would gladly contribute a tiny amount again if I thought that it may help to keep the Mozilla Suite going. And a tiny amount x how many must mount up to something useful?
Posted by: Richard on March 16, 2005 12:29 PM
