Burning Chrome

Firefox is 1.0, Thunderbird is 1.0... next?

There are a few Mozilla-based products I know of which I have a great interest in, and I personally would like to see a deeper interest from the Mozilla community in 2005. They are:

• N|Vu

  Disruptive Innovations has made some good progress along these lines, I think. Their spinoff of Mozilla Composer should reach version 0.7 next week, per a brief comment by Daniel Glazman. Personally, I await the day that N|Vu supports the tools mozilla.org does (lxr for the public most especially) and/or starts checking their code into the Mozilla tree... so I can rip it to shreds and start offering bug patches for issues that irritate me. (In an earlier weblog, Mr. Glazman implied N|Vu 0.7 would potentially be stable enough for the community-at-large to work on, or localize, or something like that. I hope he still thinks so.)

• An XML editor

  Something else Disruptive Innovations is apparently working on, but hasn't made any releases on. I remember this from a weblog comment Mr. Glazman made, and I am waiting fervently to sink my teeth into whatever he's putting together. (I've been of the opinion for a little while now that XML editing in Mozilla is a Holy Grail type of application.)

• Mozilla Sunbird / Calendar

  I haven't followed this one that closely, but from seeing the 0.2-ish releases, I can tell this will be a "mosaic killer app" (pun intended) for the future. I briefly evaluated it for a previous employer, and concluded that at the time it wasn't capable of handling the important application of group calendaring. This one is hosted and sponsored by the Mozilla Foundation, and I would strongly encourage everyone who's looking for the next big thing to hack to go after it.

Although I wanted to plug products I am personally involved in, such as my own abacus and serverpost projects and DOM Inspector, I felt that would not be fair. These projects have at best minimal involvement from the community, and they truly are developer applications not meant for the end-user. Abacus might reach that end-user-targeting someday; the others never will. Abacus and N|Vu combined would be really slick, but I can't quite get them to work together and I haven't spent the time to figure out why.