4/02/2003 04:24:00 PM
Blake, in a post on MozillaZine alluded to a major change coming to Phoenix. Actually, it's more of a major change to Mozilla. As covered on MozillaZine and Slashdot, the roadmap has changed.
Here is my interpretation of the news: Think of it more as the traditional bloated Mozilla Suite going away. There will be no more Mozilla Suite of tied applications after they finish Moz 1.4. Instead, it will be Phoenix, Thunderbird, Calendar, Chatzilla, and Composer. Phoenix will be the official Mozilla Browser. The others will be stand-alone applications that can also integrate with each other. The GRE will be instrumental. DOM Inspector and Venkman (the Javascript Debugger) will become add-ons to Phoenix.
This will involve a lot of work including unforking Phoenix and porting many of its enhancements to the tree. There is also going to be some shaking up in ownership which may help changes get implemented faster. I think this is a Good ThingTM for Phoenix, mostly because it has really stagnated since 0.5.
The name change for Phoenix is imminent, so I'll be posting again soon. In case you missed it, on April 1st David Tenser updated the front page of the Phoenix website and Phoenix Help saying that the new name was Phallus (ranked the worst of all names in a Poll). Alex Bishop even updated MozillaZine to play along. My favorite thread about the topic is here.
