7/16/2003 04:23:00 AM
Mozilla will never die because it is open source and there seems to be a large enough community that want to keep working on it. But now AOL has officially killed Netscape. Sure, they've pledged $2 million and some resources, but they've already fired employees or moved them to other projects. A lot of jobs are no more. "The company plans to continue to support current versions of the Netscape browser and the Netscape Web portal," according to CNet. The current versions, but that says nothing about how long or if it will get any enhancements.
AOL surrendered to Microsoft.
Rising from the ashes is the Mozilla Foundation. This non-profit organization is just a rebranded Mozilla.org. The PR of now being "more aggressively toward new distribution channels, new end-user markets, and better incorporation of developer-driven innovations" means they need to get funding.
Oh, sure, there will still be contributions by Unix and Linux platforms, but Apple has gone with Safari and Microsoft will only be releasing Internet Explorer with new versions of Windows. The only commercial cross-platform browser left is Opera.
I've used Opera and really liked quite a few things about it, but it just wasn't a right fit at the time. I made the move to Mozilla somewhere in the 0.9.x branch and on to Firebird with their 0.3 milestone. Mozilla Firebird still has a long way to go, but has not majorly let me down yet.
Even though AOL made Compuserve gecko-based, I have no idea what will happen in the future. Their deal to embed IE can only really apply to Windows, so any Mac or Linux offering they make will have to use something else. Assuming they even make an offering and don't decide that those markets aren't of value. 50 people were layed off so far.
The name of Netscape is still known much more than Mozilla. That will change some day. For now I think this is a big blow to the project.
