Carl Parrish: your view on new Mozilla roadmap

[Carl Parrish]

Well money talks...
During my presentation I mentioned that several big companies want to
develop Mozilla applications but didn't want the bloat that today the
entire platform requires. I also mentioned that most embedded devise
makers loved the idea of Mozilla but couldn't get past the size. Well
enough of these have now come together to offer to support mozilla
changing and that's the reason for the roadmap. (note that one of the co
authors of this David Hyatt, is also one of the lead developers of
safari). 
Please note that this is *only* a proposal The 11 people staff of
Mozilla.org (5 paid for by netscape) all believe in it but several other
companies are contributing to Mozilla and will also have to "buy in". I
don't really think this is going to be a problem but want to stress this
so that if a few months down the road you don't see any changes you'll
understand why.  
In the big picture if we're able to swing this it could be seen as 
proof that open source projects can change faster than their proprietary
counterparts. Phoenix was a *very* good idea and exactly the kind of
innovation that can prove the open source concept. This actually makes
Mozilla *more* of development environment. Most platforms are componet
based and the only thing that kept Mozilla from being was that it legacy
of being a browser. Now (if the new proposal is inacted) the Mozilla
team can work closer to how the Java team works. If you only want to
work on the mail team (thunderbird) you can and don't ever have to learn
anything about the composer (there is a proposed name for the new
composer but I can't remember). Also you'll be able to swap composer /
mail tool / IM *much* easier. Calendar is going to be a "stand alone"
project and in theory so will every piece of the suite. Notice that now
with phx being the browser we now can speak easier. One of the hardest
things to do as a Mozilla Technology Evangelist is to get people to
understand the difference between Mozilla the platform, Mozilla the
browser and Mozilla the application suite. Now will have Phoenix the
browser, Netscape (or whomever) the application suite, and Mozilla the
platform. I expect there will be several different applications suites
sort of like we have distro for Linux. Made up of several Mozilla
applications. So for example for a Netscape user hopefully they won't
notice any changes. They will download Netscape and by default they will
have all the tools they had before. However for people interested in
downloading directly from Mozilla you'll be able to pick up (and leave)
whatever you want. This is actually pushing us toward Mozilla 2.0 but
nobody seems to want to call it that yet. 

So my personal thoughts? Good idea makes it *much* easier to push
Mozilla as a platform. Will allow us to compete with Opera etc much
better and will allow people who just want to work on the browser to
simply work on the browser. What I don't like (and these are minor
things) is while I believe in the new code submission format (its been
proven to work with m/b, phoenix, and chimera) it will make it harder
for me _personally_ to get code in. But I'll just suck it in and deal
with it. My *major* problem with this proposal is its essentially
crippling XUL (my favorite componet). Now hopefully this will only be
for a short time. Phoenix version of XUL has some nice features. But 1)
now I have to relearn XUL and 2) the phx version doesn't have anywhere
*near* as many tags. So I'm concerned about current XUL apps I have out
there and how will I create new apps without these tags. But like I said
that's a short term problem and a minor one at that. Overall I'm hopeful
this will works  If I didn't answer you question let me know and I'll
try again. <g>. Also I'll be adding my thoughts to my blogger at
http://www.carlparrish.com

Carl Parrish (cparrish@carlparrish.com)
http://www.carlparrish.com
---
Registered Linux User #295761 http://counter.li.org



On Wed, 2003-04-02 at 19:49, Dennis Kibbe wrote:
> After Carl's presentation on Mozilla last month the new roadmap made public
> today seems like a U-turn for the project. What is your perpective Carl? Is
> Mozilla no longer aiming to be a development environment? Browsing (Phoenix) and
> mail (Minotaur) to be split? What about calendar and the other projects?
> 
> Help us understand, Carl.
> 
> Dennis Kibbe
> 
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