end of netscape
First IE, and now Netscape... looks like the two major browsers will not have any real releases again. That could mean that people just continue to use old browsers. Or maybe they’ll start looking to browsers that *are* still in development, like Mozilla’s Firebird. Mozilla has becoming its own foundation, with funding from AOL, its parent company. This should be a good thing, to keep development going.
I guess I am pleasantly surprised by this news. I can’t think of a better scenario as far as Moz is concerned. I’m not so keen that the major browsers have halted production, but at least there is still an alternative.
Along this same idea, I keep thinking back to how happy I was to find MT after GM had stopped doing any upgrades. It was such a happy surprised to find a program that had all of the features I was using in GM, but STILL in development. I hope that people using the outdated browsers will get the same joy when finding Mozilla, Opera, or Safari. 
Comments
IE is the most popular browser by far - I hadn’t heard they were going to quit developing it. I’d been hearing rumblings a while back of Netscape no longer being a focus for AOL (which has left those of us who are editors at the Open Directory Project a little nervous), but I didn’t know IE was about to get it. I think Opera will be safe for a while, at least; unfortunately many sites don’t work in Mozilla for me, and so it’ll be hard to make that switch fully until there’s more compatibility. (On site designers' parts, that is - Mozilla itself is just fine, it’s the dodos out there who insist on making their sites only compliant with IE that need to get a clue!)
Posted by: Meredith | July 18, 2003 05:57 AM
Yeah, I have a friend who worked for Netscape and was one of the ones who were just laid off.. I do not know if he’ll continue to contribute to Mozilla but Mozilla’s an open source project, meaning it will continue on as long as there are people wanting to contribute. So like a Linux thing. Of course I may be clueless. I’ll talk to my Netscape friend and ask him what of the future of Mozilla as he sees it. And I’ll get back to you on what he says
Posted by: Christine | July 18, 2003 06:15 AM
The Mozilla foundation is not neccessarily a good thing. They got an initial $2M from Mozilla, and $300k from Mitch Kapor, but seeing as Netscape is laying of the entire staff working on Mozilla, those $2.3M isn’t going to last too long.
Having said that, the demise of MSIE as an individual product is a good thing, since it’ll probably result in a browser market where more standard-compliant browsers like Safari, Mozilla, Konqueror and Opera all have a chance of taking over the market.
Posted by: Arve | July 19, 2003 01:47 PM