Hi Ben, I thought I would share my answer to your messages with the Mandrake crowd and see what they make of it. Here it goes. .... Bear in mind that Mozilla is not Netscape 5.0. I am not sure if they share much if any code at all. I suspect that Netscape 5.0 will have SOME of Mozilla's work on it. The goals are totally different. Mozilla's goal is to have a slim, fast, efficient, standards compliant browser/email/news/java platform with a good set of API's for applications that want to hook into their code. This is the end result of the Open-Source/GPL crew that is working on it. Netscape/AOL's goal is a Browser that features shopping sites, channel bars (for advertising and shopping), and all sorts of bells, whistles and plug ins. For instance, things like Netscape Radio with its advertising, the built in MP3 decoder with sites that will SELL you the MP3 music, and all sorts of active content for businesses to put stuff on your screen, yours speakers and your brain. The difference will be about 2 MB vs 23 MB size. Make no mistake, Netscape 5.0 is NOT Mozilla. What begs the question is to what extent are the two camps committed to each other. I doubt that Netscape/AOL has any interest in the Mozilla project other than it can save them from paying to develop future Netscape versions or functionality. I think that AOL's vision is to have the core functionality of their future browsers be the Mozilla engine. For us Linux users, I seriously doubt that we are interested much in the additional 21 MB of code designed to promote the interests of advertising and marketing companies. The squabbles between AOL and the Mozilla project are rooted on this. You will hear a lot of protests that my words are off-base or not true, but every one of those voices has vested interest in masking the truth. Opera, with its price tag of about $40 can afford to develop a browser that is free of all the marketing stuff, which is why so far it fits on a floppy. While its not open source, and fully commercial, it is a stand-alone product that does not depend on free give away. Both Netscape and Microsoft give their browsers away for free. When did this all start? Answer: When the browsers became a gateway for advertising. Like "search buttons" that lead to advertising sites. Or lead to search engines that prioritize and order the search results based on the amount of money they are paid for. Or bookmarks that are predefined for you and is nothing but a listing of advertisers. Or for the Netcenter page showing on the email page when no message is selected, etc. etc. ad-nauseam. As both Mozilla, now at milestone 10, and Netscape 5.0 approach release date, you will see a lot of this come to a head. You will see either a bloated Mozilla, or a Netscape 5.0 that takes over their coding and embelishes it, or the two camps split and Mozilla becomes a force of its own. Then they lose the AOL money and who knows what happens next. My take on it is that ALL of us will be losers on this whole fiasco. Stay tuned, we will see this all work out by year's end most likely. -- Ramon Gandia ============= Sysadmin ============== Nook Net http://www.nook.net [EMAIL PROTECTED] 285 West First Avenue tel. 907-443-7575 P.O. Box 970 fax. 907-443-2487 Nome, Alaska 99762-0970 ==== Alaska Toll Free. 888-443-7525
