* John Welch <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> [001127 21:04]:
> Okay...you are *seriously* going to sit there and tell me that AOL can't
> afford to do native UI FE's on more than one platform. That is *very* close
> to insulting my intelligence. AOL is damn near bigger than Microsoft at this
> point, heck they may BE bigger than MS, and MS has *zero* problems writing a
> browser that runs natively on more than one platform...hell, they do it with
> a browser, an email client, a PIM, an OFFICE SUITE, and games.
And how many platforms does Microsoft do development. A whole whopping
total of 2! Windows and MacOS. Also, Microsoft is a software company
and AOL is a isp or something (i dunno but it's not a software company)
so you can't really compare the sizes of the companies. Although both
of them seem to have marketing departments bigger than the software dev.
I wouldn't say that MS has *zero* problems. It seems to me they have a
lot of problems developing even on the platform that they designed and
implemented.
> And oddly
> enough, the Mac version of IE and OE are *better*, more compliant, and more
> capable than their windows counterparts, and windows has nothing from MS
> that can touch Entourage.
And why is it that the Windows and Mac versions are different? Because
they are not cross-platform and have to be designed and implemented
separately. For Microsoft to add even one more platform they would
would have to increase their dev staff by 50%. Each platform has to
have a whole separate team.
> Please, you want to tell me AOL is having a tough time finding coders, that
> I'll believe. But don't try to tell me AOL *can't afford* it. That's just
> crap.
I won't argue with you there. AOL makes tons of money off their
low-quality service. The modem to user ratio was approximately 1/4 the
ratio of a normal isp's in the last article I read. But I don't think it
would be in the best interests of AOL's stockholders to put huge amounts
of money into Netscape for multiple platforms though like you were
wanting.
> And since Mozilla is theoretically paying none of the coders, then the only
> limiting resource there is people.
And the mozilla contributers only work on what they want to work on. It
doesn't matter what other people want. The individual contributer makes
the decision.
> > "John Welch" wrote:
> >>>> And as far as the sometimes - voice threat of "without XUL, it would
> > have
> >>>> been windows - only"...riiiggght. Suuuuuure. Netscape is stupid enough
> > to
> >>>> ignore the platforms where they still have customers and a market share
> > that
> >>>> isn't a joke.
I can almost guarantee you that it would definitely only have been on one
or two platforms. And I don't know if Mac would have been one of them.
If Netscape had to pick they would be best going with Windows and some
form of *nix. That would have enabled them to port to MacOSX easily
when it came out. But I really doubt that they would have put much
effort into the MacOS 9 and earlier platform. Luckily they chose to go
cross-platform and we don't have to worry about any of this.
> >>> We didn't say it. Mike Pinkerton, one of the head Mac weenies (his
> >>> words, not mine) at Netscape, said it. No XUL, no Mac or Linux.
David
