"Bill Lipa" <nospam@nospam> wrote in message 3A4E3B83.6080104@nospam">news:3A4E3B83.6080104@nospam...
> It still makes sense to describe Mozilla as a web browser, even if it
> isn't 100% accurate. "Web browser" is succinct and easy to understand,
> while "open-source internet application framework" is vague and
> effectively meaningless.
>
> The web browser component of Mozilla is the most significant piece to an
> end user.
>
I agree totally. Why then is the development of a usable browser not a
priority for developers. Recent discussion on irc.mozilla.org have convinced
me of a few things
1. People, both developers and other interested parties are getting very
bored with mozilla as a project. The priorities and motivations of those
involved are now being seriously questioned.
2. Increasingly developers don't even want to acknowledge that mozilla is a
web browser.
3. There are, according to a developer, and I quote 'more bugs in mozilla's
code, than in any other project he has worked on'. Furthermore, the rate at
which these bugs are being addressed is insufficient to see mozilla become
fully usable as a browser for the foreseeable future.
mozilla.org tells us of the importance of standards compliance in a web
browser, and how propiertry extensions to these standards are essentially
threatening the very ethos of the Internet. This is very true, Microsoft
could in the next few years own the web. More and more developers are drawn
to Microsoft's bastardised HTML as a design model, if Microsoft ever starts
giving front-page away free(it has been discussed within MS), that could see
the situation worsen even more quickly
Mozilla could play a part in stopping this from happening, but given the
rate of progress, and the emphasis on creating a 'application development
framework' rather than what 99% of people want from the project a light
weight web browser, this seems unlikely.
