Henri Sivonen wrote:
> In article <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>, Gervase Markham
> <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
>
>> Again, as I understand the way things are working, Mozilla is a
>> developers product - other companies - Netscape, Nokia, Beonex - take the
>> code and make products out of it. _Those_ products are for end-users. At
>> least, that's what I've always been told...
>
> Why couldn't Mozilla-the-developer-product have a really great UI ready
> for vendors to package? (AFAIK, the UIs of both Netscape and Beonex are
> practically what is in Mozilla.)
<acknowledging the problem> Our UI could be better.
<quoting resource shortage> We have a resource shortage.
But there is another piece here that I think is important. There are
going to be (hopefully) more than just one class of browser distributors
(there will also be folks distributing things that are not browsers but
are built on mozilla technologies, saving that discussion for later). I
think there will at least three classes of browser distros.
The first one is the 'browser brander'. They just take mozilla, drop in
a branded throbber, a branded start page and splash screen, maybe even a
branded theme (not to be confused with new XUL), etc and release it. I
think that Beonex and Netscape 6 fall into this catagory. For these
folks it is important that Mozilla have a good default UI.
A second class of distributor like Alphanumerica who built Aphrodite are
creating entirely new Browsers with brand new XUL that are not
compatable with the Mozilla default FE (can't share themes, etc.) For
this group of developers/distributors it is not important that our FE is
totally polished and kewl but it is important that the UI be
understandable, discoverable easy to learn, easy to modify. I'm not
talking about themes here (CSS and images) but the underlying XUL.
A third catagory of distributor is the 'embedder'. They take a piece of
mozilla technology like the layout component and embed it in thier
product (maybe a browser like Galeon or a software environment like
Nautilus). For this group of Mozilla consumers the default Mozilla UI
probably isn't important at all. I imagine that the important things to
them are removing XUL from layout and stuff like that.
My point is that mozilla has more than one type of consumer that it
needs to satisfy.
-Asa
>
> (I know I shouldn't complain, because I am not providing a better UI
> myself, but denying the existence of the problem is more annoying than
> acknowledging the problem and quoting resource shortage.)
