Goddamn it. I just spent ten years watching them rename everything “Mozilla” to “Firefox.” Am I now gonna spend the next ten years watching them change it all back
Jason Lefkowitz
Goddamn it. I just spent ten years watching them rename everything “Mozilla” to “Firefox.” Am I now gonna spend the next ten years watching them change it all back 77 comments
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@linuxfiend @jalefkowit I'll never forget my discovery of Phoenix. I felt like I was on the forefront of internet tech. Such a great time! I did not know about the connection to Netscape. No wonder it had similar vibes to it.
Jason Lefkowitz
@allenstenhaus @linuxfiend Side note: Joel Spolsky, one of the founders of Stack Overflow, got his first real pop of public attention in 2000 by writing a blog post predicting the Netscape rewrite would be a disaster. It still gets circulated as a classic example of a highly influential post. https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2000/04/06/things-you-should-never-do-part-i/
Third spruce tree on the left
@jalefkowit @allenstenhaus @linuxfiend sweet jeebus i remember reading that (joel re: rewriting from scratch) like it was yesterday. 23 yrs ago! Im so old
Jason Lefkowitz
NB: If you ever wondered where Thunderbird came from, it came from Firefox blowing up the Mozilla Suite. The email client component of the Suite was never anywhere near as popular as the browser component, but it at least had a healthy base of active users, which was more than anyone could say for the other parts of the Suite. So when the Suite exploded, the email client was salvaged from the debris, given its own installer, and turned into a standalone product called Thunderbird.
Jason Lefkowitz
@mcc I’m not sure. They said something in 2017 about planning to excise XUL (which, yes, 💯). But I can’t find a release since then with a formal declaration that the work has been done. (I’m not an active SeaMonkey user myself, so all I know is what I read on their web site.)
Krishean Draconis
@mcc @jalefkowit wow, there's a name i haven't heard in a very, very long time. i submitted patches for chatzilla long ago
Andy Lundell 🙄
@jalefkowit Oh wow, They even still have Chatzilla. Perhaps one day somebody will use it.
Brett Edmond Carlock
@jalefkowit SeaMonkey is absolutely stellar, and I guess I prefer it since I grew up on the internet within AOL, so an all-in-one internet suite feels comfy, but the older LTS base means many "secure" sites throw errors and don't let me use them when I'm in SeaMonkey.
Howard Chu @ Symas
@jalefkowit it's still my daily driver. I still build it myself, leftover habit from when I was actively contributing to it. The split to firefox never made any sense to me. I can't see using an email client without an integrated HTML renderer. Or without an integrated calendar. I did a bunch of work to improve the MailNews codebase, accelerate their build system, and keep Calendar working in the suite. http://highlandsun.com/hyc/#mozilla_hacking
anthony
@jalefkowit i liked the suite! i went from netscape communicator to the mozilla suite to seamonkey and didn't switch to the firefox/thunderbird combo until like 2010 after it became clear that the seamonkey browser wasn't keeping pace.
Jennifer Wojcik
@jalefkowit I am loving your explainers of the browser wars, how Firefox came about, etc. I remember it all too. Hilarious. It really was the wild west.
Jennifer Wojcik
Especially while a lot of those people involved are still alive. It may not be so in 5 or 10 years.
matt
@jalefkowit thanks for the trip down memory lane. Here's a side fork in the path (one of many) that's interesting: https://www.jwz.org/doc/about-jwz.html
matt
@jalefkowit as far as I know SeaMonkey is the only branch that kept plugging away at the idea that a 'web browser' could and should also be a 'web editor'. It's a great loss that we don't have any mainstream web editors today.
Steve 🇨🇦🇺🇦
@jalefkowit I think they tried to spin off the chat client, too, but it ultimately became just a plug-in for Firefox and ultimately died.
:mima_rule: Mima-sama
@tewha@appdot.net #ChatZilla still lives on in the #SeaMonkey project; it's #IRCv3 compatible now actually thanks to a #UXP (the forked #Mozilla 52 ESR codebase #PaleMoon uses) fork of CZ called #Ambassador spearheading the initial effort of modernizing the #IRC #chat client. https://github.com/Ascrod/ambassador/
billy joe bowers is tired.🇺🇦
I kind of missed all that. I actually used iCab for years. Many years. It's still going, I should check it out.
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@jalefkowit Ever since they partnered with google they just lost the breaks it seems, once I read an article they wrote on where they basically say that we need more deplatforming, ever since I don't trust anything that comes out of them, which is a shame as there are so many tallented developers there, but what can I do. Article cited: https://blog.mozilla.org/blog/2021/01/08/we-need-more-than-deplatforming/
Kio!
@jalefkowit@octodon.social sorry don't you mean Firefox?
Andres Jalinton
@jalefkowit
Jason Lefkowitz
@Andres Sorry to hear that. If it helps, this is kind of the Classic Tech Problem. Everybody suffers through it sometime. I know I have 😀
Andres Jalinton
@jalefkowit
Oggie
@jalefkowit Honestly it sometimes feels like google is the real spirtual successor to this. And I don't mean the obviously evil, cartoonishly bad things they are doing, I mean the google graveyard, where anything that seems like if they let it mature and be nice and stay supported it might oh wait it's dead.
yes, it's me, liza 🇵🇷 🦛 🦦
@jalefkowit i love this little history lesson. i keep thunderbird just as a reminder of the old days not because it's any better than the web interface of my email provider. i love that it still has RSS & IRC and Sunbird. but i have to ask, because i noticed: wtf? is with all this rebranding at mozilla. i hate it.
Irenes (many)
@jalefkowit the endless cycle of giant software organizations and their branding. ask any ex-Googler about their feelings on "gchat".
dch
@jalefkowit another reason why they have no money for software development how much is this going to cost them |
Sometimes I reflect on what a true miracle it is that Mozilla produced several useful and important products despite heroic efforts by their management to prevent that outcome