dingman - 4:16 am on Oct 22, 2002 (gmt 0)

OK, I will grant Brett that Netscape released the source to Mozilla for all the wrong reasons. I will also grant that Netscape-AOL-Time-Warner-whoever-else go to significant lengths to keep users from realizing the potential benefits of the leading open-source browser. They pour lots of money into it, largely, in my biased view, to maintain de facto control of development, then try to put the brakes on adoption of Mozilla by the masses instead of NN6/7, which as far as I can see add nothing but branding and often don't work as well as the version of Mozilla you would have gotten if you downloaded it the same day. The "perpetual beta" in which Moz exists strikes me as an NN marketing tool to scare users into *not* using Moz - I've been happily using it for two years, since back when its version numbers were M#, # was an integer. I think "beta" in this case is a state of mind, not a state of usability.

I also think that Mozilla is too big and bloated. The skins are universally horrible, it takes forever to start up, and it has lots of non-optional extra functionality I don't want, need, or use. But it does have a rendering engine I like, Gecko, with good support for CSS and the DOM. I wish they'd throw out skins, throw out the messaging app, basically throw out everything that Galeon doesn't do. (Then add a spell checker for form textareas. :)) Phoenix might be a step in the right direction, but frankly I'll be suprised if it doesn't just turn into Mozilla's slightly-less-bloated little sister.

However, despite all that, I'm glad mozilla is out there. Even with all its faults, I sincerely prefer using Mozilla over IE on my Win2k machine at work. And even though the corporate behemoth that gave it a spiteful birth isn't all that sure it wants to see Mozilla grow up as an open-source project, users still get something out of it: K-meleon, Galeon, Chimera, etc. The browsers that take the good bit of Moz and put it in a better package.

That's the power of open source, even for the poor guy who can't compile 'hello world' for himself. For all the wrong reasons, Netscape gave us Mozilla, and paid a whole bunch of talented people to work on it. Yes, their payroll influences the development in some adverse ways, but already there are forks to address *my* complaints. No matter what Netscape-AOL-Time-Warner does, they can't take back the gift they've given us. And if it isn't a perfect gift, and they only gave it in hopes of hurting IE, still, we have it, and it's a good starting point. I'm glad we have Konqueror, too, and I certainly haven't given up on Konqueror ever becoming a better browser to use than Moz, but on the whole I think we're better off with Mozilla out there than we were without it.

In short, yes, they are trying to keep controll. Yes, they are having enough success that they are at least slowing down the development of the code they gave us. But no, we wouldn't be better off if they had never given the gift. My desktop is a much nicer place to browse the web than it was three years ago, because I have Galeon, because we have Mozilla. And since I like Galeon better than Konqueror, it's even a nicer place than it would have been if Mozilla hadn't been released as obfuscated but open source.