grelmar - 2:47 am on Nov 17, 2008 (gmt 0)

@ swanson
Wow. So, you're saying that when MS drops support for .doc files made before 1995, and the only software that will continue to support them is is open source apps like Open Office, MS is still right, simply because they're doing it for commercial reasons?

Or that when MS leaves known vulns open in IE for 6 months at a time, it's Ok, because they're doing it for commercial reasons?

@ fischermx

The big deal isn't the lass of Firefox 2.x, the big deal is the drop in support for the older Gecko rendering engine, which is in a ton of apps that Mozilla doesn't necessarily control, and can't force the developers to change to the new rendering engine. Many of these apps aren't browsers, but "browser like objects" like RSS feed readers, email clients, etc.

@ no one in particular

It doesn't really matter that Mozilla is going to drop support for the old Gecko engine, simply because it's open source. If/when they drop support, two things are going to happen:

#1 Most of the outside apps using the older Gecko engine will simply upgrade to the new incarnation.

#2 For those apps that don't, or can't, adopt the new rendering engine, I can pretty much guarantee someone will pick up the the older Gecko and keep maintaining it. It's happened time and again in the FOSS community. The core outfit behind a piece of software drops support, and someone else picks up where they left off.

[edited by: tedster at 3:13 am (utc) on Nov. 17, 2008]