MozillaZine

Roadmap Update: Mozilla Application Suite will be Sustained

The roadmap (http://www.mozilla.org/roadmap.html) became out of date some time around the middle of July, when the Mozilla Foundation was spun out, and about nine-hundred things related to that momentous event happened all at once. My sincere apologies for failing to keep it in synch with the shifting terrain.

I've finally updated just the parts that talk about the SeaMonkey application suite (the current default build) to say that the suite will continue to be supported for the many organizations who have deployed it, or a derivative of it such as Netscape 7.x. The Mozilla Foundation intends to sustain the suite with enough engineering to supports such deployments, especially enterprises and large organizations who are already committed to the suite, and who require a smooth upgrade path. "Sustain" here, so far as we can see, means no major UI overhaul or radical front-end innovations — we see no conflict here with the active contributors, who are doing a great job keeping SeaMonkey in fine shape.

The focus for innovation and development, in both application and back-end "GRE" type work, remains on the new standalone apps, Mozilla Firebird, Thunderbird, etc. This focus on the new apps and their add-on architecture has not changed, even thought SeaMonkey is no longer at risk of bit-rot. We are just doing two things now, innovating and sustaining, in order to satisfy several distinct sets of customers of Mozilla products.

While I was editing, I updated references to the 1.4 branch that were written in the present tense last April, and made a few similarly minor tweaks.

I've got a complete rewrite of the roadmap coming along, which deals with the larger issues of Mozilla 2.0; the future of web standards and the "open web" vs. emerging closed, single-vendor systems; and other big important stuff. It should be up before the end of the month.

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