This is excellent news.

this is exactly what i was hoping mozilla.org would do. i really like phoenix, but never use it since i use all the other suite addons constantly (especially dom inspecter, venkman, mail and composer) ... i'm *very* excited about this.

I'm sure I'm not alone in thinking that this is a fantastic development. I thought it would never happen, though, because of corporate influences such as Netscape/AOLTW bogging down the innovation process. I am relieved to see that the Mozilla.org drivers are able to put these influences behind the innovation, health, and success of the organization as a whole.

I have to wonder, though, what this means for Mozilla.org's relationship with those vendors. Will Netscape be (hopefully) following suit and using the new toolkit-based applications for future versions of their suite? Or will they continue to develop indepently off a fork from the 1.4 XPFE branch? How will this affect the way in which the developer resources Netscape provides are assigned?

I saw this news yesterday and breathed in relief as it disappeared.

Mozilla had an excellent amount of bloat to my own taste. Oh, well, time to move on then. It's sad, however since Mozilla kept the old Netscape traditions and everything.

Whenever I hear that many buzzwords from a consultant, I lock up my wallet and sit with my back to the wall...

"Reset ... around" "Rich" "strawmen". Sounds like the end of Mozilla to me.

sPh

Congratulations with a fine decision. This is exactly what I have felt is necessary for the past few months. I'm a full time phoenix user now, mostly because it is way better than the regular mozilla. It's a bold move but it is also a necessary one. Basically people need to get their hands free to do the stuff that is necessary and basically the current mozilla has become an obstacle for doing so. Hence the phoenix and minotaur projects that try to work around this.

I'm sure 1.4 will turn out another fine milestone. I'm also sure most of us are looking forward to 1.5 and eventually 2.0 :-).

Keep up the good work!

I've been waiting for this. Weird that we find out 1.4 is the last monolithic version at, oh, 1.4 alpha stage, but so be it.

The main reason I resisted Mozilla over IE was the bloat...since I discovered Phoenix, I'm a total convert! Maybe the modular nature of Phoenix/Minotaur can push Mozilla back into the popular use that Netscape enjoyed in the pre-Internet Explorer days! And of course, since AOL are switching to Gecko, this all adds up to a BIG step forward!

The only thing I don't understand is why, if the changes are going to be this drastic, they're not calling it Mozilla 2.0? It seems like dropping (or at least deprecating) XUL as a supported interface to mozilla would break the "generally backwards-compatible" implication that calling it 1.x carries.

Let me soak this in............. I remember when the Phoenix project started "as an experimental browser for mozilla technologies" and the ultimate goal was just this, but I never expected it to be so soon!

This is definitally the right decision for Mozilla. But, I hope that mozilla.org, as an organization is steping on allot of feet doing this, and it is a very GOOD thing!

I only have 2 concerns;

1.- How can we prevent 'Phoenix' (the new moz browser) from going the same route as mozilla went with undecisive UI decisions? ye, I read the roadmap, but can that really hold true? While I beielve it can, who's the one to make the final decision if no sole owner of UI is set?

2.- In context to GRE, what will prevent ONE crash by GRE to ot take down all my applications that are running off of it? If I'm runing Moz browser(Phx) and Thunderbird, and Thunderbird crashes, it should not take down my browser, but if the fault is in GRE will it then?

Again, I applaud the Mozilla organization for this wonderful proposal (and hopfully implementation).

In concern to the roadmap, I think it should be made clearer, how easy it is to move you application from Mozilla based to Phoenix. Most Extensions/add-on's and applications require only a small amount of tweaks to get working (not all ofcourse).

On another subject, who's still on Netscape's pay-roll that is working on Mozilla. Are all @mozilla.org e-mail holders on Netscape's payroll. Interestingly enough, in the roadmap, their are only 2 netscape.com e-mail holders.

Is mozilla finially breaking away from netscape's hold? Are any other companies paying distrubuters to work on Mozilla/Phx?

Many might say "who cares", but I must admit that Money does pertay in a small way to the speed of development of an open source project.

Appreciate any/all feedback

Cheers -Jed

http://amiga.org/modules/news/article.php?storyid=2002

Ugh. I am a MCSE sysadmin type, so I am on a lot of MS centric mailing lists. Just today I got a message about the panoply of licensing options (shrink wrap vs volume) and package versions of the forthcoming Office 2003: basic standard professional professional enterprise small business edition...

... you get the point. The value of Office is diminished when you are no longer certain that my version of a suite (office, mozilla), can do all the things that your installation of said suite. Currently, if I have moz, and you have moz, we can be reasonable certain that our functionality is highly similar. It sounds like moz.org wants to get away from this, and this is a bad thing.

Having less tightly coupled applications is likely to have a higher correlation with increased bugginess with interaction between them.

Moving to a more component oriented model is going to raise the bar for 3rd parties to package and develop on them, as keeping versions in sync will be like spinning plates - instead of testing your web site against a gecko based browser, you probably will need to test it against many more permutations, or, if you are like far too many, you'll simply decide its not worth it to deal with these OSS lunatics and their 1 user to 1 browser version ratio, and craft some javascript nuisance ware that attempts to punt away visitors to your root page.

Bloat is a ridiculous argument - look at the walmart lindows pcs - we all live in the age of having more cpu and ram than we know what to do with for short money. Its painful to see the bloat argument apparently torpedo the most "Mom ready" polished OSS software package into a grab bag of componentry.

I am definitely on the periphery of all moz development, as I am but an end user who has been kicking its tires since the .9something beta days. I just find it strange that a process that seems to have been releasing more features more quickly than IMHO any other phase of the 5 yr project is about to change things dramaticalls.

I hope my fears are unfounded.

ostiguy

Does this mean that Phoenix will inherit all of the main Mozilla tree's delightful little prejudices?

"We won't fix that! This isn't an end-user browser!" "I'm tired of people complaining about this bug! Instead of helping to fix it, I'll mark it WONTFIX!" Oh, and my personal favorite: "Shut up, learn your way around 200 megs of code, and fix it yourself!"

Phoenix doesn't have these problems, because its stated purpose is to be an end-user browser. When the old Mozilla team moves over to Phoenix, are they going to carry their own ideas over?

I am so happy that this is happening. I do have some questions though (copied from my blog - http://www.chrisgonyea.com/):

What theme UI will the new Mozilla use? Phoenix's theme is the nicest browser UI that I've used today, very pleasing on the eye and easy to figure out. I know Minotaur is going going to be based on Phoenix's theme. Will this new Mozilla use this theme as well and finally ditch the Modern/Classic themes?

Will the focus on quality, which what made Phoenix excel, still continue when it becomes Mozilla's focus? The roadmap says it will, but judging by the past I will believe it when I see it.

Will Mozilla become an end-user product as well? I seem to recall numerous bugs that are marked WONTFIX because Mozilla isn't an end-user product. Phoenix has been geared towards the end-user, so how will Mozilla keep this up or will it be the same old story?

That said, what will Netscape do? Will it continue to use the Mozilla-suite or will it change over to the separate Mozilla applications? Will it use the Phoenix theme and ditch Modern/Classic? How much will Netscape change on its own version of the new Mozilla?

How quick will the new Mozilla be developed? Does this mean Minotaur (aka Thunderbird) will get the huge kickstart it needs with more developers moving to it? Or will the process be much slower?

How soon will the GRE be ready? How soon will the GRE be used by Phoenix and Minotaur/Thunderbird?

Cool! I will keep on using Mozilla 1.x well into the future. I won't be using Phoenix and Thunderbird as much as I would be using Mozilla.

Something about this just sounds like the perfect direction Mozilla should be going in...

Very good news guys, now we all get the sudo-pheonix smaller, lighter, faster browsers!

... is definitely to name this "Mozilla 2.0", as some already said. Just another vote on what I think is the best proposal to this change.

I guess we can always get used to something new, but the classic theme is quite nice. Is it going to survive the change?

David Hyatt moved to Apple's Safari/WebCore/KHTML, but he co-wrote the new Mozilla roadmap so I guess he's still very involved in Mozilla. (In his personal blog he talks about how mastery of two CSS engines may be affecting his life!)

Forgive me if this is answered in the roadmap page, but how do other major projects fit into this? A good example is the Calendar. It's supposed to land into 1.4 sometime, but if they split everything from there into Phoenix and Minotaur, would it then be part of Minotaur (more logical than keeping it with Phoenix) and make Minotaur more of a PIM (almost)? Or would it be completely separate project that, through coordination by groups, works well with the other stand-alones?

Sounds good. I'm not totally convinced that this is the right plan, but I am totally convinced that having a plan is much better than not having one. Since 1.0, we've been kind of drifting along with no big picture. Now we have a big picture. That is good.

This is definitely one of the big days in the Mozilla Project's history. After reading through the new roadmap, I'm pretty optimistic that we will look back on this day positively.

I have been using Phoenix full-time on my work Windows system for more than 5 months, and it is far, far better for my purposes -- basic web browsing -- than Mozilla is. I *love* Phoenix, and I'm excited that it will become available officially for Mac OS X as well, which is what I use at home.

Regarding moving e-mail off into a separate application, I have annecdotal evidence that this will be a good thing. A while back, my mother decided to give Netscape 7 a try, to upgrade herself from using Netscape 4.x for e-mail. Her experience was awful, and she quickly headed back. But 4.x is a dead end, and she eventually moved to Outlook. I am certain no good can come of that.

So I regard Thunderbird/Minotar becoming the primary e-mail application from the Mozilla Project as a very positive development. My wife is still using Netscape 4.7 for e-mail, but now perhaps I can soon switch her to Thunderbird, instead of Outlook (which she just began using at work).

So rock on, team, this is Good Stuff!

Ugh, so does this mean I can forget having search as part of the dropdown autocomplete? Having a second text input field is indeed a novel idea, but just typing a search term into the location bar, hitting tab, and enter was great. Is there some preference in phoenix?

Also, does this mean that all of the mozilla bugs will be migrated to phoenix? If not, what will happen to them?

Since everyone is so euphoric, I'll play the skeptic:

Phoenix is the proper name; once again, we toss the old and bring in the new, as we did with the original Netscape code. One downside to it: People may question our commitment to the new Moz -- will we throw it out, too, when it gets too old and hoary?

Who will invest their resources in the new Moz if they question our long term commitment?

* What about hackers who worked late nights to clean up their code, only to find out it's been left behind in a product that's no longer being developed (BTW, how much XPFEMoz code will be used in ToolkitMoz? 50% 90%? How many person-hours have we lost?) Other community members contributed many hours; who will do it again?

* What about someone who convinced his boss at BigCo to build an application that depends on XPFE (someone correct me if that's unlikely)? What's their employment future?

* What about the corporate CIO, who doesn't want to use OSS because, he's worried, there's no vendor committed to the product? What will he think?

I know there are answers to these questions, but they need to be asked. Others will ask them, and we need to have good answers.

This is absolutely positively the best news I've heard in a long while. This is more important than the original Mozilla announcement because it has a real chance of turning the numbers around. Phoenix has demonstrated that Gecko is a very capable rendering engine and XUL both performs well and feels native. The new roadmap perfectly lays out these terrific plans. Great job!

I took a look at the new architecture for Phoenix and from my limited knowledge of OSes the structure looks a lot like the way MacOS X and UNIX is structured in componets and which makes thoses OSes speedy and efficient. Is this a fair comparison?

I wish this were just another bad joke. I guess I'll survive, though. I'm not too thrilled about having to live with the extra memory usage that's likely to result from having both Pheonix and Thunderbird/Minotaur running at once (and why would I ever close them? I don't shut down Mozilla now). There's never been anything compelling to make many of us switch to Pheonix, so I guess the Pheonix supporters have now found a way to strongarm us into switching.

so does this mean that i won't be able to use one application (like i do now with mozilla) to do my email and browsing? will i have to use 2 programs (phoenix and thunderbird)? will there be any way to integrate them? that is the one thing i love most about mozilla...

Awesome! Best news I'v heard in a long time.

But what's in the near future for Phoenix? Long term (by July August) is moving over to Phx and Thunderbird from the Moz suite. But during that transition (moz 1.4, then 1.5 1.6) how will this be handled?

Will the announcment for Phx's new name be soon? Will a version 0.6 be released, or no release until 1.5/1.6? During the creation (in proccess now) of Moz 1.4, will worked be done on Phx? Who decides who will do this work?

I am in now way doubting Moz the Org, I'm just curious how these first few CRITICAL months are going to be carried out. Seems pretty complicated to me, but it's definitally worth it, by August we will be pissing our pants with joy!!!

Cheers to the Phx team for getting their baby and dream completed, and to the rest of the Moz folk for their awesome work to make both Phx and Moz a reality!

Thanks for the feedback!

Sorry, i think phoenix totally sucks :(

I am glad to see that the Phoenix will finally have official support for the Mac platform.

It is not that I have any opposition to Camino, but it will be nice for Mac users to have access to several of the XUL based add-ons that have and will be introduced for Phoenix.

I'm not getting the point of Phoenix/"XPFE browser" dichotomy in the Roadmap document. AFAIK, XPFE is essentially XUL+JS+CSS accessing binaries (or other modules) as XPCOM components via XPConnect. Is Phoenix built in a different way? And one more question: what exactly constitutes 'the Phoenix toolkit'? Of course, this is not a place to address the issue in details, but providing some link would be great.

Just a thought: bugzilla has some 10000 open bug reports. Not all, but many of them will still be valid after the change. Many others will only apply to the 1.4-monolithic-branch. Who will wade throught them and decide? Many bugs (just look for very old crash bugs) are probably WFM for years, but nobody can prove it. Will they be allowed to still hang around, making bugzilla stay and make even more chaotic than it already is?

And there are cases (RFE's) which will apply to both branches. Well, ok, maybe such bugs will be split.

I think this change gives a great chance to purge bugzilla of the many bugs that just should not be there. But it also has a risk that MANY old bug reports that don't apply anymore will stay and make life difficult for everybody.

My opinion (AFAICT after one night) is that I should cut back my Mozilla/Bugzilla involvement for quite some months ("it does not make sense anymore because all until 1.4 will be thrown away and even afterwards there will be big changes for quite a time") until the dust has settled down.

I gues Microsoft is now laughing and writing down 3 - 0 in favor of IE on their browser board.

How can I say something like this here ? Well.. IE has nearly looked the same in alot of years... new features but it is still same old IE GUI. When Mozilla.org do this kind of big changes it also means a failure in creating a competitive browser against IE.

I guess I'm not the only one here that thinks that Mozilla today eats alot of memory and may not be the fastest browser to startup on the market. Se for example Safari, K-Meleon, Galeon ...

But I also think this was a good step to move on to the next generation of the Mozilla project but it's still a failure in one way when you think about it.

But lets forget about that and welcome Phoenix (though my project EasySearch will be shut down :( beacuse of the built in feature)

If you want the new era of Mozilla to be renamed 2.0 rather than 1.5 vote for the bug here:

http://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=200454

If you want the new era of Mozilla to be renamed 2.0 rather than 1.5 vote for the bug here:

http://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=200454

I wrote this to drivers, but I'd like to share it here as a kind of request for comments:

The recent announcement of upcoming changes has disquieted quite a number of Mozilla "semi-developers" (and maybe developers and users as well) up to a point when they doubted each others contribution to the Mozilla project on IRC (#mozillazine). The main fear of this group of people seems to be that the new product will have less of the functionality they like about Mozilla. This may be functionality average users do not need and that should therefore not be in the new main product by default.

But as opposed to what some on irc.mozilla.org said the unpaid developers (even "semi-developers") _are_ important in an Open Source project - especially here where the future of funding by Netscape may not be secured for many years. And you know very well that in Open Source people work mainly on products they use themselves. So it should be important that the new product will also please developers.

The announcement seems to place the advanced functionality they like to some kind of extensions. But hopefully not extensions as on mozdev.org: those are "too far away" from Mozilla to be considered a part of it. They are just like third party addons for IE. If you really look for them, you find them, but if you meet another user with similar interest, he probably never has heard of them.

So this my proposal (or "petition", whatever) is about _mozilla.org_ hosting and developing at least some core extensions and distributing them close to the product. The vision I have is having in the default Mozilla installer also those advanced extensions listed for those interested. They may be hidden deep inside some hierarchy, as long as they are accessible. This way they would be considered part of the product and nobody could really say that his beloved Mozilla had lost what made it strong. End-users may simply click "default install" and get whatever is considered good for them. They may click "advanced" to install some more or less components (as chatzilla) - only when they go into each's details they would have the choice for some advanced extensions.

Actually this is how most big application suites' installer works: they give much more choice for those interested (e.g. in graphics suites you can select which import filters out of dozens you want to install) while still offering the ease of use for "regular" users by giving reasonable defaults. Why should Mozilla not have such a more powerful installer?

(An equivalent in zip files might be a default zip file and one with all extensions (Netscape offered "base install" and "complete install" earlier).)

And if such an installer could even be used to install single extensions later that were initially not installed - that would just be great!

But my main plea is simple: Please do not kill Mozilla functionality by moving it to mozdev.org or elsewhere, but help development and public perception of at least the most important extensions by offering a place at mozilla.org, supporting it officially and making it possible to install it with the application itself. Thanks.

Just as the roadmap talks about embedding Minotaur into Phoenix, the way forward for the calendar could be as an embedded extension for Minotaur.

Some people like a standalone mail/news client that isn't your jack-of-all-trades Outlook/Evolution replacement. That's going to be Minotaur.

But Minotaur could also be an Outlook replacement for those who are looking for that sort of solution. Allow the calendar to be installed as an extension (like Phoenix's extensions) and you've got three of the main features of a PIM (mail, address book, calendar). Develop some sort of stickynote-style scratchpad extension and you've mostly got the whole thing.

Evolution at the moment is only available for Linux and friends, and it seems as if there are no plans for a Windows port any time soon. This would provide a lever for those on Windows to abandon MS Office entirely. I mean, OpenOffice.org [openoffice.org] replaces much of the rest of MS Office bar Outlook; a Minotaur that can be extended to be that Outlook replacement would finish the job.

Not to mention having a further competitor to Evolution on Unix and Linux, particularly once Kontact gets going.

Going the extension route makes far more sense than adding the Calendar to the monolithic Mozilla suite, slowing everybody down.

And anyway, does a stand-alone calendar really make sense? A stand-alone Composer perhaps. But a calendar naturally fits into a PIM environment - surely this is the way forward?

Thexder.

Architecturally I think this is absolutely definitely the right thing to do, with no question whatsoever. The facility to allow extensions (particularly if these can be extensions into Gecko - kind of a new browser plugin format but at a more powerful/easy to manage level) but keep the basic install simple is exactly what's needed.

From a user interface point of view though, rather than technically, I kind of think Phoenix sucks compared to Mozilla :(

(And that is assuming you use Mozilla just as a browser.)

My hope is that with main development effort on Phoenix, not Mozilla, it will improve quickly. I'd like to see them incorporating a professionally done version of GreyModern, or else some other non-suck scheme (orbit is not so bad) with large buttons by default. There are a lot of Phoenix themes but most of them are pretty poor and as usual, themes don't always keep up with browser features...

I suppose that's my other concern with the 'stronger UI lead' aspect of this - so far I think the 'stronger UI lead' in Phoenix hasn't really made a better UI. There are important UI features that Mozilla is missing, like configurable toolbars, so I definitely see the technical improvements, but the interface itself is still a bit of a mess by comparison (IMO). As far as interface is concerned, Mozilla suite 'bloat' has no real effect on me: five buttons wasting room in the status bar, sure, but who cares. I don't *use* the ugly 'new' menu, I press ctrl-n. :)

And I hope there are extensions at the least that let those of us who don't use tabs consider Phoenix, including middle-click to open new window etc... you don't seem to be able to do that at present (within the GUI).

--sam

I like the idea of splitting the browser and mail client--and I definitely like that Phoenix is a bit more user-centric than Mozilla's always been. But there are a few things that bother me about this.

First of all, Mozilla-the-browser and Phoenix aren't identical at the moment in terms of feature set. Some things are done differently, sometimes in a largish way. (The dropdown searching from the location bar was mentioned in a previous post, and is something I use a *lot*.) Phoenix gaining the additional development power will solve some problems, but it doesn't exactly deal with what they're going to do about places where the two programs have already taken different paths.

Second, what're they going to call it? Will there be, in essence, no more 'Mozilla'? Or are Phoenix and going Thunderbird/Minotaur/whatever to be called Mozilla-Browser and Mozilla-Mail? Or what? That's not terribly clear, and among other things, it's kinda hard to evangelize to friends and family and coworkers and the like when you don't even know what to tell them they ought to use.

Third, does anybody know what Netscape and the like are going to do about this? Are we going to see a Netscape Browser and Netscape Mail done separately, eventually? Will they continue to merge many things into one program?

And fourth, and finally... what about the things *other* than Phoenix and Minotaur/Thunderbird/whatever? What about Calendar? What about Composer? What about Chatzilla? I don't necessarily use these things, but some people must, and it doesn't seem immediately clear where they'll fit into the grand scheme of things. More separate programs? This stops seeming like such a good idea when you start thinking about using all of these things and having to install and run them all separately. How well are they all going to integrate when they all run separately?

So... well. I think this has the potential to do good things, but I'm really unsure at the moment of what to expect. I really can't see why the existing model is so bad and must change, but I hope that changing it won't leave those of us relatively happy with the way things work in the dust.

Phoenix crashes rarely. It does crash, though.

So when will Talkback be available for it?

Configuration and state, that is. I'm not so much concerned about the state of the UI and the components which present themselves to users, as that of the bits which tell those components how to behave.

Things which ought to be grouped together are scattered all over, and often the poor sysadmin. can find no hints as to where to look for things which, in an institutional setting, ought to be easy to find and to tweak. (Take a simple thing like the page which shows up the first time you use the browser. We've got a fleet of public stations with a potential user base of 6 *million* people, and no way are we going to deal with storage for six million profiles. So I've rigged the stations to delete profiles at logoff. This means that, here, *every* time you use Mozilla is the first time you used Mozilla. Since we use the browser as THE user interface to our services, we want *our* page to show up the first time. It took *days* of research to find out where this was buried, and still longer to figure out how to defeat it. I did the same thing to IE in a couple of hours, and IE's configuration mechanisms are not exactly advertized either.)

Also, cross-platform has been over-extended into the welter of configuration files. The result is a configuration system which is equally frustrating on all platforms. It wouldn't be that hard to wrap platform-native configuration mechanisms in common functions, so that native mass-configuration tools can be used in institutional settings. (Like, ADS Group Policies for our thundering herd of, pardon the expression, Windows 2000 workstations.) Yeah, I would write it myself, if I hadn't come away from every encounter with the code wondering, "what language *is* this, *really*?")

Mozilla is great, I use it myself all the time, but it's become a nightmare for sites which need mass-deployment, mass-setup. and intimate control of the product's behavior by IS/IT staff rather than individuals. It's really hard to use it as a component of *my* designs.

The picture (roadmap/branching-2003-02-20.png) on the roadmap page does not seem to match what they are describing. Shouldn't the 1.4 branch continue off into the right side of the screen and the 1.0 branch get stopped at that point if 1.4 is going to replace 1.0 as the "solid-as-a-rock" version?

A picture is worth a thousand words, right?

I read through about everything here and not once did I see this. You can't use the name 'Phoenix' Not my idea and I'm sure that this isn't new, however have I missed something? Is the name Mozilla dead or is it that one will use 'Phoenix' but just call it Mozilla, I'm confused.

The below is a paste from: The 'Phoenix' project page http://www.mozilla.org/projects/phoenix/

Phoenix needs to be renamed

The Phoenix project will soon be renamed because of legal issues. After many months and several hundred suggestions, Phoenix's new name has been chosen (and it's not Phallus!). It will be revealed shortly, after some final legal checks have been made.

I have two comments to make

1. I can't BELIEVE that we're starting over again! Didn't mozilla already re-design and "componentize" the architecture - 5 YEARS ago? How many thousands of man-hours are going to be thrown away this time?

2. This announcement is going to immediately put a halt to a LOT of development effort. Who wants to work on a dead end project? I know that I'm not working on my project anymore. It's really demoralizing to have the rug pulled out from under you without any warning. And what about 1.4? Who's going to care about finishing that up? Maybe they should have waited until after 1.4 to make this anouncement.

Mozilla. :)

How about trademark infringement in case of Minotaur? There is a company Minotaur Technologies LLC - http://www.minotaur.com

It seems that there will be two different browsers for the OS X - Camino and Phoenix. Is this really necessary? I mean it's not like AOL has an unlimited development funds for all this.