Mozilla Leaves Out Linux For Initial Web App Support 403
darthcamaro writes "Guess What? Linux is not a primary platform for Mozilla. For Mozilla's upcoming Web Apps marketplace, Linux support is not part of the initial release. Some Mozilla developers simply are shrugging this off as Windows and Mac dominate the Mozilla user landscape today."
Turnabout is fair play (Score:1, Interesting)
pathetic (Score:5, Interesting)
"...shrugging this off as Windows and Mac dominate the Mozilla user landscape today."
And that is a big part of why Windows and Mac continue to dominate the landscape. The Linux versions of many apps tend to be second rate. Then the developers look at it and say "see, nobody really wanted it on that platform anyway."
That's a pretty sad statement for an open project to make.
Web apps == (Score:2, Interesting)
The whole point of web apps is to tie you to an online service, make your data less secure, and lose your privacy so that you become a marketing unit on their business plan.
And the 2nd point of web apps, or perhaps not a point but an effect nevertheless, is to try to make you forget what decent Human Interfaces on native apps used to look like, so that you don't mind using an in-browser GUI that is more primitive and less responsive than anything we had in the 80's, and badly designed to boot because webbies have no clue about HI ergonomics.
Re:A matter of share: 85%, 12%, and 2.5% (Score:4, Interesting)
It would be interesting to see what % of Mozilla code is developed on each platform.
Re:Turnabout is fair play (Score:5, Interesting)
Isn't it a shame however that because more and more people get more and more powerful machines, that the developers code more sloppily because "the machines can take it"?
Re:Fork it, then (Score:5, Interesting)
I suffer from some kind of mental problem where when presented with a choice, I break into a near frenzy of research on said choices. It can almost paralyze my choices as I try to discover the best choice. While I enjoy the research, sometimes I think I would be happier to just have one choice.
Re:Fork it, then (Score:3, Interesting)
In 2005, with the official suspension of the Mozilla Browser project, it was expected that the 30+ Mozilla devs would, naturally, just switch development to Firefox, the new child, which at the time only had 3 core developers.
The Mozilla devs, however, upon looking at the bastardized, sloppy, memory-leak-filled Firefox pre-2.0 codebase balked. They considered the Firefox devs to be rank amateurs and there was a move to change up the org structure of Firefox. That backfired when the Moz Consortium, encouraged by Google, entrenched support against Firefox and basically shunned the old guard developers.
The old guard then decided to fork the old Mozilla browser and, against the wishes of the AOL Corp., completely diverge from Netscape towards a more lean, memory-resilient browser/email/chat program called **SeaMonkey**. It took a while, and they didn't have the hundreds of millions of dollars, or even a modicrum of the advertising money or corporate backing that Firefox has had, but their product is vastly superior where it counts to Firefox and Thunderbird and maintains binary compatibility with their plugins.
You should really check out SeaMonkey http://www.seamonkey-project.org/ [seamonkey-project.org] It's how Firefox outside of the Moz Corp would be, and I enjoy it substantially more. Plus, they do a GREAT job keeping up with the Gecko Engine and are virtually always on a newer, better version than Firefox. Oh, and they don't have the memory problems, either.