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An End of an Era?

The Mozilla Foundation has finally announced its plans for the Mozilla Suite (the combined browser/email client/IRC that evolved from Netscape). There will be no future 1.8 releases and only 1.7.x updates as needed. However on the other hand there is a group of folks that are organizing to continue work on this project outside the official framework of the foundation. There is also some good commentary by Mitchell Baker. It remains to be seen what happens.

What is interesting to note is that the concept of all-in-one browser popularized by the original Netscape is slowly dying. Instead small and fast applications like Firefox, Thunderbird and Sunbird are taking over. However, it remains to be seen whether they will perform better than an intergrated application. One persistant problem that has been bugging me is that the main rendering engine, Gecko, is shipped separately with each product instead of having some kind of a shared library. Perhaps they will fix this in the future.

I personally have been using Mozilla Suite’s email portion for the past two years but haven’t really used the browser outside of testing (my main browser is Opera because of speed). These days most of my development takes in Opera and FireFox, and I can’t remember the last time I used Mozilla Suite for browsing. HOWEVER, one of the main reasons why I have been reluctant to switch to Thunderbird is due to the fact that I have a shared mail directory between my Windows and Linux installs of Mozilla and I haven’t figured out how to do the same with Thunderbird. But given that Mozilla is not been updated anymore, I guess it’s time to switch. If I figure this out, instructions will be posted here of course.

Tags: firefox, mozilla, thunderbird —

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