Netscape 8 - Setting the browser back two years
Could someone in the Cinci area with a blunt object stop over at Clint's and help him Kill Himself. He's witnessed the new and improved, shiny, senseless, stupid, Netscape 8.0 User Interface.
So here's the story as I understand it. Netscape/AOL took Firefox and
rebranded
it, which was expected. What wasn't expected was that they
completely reverse every single usability refinement the Firefox developers
have been working on over the past two years. This is just completely
crazy. I'm all shock and awe over here.
I might have expected this around 2000, when shiny was all that mattered but we've grown since then. The whole premise behind Firefox was to cut away the fat and shiny stuff that grew on the Mozilla base over years of being controlled by a clueless marketing department. How is it that this was completely lost on the AOL/Netscape folks?
People don't want more, they want less.
Anyway, this one is going down in net history so I had to get a mention in for the archives.
NS8, part 1: I need closure
The factors that led them to choose IE..
News.com.com.com is reporting that Firefox is gaining on IE faster than expected. Amsterdam based OneStat.com has IE's market share as low as 88.9%. I can't help but wonder if those guys didn't hit the hookah a few too many times before running the numbers. The Mozilla Organization has been saying that they hope to have 10% of the market by the end of 2005. You could project that they might reach that by the end of 2004 if these OneNet stats are accurate, which they most probably are not.
Sigh
At any rate, check out this gem from Microsoft's director of product management for Windows, Gary Schare (pronounced Gair-ee Share-ee ;)
"I still believe in the end that most users will decide that IE is the best choice when they take into account all the factors that led them to choose IE in the first place," Schare said. "Meanwhile, we're happy that they're primarily (using Firefox) on Windows, and that Firefox is part of the large ecosystem of software products available on the Windows platform."
The "factors" he references are covered briefly here, while more on the "Windows ecosystem" he mentions can be found here.
Emacs Keybindings for Firefox
Experimental Firebird Extension RPMs Available
Building RPMs for Mozilla Firebird Extensions is moving along nicely. The following extensions have been packaged up without much problem.
RPMifying Mozilla Firebird Extensions
Firebird Extension / Theme RPMs
If someone can provide a mechanism for programmatically installing Mozilla Firebird extensions, I would be more than happy to put a night aside for packaging a bunch of them for RPM to push up to fedora. From what I'm reading here, it looks like the xpinstall stuff is limited/non-existent from the command line. Lots of people wanting to know how to do unattended/cli installs but no one replying seems to understand why you would want to go cli instead of using the browser. Trying to roll Firebird out to a large number of machines w/ a standard set of extensions is a nightmare.