Cool. The Mozilla Foundation was founded today with a lot of support from big companies. I hope, this will lead to a even greater future of Mozilla.

Update: ...AOL has axed the Gecko team in a mass firing and are dismantling Netscape (they've even pulled the logos off the buildings). Ok, that one was foreseeable after the founding of the Mozilla Foundation... At least I have seen the logos on the building and the oldest still existing web-cam in real life. Bye bye Netscape... and I still remember the day, when a friend of mine showed me Netscape 0.9. What an impressing improvement over Mosaic ;)

detail @ 17.07.2003 09:52 CEST
Imho, all over its life Netscape was making too much noise around itself and inspired too many people with excess fanatism.

AOL invested huge sums of money into Netscape, but now you can see the result. At the same time a small Norwegian company Opera Software developed a web browser with far less investments using only internal labour forces. But Opera browser has more features than Mozilla/Netscape and is working much quicker (especially on slow computers) and lighter.

Sorry, but there I feel no regrets for Netscape's closure.

P.S.: Started using Internet in 1997 with Netscape, in 1998 switched to Opera (version was about 3.50) and still using it (now 7.11, with built-in Mail and News client).

George Dafermos @ 20.07.2003 05:09 CEST
Opera rules on Windows,but unfortunately the MacOSX version of it is way behind in terms of ease-of-use and functionality. But yes, I see the same thing: opera is so addictive and so functional (on PCs) that anyone would be tempted to switch to opera, if only they've seen it once in action.

regarding Netscape's imminent "demise", i think things are a bit more complicated: who's gonna be paying the checks of the core people of the mozilla foundation, or anyway the biggest part of it? Most certainly, AOL will. Now, the issue of changing the name is just part of the story. Will Navigator/Communicator stop shipping now that AOL's started firing Netscape people? I can't tell.....but i guess not. do you know anything about that?

and how come sites with outcries from now-almost-gone-for-good netscape employeess haven't started mushrooming everywhere, in much the same way that such sites sprung up all over when AOL was seen as manipulating community leaders, who were volunteers, and driving them so vexed that most of them drove off for a better community space, less controlled by commercial entities and where their unpaid for labour pains would be more appreciated? Where are those sites then, and where are the "obituaries" of the Jamie Zawinski type?


george