Firefox 3.5 Logo Troll

The other day my colleague Andy Peatling (BuddyPress lead) tweeted

“The lighter part of the Firefox 3.5 logo globe kinda looks like a zombie: http://bit.ly/Mn20l“.

Mozilla Firefox 3.5 includes a new logo. But now thanks to Andy, I can’t help but always see the water troll when I look at the logo.

Experience the troll, download Firefox 3.5 today!

My good friend Chris Messina wrote a very interesting article, which in many ways comes down to a large, influential part of the web development community being disenfranchised from Mozilla.

Doom! Of course John Lilly is playing cool on the outside, because they have long fought giants. Mozilla’s ability to combat goliaths, and live with fear and uncertain contribute to them being the best browser development community there is.

Although Mozilla is the best browser community, like Chris Messina, I consider myself part of the disenfranchised community, tired of the Firefox is the web mentality. But I will readily admit nobody has a better track record than Mozilla for open source consumer software development.

As impatient consumers, particularly impatient geek consumers, we all want our pet issues addressed right NOW. One of the greatest achievements of Mozilla these last few years is worrying about the right problems at the right time. And one thing they’ve always gotten mostly right is enabling participation in all aspects of Firefox development, promotion and support.

My instincts tell me that it has slowed them down (a lot), but positions them well for the long game.

In many ways their community, their team, is like the guiding principle of the Internet, they can remove a number of members, and the team will continue to function. Firefox development is highly robust and survivable.

Are leaders like Dave Hyatt, Ben Goodger, Blake Ross, Joe Hewitt, and Mike Schroepfer missed? Of course they are, but these are only a few of the many Mozilla champions.

“We build Firefox with an open development process. At Mozilla people earn respect, authority and decision-making ability by demonstrating their abilities. This allows individual people to become full, equal participants, with both authority and responsibility for building a better Internet. The development process for Firefox demonstrates the type of Internet we want to build. (Not perfectly, of course.)”

Chrome will be the browser built by Google, like Safari is the browser built by Apple. Firefox is the browser built by everyone.

Everyone that can cope in the structured, programmer-geeky rule laden Mozilla open source community. But maybe that is what is required for such a complex and important product.

What track record does Google have in open source development of consumer software? Any?

By extension what track record does Google have in supporting consumer products? Here they do have one, and it’s a poor one. Automation ultimately doesn’t cut it. Also, it’s much more fun when the software is installed, as opposed to a web service that you fix and update any time.

What community leaders has Google assembled for these heady tasks?

What open source tools do these Google leaders have in their arsenals? As great of gifts as the Netscape source code in 1998 were the open source tools to develop and collaborate on development.

Although today using Bugzilla and Bonsai (with Hg Web Viewer a poor replacement) would probably drive me nuts, those are a couple of the tools that makes development of a large, complete product by a large Mozilla community possible.

Google Code seems great for small projects, or non-consumer software projects with small teams, but I’m not convinced that Google Code is up for the challenge of a web browser. But I suspect it doesn’t have to be.

I don’t expect Chrome to become a leader in the browser space. I expect it to be about writing cool code, solving cool engineering problems, and pressuring Mozilla into solving the problems that Google cares about, or someone else will take Google’s code and solve them.

The greatest gift of open source isn’t the right to fork, but the ability to merge. I expect Apple to be the first to incorporate this generously licensed code (third-party software). But Mozilla won’t be that far behind, because with the top teams collaborating on WebKit, the myth of the masses will be eroded. Sure, Mozilla’s development team may be made up mostly of volunteers, but those contributions are often picking at the surface of problems or polishing generally solved problems. The complexity of code necessitates highly skilled, highly focused, full time developers.

Chrome’s technologies will be powerful forces for the Mozilla disenfranchised. Will WebKit one day power Firefox? What other technologies or experiences will we see Firefox adopt from Chrome?

Reading some of the comments there is some confusion about whether this allows an offline mode of WordPress and also about the privacy of using this Google browser add-on.

People wonder if Gears will allow them to use the WordPress Dashboard to write posts while offline. We’re not quite there yet. Gears for WordPress 2.6 (coming soon!) uses Gear’s LocalServer API which basically is a persistent, smart cache allowing the static files to always be loaded from your local computer — turbo!

That takes me to the second concern I see in the blog posts and comments about this feature, specifically on the Weblog Tools Collection post. Some people are really concerned with the privacy of Gears. Understandably, they are leery of providing Google even more personal data. Gears isn’t a web service. It only talks to the mother ship to check for updates, unless you allow anonymous usage statistics:

• Your copy of Gears includes a unique application number. The unique application number and information about your installation of Gears (e.g., version number, language) will be sent to Google when Gears automatically checks for updates.
• If you choose to enable Usage Statistics for Gears, it allows Gears to send crash reports and to collect a limited amount of non-personal information about your use of Gears and send it to Google.
• If you use Gears for Mobile, we may collect certain information such as your device and hardware IDs and device type, the browser type, the request type, your carrier, your carrier user ID, and the content of your request, which does not by itself identify you to Google, though it may be unique or consist of or contain information that you consider personal.

If you still are concerned about the privacy of Gears, here are two more reasons to have confidence: open source and Brad Neuberg. Gears is open source. This means that anyone can pop the hood and scrutinize the code — and people do. A very highly regarded open source developer Brad Neuberg is very involved in Gears. He is a leader in web development, open source, and collaborative development. He’s a person that I admire greatly, and trust through associations.

Wrapping this up. There is no WordPress dependency on Gears. It’s an optional browser plugin that can make for a faster experience. If you choose to use it, you should feel confident your privacy is respected.

Monday Update: Jeremy Bicha asks an astute question, why WordPress warns not to use on public or shared computers. The answer is that in a future version of WordPress we want to allow you to write and edit posts, and maybe even manage your blog without being connected to the Internet. That’s why Andrew decided (and I agree) it is better to warn against public/shared computers from the beginning.

As I know from my own experience dabbling in web browser development, it’s an incredibly challenging undertaking. Using Firefox 3 is the most polished, rich browsing experience!

Cameron Field twittered “Anyone know how to install WordPress on a Microsoft Office Live hosted site/domain?”

Intrigued by what “Microsoft Office Live” is, I google it and go to smallbusiness.officelive.com, but instead of finding out what it is, I was rudely redirected to http://home.officelive.com/Misc/CompatibleShell.aspx?linkId=UnsupportedBrowser and greeted with

To use Microsoft Office Live, your computer must meet one of the following requirements:

* Microsoft Internet Explorer 6 or 7, running on Microsoft Windows XP, Windows Server 2003 or Windows Vista. You can download Internet Explorer from the Windows Internet Explorer page.

* Firefox 2.0, running on Windows XP, Windows Server 2003, Windows Vista, or Mac OS X 10.2.x and later. You can download Firefox 2.0 from the Firefox download page.

So, not only is the site checking what browser I’m running, but what operating system I’m running the browser on. Maybe there is a legitimate technical reason why this site doesn’t work for Firefox running on Ubuntu, but that would surprise me as I can’t imagine why integration with Mac OS X could work without any easy solution also for Linux.

Assuming there is a technical reason, the saddest part is the missed opportunity of at least giving me information about the site.

I’m filing this one Optimized Under.

“While we will no longer support the Netscape web browser as of [March 1], 2008, Netscape.com will still continue to serve as a general use Internet portal.”

Less than two months after AOL released it, Netscape Navigator 9 was on its death march and today it is no longer supported. With it hopefully the Netscape Browser and Netscape Navigator brands will now stay dead and live on in Mozilla Firefox and the many other Netscape derived products, projects and communities.

Personally, I’m really happy that the monstrosity Netscape 8 Browser was created and I had the opportunity to be a small part of it. I think the project started sometime in the summer of 2004 for Mercurial not long before Firefox 1, and I joined up in Feb of 2005.

I was told that Mercurial Communications had to convince AOL for it to be based on Firefox, and that AOL originally wanted it to be a skin on Microsoft Internet Explorer, not unlike AOL Explorer. It was a bizarre software project with awkward communications and misplaced priorities.

There were quite a few calamities, that can now be laughed about including:

• “[Crammed] all of the exciting new features into the toolbars.”
• Netscape 8 Browser being overly pitched as the most secure browser is is unsafe and patched the next day.
• Netscape 8 ‘breaks’ IE

Netscape 8 Browser was a horrible beast, but there was brilliance buried within. Its a shame that as far as I know AOL has never made the source available. Alex Vincent (weirdal) asked almost 3 years ago where’s the source?

It was an awesome experience working with many of Victoria’s software superstars. The experience is directly responsibly for me hooking up with the amazing people who started Flock, and becoming friends with people in various Mozilla communities. I then opened the door to many of those Mercurial colleagues joining Flock. From there I went to the best job I’ve every had, where I am today working on WordPress for Automattic.

“In the mid-1990s [Netscape] was used by more than 90% of the web population” Today, it isn’t even worth measuring.

From the same BBC News article titled “web icon set to be discontinued“, “although a core team has continued to work on the secure browser – it is currently on version nine – AOL has decided to finally pull the plug.” The author (no by line included) seems to have a confused history of the browser. The Netscape browser has had many… handlers.

One of the most amazing discoveries for me working on the Netscape 8 Browser was how important Netscape Communicator was and still is to many people. What a legacy.

It is no surprise that Netscape brand is still powerful today. The Web is sticky with nostalgia with Michael Arrington’s headline calling it “a sad milestone” to Roland Tanglao‘s lament ending with “Good-bye Netscape, I’ll miss you!”

It is incredible how many people after all these years still have netscape.com (one of the first news portals) set as their home page. The loss of the ad related revenue seems like the likely reason why Jason Calcanis’ Netscape Digg clone died, well limps on as propeller.com, and old was new again on netscape.com. I will never get back those days of my life spent testing the Netscape 8 Browser to make sure it worked with the Flash heavy, often male chauvinistic netscape.com.

Sorry, back to the legacy and the people. It was amazing interacting with people like Netscape Champaign Jay Garcia and the reasonably-initially-hesitant Mozilla community members. No other technology company has a greater legacy than Netscape. And so many of these amazing people continue to create choice and innovation on the Internet with Firefox, Thunderbird, and many other open web pursuits.

The recent updates to http://blog.netscape.com/ — by Tom Drapeau and Richard Klein demonstrate AOL supporting that legacy and being class acts as the curtain drops for a last time on Netscape software It is sometimes easy to forget that AOL donated $2 million to the Mozilla foundation ((Mozilla Organization entry on Wikipedia).

And so at last the beast fell and the unbelievers rejoiced. But all was not lost, for from the ash rose a great bird.” The Book of Mozilla, 7:15

I’m going to go watch Code Rush again now.