“I’ve had numerous conversations regarding Mozilla and skins
over the past week. I was of the opinion that the lack of a native
widget set would not necessarily be the death of Mozilla, but it
would cause mozilla.org some heartache as usability proponents
railed about Mozilla’s defying of convention. From the looks of the
reviews of Netscape’s PR1 release, I wasn’t far off.”
“I now believe, however, that there has been a fundamental
misunderstanding of what Mozilla is, where it’s going, and indeed
what direction the Web and its “standards” are leading us. Key
to an understanding of Mozilla is a defining of its scope and
capabilities.”
“Mozilla is not a browser, and this became quite clear
from my meetings with developers over the past few days. I won’t
quote anyone directly, but one rather prominent developer remarked,
“Mozilla is a platform from which a browser can be easily made,
but it isn’t a browser”. I would add to that, “it’s a platform
from which many Internet-ready applications can be created and
deployed in a cross-platform manner.””
“Mozilla is providing an open view of our Internet future and
asking us all to participate. Unfortunately, where they’re headed
might not be the direction that many people had hoped Mozilla would
go. They have many options available. They can strike out in their
own direction, from the Mozilla code available (they could, for
example, embed the rendering engine inside a wrapper application
that uses native widgets, turning Mozilla into “just a browser” —
something that many seem to want). They can strive to make the
existing Mozilla work better. Or, they can resort to leaving
themselves at the mercy of a closed-source world. They have all
these possibilities at their disposal. Before Mozilla, what choice
did we have?”