Netscape will cease development for new browsers.

[Yachats_Guy webforumsuser@macromedia.com]

From Eric Meyer's [url]http://www.meyerweb.com/[/url] is the following announcement:It's true: Netscape is no longer a viable entity. I'll leave it to others to draw conclusions regarding how this move is related to the agreement AOL and Microsoft reached a while back. Y'all can probably do a much better job of it anyway.

From what I can discern, there will be no more new versions of Netscape; the browser will go into maintenance mode, whatever that means. More than half the staff was let go today, and Mozilla has been spun off into an independent, non-profit foundation supported by AOL, IBM, Sun, and others. I have no idea what will happen with netscape.com itself. DevEdge will cease producing new content, it would seem, which is a shame. We produced some really good stuff, and had more in the pipeline. Hopefully that forthcoming material will find another outlet.

For now, I still have a job, although my team's been split up and sent to different organizations within AOL. I don't know yet how this will turn out for me, but I do know that today I'm saddened by the loss. Yes, Mozilla will go on, but another pioneering force of the Web has just been painfully dimmed. It's worth a moment to reflect on where we've been... and where we might be headed.

Looks like the so-called 'browser wars' are really over indeed.

[Dagwood Bumstead]

"Yachats_Guy" [email]webforumsuser@macromedia.com[/email] wrote:

> From Eric Meyer's [url]http://www.meyerweb.com/[/url] is the following announcement:It's true: Netscape is no longer a viable entity. I'll leave it to others to draw conclusions regarding how this move is related to the agreement AOL and Microsoft reached a while back. Y'all can probably do a much better job of it anyway.
>
> From what I can discern, there will be no more new versions of Netscape; the browser will go into maintenance mode, whatever that means. More than half the staff was let go today, and Mozilla has been spun off into an independent, non-profit foundation supported by AOL, IBM, Sun, and others. I have no idea what will happen with netscape.com itself. DevEdge will cease producing new content, it would seem, which is a shame. We produced some really good stuff, and had more in the pipeline. Hopefully that forthcoming material will find another outlet.
>
> For now, I still have a job, although my team's been split up and sent to different organizations within AOL. I don't know yet how this will turn out for me, but I do know that today I'm saddened by the loss. Yes, Mozilla will go on, but another pioneering force of the Web has just been painfully dimmed. It's worth a moment to reflect on where we've been... and where we might be headed.
>
> Looks like the so-called 'browser wars' are really over indeed.

Who cares about the Netscape *brand*.

A good read is this article:
<http://siliconvalley.internet.com/news/article.php/2235701>

Firebird and Thunderbird are the new applications (based on Gecko).
Everything is moving towards individual apps instead of a one big
monolith one like Mozilla. Even Composer is an independent app, that
might one day be a very good free html visual editor.

So in short, we will still be developing for Gecko for the foreseeable
future.

[Eric A. Meyer]

In article <bf4161$qvs$1@forums.macromedia.com>,
Dagwood Bumstead <dagwood@smalltown-usa.org> wrote:

> Who cares about the Netscape *brand*.

The 50 people who were let go, maybe?

--
Eric A. Meyer
[url]http://www.meyerweb.com/eric/[/url]

[Dagwood Bumstead]

Eric A. Meyer wrote:

> In article <bf4161$qvs$1@forums.macromedia.com>,
> Dagwood Bumstead <dagwood@smalltown-usa.org> wrote:
>
>

>>Who cares about the Netscape *brand*.

>
>
> The 50 people who were let go, maybe?

Yes of course - I didn't mean to trivalize that aspect. I've been there
and it's not pleasant, especially with the personal relationships one
develops.

Hixie moved to Scandanavia and seems to be happy working for Opera, and
apparently some others were hired by the Mozilla Foundation.