BlogOfTheMoon

I'm a bit late on this (consequence of still not having proper [read broadband] internet access at home), but on Wednesday, AOL announced that they would be laying off the entire browser development team at Netscape. I find this sad in two ways. Firstly, I've always been a user of Netscape or Netscape-related browsers. I started off with NS3 when I first gained internet access, and stuck with the 4.x series even during the four year drought while we were waiting for the much-mooted Netscape 5. I've never liked IE, both for its interface and the philosophy behind it (tying it into the operating system to gain a de facto monopoly). The other reason that I find these layoffs worrying is that we still don't know how it will affect the development of Mozilla. Netscape developers have played a key role in Mozilla's development over the past four years and without this large body of coders, I really don't know what will happen. Still, most opinion over at Mozillazine is positive and the creation of the Mozilla Foundation and a new end-user focus should make for interesting times over the next few months. So RIP Netscape and here's to a positive future for Mozilla!