No more spark from the Firefox developers?
March 13, 2005 11:56 PM
Lots of stories on troubles within the Firefox development community:
- From ForgetFoo: Firefox in Trouble?
- From TheServerSide.NET: Firefox is Heading Toward Trouble
- From Slashdot: Problems with the Firefox Development Process
- From a Firefox Developer: The Firefox review deficit
Similar news for the Mozilla suite from which Firefox is derived:
- From ActiveNetwork: Mozilla Suite is dead
- From MozillaNews: No Mozilla Suite 1.8 Final - Seamonkey's Fate Unclear
- From Slashdot: Mozilla Foundation in More Development Trouble
I'm not going to predict an early death of Firefox as some have, but this could hurt the open source community and reputation. One of the most popular and widely used open source projects has trouble securing developers and keeping them interested. What needs to be done to prevent this fate from happening to other promising open source projects? Will Eclipse face this problem, or will IBM's backing prevent it? Will Google or AOL become the IBM of Firefox, or do they not care since fewer browsers equals less development & qa for their web sites?
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Posted March 18, 2005 11:19 AM
This is a worrying development. I have been using Firefox for some time. One of the reasons their development group are drying up is that they are fairly elitist (understandably so) when allowing people into the tree. This does mean stuff should be QA'd well (apart from Mac Users getting the windows Update), but it also means the number of contributors are low - so the resilience that a large community normally gives to an open source project is not there. Since the source is available, and checking the license - maybe the community need to go and carry on developing it for them using SourceForge instead. It would be a shame to let such a good thing go.