And here comes Pheonix
Yes! Mozilla.org posted the new development roadmap, which among other thing says:
Switch Mozilla's default browser component from the XPFE-based Navigator to the standalone Phoenix browser. Note: the Phoenix user interface is defined entirely using XUL. So in preferring Phoenix, we are not deprecating XUL. We are demonstrating how XUL is a sound basis for fast, cross-platform applications such as Phoenix.
and
Continue the move away from an ownership model involving a large cloud of hackers with unlimited CVS access, to a model, more common in the open source world, of vigorously defended modules with strong leadership and clear delegation, a la NSPR, JavaScript, Gecko in recent major milestones, and Phoenix.
This is very very cool. There's already an experimental Pheonix build for OSX, but it really isn't ready for prime time and was more of a "proof of concept" that they could get it over (ie, it crashes all the time on my machine). I don't think it will actually be called Pheonix anymore, due to legal issues with the name... but minotaur was a cool name for the mail app so hopefully they'll find something equally as cool.
As it is right now, when you use Mozilla you have a mail client, HTML composer, chat application and some other stuff that most people will just never use. This not only increases resources while running Mozilla, but makes downloads for the app itself much higher than they need to be. Seperately, if you do use the mail client (now called Minotaur) if Mozilla happens to crash (or vice versa) only one app will go down, not both. Very very cool.
It'll be interesting to see what comes of the new, more structured development model... i haven't spent a huge amount of time looking through the Mozilla codebase simply because it seemed to be a free-for-all of used code, might be used code, code that will never be used but they'll keep it around anyways, and code that someone hopes will get it...
Posted by drunkenbatmanApril 03, 2003, at 03:43 PM
