Excellent review of Firefox and Mozilla's financial relationship with Google. Mitchell Baker is both the CEO of the for-profit Mozilla Corporation and charwoman of the non-for-profit Mozilla Foundation. While the foundation has managed to give away less than $300,000 of it's $74 million war chest, it paid Mitchell $500,000 per year in compensation.

This all seems rather incestuous.

Quoted: Mozilla has come to resemble a Silicon Valley start-up more than a scrappy collaborative underdog.

$3 going to startup a more serious effort to make Thunderbird competitive. New venture called "MailCo".

This article bashes MS for not evolving email quickly enough. That may be - but the main problem is that MS is so focus on the "enterprise" email problem, that they don't really have a best-of-breed email solution for small business and home users.

[and, yes, I started the Outlook email client development team at Microsoft]

Product evolution is difficult. Look, for example, and the pitifully slow rate that Google has been able to integrate calendaring with email - and still no good offline versions of these web-hosted products.

Quoted: Mozilla is going after email. Why this is a Very Good Thing for the market.

Next version of (proposed) JavaScript ECMA-Script (version 4). New features include:

- Classes
- Interfaces
- Packages
- Namespaces

A nice annotated version of the Mozilla Public License (hover over green text to see explanation of terms, etc.) . I like this license MUCH better than the GPL. It's friendly to a much wider variety of users, and derivative works.

It's still "open source" in that any modifications you make to the original must be published in source form. But you can combine to make larger works that have unique licenses for the completely original portions you create.

HTML 5 around the corner??? I'm not familiar with Web Apps 1.0 and Web Forms 2.0, but here are the W3C proposals:

http://www.whatwg.org/specs/web-apps/current-work/
http://www.whatwg.org/specs/web-forms/current-work/

Quoted: HTML5, comprising the Web Apps 1.0 and Web Forms 2.0 specifications,
is the product of many years of collaborative effort. It specifies
existing HTML4 markup and APIs with much clearer conformance criteria
for both implementations and documents. It specifies many useful
additions, in many cases drawing on features that have existed in
browser-based implementations for a long time. And it actively draws
on feedback from implementors and content authors.

FIrefox 3 Wiki.

List of Mozilla.org's current projects.

The client-side JavaScript engine used in Firefox (or more specifically, in Gecko, the Firefox rendering engine).

We got a very nice review of our Firefox extension on mozilla.org. I also note we're getting 28 downloads a week. Not bad considering it's not featured in any way other than being one of many hundreds of extensions you can download.

Quoted: So many social bookmarks out there, yet just tried this one as I do most EXT's just to compare...
This is very clean, fast and non intrusive with just two buttons. Now as far as Blue Dot itself. I have found it to be a step above many and worth checking out. Unlike many EXT's that I dump right after checking out even if they are worthy, this one will be a keeper. Nice job Blue Dot and Mike Koss.
Wishing you much success in a very tough and competitive area in the net.
Sincerely,
Heidi-Ann Kennedy
Scientific Frontline®