Monday, 12 August 2013

NetSurf could be it.

In my opinion Mozilla is not the organzation it used to be. It doesn't listen to either users or developers. It makes arbitrary changes and requires web developers to cope. This attitude reflects an abberant power imbalance felt by Mozilla between them and their users.

Rather than hope for a change in attitude at Mozilla, I think the org should be replaced with a project which more accurately incarnates progressive ideals. I think NetSurf could well be it. I must say, I am impressed with its project breadth: Amiga and even Atari... that's impressive. I remember that there were ports of Firefox to the GP2X handheld, before Gecko became too obfusticated to port, and looking at these home computer ports I think I see that same spirit. I also like how you are using libraries, as opposed to IBM's XP-COM unqualified disaster. I notice that you are lacking in areas, however, which Mozilla dealt with long ago, with C-based libraries that have been successfully implemented. Your Javascript woes, for example, can be ably handled by the SpiderMonkey engine, as they were in SphereRPG, which used SDL and SpiderMonkey side by side. With respect to HTML 5, I think you may want to question your dependence on it, because with few exceptions the standards process has been taken over by Google and is being biased towards its interests. These interests are not necessarily accessory to a "better web".

I think standardization compliance is a red herring; rather, I think the future lies in passion and leverage of popular values. However it would be a mistake to engage in "browser war" -- people who use Firefox do so because they detest Microsoft, Google, and Apple all. What we want is an alternative to Mozilla and its modus operandi... if the sites and apps we make won't run on other browsers, then they should use ours. Google's aggressive adherents are the real secret to its success... responding to their attitude in kind could pay dividends for Netsurf.

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