The Mozilla project, largely sponsored by AOL-TimeWarner, has taken a dramatic turn. Team leaders have advised Mozilla developers to abandon the "swiss army knife" approach for smaller and lighter applications, according to a statement posted on the mozilla.org site today.
In the statement, team leaders Brenden Eich and David Hyatt take the criticism on the chin, and the team has also vowed to tighten up its development methodology. The winners include Phoenix, a fast and light version implementation for Windows and Linux, which becomes the focus of the project. Phoenix uses a different browser UI infastructure than Mozilla/Netscape 7, and offers many other advantages.
The losers are the cross-platform toolkit (XPFE) and the user interface language (XUL), which created a rich scriptable environment that can justifiably be described as a "platform". The Mozilla suite will favor standalone mail and composer applications in preference to the monolithic package developed now.
News source: The Register
