A lot has been written recently which purports that people just don’t seem to understand what it takes to make Mozilla into the best, and that we all just need to pipe down about the problems in both the currently-shipping Netscape browser offering and in the development cycle for Mozilla. (Some of this seems to stem from my postings and comments on this issue over the past week.)

There are a few major problems with the line of thinking that’s driving the current Mozilla/Netscape/AOL defenders:

1. Netscape, whether or not they want to say so, should feel like they have at least an iota of responsibility for fixing the major showstopping bugs in their currently-shipping product. Here, I am referring to pages with up-to-spec CSS just plain crashing their browser; the fact that a developer contacted them to ask them to help, and their response was that they were too busy on ther next version to fix this, is just abhorrent.

   Imagine if Microsoft Word had a bug where opening up a document saved in a prior format just crashed the application. Now imagine if, when contacted, they said that they wouldn’t bother fixing it, because Office 2001 is currently in development, is a new code base, and people can just wait for that. I guarantee that you’d read about the ensuing fracas on major computer news sites, Slashdot, and possibly even on Scripting News — because it’s Microsoft that’s involved. The fact that Netscape is the company here that’s making a totally stupid decision is what is making people defend them. They’ve got a good thing going, I guess. (I imagine, though, that the real reason that nobody cares about this is because Dori’s right — Netscape is irrelevant, and thus, nobody is even bothering to lift a finger.)

2. While the Mozilla group claims that things are moving so slowly because, for once, they’re trying to do it right, what they in fact are doing is adding more bloat, features, and doo-dads to the application that don’t matter, and methinks this is what’s taking so long. Sure, it will be a browser. It will also be a mail client, a news reader, an instant messaging client, a voice-over-IP client, a client for news, travel, and financial data, a portal, and possibly will make your bed for you. The scariest quote from the above-quoted PC World article:

   Netscape says it will more heavily leverage AOL properties, including shopping sites, from within the browser. Netcenter services are also being more tightly woven into the browser, along with many “modular” add-ons that will let users tailor the browser’s appearance.

3. Netscape’s gotta take the bad (or what they see as the bad) with the good. By choosing to make the Mozilla development process a public one, they have opened themselves up to public criticism of that process. And given both that their current browser is terrible and that the product of the Mozilla development process doesn’t look to be anything like what I want to use in my daily browsing life (and, so far as I can tell, this amalgam of tools lumped into one app isn’t what most web users want to use either), I feel like web developers are getting shafted. Thus, criticism.
4. No matter what they use to justify their current timetable of development and lack of willingness to fix their current browser, or what my or anyone else’s opinions are about their strategy, Netscape surely should realize that their continued path can only lead to irrelevance. StatMarket’s one-year trend graph of Microsoft vs. Netscape is pretty telling — as Netscape dawdles, Microsoft wins. (Note that I’m not particularly pro-Microsoft on this issue except for the fact that Microsoft’s browser is clearly a better one. If BrowserCorp or WebCompany or HTML’R’Us had a browser that did CSS and was quick and didn’t crash and was free, then that graph would probably look a bit different, and I’d feel a bit different.) We can all argue and argue and argue on this, but in a year, I’m willing to bet that even with Mozilla on the scene, that graph won’t look too different, and as a developer, I’ll still be developing sites predominantly for MSIE.

So, in the final analysis, it’s interesting to me that the people who put forth the lament that people just don’t understand what it takes to make a better browser clearly believe that this whine will change reality, and that people will take a step back and stop switching away from Netscape and to other browsers. People probably feel bad for their plight, but this doesn’t appear to be a strong enough reason for them to stop fleeing Netscape’s product.

(And as a postscript meant specifically for mozilla.editthispage.com: I’m running Mozilla on three different platforms, but I’m not seeing anything groundbreaking, and I’m not tempted to switch. Oh, and your comments regarding AOL’s blocking of AIM interconnections demonstrate a fundamentally flawed understanding of AOL’s own statements, releases, and actions earlier this year; your snide remark about the BetaNews user comments smacks mostly of the “I can’t defend someone so I’ll insult their attackers” mentality.)

[late note: I posted a followup to this diatribe at this location in the discussion group.]