Mitch is talking about the future of the Mozilla projects and how they relate to OSAF projects. He likened Mozilla to being similar to Harry Potter – having lived with the repressive aunt and uncle while it was Netscape, and having blossomed into unanticipated success with Firefox.
In this conversation Mitch is very careful to note that his role at Mozilla is as the chair of the board of the Foundation, not as someone in charge of product direction or priorities.
The new Mozilla Corporation is organizing around the product development at Mozilla, working very hard on Firefox 1.5 and looking ahead at 2.0, with a lot of work going on in the graphics rendering engine, etc.
There is a Mozilla project that is working towards making Python a first-class language for Mozilla development. Mitch notes that it’s just not realistic to expect devlopers to write Mozilla extensions in Javascript these days. This could make integration between Chandler and Mozilla easier.
There is a Chandler project getting started to look at whether it makes sense to look at moving Chandler’s cross-platform GUI development tools from wxWidgets to XUL (the platform used by Mozilla). This would be a large long-term shift which would not take place before Chandler 1.0 is released.
One possible Chandler parcel that could integrate with Firefox – Integrating web-browsing stuff with email, tasks, and calendaring. Effectively types everything you look at in Firefox as Chandler items that can be searched and integrated with other stuff in the Chandler repository, synchronized, and shared.
Mozilla is kind of a platform and kind of not – it’s very hard to build applications other than a browser on top of the code base. That is slowly being addressed, but certainly makes it difficult for Thunderbird to progress. There are questions about how good is good enough – what should be the aspirations for Thunderbird?
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