Problems with FireFox

[James Glasheen]

Lack of developers (http://www.dmxzone.com/showDetail.asp?TypeId=1&NewsId=8527) causes big problems for them.

[francis]

According to some sources, yes. But then remember that they're a small open-source organisation and not a multi-billion dollar global corporation. Ben Goodger (one of FF's main developers) has commented on the situation (http://weblogs.mozillazine.org/ben/archives/007715.html) in one of his blogs. Also, Mac FF users can be happy as they've just got a new fulltime developer (http://www.macuser.co.uk/?news/news_story.php?id=70018)

FF will be alright because it's open source there will always be people who will be able to help. If it really started to flounder (as opposed to ust being the subject of unsubstantiated rumour) then people would jump in and help.

FF has already forced the hand of MS to finally do something about IE (http://blogs.msdn.com/ie/archive/2005/03/09.aspx) when they said nothing would be done until Longhorn. This, finally, seems to include, some much needed standards support in IE7:

Given the strong usage of IE in the corporate space as well as embedded in applications, we have a strong requirement for backwards compatibility with our previous behavior, compliant or not; that requirement does not mean “don’t touch anything”, it is just a recognition that keeping our engine in sync across strict and quirks modes is challenging when quirks mode has to work nearly exactly the same as it always has. We will continue to improve our compliance under strict mode even when it breaks compatibility, and under quirks mode when it’s not damaging to our backwards compatibility

Incidentally, if anyone's looking for a good article on IE/FF and why they should switch, how stuff works has a good one that's written in easy to understand terms (http://computer.howstuffworks.com/firefox.htm/printable)