471494 - New History page overlooks mozilla.org's work sponsoring/fostering other projects and applications

Status: RESOLVED FIXED

(www.mozilla.org :: General, defect)

Description

[Smokey Ardisson (offline for a while; not following bugs - do not email)]

The new History page is a pretty nice, brief summary of the history of Mozilla project.  I have one main issue with it, though: other than a brief mention of the Mozilla Suite/1.0 and one of Thunderbird, the page reads a tiny bit like gold-paving the road to Firefox's ascendance on the world stage and ignores all of mozilla.org's work between 2000 and 2004/5 as a development ground and home for other projects and applications ("there was the Suite, there was Phoenix, Firefox became totally awesome! full stop.").

I think it is an important part of mozilla.org's moral legacy that during those years when the internet was stagnant, when Netscape had lost and was falling to ruin, and when m/b was just Luke Skywalker on Tatooine, the Project (big P) remained a place that was willing to support a variety of software types and developers and serve as a home and an incubator.  Things like Bugzilla, NSPR, NSS/open-source crypto, Rhino, Chimera.

I don't even feel like these need to be mentioned by name on this page, but I think the page is poorer for the lack of a sentence or clause mentioning mozilla.org's important role fostering many types of internet and internet-related software development in the middle years.

(It'd also be cool if at some point we could have an interactive timeline up on the site, perhaps with different categories or tracks--application releases, technology developments, organizational milestones, etc.--to help people explore the rich history of mozilla.org/the Mozilla Project, but that's another bug somewhere.)

Comment 1

[David Boswell]

Thanks for the feedback.  Longer term I'd love to merge the History and Timeline pages and make it interactive and expand it to include more of the details.  

For the new History page I was trying to balance making it readable (aka, not too long) with making it comprehensive.  I agree that there are big things left out of it and I'm happy to take a pass at adding more information.  Maybe throw in a bit about 'let a hundred browsers bloom' and the other non-browser projects?  I'm happy to post some draft text here for review, but it might be a few weeks.

Comment 2

[David Boswell]

Attachment: Patch for History page

I took a quick pass at updating the History text to address these comments.  Basically I rewrote the second paragraph and made some small tweaks to the 1st and 4th paragraph.  Feel free to provide feedback or suggestions.

Comment 3

[Smokey Ardisson (offline for a while; not following bugs - do not email)]

That rewrite looks good to me, David; it satisfies my concerns and still meets your goals of keeping that particular page short and readable.

(Incidentally, I was only familiar with the hyatt phrase; I wasn't aware that you'd written an article about the blooming-in-progress :) )

Comment 4

[David Boswell]

Great, glad this edit addresses your comments.  I'll wait a bit longer to see if anyone else has feedback before checking this in.

The funny thing about that article is that Phoenix is at the very end.  I guess I was a bit off at predicting Phoenix's future :)

Comment 5

[Samuel Sidler (old account; do not CC)]

The changes look good to me too. fwiw, hyatt's blog post is here:

http://weblogs.mozillazine.org/hyatt/archives/2002_04.html#001721

(More because I always look for it and have trouble finding it...)

Comment 6

[David Boswell]

I just checked this change in with a couple additional small tweaks.  Feel free to reopen this bug or open a new bug if there are other changes you'd like to see on the History page.

Comment 7

[David Boswell]

Closing as fixed.