CNET’s “Apple snub stings Mozilla” article has the Mozilla crew in a tizzy. Here’s a choice weblog quote:
It really gives me pause. They are talking about Mozilla from over a year ago. They are talking about a pre-1.0 Mozilla release. Mozilla has gotten a lot better since that evaluation [Chris Blizzard, Mozilla developer and RedHat employee]
They’re also talking about a pre-3.0 Konqueror release, Konq 2.2.2 vs. Mozilla 0.9.7 seems about right. If the Safari team honestly started working with KHTML around that time, I find it hard to believe that technical considerations played any part in Apple’s decision not to use Gecko. Licensing issues and politics seem much more likely; KHTML didn’t win over Gecko, it was merely better than starting from scratch.
Not using Gecko is a bet on a standards-compliant web, KHTML will never achieve enough marketshare to be meaningful by itself. I don’t think it’s a good bet, but what do I know? I use Windows XP and Phoenix…
Anecdote: With my former-employer’s CMS, I dropped support for 4.x browsers around August of 2001 (if memory serves, due to CSS issues). I wanted to drop them sooner, but we had a small group of employees clinging to Netscape 4.x on Linux. Mozilla 0.9.3 was the tipping point, it met the needs of the CMS and was good enough that I could force the Linux users to switch without risk of death threats.
