Re: [gopher] A letter to Mozilla Foundation
Cameron Kaiser <spectre@floodgap.com> writes:
>> What I think they shouldn't do is just drop it due to security
>> concerns. See, dropping extension support would avoid problems due to
>> evil add-ons. Dropping plugins would avoid the Adobe Flash programming
>> errors. And dropping javascript would solve lots of other problems. It
>> should be about what they want to support and have in their program.
>
> I agree wholeheartedly, and I think the whole security thing was a
> smokescreen.
>
> My personal feeling is that they wanted to shake out technologies they
> believed were not worth their time, and they chose (not unreasonably)
> Moz 2.0 where a large number of internal changes were taking place to
> draw that line. Although they never went out and said it, this was
> implied by comments like Mike Shaver's where they did not want cycles
> wasted on testing and development for it.
I'd like them to state clearly the true, deep reason. Although, we've
already found they're against gopher support itself, we deserve a clear
answer.
> I would be disappointed, but respectful, if they had been open about
> this from the beginning. The real argument is how much investment it
> would have required to maintain, and, well, my perspective on that is
> well known. I was more than willing to do the work to keep the code in.
> But that wasn't what they wanted.
If they say manpower is the issue, I'd expect more of that to fix the
issue. It seems they should really double-check their excuses.
I hope the fact they didn't point out a solid reason to take it out does
not mean they didn't spend enough time thinking about it.
>
> The fix was in for Gopher back in 2007, and I'm just happy we got it
> to stay in for three years after that.
So am I. Although I use Overbite, sometimes I rely on Firefox's native
ability to browse the protocol. Also, as nowadays many people are using
Firefox, this means that during the last years they were able to browse
the link in my signature.
> For the record, killing Gopher in Fx 4.0 has awakened a lot of background
> interest from people peripherally aware of it who were sorry to see it go.
> I've gotten quite a few letters from people who were happy to see an
> add-on still in maintenance, and said they would spread it around a bit.
> This might amplify as the actual end (i.e., release of Fx 4.0 final)
> approaches.
Gopher saw some interest in the last months, like an article at
BoingBoing (then quoted in /.), on the "gopher archive".
A key point in spreading gopher is the support of a largely used browser
like Firefox. As we will still have a pointer to Overbite when browsing
gopher:, that's not completely lost (I don't mean it's good, I mean it
isn't as bad as it could be) --- people can still follow the link and
install Overbite.
Maybe the userbase grows a lot in the next months, for some new users it
might be just a matter of seeing things differently, as Rob Sayers says
"Thinkig of it like that, a method of easily serving directoies of data,
rather than a scaled down web makes the whole thing more appealing I
think."
in gopher://gopher.robsayers.com/0/whygopher.txt
> I heard back from the SeaMonkey folks and they were happy to offer
> assistance porting OverbiteFF to SM, and it's nearly done if people want
> to give it a spin.
I've not used Seamonkey for ages (actually, I never used it, I used the
Mozilla Suite), but maybe it's time to look at it again :-)
--
Nuno J. Silva
gopher://sdf-eu.org/1/users/njsg
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