The Mozilla Foundation has announced there will be no more releases beyond 1.7.x of Mozilla (confirmed with Asa). I take my hat off for a moment of silence. Last weekend, I finally moved my e-mail from Mozilla to Thunderbird so I can use Firefox all the time instead of Mozilla (habit, y’know?). Mozilla got me off my Netscape addition (when I look at Netscape now, I’m glad I made the move although I am thankful for my time with it) and I adore Firefox. To the future and beyond!

The Mozilla Browser, originally an offshoot from AOL’s Netscape and the spark that helped to coin the term “Open Source,” will no longer benefit from new releases from its Mozilla Foundation masters.

The movement has since given birth to a new group that may take over future releases of the suite.

In an open posting on Mozilla.org, the Mozilla Foundation said it had begun a transition plan in 2003 to focus development on the next generation browser, which was to become Firefox.

The Firefox next generation browser effort was begun to remove the “bloat” from the Mozilla Suite code that includes an integrated mail client and HTML editor. Firefox is derived from the same code base as the Mozilla Suite, and utilizes the same “Gecko” rendering engine.

[Mozilla On Its Last Legs, continued]