[gopher] Re: Strategy: end of Gopher in Mozilla

[Stegozor <stegozor@xxxxxxxxx>]

On 1/16/08, Cameron Kaiser <spectre@xxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> Brandon Eich has spoken on 388195 and has stated that gopher will disappear
> in Mozilla 2, which means Firefox 3 will be the final version with gopher
> support. (And what a jerk he is. Wow. Did you read his comments on SOAP?)
> This is a crushing blow.

To say the least. Right now I wonder if it's worth continuing: we can
forget about newbies who land on gopher sites more or less by mistake
or by clicking on a link just to see how it looks. And no fresh blood
means death, sooner or later.
There is a question posted yesterday in news:comp.infosystems.gopher
asking about a proxy for Opera. What the hell should I answer him?
That he should use Firefox?

> At this point strategy needs to be discussed to have a workable, deployable
> modern client in place for when FF 3 becomes EOLed in a couple years.
>
> As I see it, we have two options:
>
> - FF add-on. This has the advantages of integration, but we have to play
> in their sandbox, including dumbing down features that don't work well in
> a browser environment. However, a lot of work is done for us, and it is
> cross-platform. We would need someone/ a team with good knowledge of how
> to do this.

This would help for simply legitimacy. People tend to install Firefox
extensions from the official Mozilla extension room, but a .exe from
dudes they don't even know, I think they'll be less confident. They
would just walk away.

If we were able to come up with a JavaScript patch maybe it would have
been accepted. We will never know. The one thing that is sure is that
we had nothing to offer and now, Brandon Eich can say "no free
lunches".  You couldn't do all the job yourself, Cameron, and we
failed to help you on this. Now, even if some people developed an
extension, I'd ask if it's really worth it: how many people are going
to install it anyway?

-- 
Goebbels was in favor of free speech for views he liked. So was
Stalin. If you're in favor of free speech, then you're in favor of
freedom of speech precisely for views you despise. Otherwise, you're
not in favor of free speech - Noam Chomsky.