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

[Cameron Kaiser <spectre@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

> > 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.

This partially happened with IE, also, although IE was a pretty sucky
client for a long time. But I agree, this is a big drain on the curious.
People will actually have to *look* for a gopher client and this won't
be compelling to the casual.

Naturally the Gopher Proxy will still be running, but with no automatic
flow, that won't help very much as no one other than those searching for
it will know to go there.

Part of this will require a public relations campaign to publicize the EOL.
We lost the battle, but we can still win the war by getting people who use
Gopher routinely to spread the word about alternatives. And at least there
is a little time to play with -- thank goodness Gopher was still in 3b1 or
we'd be totally up a creek.

> 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?

I saw that. I do note that there are some encouraging things still, such as
there is still a gopher proxy setting in Mac OS X 10.4. Can anyone confirm
it still exists in 10.5? Is there a similar option in XP/Vista?

We may be able to exploit this for more transparent access.

> > 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.

That's certainly a valid point. It would have a greater learning curve,
though. I've done a little work with customizing plug-ins but I have never
written from scratch, and Moz 2 is going to be a different architecture
in any case with some major and possibly fractured API decisions.

> 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?

It wasn't your fault and I knew I had bit off more than I could chew, but
we had to at least demonstrate the community was behind it. Even with
reasonable XPCOM experience, though, I had no chance of making 1.9.

Now that 2.0 is closed to us, it's the add-on route or the custom client.

The reason I suggested AIR is that it does have direct socket access and
that is definitely a big plus. I think people would be more likely to run
an AIR app that's managed than a random .exe. However, that also carries
the burden of installing Adobe AIR (free but another download), and AIR has
not been a paragon of stability or efficiency thus far.

-- 
------------------------------------ personal: http://www.cameronkaiser.com/ --
  Cameron Kaiser * Floodgap Systems * www.floodgap.com * ckaiser@xxxxxxxxxxxx
-- Consider the lilac. And while you're doing that, I'll go through your stuff.