August 8th, 2005
Mozilla Foundation wants at making RSS usable by mere mortals
I ran into Chris Hofmann, director of engineering for the Mozilla Foundation, at a Red Hat press conference (support in Red Hat’s Certificate System for smart card detection in the September releases of Firefox and Thunderbird 1.0) and asked him about other projects that Mozilla could undertake, such as blogging and wiki projects. He said that he doesn’t have plans for blogging or wiki projects, but that the Mozilla Foundation is looking at developing a next generation of communications tools. "We have just scratched the surface of RSS integration with a browser and e-mail. We made it easier to navigate and get feeds, but publishing and improving RSS usability will be an ongoing challenge," Hofmann said. "Our researchers are looking at new ideas now, but we aren’t ready to talk about it now. " Open source development is about sharing, but just not everything at once. He characterized the efforts of the Mozilla Foundation as evolutionary, "grinding out small improvements."
Dan Farber, editor-in-chief of CNET News.com, has more than 20 years of experience as an editor and journalist covering technology. See his full profile and disclosure of his industry affiliations.
