richwklein.com

Flock has put up a rather complimentary blog post today about the Netscape Navigator Team.

With the decision to cease ongoing support of the Netscape browser, we are honored to have the support and endorsement of AOL and Netscape, who have introduced Flock to millions of loyal Netscape users as AOL sunsets ongoing support for the Netscape products in the field. Tom Drapeau from Netscape has been instrumental in helping increase awareness of the Flock browser, and by doing so has introduced a global audience of people to the unique experience that only the Flock browser delivers.

I really enjoyed my time working on Netscape Navigator. Hopefully, I’ll be able to spend a little bit of time working on Flock soon.

Flock - the browser for people who like to be connected. When using Flock, people can easily discover, access, create and share videos, photos, blogs, feeds and comments across social communities, media providers, and popular websites.

I usually use Eclipse as my development environment. Recently, I’ve been running out of memory when I use it. I’ve now switched to Komodo Edit because of that Eclipse memory issue. Komodo Edit is a real nice editor, but I would like to find some add-ons to create a more robust IDE experience. Here are the things I’m currently missing out on:

• SVN and CVS integration
• Terminal Window
• Toolbox Packages

If anyone out there can point me at some add-ons for these features, I would be forever indebted.

March 1st was our end of support date for the Netscape client products. This means there will be no more active product support for Navigator 9, or any previous Netscape Navigator browser. This includes Netscape v1-v4.x, Netscape 6, Netscape 7 Suite, Netscape Browser 8, and Netscape Navigator/Messenger 9. The Netscape Archive has been setup as a final resting place for these products.

This means I’m done working on Netscape Navigator and have started to work on Propeller. Hopefully, it will not take me very long to get up to speed and be a great asset to the propeller team.

The Netscape Archive has been created to preserve a final resting place for client side Netscape applications, given that official support is ending March 1, 2008. The archive is now available at archive.netscape.com. We are seeing encouraging signs from our server logs that show us that a great many people are having success migrating to Flock and Firefox via the auto-update option, which is great news! We want to make sure that folks can satisfy their sense of nostalgia, while still trying out the best of breed of current browsers.

The official announcement can be found on blog.netscape.com; the Propeller discussion is here.

Today we released the final version of Netscape Navigator 9. The main feature of this release is the inclusion of a migration extension that will help users move to either Flock or Firefox. This is our subtle little hint for you to stop using Navigator and move on to something else.

The official announcement can be found on blog.netscape.com; the Propeller discussion is here.

Lilmatt posted recently about Making good on a promise. zbraniecki followed up with a post on not-invented-here syndrome. I just wanted to comment.

Since we are ending support of Netscape Navigator, we have been working on migrating users. We’ve been working with both Mozilla and Flock in migrating our users to their products. Even with all parties having competing products based on the same code base, I have not witnessed any animosity between these two groups in my dealings. They have been very cooperative.

Firefox - Discover all the ways a browser can make the Web better for you. Firefox is the safest and most enjoyable way to surf the Web.

2007 has been an exciting year full of changes for me and the family. We’ve bought 2 acres of land a couple of miles outside the city that we are planning on build a new house on in 2009.

I left Tone Brothers, Inc. in December of 2006 and started working for AOL. So work has been completely different for me this year. I went from a 70 mile a day commute to working at home. I went from working in a manufacturing environment on an iSeries server to working on the Navigator browser using Windows XP, Windows Vista, Mac OS X, and Linux. This has been the most fulfilling year for me as far as work goes in a long long time. The announcement on December 28th of the EOL for Netscape client side software, it looks like I’ll have lots of changes in 2008 to keep me going.

Noah turned 2 in August and Wyatt turned 1 in November. We have had Noah learn to talk and talk and talk and now going through the terrible twos. Wyatt has learned how to roll over, sit up, crawl, and then walk. Noah had a case of hives that lasted for several weeks and we never found the culprit. We had some serious scares with Wyatt and his deformational plagiocephaly which hasn’t been any problem since he seems to be developing right on schedule. We have had a ton of bumps, bruises, good days and bad. I am so lucky to have found a job where I can be home for all of it and love watching every minute.

Rachel and I celebrated our 9th anniversary this year. Its crazy how fast the time goes by, it seems like we were newlyweds only yesterday. I have the most wonderful wife in the world. She is a wonderful mother to our 2 boys and she has been extremely supportive in my decision to change careers at such a crazy time in our lives. We have our moments, you have to remember that we both are at home all the time now, but I fall in love with her more everyday and I can’t think of another person I would want to spend the rest of my live with. We both quit smoking in October of this year.

This has been a wonderful year full of changes, I hope that 2008 will be the same.

Although I did not kill Navigator, I am the sole remaining engineer that is working on it. That being said, a single person does not constitute enough resources to reasonably maintain a browser or e-mail client. Here is the official announcement about the “End of Life” for Netscape software. Since we will no longer be working on these products, my responsibilities will be transforming. I will be working on system integration. That means I will be working with AOL’s APIs to provide integration between applications and also to provide extensions that use those APIs. Changes in a persons work responsibilities are always a scary thing, but I’m excited about what the future holds.

We have released version 9.0.0.5 of Netscape Navigator. This is a security release to bring in changes from Firefox 2.0.0.11. You can get it at browser.netscape.com. The official announcement can be found on blog.netscape.com; the Propeller discussion is here.

Since everyone else is glowing about the new design coming up for Propeller, I thought I would put my 2 cents in. I’m really digging the look. I think our users are going to love the new layout. This is just going to put Propeller on a whole different level than anyone else and I can’t wait for everyone else to be able to see it.