C|Net's News.com is running another story by Paul Festa on Mozilla, this time focusing on its website editor component. Like other articles by the same reporter, this one contains an unintelligible headline, a misleading summary, unsubstantiated statements, and matters of opinion stated as fact.

Let's take each of the above individually:

An Unintelligible Headline:

"Composer to get another hearing" screams the new headline. The article that follows, however, does not fully explain why Mozilla Composer is on trial - what its alleged crimes are, who is charging it with those crimes, and what the possible consequences are. My sarcastic evaluation would be that unintelligble, yet dramatic sounding headlines are more likely to make the Top 100 charts of Popdex or DayPop than understandable, ho-hum ones.

A Misleading Summary:

In most News.com articles, it seems that the first paragraph of the article (immediately below the headline) is a summary of the entire article. In this case, the summary states:

"When Mozilla.org announced plans last month to focus development resources on separate browser and mail applications, a pioneering Web authoring tool called Composer was left a software orphan."

But on the very next line, the article goes on to say:

" But a contributor to Mozilla, Netscape's open-source development group, plans to rescue Composer from its current limbo."

So far, if I had just read the summary, I would have thought: "oh, so Composer will now be discontinued". If I had glanced beyond the summary, I would have noticed that the entire meaning has been turned on its head; now, instead of being "orphaned", it is being rescued. Whether this crucial omission from the summary was deliberate or unintentional remains unclear.

(I also would have inferred that the reporter regarded Composer as being significant, since he referred to it as having been a "pioneering Web authoring tool" in the summary. More on that soon. )

Unsubstantiated Statements:

The next paragraph gets more interesting - Mr. Festa now attempts to show that even though Composer was once relevant, it no longer is, because it has been overshadowed by the likes of Dreamweaver and FrontPage. I quote:

Composer's potential may indeed be great, but its recent past has been less than good.

Okay, point taken: he says that Composer's "recent past" has been "less than good". What does he use to back up that statement? His own opinion, or a statement of some sort from a programmer or user of Mozilla? If this is an opinion, then it should have been labeled as such. How can responsible journalism pass off personal opinion as fact, without further corroboration? He continues:

Although Composer was one of the earliest mass market applications for Web authoring and survives as a component of the free download Netscape 7, it has fallen by the wayside as Microsoft FrontPage has taken over the low end of the market for Web authoring tools and Macromedia Dreamweaver has dominated the high end.

Here is another claim that Composer has "fallen by the wayside". You might counter with "Who uses
Composer anyway? Everyone has heard of FrontPage, but to most people Mozilla Composer does not mean much at all." Even if this were true, it would not be enough for Mr. Festa to pass this statement off as fact, without some reference to confirming evidence: a report, a comment, a third-party observation.

Matters of Opinion Stated as Fact:

The next paragraph is even more enjoyable:

"Last month, when Mozilla announced it would scrap its unwieldy, feature-packed browser for a leaner version called Phoenix, it simultaneously announced plans to develop the Netscape mail client along with Phoenix, under the name Minotaur. "

The text in bold above is a link to another News.com article, whose headline reads Phoenix rises from Mozilla's ashes. (So much for his previous description of Composer as once having been a pioneer. And why the reference to a Netscape mail client? After having written so many articles on Mozilla, he should know how Mozilla is different from Netscape. )

Without refering to linked article explicitly he characterizes the current incarnation of Mozilla as "unwieldly and feature packed". Had Mr. Festa used the latest version of Mozilla, he would have noticed the following: the total download size for the Windows version of Mozilla is about 13 megabytes. On its Internet Explorer page, Microsoft notes that the download size of a "typical installation" of Internet Explorer 6 SP1 is 25 megabytes. It also mentions that the download size can range from 11 to 75 megabytes.

The 13 megabyte version of Mozilla which I referred to is the full version (with an email program, Composer, IRC chat program, JavaScript console and debugger and Document Inspector), which compares favorably with the maximum size of 75 megabytes of Internet Explorer's full version. Had Mr. Festa actually used Mozilla or checked his facts, he could not have brought himself to claim that Mozilla is unwieldly - not at least when compared with the current version of Internet Explorer.

What appears to be good journalism on the surface, is at best nothing more than impassioned opinion sprouting - operating under the guise of responsible and unbiased reporting.

He concludes the article with a quote from Mozilla developer Daniel Glazman's personal weblog, instead of a quote from an interview with him. The quoted excerpt states Glazman's desire to continue Composer as a stand alone program which would accompany Firebird and Thurderbird (the standalone browser and mail components) in the major next version of Mozilla.

His final line is :

"Glazman and Mozilla could not immediately be reached for comment."

This article is but one in the long history of Mr. Festa's apparent quest to portray Mozilla in a negative light. I challenge any reader of MozTips to dig up a single article of his, which has anything good at all to say about Mozilla.

Maybe his personal, unpublished conclusion is, after all, similar to what he wrote in his summary for this article: that Composer, like Mozilla, is an orphan. That is presumably because, in his eyes, both have been abandoned by the willful praise of the parental press. As he sees it, without the explicit parental blessing of the press, both Mozilla and Composer are now relegated to being mere wandering children, devoid of relevance, orphans of history, mere shadows of their former selves !

If only a certain, unnamed mainstream Internet technology news outlet had given Mozilla a fighting chance, the public perception of Mozilla would be quite different today.

[Last few paras edited for clarity since the original post]

Category: Mozilla Press

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