The importance of plugins now that Netscape is gone

mozflp · Post by **mozflp** » August 4th, 2003, 4:00 pm

One thing that worries me very much with Netscape going down are plugins. There must be strong pressure from the Mozilla community to ensure flash, realplayer, acrobat, java, *.* plugins are developed for Mozilla.

If companies start to produce only plugins for IE, Mozilla will suffer a very, very strong blow. So will all other browsers that use NS based plugins.

Plugins are a part of online life, even though I hate sites with plugins they are here to stay, and Mozilla mustn't be shut out of the plugin party.

So don't forget plugins, people!

mozflp

jrobbio · Post by **jrobbio** » August 4th, 2003, 4:35 pm

Don't worry mozflp check out this site: http://plugindoc.mozdev.org/windows.html

Flash installation is seamless, so is realone, java and Adobe. The only tricky one can be shockwave, if you don't install in the default place.

They certainly haven't shut out the plugins

Rob

SomeGuy · Post by **SomeGuy** » August 6th, 2003, 6:34 am

That's great that there are so many plugins out there now, but I think the real concern, which the original poster was trying to convey, is that in the future these plugin makers may drop Netscape/Mozilla support in their products. Look at the number of other plugins on this site that already require installation futzing because they were designed for Netscape 4!

Fortunately these current versions of the plugins won't just disappear, and those with working plugin support probably won't drop it immediately. I suppose that Active X plugin might allow some Active X IE only stuff to work in Mozilla, but I am not too familiar with that.

The challenge for the immediate future will be getting application vendors and even just web sites to continue to design for Mozilla. Now that Microsoft finished off Netscape by paying AOL who squashed Netscape like a bug (That makes me so sick!) I can already hear millions of braindead web designers/developers yelling "Netscape is dead Mozilla is just another one of those programs like Lihn-ux that are written and used by hippies, I only have to design for IE now! Yayyyyyy!" Something has got to be done to counteract this. It was so much easier to tell people they needed to design for Netscape (and therefore Mozilla) when AOL was threatening to change their AOL client to use Gecko.

I will do the little I can do to advertise Mozilla. If enough people actually use it then, in theory, developers will develop for it, but people won't use it if nobody is developing for it!

Also, In the future Mozilla will need a distribution that will bundle some of these plugins like Flash and Java. Fortunately there is currently Netscape 7.1 that serves this purpose.

Post by **shadytrees** » August 6th, 2003, 6:57 am

The ActiveX plugin barely works right now. I doubt the companies will stop producing plugins. The big ones (Sun, Macromedia, etc) have loads of money and they can't afford to miss out on 5-15% of the market by just producing plugins for IE.