[gopher] A letter to Mozilla Foundation

[Nuno J. Silva]

Cameron Kaiser <spectre at floodgap.com> writes:

>> > My personal feeling is that they wanted to shake out technologies they
>> > believed were not worth their time, and they chose (not unreasonably)
>> > Moz 2.0 where a large number of internal changes were taking place to
>> > draw that line. Although they never went out and said it, this was
>> > implied by comments like Mike Shaver's where they did not want cycles
>> > wasted on testing and development for it.
>> 
>> I'd like them to state clearly the true, deep reason. Although, we've
>> already found they're against gopher support itself, we deserve a clear
>> answer.
>
> I did find a Google Chrome request someone filed to add gopher to that.
> It was pretty crisply rejected even though a lot of people joined in.

I found two requests (maybe they should have been merged), 5106 and
11345

http://code.google.com/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=5106
http://code.google.com/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=11345

both stamped WONTFIX.

(There is also bug 30840, if people are told it's an unsupported
protocol and that they need another program to browse it, it's far
better than getting a google web search, no matter what is the
unsupported protocol.)

http://code.google.com/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=30840

>> A key point in spreading gopher is the support of a largely used browser
>> like Firefox. As we will still have a pointer to Overbite when browsing
>> gopher:, that's not completely lost (I don't mean it's good, I mean it
>> isn't as bad as it could be) --- people can still follow the link and
>> install Overbite.
>
> I hope that Mozilla adopts bug 572000; this at least gives people a way
> to migrate. I think, though, we should be emphasizing more why Gopher is
> different rather than the popular misconception that it's a "mini Web."
> Rob did put this very well, better than I did in so many words:
>
>> "Thinkig of it like that, a method of easily serving directoies of data,
>> rather than a scaled down web makes the whole thing more appealing I
>> think."
>> 
>> in gopher://gopher.robsayers.com/0/whygopher.txt
>
> I think anything helping to encourage its hierarchical nature serves to
> make it more distinct, and therefore more valuable/relevant.

It's gopher's main strength. And at the same time, it's one of the
greatest weaknesses of the web. Some parts of the web are sometimes just
a big mess.

> Also, I'm exploring Gopher in constrained environments. On Twitter we
> were talking about Gopher over AX.25 and KISS packet radio links. This
> sounds like a terrific use for a link that is at best 9600bps and often
> as low as 1200bps, much like using GPRS and Overbite Android on a mobile
> device.

Is there any J2ME gopher client? That'd make a good use for J2ME+GPRS
cell phones.

>> > I heard back from the SeaMonkey folks and they were happy to offer
>> > assistance porting OverbiteFF to SM, and it's nearly done if people want
>> > to give it a spin.
>> 
>> I've not used Seamonkey for ages (actually, I never used it, I used the
>> Mozilla Suite), but maybe it's time to look at it again :-)
>
> 1522 has SeaMonkey support in it, so let me know how you like it. SM are
> strict embedders of Mozilla, so when they adopt Mozilla 2.0 (in SM 2.1),
> gopher dies there also. However, 2.1 is barely in its second alpha and there
> is probably a long way to go before it will even make beta.

I was hoping they could patch gecko to use a gopher-enabled engine, but
that probably does not mix well with their goals (I suppose what they
want is to pack Firefox, Thunderbird and others together, trying to keep
every feature as-is).

Thinking of Mozilla Suite and Gopher reminds me of this screenshot :-)

gopher://gopher.quux.org/g/Software/Gopher/screenshots/mozilla.gif

I'm sad I never used this, looks... interesting!

-- 
Nuno J. Silva
gopher://sdf-eu.org/1/users/njsg