I was quite surprised when I saw this article from PC Magazine. It appears that Mozilla will stop producing the Mozilla Suite, which has long been its bread-and-butter, and reassign developers to work on Firefox and Thunderbird.

This certainly doesn’t come as a surprise with the popularity of Firefox and Thunderbird reaching an all-time high. Plus, the Mozilla Suite had a reputation for being bloated with too many features. Even though preview versions of Mozilla 1.8 have been released, it appears that a full version will never be completed as efforts switch to the smaller Firefox and Thunderbird applications. Since these apps were started in an effort to focus on one thing and eliminate the code bloat that affected the Mozilla Suite from the beginning, it seems like a good idea. The bigger question is where does this leave Mozilla as an application platform? Will there still be a common platform or will it become Firefox- and Thunderbird-specific?

Since Mozilla hasn’t made an official announcement on its site about the move yet, I suppose we’ll have to wait and see.