On the heels of it's latest alpha release (1.4), Mozilla has announced a major change in its development roadmap, deciding to replace the Mozilla suite of applications with the "soon-to-be-renamed stand-alone Phoenix browser and the Thunderbird mail and newsgroups client (also known as Minotaur)."

Although this could confuse prospective new users of Mozilla, I see this as a good thing. Despite its success as a more-than-viable open source competitor to Micro$oft's monopoly, the Mozilla project has been accused of trying to cram too much into the application, bloating what was once a streamlined browser. I've already tried Phoenix, and it seems to load much faster, and I can see that its memory footprint is much smaller. Minotaur is still in very early alpha release but builds on the current Mozilla mail client. Although there is something to be said for an integrated suite of applications, it forces everyone to deal with the bugs and bloat of a large suite. Right now I use Eudora for my e-mail needs, so Phoenix is really a better solution than Mozilla for me if all I want is the browser portion. However, I'm keeping an eye on Minotaur to see if it's worth switching to; its Bayesian Spam filter alone could be worth the switch. Like I said, I hope this doesn't confuse Mozilla's image, because I think that this development will help stabilize Mozilla in the long run.