BlueGriffon

» see bluegriffon.org as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the last words ~

I never installed BlueGriffon, and the reason is the same one that kept me off Nvu. By 2010 I had been writing markup by hand for well over a decade, and a program that generated it for me would have been a tool I had to correct rather than a tool that saved me anything. BlueGriffon was built for the person who still wanted a window with a page in it and a toolbar above it, and that person was real, just not me.

The project announced itself on 12 August 2008 at 11:19 in the morning, with a post on a fresh blog whose first paragraph is the best thing anybody wrote about this whole lineage. "In the beginning was Netscape Gold. Then Mozilla Composer. From the ashes of Netscape and the code of Mozilla Composer came Nvu. Nvu had a cousin, KompoZer. But all this tools now belong to History and are extinct or on path to extinction." Then the pitch: Gecko now had the power to fuel a next-generation WYSIWYG editor, and this was it.

Daniel Glazman had earned the right to that paragraph. He was at Netscape, he led Nvu for Linspire and quit it in September 2006 because he wanted a rewrite rather than another release, and BlueGriffon was that rewrite. He also co-chaired the W3C's CSS working group for years, which shows up in the product as a stubbornness about standards that its commercial competitors never needed.

~ the record ~

~ the lineage ~

Every editor in this family is the same code getting older. Netscape Composer shipped inside Netscape Gold in the mid-nineties, went into the Mozilla Application Suite as Mozilla Composer, got picked up and funded by Linspire as Nvu, and got forked by volunteers as KompoZer when Nvu was abandoned. BlueGriffon broke that chain deliberately by starting over on Gecko and XULRunner instead of inheriting the pile.

What it bought with the rewrite was standards support nobody else in the free tier had. It would produce HTML 4, XHTML 1.1, HTML5 or XHTML5, do its styling entirely in CSS, and follow whatever parts of CSS3 Gecko had implemented that month. It picked up SVG editing by adapting SVG-edit, and by December 2010 it could pull typefaces straight out of the Google Font Directory, a feature Glazman shipped as a free add-on the same year that directory existed. Later versions did EPUB. Nvu's rulers were rewritten in SVG because the originals, inherited from Netscape, were held together with hacks.

~ fourteen years ~

The business model was the crack. The editor was free under MPL, and the money came from proprietary add-ons and paid versions, sold by a small French company called Disruptive Innovations that was mostly one man. That works for a while. Version 1.0 landed in 2011, 2.0 followed, and 3.0 and 3.1 both arrived inside a fortnight in November 2017.

And that was the last release. From late 2017 the download page offered 3.1 and kept offering it, through Firefox's removal of XUL, through macOS turning hostile to unsigned and 32-bit builds, through six full years of the web changing underneath a program that had stopped moving. The Wikipedia article was still describing the language list from a 2021 page capture while nothing had been compiled since 2017. The GitHub repository's last commit is dated December 2019 and its message reads "on the way to 3.2".

~ the goodbye ~

The archive puts the end between 24 and 29 March 2024. On the 24th, bluegriffon.org served the same eleven kilobytes it had been serving for years. By the 29th it was fourteen hundred bytes, and it has been ever since.

What is on it now is worth reading in full, because it is unusually direct for a shutdown notice. "After 14 years of existence, it's time to wave goodbye to BlueGriffon." Some of the reasons are technical, and Mozilla killing XUL is the one he names. Some are his own: a wish to move on after so many years, and being fed up with running a small company. He acknowledges that BlueGriffon should have become an online app and says plainly that he does not have "the time, will and courage" to make that move. The last line before his signature is that he is not an active lizard any more, but that is another story.

The count is off by two if you go from the announcement, which suggests he was measuring from the first public build in 2010 rather than from the day he registered the name. The source has been on GitHub under MPL since 2015, tags and all, so the promise to release it was mostly already kept. bluegriffon.org still answers over plain http today. It does not answer over https, which is its own kind of comment on a web editor that outlived its own certificate.

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