A massive (six-page) interview with Steve Champeon on just about everything is now available on the Meet the Makers site. Great insight into the worlds of both Champeon and the Web development community.

Mozilla 1.4a is now out, and features improved bookmark handling and P3P support. Another Mozilla-related item: a simple, cross-browser, rich-text editor by Kevin Roth.

And in more Mozilla news: big changes happening with the project, changes that may partly explain why there’s been no progress on Phoenix. Turns out, after 1.4, the Mozilla suite will be essentially frozen, and all future development will be concentrated on a standalone browser (Phoenix) and a standalone mail client (Minotaur/Thunderbird). Those will, it looks like, be folded back together for what subsequent Mozilla releases (e.g., version 1.6).

What this means is Gecko-based programs will run from a shared environment, but individually be smaller and quicker. Also one of the goals of this new direction is to improve the layout engine — which is great news for Web users and builders. Full details at Mozilla.org, summary and comments at MozillaZine, and an executive summary at Blogzilla.