Mozilla Author Nigel McFarlane Dies

[medicine]

Nigel McFarlane, the Australian author of two Mozilla books and dozens of Mozilla articles, has died. Nigel became well known in the Mozilla community when his book Rapid Application Development with Mozilla was published in 2003. His most recent book, Firefox Hacks, came out earlier this year.

In addition to books, Nigel also wrote dozens of articles about Mozilla. Some were technical tips and hacks, others evangelised Mozilla products to corporations. Much of his work appeared on SearchEnterpriseLinux.com, where he was the site's resident Mozilla expert, regularly answering readers' questions. His last piece, Clearing Internet Explorer barriers to using Firefox, was published in May.

Nigel also contributed more directly to the Mozilla project, adding comments to Bugzilla bug reports and participating in discussions. Last year, he was a speaker at the Mozilla Developer Day 2004 conference. Outside of Mozilla, Nigel was known as an advocate of Web standards and author of two books about JavaScript. He was a prominent open source analyst and commentator.

Nigel began working in IT professionally about twenty-five years ago when he was a UNIX system administrator. Backed up by degrees in computer science and physics, he subsequently worked in a number of different roles with a variety of different technologies. Most recently, he offered his services as a consultant and technical writer under the name Kingtide Innovations.

News of Nigel's sudden death was posted to the Web Standards Group mailing list by Russ Weakley. Neerav Bhatt sent us a link to a copy of the message announcing that Nigel passed away. Melbourne newspaper The Age also has an article about Nigel's death. Nigel was a regular contributor to the technology sections of The Age and its sister publication the Sydney Morning Herald.

John Allsopp from westciv has written a short tribute to Nigel McFarlane. Thanks to andy for the link.