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History of Netscape and Mozilla
Sabah Arif writes "Netscape was there at the beginning of the internet boom. In 1996, the company controlled 90 percent of the browser market, but now its usershare is in the single digits. The spawn of Netscape, Firefox, has never been more popular, and is poised to beat Microsoft in the browser market. Read the history of Netscape and Mozilla at MLAgazine."
The second most popular browser available today, Firefox, is a direct descendant of the Mosaic Netscape browser released in 1994. The product was created by NCSA refugees, Jim Clark and Jim Andresson. Together, they revolutionized the internet, making it synonymous with the world wide web.
NCSA Mosaic was the first popular, graphical browser available to personal computer users. Before, the internet and its resources were primarily only available to those in academia and other research institutions. Eventually, online providers began to offer internet access in addition to their proprietary networks, and HTML took off. The first browsers available to the public were very primitive, typically only capable of rendering simple text and hyperlinks. The University of Illinois, at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications, developed the Mosaic browser. It was innovative because it was capable of rendering images, and itself had a graphical interface. By 1993, it was the dominant force on the internet. It had almost complete dominance over the internet, and was widely applauded for its quality.
Other people and companies wanted in on the game. Jim Andresson, developer of Mosaic for UNIX, and Jim Clark left the NCSA to found Mosaic Communications on April 4, 1994. Capitalizing on the former student's familiarity of the Mosaic browser, Mosaic Communications released its first browser months later. Its name was Netscape. Almost instantly, it became more popular than Mosaic, mostly because of bundling deals with internet service providers. Navigator included many new features not found in Mosaic. The most popular one was the ability to display pages as they download. Unlike most other browsers, a user did not have to wait for the entire page to download before it was usable. The NCSA took issue with the name Mosaic Communications, and the company was renamed Netscape Communications, and the browser was renamed Navigator.
A year later, Netscape was short on funds, and decided to go public with its initial stock price at $28. On its IPO, the stock price rose to $75, an unheard of leap in the software business. Netscape continued to gain marketshare, and controlled %90 of the browser market in mid-1995.
Version 2 of Netscape included a plethora of new features, many of them haphazardly implemented. The new version included support for cookies, frames and a new email client. Netscape 2 grew even faster than the first version, and helped Netscape double its revenues every quarter in 1995.
Navigator was evolving. It had added many new features and tags that were not available on any other browser (though eventually, most of these tags would be adopted the W3C), which made it difficult for other browsers to coexist with Netscape. As its marketshare and revunes grew, so to did the company's scope. Netscape began developing a product called Constellation. Constellation would allow a user to access files from a desktop anywhere on a network. It was to make the operating system an irrelevant component on the desktop computer.
Microsoft felt threatened by Netscape's continued growth, especially its assertion that the browser would replace the operating system as the most important software on a computer. Several executives visited the Netscape campus in August of 1995, and made a proposal. Netscape would cease all development for their Windows version of Navigator, but would face no competition from Microsoft on other platforms. The company refused, and Microsoft began developing a new web browser.
Unable to develop their own web browser so quickly, Microsoft turned to Spyglass, who had licensed Mosaic's source code from the NCSA. Microsoft would give Mosaic a monthly payment, and a percentage of the revenues the browser generated. Using Mosaic code, Microsoft released Internet Explorer 1.0 on August 1995 as part of the Internet Jumpstart pack for Windows 95. The new browser was widely derided for being so primitive and clumsy. It was little m
Second sentence: "The product was created by NCSA refugees, Jim Clark and Jim Andresson." Who the heck is Jim Andresson?
Then the article goes on to be filled with gems like: "Several months later, NGLayout, renamed Gecko, was released several months later, but a browser based on it would not be released to the public for years, though there were publicly available betas."
And my favorite: "An open source database from Germany carried the name Firefox, so the project was renamed for the last time. It was called Firefox."
The name changes Mozilla has gone through are so confusing even the author cannot properly keep track of them. The database was called Firebird. One good thing to come out of all the messing was they made sure to carefully isolate all the branding information and make tools like Firesomething possible, allowing users to personalise their browser.
NetworkMirror
Keep in mind that in the early days of Netscape, there was no W3C. Pure HTML really wasn't very good. HTML was about as capable of formatting things as Windows 3.1 Write was.
Blink certainly was a bad choice, but Netscape also created tags such as table and center.
For the 4.x browsers, Netscape created the layer tag. MS saw the beta, and decided to out do Netscape by creating a different standard and pushing it through the W3C before Netscape tried pushing theirs through. That's how things ended up like they did.
Netscape 6 was just the Mozilla release of the time with the name & logo changed. The Netscape 4.x code was horrible. The Mozilla team was almost ready to do a 5.0 beta release, but eventually decided it wouldn't be a hell of a lot better than 4.x and would just piss people off more. A complete rewrite of the project was being done in parallel which was always intended to be used for 6.0. They underestimated the amount of work necessary to finish the 6.0 branch, and decided to completely skip 5.0 figuring 6.0 wasn't too far away.