Slashdot Mirror
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."
I remember when I made the switch from Netscape 4 to IE 5. I resisted IE for many years, but at some point it just became evident that Internet Explorer was a superior product in almost every way.
Once Foxfire became stable and usable I switched to it, and some time later it became Firefox. So far it's the best browsing experience I've had and the extentions published for it make it endlessly expandable.
I think there will always be a segment of the market that is satisfied with whatever does the minimum possible to get the job done, but as we see Firefox's market share rise we know that some people will take the time to upgrade to the superior browser.
"There's companies that are just so cool that you just can't even deal with it," - Bill Gates, about Google
Way to cherry-pick your numbers:
W3Schools is a website for people with an interest for web technologies. These people are more interested in using alternative browsers than the average user. The average user tends to use Internet Explorer, since it comes preinstalled with Windows. Most do not seek out other browsers.
These facts indicate that the browser figures below are not 100% realistic. Other web sites have statistics showing that Internet Explorer is used by at least 80% of the users.
"There's companies that are just so cool that you just can't even deal with it," - Bill Gates, about Google
My website's percentages (I would say a somewhat stereotype independent website):
.5% every month), so that kind of confuses me. Either way, IE is going way down, and Mozilla/FireFox are going up.
January 2005:
MS Internet Explorer 95.9 %
Netscape 1.8 %
Mozilla 1 %
Opera 0.4 %
Safari 0.4 %
February 2005:
MS Internet Explorer 92.5 %
Mozilla 4.1 %
Netscape1.4 %
Safari 0.8 %
Opera 0.5 %
March 2005:
MS Internet Explorer 90.9 %
Mozilla 2.7 %
FireFox 2.1 %
Netscape 1.4 %
My guess is that my host just updated awstats so that firefox and mozilla are seperated. It does list FireBird (less than
hopefully they will read what we have commented over here and brush up on their research and editing staff. I do not need to point out every mistake, most of you have caught them already in the ~50 comments posted for this article. But whoa momma there are many.
the cool thing is, most of us that commented actually RTFA - maybe M-LAG-azine did not think they would have anyone read it, just hit the site, see it was full of holes and start clicking some ads or without readers the contents of the article would not have to be accurate?
It is a shame, they are touting themselves as 'a site devoted to the history of personal computing' - I guess you don't have to have your facts straight, just 'devoted' to putting flawed history writeups. I'm scared to check out their sister site 'Macreate'.
do you have shinyfeet?
IE was only ahead because of the way it locked people into writing for the funny way it displays pages
Funny, that sounds like another browser I know. Long before Microsoft entered the browser arena to make Windows a viable internet machine out of the box, a company called Netscape was destroying competition in the browser world with it's "embrace and extend" philosophy. Rather then follow the standards of the day, Netscape proceeded to liberally "enhance" their browser with quirks only they supported (most infamous being the blink tag). With their vision of turning the web into a form of TV (where the webpage controlled your computer with crap like popups, window resizing and statusbar changing) they managed to create a browser that had lots of interesting (or stupid, depending on your view) things for web developers to do, but was completely incompatible with every other browser. Their monopoly got so bad webservers where being coded to look for the "Mozilla" string at the beginning of the agent field, rejecting people who didn't use the one browser because pages designed for it wouldn't render correctly on standard browsers. This forced the competition to modify their user agent just to get a page (even Internet Explorer had to identify itself as "Mozilla"), at which point they still had to try and emulate Netscapes propritary extensions.
Now by Netscape 3 the rest of the original browser market had been crushed by anti-competitive practices. However a new browser was appearing at this time, the first viable version of Internet Explorer, IE 3. Unlike smaller companies that Netscape could push around, IE was being made by a company with enough money to play (and eventually beat) Netscape at it's own game. IE 3 matched a great deal of Netscapes extended standard, then proceeded to do some extending of their own. By the next major incarnation, Netscape/IE 4, Explorer was not only playing Netscape's game, it was playing it just as well if not better then the master. What really helped though was that at this point there was an actual standards body appearing, creating CSS as a web standard. IE, in addition to creating it's own extensions, proceeded to try and support it (creating the first viable implimentation). Now while the IE CSS implimentation is today seen as quirky and incomplete, back then it looked quite good compared to Netscape, who apparently believing they where still living in the one browser world where Netscape could simply define a new standard whenever they wanted to kill competition, had proceeded to try making their own new standard, implimenting CSS as less then an after thought (where as IE has problems rendering CSS exactly to spec, Netscape just plain crashed on all but the simplest code). This created a market where the choice was between a browser that came on your computer, rendered its webpages and the webpages of the competition correctly, and was generally quite stable, vs a browser you had to download, didn't render half of new webpages correctly, and had a habbit of randomly crashing (CSS was sometimes the cause, but especially during the 4.5 period you could expect at least 1 crash for no reason each session). Netscape sealed the deal when they waited forever to release Netscape 6 (they skipped the 5 generation, allowing Microsoft to get a further leg up), which when finally released turned out to be the least stable browser ever concieved by man (for reasons unknown Netscape dropped their code base and wrote 6 from scratch - the successor to Netscape, Mozilla, was based on the actually usable 4.x codebase)
As a number of posters have noted, the article is riddled with errors (Jim???), and doesn't say much that isn't common sense. However the conjecture about Firefox taking over the market is only conjecture.
I do think firefox has a chance of doing big things, but it's not going to do it by itself. Firefox still needs our help.
Tomorrow I am going to my brother's house to set up his new computer for his daughter who will take that computer to college this fall. As per normal I will spend about 30 minutes getting it set up, and then about another hour ensuring it has firefox, and thunderbird installed and prominently in the quick launch tray, and also configured for fast startup (always in memory after first use).
Additionally I will expunge all visible references to IE and Outlook (on the START menu, in the Programs menu, etc.) and ensure his default clients are set to firefox and thunderbird.
Fortunately I don't have to give any tutorial on firefox and its features as I've already set up his other computer previously and he now doesn't even really remember how to fire up IE.... so much the better. I also switched out any software that overrides the default browser setting (specifically McAffee).
For all slashdotters, this is one contribution we can make above and beyond posts in this forum. (Lots of good posts and info in this forum.... my brother hasn't a clue what slashdot is, nor does he care -- probably the attitude of 99%++ of the consumer demographic.) Let's all give firefox the additional nudge -- it couldn't hurt.
IMHO, one of the main reasons why Netscape failed was its management (or lack thereof). I have no idea why this never, ever gets covered, but you see this throughout not only the demise of Netscape, but also the software as well. This REALLY ought to be studied more, as it's a classic case on what not to do with software projects.
One key problem (from what I've heard, and seen myself) is that no one was in charge of the various sections of code. Usually, with well run organizations, there is Someone Responsible for any given section of code. If something goes wrong, it's that person who's at fault, and is responsible seeing that it's fixed.
From what I'm told by people who worked there, that wasn't the case. Anybody could check-out and change anything they wanted. The original author of the code had no say in the matter. And when asked to make changed to the code later on, he would throw up his hands and say "Whoa - that's not my code anymore". This is a natural response in this environment, so I'm not surprised that the original Netscape code was so bloated when it was first released.
One guy I knew said that he had to have his manager step in, and make certain that if anybody mucked with what he was implementing, that that person would be fired.
This is not way to run a serious Engineering Organization. And I have reason to believe that this is true, having seen some of the later work that these managers have done.
The really funny thing is, the most noted V.C. organization in Silicon Valley (K.P) is still really enamoured by this so-called "management". So much so, that they push the former managers off on their newest hot startups. And, to show that I'm not just making this up, a former Netscape VP of Engineering is at one of KP's startups in San Jose. From what I hear, morale has plummeted since he joined last fall.
Right, and Webcore isn't platform specific and does not use MacOSX specific features that ain't replicated anywhere else, which means that it'll be easy to port Safari to W32 machines...
I don't think we'll see this kind of innovation come from within the Mozilla Foundation, but a version of Firefox that could switch between Gecko and Webcore would sure be neato (ala Netscape 8's choice between Gecko and IE). And especially useful for web developers.
And I don't think it'd be as difficult as you imply...
One route: Nokia ported WebCore to the GTK toolkit, and GTK is available for Windows (see Gimp, Gaim, etc.). I don't think anyone is actively working on GTK Webcore though.
Another route: Webcore's original parent - KHTML - is tied to the QT toolkit (both Apple Webcore and the GTK Webcore use QT-ish compatibility layers called KWIQ). It was recently announced that the next release of QT will include a GPL version for Windows.
So, who the hell knows.