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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 spawn of Netscape, Firefox, has never been more popular, and is poised to beat Microsoft in the browser market.
I'm a firefox fanatic, it's without doubt the superior browser. But spouting such mindless rubbish as that comment doesn't do anyone any good. In my mind 'Poised to beat' would be when Firefox is at 49% browser share, not the less than 10% (compared to 80%+ for IE). Keep the propaganda out of news items please, and let Firefox promote itself by simply being the better browser.
Jolyon
Please read my Canon EOS tech blog at http://www.everyothershot.com
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
> Firefox, has never been more popular, and is poised to beat Microsoft in the browser market.
Come on, folks, I'm a rabid Firefox fan and even *I* know this kind of rhetoric doesn't belong on the front page...
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
Folks, the score is Team A 95, Team B 3. It looks like Team B is poised to finally beat Team A. What a game! What a game!
Karma means nothing to me, so suck it...
W3 shows IE at 65%, Opera at 2%, Firefox at 25%, Mozilla at 3.5%, and Netscape at 1%. While this is the lowest IE has every been, its decreasing slowly.
This is my last post.
[6th Estate]
Is firefox ready to take the browsing crown ?
Not quite I say.. there's unfortunately still a few things holding it back. As I see it, the following hold FF back from being the dominant browser (note: not all these are things that are FF/Mozilla Fndations' fault).
IE is the default browser in all windows distros, unfortunately, this means IE has a defacto advantage, and a huge one at that, as many people dont even know the alternative exists.
On the same note: Many people dont know about FF. Things like spread firefox and word of mouth, and positive press are helping this problem in a big way. Now even some of my non-tech savvy friends proclaim "I'll never touch explorer again, I love the 'Fox". Firefox has become enough of a better browser that they see that as superior.
Stubborn IT policies that refuse to consider new applications, namely a new default browser for companies. I know my school has finally seen the light and included FF as an option on the default install on all publicly available computers. But it's still not on the desktop, hidden away in the programs menu. We need the make it just as easy to launch FF as to launch IE (I know a default install of FF puts a desktop icon there, but we need to get IT departments to leave it there).
The extremely techincally illiterate who hold corporate power. That is, those upper level managers who have only ever known IE, and are terrified to use anything else because of those viruses and worms they keep hearing about. If they're intelligent, they'll listen to smart IT advice, however, we know how often upper management likes to think they know best outside their area.
I'm sure there are areas that i've missed, but these are some of the problem's facing down the 'Fox as I see it.
Yes, capitalism includes the right to price one's product as one sees fit. So now you want it to be against the law to give away free stuff?
.. quit trying to shove your "solutions" down people's throats.
.. deal with it.
What's next on your agenda, banning charity?
People like IE and don't care enough to look for alternatives
Most Microsoft users can switch to an alternative operating system without being summarily executed by the Secret Police.
Alternatives to Microsoft exist and aren't being hidden under a rock.
People don't want them
I agree that this is barbaric, but it is correct English. Try reading it thus (I've re-arranged the sentence to make it easier to parse, but haven't changed the grammar):
Firefox, the spawn of Netscape, has never been more popular, and is poised to beat Microsoft in the browser market.
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 product was created by NCSA refugees, Jim Clark and Jim Andresson.
No, it was Jim Clark and Marc Andresson.
Netscape had a great lead in 1996 but when IE 4.0 came out, with its far superior Java scripting capabilities, Netscape was junk. IE 5.0 only furthered that gap. And whatever happened to Netscape 5? Hmmm.
Bundling aside, IE crushed Netscape because IE was the better browser.
This is my sig.
It was called Phoenix, not FoxFire! Also, marketshare isn't really an accurate term. Maybe with Opera, and iCab (which refuses to die) you can talk about a market. Personally, I'd be releived if Firefox takes over from Linux as the 'posterchild' of free software. Linux tends to confuse Joe User as to what Open Source is all about.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Signature_bloc
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
So.. you would prefer:
The spawn of Netscape and Firefox and has never been more popular and and is poised
Does your typing involve conscious thought, or merely involuntary, peristaltic regurgitation of mutated Slashdot memetic material?
Tedious Bloggy Stuff - hooray?
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.
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?
NetworkMirror
What 'current lgpl violations'?
"The way we can tell it's C# instead of Haskell is because it's nine lines instead of two." -- wadler
"Well, good luck finding a judge that doesn't run a bestiality site."
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.
Didn't Netscape attempt to rewrite their browser in Java? If so, that's an important part of the story.
The article claims that Netscape was about to go bankrupt just before being purchased by AOL. Given the millions raised by going public this seems unlikely.
The article says that Netscape was founded by Jim Clark and Jim Andresson (" 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.").
I could be horribly mistaken, but wasn't it Mark Andreesen? Are was there both a Jim Andresson and a Mark Andreesen?
"Reality is merely an illusion, albeit a very persistent one " -Albert Einstein