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."

Comments

Please cut out the mindless propaganda.

[jolyonr]

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

Re:Please cut out the mindless propaganda.

[lazuli42]

The spawn of vi, Vim, has never been more popular, and is poised to beat Notepad in the text editor market.

Maybe? Maybe not. How about:

The spawn of xv, The Gimp, has never been more popular, and is poised to beat Photoshop in the graphics market.

Nah... Perhaps:

The spawn of some Swedes, Blender, has never been more popular, and is poised to beat 3d Studio Max in the 3d modelling market.

You gotta be happy with *one* of those.

Re:Please cut out the mindless propaganda.

[lazuli42]

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.

Re:Please cut out the mindless propaganda.

[Michalson]

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)

Re:Please cut out the mindless propaganda.

[edwdig]

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.

Just the facts, ma'am

[coupland]

> 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...

Article's text

[StefanoB]

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

Re:Netscape 4 to IE 5

[__aawfbm2023]

Once Foxfire became stable and usable I switched to it, and some time later it became Firefox. Oh yeah? Well I'm such a hardcore, ultra to the maxx, mozilla fan that I was using Firefox back when it was called Oxireff!

Poised to beat?!

[orionware]

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!

My website's stats

[Cmdr Whackjob]

My website's percentages (I would say a somewhat stereotype independent website):

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 .5% every month), so that kind of confuses me. Either way, IE is going way down, and Mozilla/FireFox are going up.

Re:Good grammar

[azzy]

So.. you would prefer:

The spawn of Netscape and Firefox and has never been more popular and and is poised

The article author cannot even get the name right

[gnugnugnu]

An open source database from Germany carried the name Firefox, so the project was renamed for the last time. It was called Firefox.

(sic)

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.