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.

[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: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!

Re:Good grammar

[azzy]

So.. you would prefer:

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