Slashdot Mirror
A History of Firefox
chrisd writes "Firefox module owner Ben Goodger has written what I think is a very interesting post about how Firefox came into being. It goes into details unheard of to date about the inner workings at Netscape and he fills in a timeline spanning from the open sourcing of Netscape to the release just recently of Firefox 1.5. Especially interesting and poignant are comments like this: 'I was told I could not expect to use Open Source tricks against folk who were employed by the Company (all hail!). I held true to my beliefs and refused to review low quality patches. I was almost fired. Others weren't so lucky.'. Anyhow, I consider this required reading for any fan of the Firefox browser." Or even just a programmer. Worth reading.
It was done in a zing!
The Firebird name was taken, so they got a new suffix with the Firesomething random animal generator.
ok, I'm off to RTFA...
February 06, 2006
Where Did IE7 Come From, Why and Who Cares?
The story of Internet Explorer is long but yet lacking in detail or any real value. There are many perspectives. This is mine. IE was of course written by Spry and acquired by us at Microsoft.
Since then, we've added many new bugs (I mean features), security holes (err... features),
stolen and duplicated ideas (umm... innovations). Even more importantly, we added tons of
new code to work around things in the original Spry browser we didn't understand... tons...
and since bigger is better, that alone makes IE7 the best browser on the market.
IE7 keeps Windows users working twice as productively (doing System Restores and removing viruses)
on their machines - what other browser forces (I mean allows) a user to sit in front of their
computers doing (recovery and restore) work?
Such amazing new security ideas like sandbagging (umm.. sandboxing) IE will force IE to write
files and such to only the temp directories (though since so many viruses and spyware already
write themselves there and then execute this is another item our Marketing Department needs
to spin as an improvement).
All in all, our newest browser is bigger, (bloatier), (borrowed and outdated) feature rich and
far more (or less) secure!
Footnotes
1. Some people claimed we didn't create all the new innovations in IE7 like tabbed browsing,
but you need to remember that Time is relative. Besides, even though we were the last ones
to come out with these innovations, our amazing Marketing Team can still convince the world
we are first - we call it our "Leading the Pack From the Rear" methodology.
2. "How to Secure & Stabilize your browser(TM)", or "The Mozilla Advantage" as it is more commonly
known as.
3. "Module Owners" - Microsoft, Microsoft and only Microsoft - where we "borrowed" the ideas, code
and technology is irrelevant.
4. "Moving Target" or "Barely Crawling Target" as we prefer to call it.
StarTrekPhase2 - The Five Year Mission Continues!
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opera
Great. Now, if only part of it would be actually true.
Fucking Wikipedia-MMORPG.
Baranovich:Gant:You Must Think In Russian ::
/., here Russia Thinks of YOU !!
this is
There are places where the networks are not touching,and there are places where they are-Boeing's Lori Gunter
this is /., here Russia Thinks of YOU !!
Ask not what you think of your country.
Ask what your country thinks of you!
I like this instead: It's not a bad thing at all that Microsoft draws from Apple. The goal is to provide the best product possible, and that does at times require the implementation of good ideas that were thought up elsewhere. Browsers like Opera and Safari innovate; Internet Explorer brings those innovations to the masses.
There's nothing wrong with Microsoft drawing good ideas from Apple, or from anyone else. That's the best thing they should do, as it benefits their customers.
Now just because they incorporate such ideas doesn't mean they do it well. The problem with IE isn't so much the feature set it offers, but how it insecurely and poorly offers those features. Opera, Konqueror, OmniWeb, Safari, and even Firefox to a lesser extent, do a better job of implementing such ideas.
Cyric Zndovzny at your service.
My favorite method in mozilla is the kungFuDeathGrip();. I have no idea what it does thou, but it sounds awesome.
And do you know what? Wikipedia isn't a credible source.
Cyric Zndovzny at your service.