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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.
I held true to my beliefs and refused to review low quality patches.
Free from business buzzwords and company politics mumbojumbo.
all that remains is a top notch stable product.
perpetually dwelling in the -1 pits
Copied all the ideas from Opera, called it 3 diffrent names, and then achived fanboy cult status.
Mozilla was a good community relations move on the part of Netscape. I can remember early on when Netscape had sued Microsoft and delayed the release of Windows 98 in a fight for browser dominance. The only logical move was to appeal to the community at large just to stay alive.
Go take a look at the Mozilla codebase. Seriously, go do it right now. It is amongst the worst code I've seen written. It's overly complex, it's bloated, and it's badly architectured. But please, don't take my word for it. Go look for yourself.
If there were any efforts to limit the inclusion of low quality patches, I think such efforts failed. But then again, what would be a low quality patch to the FreeBSD project may very well look like a real gem when compared to the awful codebase that makes up Mozilla.
The true power of open source is letting us see how awfully written many of the most popular software products are, Mozilla included.
Cyric Zndovzny at your service.
I'm not sure why your post was heavily moderated down. It does address a very serious point: Opera did influence Firefox.
Certain innovations, including tabs and mouse gestures, were first developed for Opera. Subsequently, they were found to be very useful features, and thus were adopted by other browsers (Firefox included).
It's not a bad thing at all that Firefox draws from Opera. 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, Konqueror, OmniWeb and Safari innovate; Firefox brings those innovations to the masses.
Cyric Zndovzny at your service.
If you were trying to make a joke, I guess I missed it.
Obligatory Soundbite Catchphrase
Opera is in a completely different niche, and it's adware.
Not anymore, as of version 8.5 (last September).
And even when it was, at least it was benign adware like Eudora in sponsored mode, not nasty adware that brought up a zillion pop-ups behind your back, inserted extra links into web pages, and surreptitiously installed more pop-up generators.
Granted, the ad bar was #*@!$ annoying, but it was hardly in the same class as, say, Gator/Claria/whatever.
Clever signature text goes here.
IE was Microsoft and Mozilla/Firefox was AOL/Sun/Nokia/IBM/etc. Everyone else was in some major corporation's pockets, but not Opera.
Its not really fair to lump Firefox with the big corporations. Its entirely because they rebelled against their roots that they got where they are today.
And its not really fair to talk about "out of the box" only when Firefox and Mozilla's key innovation is XUL. The fact that you can actually create applications or applets specificially for it is its unique innovation - an innovation not ever used by Opera. And its not at all fair to say that all the rest of the innovation in Firefox came from Opera, or that all of Opera's innovation came from Opera itself. The "innerHTML" property always springs to mind as one heckuva convenient thing that came out of Microsoft's browser.
There are some things I have always really liked about Opera. In the bad old days, it didn't render nearly as well as Mozilla. I couldn't find any ways to do the neat things with javascript that I was pulling off in IE or Firefox in Opera. But Opera was fast - something I attributed to not actually having the ability to support these features.
Those days are gone, though, and Opera has most of the capabilities that the other two browsers have. The only thing missing from the current version that I'd like are:
1) iframes. You can't put one on top of another. z-indexes don't work with iframes.
2) opacity. Both of the other two browsers have a mechanism for blending layers. Opera doesn't, AFAICT.
Those are deal-breakers for me. I can't work around them.
Of course, Opera isn't alone in missing features. Firefox won't let you change the color of the scrollbar or status bar, but Opera and IE will. IE has serious problems doing vertical layouts, and all of them have their issues with CSS3. These are all issues I can live with, though.
I 'spose most people see the past with rose-colored glasses, though. Hopefully I haven't shattered them too much.
Mod me down and I will become more powerful than you can possibly imagine!
Since no copies of IE were ever 'sold', Spyglass never got paid. Microsoft never miss a trick, do they?
They later sued Microsoft for contractual shenanigans and settled for $8 million.