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.

Comments

Mozilla: a good PR move for Netscape...

[thx1138_az]

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.

Pardon?

[CyricZ]

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.

Re:Pardon?

[ZuperDee]

I can tell you many people couldn't believe that thing could actually run without crashing after 5 minutes of us.

I couldn't believe it either, because for me, NS 4.x actually did crash after 5 minutes of use, most of the time.

Re:Pardon?

[bdaehlie]

What you are saying about Opera is simply not true. Yes, they offer much of what we do. But they don't come anywhere near offering all that we do. Consider at XULRunner, Firefox extensions, or the fact that we have a more compliant rendering engine. About the rendering engine in particular, the first 90% of compliance is not that hard. It is the last 10% that adds the majority of the complexity. Opera has not gone as far (far as they may be) in terms of compliance and the complexity tradeoff is absolutely not linear.
So, if you want what Opera has to offer and only that, then use Opera. But don't bash Mozilla's codebase because we don't offer the same feature set that Opera does and therefore a bunch of our code is needlessly complex.

"It appears that the Mozilla project has overcomplicated them, for whatever reason."

I think if you put even 5 minutes into thinking about "whatever reason," you'd not be saying that. Again, I'll use XULRunner and Firefox Extensions as examples of things that Opera does not do and will never do in its current form because they lack the (complex!) infrastructure that allows for such capabilities.

It is easy to bash code and get a good response from people - a large part of slashdot is just that. It is much harder to defend code, and that is something I just can't do for the Mozilla project in the time I have allotted for myself to post on slashdot. All I can say is if you want to know how good/bad the Mozilla code is, give it a lot more thought time or ask someone who would actually know. You could start with Mozilla developers. We're not all so biased and blinded as to blatantly lie about the quality of the Mozilla code.

Re:Pardon?

[CyricZ]

Yeah, we've got some memory leaks once in a while, there are many things we could do better, and we don't run in 64K of RAM, but it really isn't a big deal outside of slashdot postings looking for karma, and it really isn't much worse (if at all) than other apps.

Is this seriously your attitude? It's no wonder that Firefox and much of the other software from the Mozilla project is so bloated. Even on systems with 2 GB or more of RAM, it is still a relatively scarce resource, and thus should not be wasted. I have used release builds of Mozilla 1.7.x that consumed upwards of 400 MB of RAM after being used for a few weeks, and that's with the cache disabled. That's 400 MB resident, mind you.

Remember, 400 MB for a web browser is still a massive consumption of memory on a 1 or 2 GB system. When there are many regular folks with systems that only have 512 MB of RAM, you start running into serious performance issues (which is often reported to be the case).

You say it's not a big deal to waste memory. Sorry to say it, but you're fucking wrong. Firefox will continually be looked upon as an inferior browser by those with any software development background if such a trend of waste continues.

I hope you understand why I keep coming back to Opera. They've put out a product that's just as portable and just as featureful as Firefox (if not more so). And they manage to do it without consuming hundreds of MB of RAM.

Opera did heavily influence Firefox.

[CyricZ]

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.

Re:Opera - kind of a sad story in a way?

[fireboy1919]

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.