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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 think I'd rather read such a piece about the history of Opera. Indeed, there is far less known about the inner workings of Opera (the company) than there is about Netscape, let alone the Mozilla project.
It would also be excellent if Opera were to release the source code to some of their historic (and now obsolete) releases, say Opera 3 and earlier. While there may very well be licensing issues concerning some of the code, even being able to store a fair portion of it would be a blessing to computer historians around the world.
Cyric Zndovzny at your service.
also interesting:
http://www.jwz.org/gruntle/nscpdorm.html
http://www.jwz.org/gruntle/nomo.html
Impressive, indeed to admit to having been heavy-handed. Then again, there is a stark difference between leadership and running a popularity contest.
OTOH, even Emacs will have another release Real Soon Now. The ones to fear are those who claim to have Teh One True Way.
Get thee glass eyes, and, like a scurvy politician, seem to see things thou dost not.--King Lear
Kenobi:Skywalker:Use The Force, Luke :: ::
Baranovich:Gant:You Must Think In Russian
Firefox:Goodger:In Open Source, You Must Think.
In a related paper, the histrory of Mozilla has been described through emprirical software engineering here. It shows how the source code changed over time etc.
Wasn't the Mozilla suite very popular on Linux, perhaps accounting for most of its users, shipping with Red Hat and the other non-K distros as the default web and email applications? But then there was a speedy fork which became very popular on windows as an alternative to ie, thus mozilla greatly changed their position, almost abandoning their old userbase for their new intiative of evengalistic saving of windows/ie users. But then I see that ie/7 is going to ship very close to firefox 1.5 as it did to ie/6 (layout, extra features disabled, tabs hidden).
Anyone remember the style-sheet changer?
I don't recall ever meeting a Netscape user who paid for his/her browser. They gave it away in real effect.
Also without entire classes of capabilities. Yes, I know, you vehemently disagree, but perhaps you should learn something of what you spout about before you do so. I was getting paid handsomely years ago for deliverables which worked fabulously in IE and Mozilla which Opera would blow sky. A browser's features and capabilities aren't limited to whether or not it renders your favorite porn site.
I often wonder how widely accepted the whole Mozilla/Firefox stuff would be if AOL had turned it into "The Internet" like what they are doing with IE. So many AOLers think that IE is "The Internet", would it have been different had AOL gone on to use Mozilla? How would the geeks respond to this? I imagine quite a few heads exploding trying to rationlize out who is more evil in the IE vs AOL battles. Geeks like to think they are completely objective...but we are anything but...geeks can be full of just as much zealotry as the latest religious fundamentalist. Take a *nix vs MS argument and replace either one with Creationism and Evoloution...almost the same sort of fight. So...how accepted would AOLFox have been?
The only change I can believe in is what I find in my couch cushions.
Being a user from Firefox 0.3 (Phoenix), I immediately predicted it's success. It was, unlike clunky Mozilla (and Netscape) a real refresh in a browser world. Tabbed browsing was very novel thing back then (although not completely new). Enough for me to switch fro IE. Soon extensions were there and it was definitely a killer feature that gave firefox a BIG boost.
Firefox broke into the mainstream, but the only innovation is the extensions system. Opera and OmniWeb have tons of innovative features, but most people never get to know about it.
And some of these features are actually possible to do as Firefox extensions.
It's almost as if there's no point in any other browser :) You can use Firefox, and if you need more features, you can just install extensions.
But I actually find extensions to often be very bad substitutes for properly integrated features. Not everyone wants to deal with extensions.
Netscape took their share because IE was practically unusable. Once Microsoft geared up development internally, which Netscape should have anticipated, Netscape still had the opportunity to maintain their edge and leveraged themselves as a "cool app" company which would have suited the market fine for years after their decline. They could have done any number of things to counter the fact they'd have to give the product away free, using the Opera model for example. I mean they had market share. People didn't migrate to IE en masse simply because it was free and netscape wasn't.
If netscape had targeted user experience as aggressively as the firefox project has, instead of just resting on their laurels and thinking being first was good enough, they'd probably still be in business. Instead they just let it slide and spent their time and energy trying to convince everyone how unfair Microsoft was.
The ads are removed, anyone can download and use it, and you may be right about your claim when you say "most of us", but that doesn't include me. Just because something is closed source doesn't make it bad.
;)
As for my view, I find that people who think *everything* should be "Free as in beer" and "Open Source" are naive and selfish. There are benefits abound on both sides of the street. These capitalistic companies that have closed source software/hardware laid the ground-work within which we walk today. Intel, IBM, Bell Labs, Sun, HP, VM Ware, etc...
It took lots of money to make today possible. John and his best friend Jose wouldn't have created todays processors in their basement. They wouldn't have been able to write the databases of today without the inroads made by Oracle, IBM, Ingres, Microsoft, etc.
Compare Opera to IBM, Microsoft, Oracle, EMC, Symantec, Intel, and just about any other corporation out there. Hell, Apple has this huge following and in my opinion they are nothing but a Microsoft wannabe. (Look at the iPod and all the law suits that Apple filed because people wanted to interface with there iPod without being forced to use iTunes) The Aqua debacle, Apple's hardware, etc...
I don't hate any of these companies, but if I had to say one of them was a good guy. Opera.
Disclaimer: I'm using Opera to post this message.
I don't know a thing about the Mozilla codebase, but I do know that the Gecko engine is not anywhere near as close to being standards compliant as Opera is. Opera can almost pass the Acid2 Test, Firefox doesn't even come close. (though it is much closer than IE)
If you want to do what Mozilla does, you need something like nspr. Even apache has something similar, apr (so I hear, I have not looked at their code).
As for XULRunner and the infrastructure involved in that, it would surely be a shame if the Firefox extension system was not around. By asking why we're messing with XULRunner, you're basically also asking why we're messing with Firefox extensions in their current form, because the infrastructure for both has a lot of overlap (XUL, XPCOM, nspr...). Sure, you could make developing extensions much more difficult and thus reduce some complexity in the Mozilla codebase (though less complexity is in no way guaranteed if you want similar capabilities), but then we wouldn't have nearly as many of the great extensions we have today. And what we did have would largely be for Windows only. Furthermore, we were able to take that work and extend it a little to offer XULRunner, which has been very useful for quite a number of people. You may not want XULRunner, but that doesn't say much about the need for it. And you're not suffering much for it either if all you want is a simple web browser.
The great part is, we were able to do all of this without really bothering our users that just want a web browser. Firefox is a pretty cool piece of software that many, many people enjoy. The development of XULRunner and Firefox extensions has done more good for them than bad (through bug fixing and developer interest), and a user that loves Firefox probably isn't going to care so much about any theoretical argument that it is coded sloppily. 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. The tradeoff is worth it. You just need to understand it.