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

A history of Opera would be more interesting.

[CyricZ]

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.

see also

[Anonymous Coward]

also interesting:
http://www.jwz.org/gruntle/nscpdorm.html
http://www.jwz.org/gruntle/nomo.html

Effectiveness often breeds resentment

[smittyoneeach]

There was and remains much resentment towards Firefox and its development model. At its creation, there was much shouting about how the many were not always smarter than the few, the merits of small development teams with strong centralized direction, the need to adhere strictly to Mozilla's module ownership policy[3]. In practice, these statements resulted in effectively locking everyone but the Firefox team out of the Firefox source code. We railed against the inefficiencies of past UIs. We were unnecessarily harsh, and polarized opinions. We had been badly wounded by the Netscape experience and the disorganization that had followed. I don't think a lot of people understood that. It wasn't something we could easily communicate.
To many, it looked like we were breaking ranks. We were claiming their work had no value. It was said that what we were doing went against the principles of community development. That wasn't true -- as most open source projects are centrally managed by a small few. Many have well defined release plans and maintain tight control over what contributions make it in. We had hurt our case though by being so dogmatic up front. We did not do a good job of PR.

Recalls a Margaret Thatcher quote, from her speech at the US Naval Academy sometime around '93 or '94: "Consensus is the absence of leadership".
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.

History of Mozilla

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Something about the mozilla suite on linux?

[matt me]

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?

The AOL Factor

[db32]

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?

Even 0.3 was very usable

[octopus72]

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.

Re:Opera did heavily influence Firefox.

[worb]

It would be really nice to see Opera and OmniWeb (in particular) receive more credit. I think they deserve a lot more attention than they have now.

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.