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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.
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...
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
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!
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
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.
Kenobi:Skywalker:Use The Force, Luke :: ::
Baranovich:Gant:You Must Think In Russian
Firefox:Goodger:In Open Source, You Must Think.
I think Netscape's mistake came earlier: when they thought that people would each pay $40-50 to buy a standalone browser. IE cut the floor out beneath them and Netscape went down hard after that.
Someone arriving at Netscape at 1999 would have been someone boarding a sinking ship, it would seem...
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?
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.
It already does. I've been running this browser instance in single-window mode (tabs only, never a new window - ever) for 2 months now and it's only using 95MB of memory. Which granted, is a lot, but it's fairly normal for Firefox with 10 tabs open. If it didn't release memory when I closed tabs, it would be way, way, way beyond that.
Random and weird software I've written.
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.
Unlike Mozilla, Opera has always had make money, and that in a situation where they've had less than one per cent of the market. So Opera hasn't been able to take "shortcuts" and rely on donations until it turned out that searches could actually pay for development, alongside other deals of course.
That hurt Opera a bit, I think. You have to pay for Opera while the others were free. Then you could choose ads instead, but most people don't like those. So Opera never got a huge following.
Opera was also a power user program for many years. It is not until recently that Opera has cleaned up the default user interface to make it easy for newbies to start using it as well.
While the payware, the ads, and so on were necessary to keep the company afloat, it has also hurt Opera. Firefox could come around to steal the thunder at exactly the right time, and backed by a massive marketing campaign. Firefox's timing was incredible. They released 1.0 when everyone was talking about how dangerous it was to use Internet Explorer.
While Firefox was free as in beer, easy to use, and ready for the masses (more or less), Opera still had to rely on ads, and had to charge for the browser. But they cleaned up the UI, and last year Opera was released for free-as-in-beer.
Some may say "too little too late", but Opera has never been huge. There isn't much of a market share to lose! Opera has a small but loyal following, and it's still smaller, faster, and it has more functionality out of the box than Firefox.
Now that Opera has simplified the UI and removed the ads, it can only grow. It will need proper marketing, though, and it will need to differentiate itself from Firefox and establish an identity which gives people a clear vision of what Opera is about, and why they should use it instead of something else.
Opera has always been the "browser innovator". Most features in Firefox were available in Opera ages before Firefox did it, and some were even invented by Opera. But these days Firefox takes all the credit, and that's partly because it can rely on others who have done everything, so it can simply pick and choose from other browsers' innovations. And it can avoid the pitfalls too, because Firefox already made those mistakes back when it was "Netscape". Firefox obviously benefits from being Netscape's "successor". All web designers know about Netscape, after all. So they can't ignore it when designing pages.
Opera has done a lot, but one wouldn't think so just by looking at its market share. It's a pity, really. Opera was the only independent browser, and they put real money into open standards. IE was Microsoft and Mozilla/Firefox was AOL/Sun/Nokia/IBM/etc. Everyone else was in some major corporation's pockets, but not Opera.
Now Firefox has stolen the thunder, partly deserved, partly undeserved. But I think Opera can make it too. They just need to get the marketing right.
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.
well, and i'm really not making this up, i came home from work about a week ago and opened the laptop on my coffee table (that had been on for about a week, probably, with an instance of firefox running constantly) and i found that it had stopped responding almost entirely. I checked task manager (took a while to open) and I was running at 1.2GB of memory/page file usage (this is a laptop with 512MB of RAM). Checked Firefox process and that was well over 300MB. I killed the firefox process (this took about 10 mins to finish cleaning up) and memory usage dropped to around 300MB total - meaning i had recovered around 900MB from the firefox process. I'm not sure why there was a discrepancy between the reported memory usage and the memory recovered but there you go. The memory leak didn't seem to happen gradually either, as it was fine the evening before. Unfortunately I have no idea what the cause was so i haven't submitted a bug report (maybe i'll try and reproduce it sometime - probably not though) but i'd say there's still at least one big memory issue floating around.
If you were trying to make a joke, I guess I missed it.
Obligatory Soundbite Catchphrase
Hi Berger,
:) Sour grapes don't help anything, and like others here, I enjoyed this article as a persuasive essay on why software engineering doesn't have to be as dispassionate as most people think.
I appreciate the nod. Richter made a similar comment on the post itself. I attempted to respond with the following about an hour ago, but it seems it didn't make it past the moderation filter, so here it is:
"Hi Richster,
I'm not sure either. My post on Firefox Religion from this time last year did mention Ben. But to be fair, Ben's article does begin with a discussion of perspectives
I haven't lost interest in Firefox by a long shot, but coding-wise I prefer to work in leaps and bounds in small teams on fledgling products. Firefox no longer fits that profile--which is mostly a good thing! So I've been working with Joe Hewitt (another of the original Firefox guys) on a new project that will complement Firefox.
I think when we release, it will become clear that I never actually strayed too far from the fox. But I also know that the kinds of things we're working on could never be achieved--or achieved quickly enough, at least--if attempted in a project that has grown as large and mature as Firefox. Thus, our new project is in many ways a realization of where I would take Firefox today were it still as pliable (and thus immature) as 2 years ago.
Given that there are only two of us on the project right now, it consumes about all the coding time I can muster...so I allocate my Firefox time on SpreadFirefox and its campaigns, such as our newest, Firefox Flicks.
Thanks,
Blake"
Maybe you were looking at the user identification string, which says "Mozilla/5.0" for Firefox and the other major browsers. For example, mine identifies itself as "Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.8.0.1) Gecko/20060202 Firefox/1.5.0.1 (mahowi)" when I check Help->about Firefox Community Edition