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Mozilla Celebrates Its 10th Birthday
I Don't Believe in Imaginary Property writes "Mozilla has turned 10 today. It's been a long, strange trip from being the once-dominant browser, going down to almost nothing, and returning to something like 25% of the browser market. 'With a sliding market share, Netscape decided to focus on its enterprise oriented products and gave away the browser but most importantly allow volunteers to work on the product. Mozilla was nothing but Netscape's user agent (the name a browser uses to contact the web server), a reminder of the first Netscape code name. Over time, Mozilla would become the name of the open source project, AOL would buy Netscape and Internet Explorer would get up to 90%+ of market share leading to the worst period in web browsers' history where innovation was a niche for Opera and IE remixes users.'"
Mozilla as spun off in 1998 was never the dominant browser. By the time Mozilla was open sourced 10 years ago, IE was the dominant browser by a significant margin. If the browser was still dominant, I doubt Netscape would have ever open sourced it.
Assuming most people are like you is dangerous, foolish, and typically invalid. You have no reason for making such an assumption.
Also, is there a way to block submitters? This imaginary property zealot is starting to get on my nerves with the editorializing. I don't like my stories assuming I'm a dipshit hippie.
Slashdot - where whining about luck is the new way to make the world you want.
Before Firefox started getting popular in the middle-late age of IE6 the web was stagnant, very little innovation that people could see was being done with MS finally killing off Netscape, yes there was progress but in the grand area of things most code had to be checked on like 3-4 browsers to make sure it could render (IE5, IE6, Opera and Netscape/Firefox) correctly. Now, with Firefox/Safari/Konqueror/Opera all being mostly standards-compliant very little testing needs to be done except with IE5-7. I would call it the worst age of the internet from a developers standpoint, with non-standards following browsers being the norm.
There is no "disagree" moderation, and troll, flamebait and overrated are not valid substitutes
I remember when Firefox was covered by Slashdot about 7 years ago. It was described as some itty bitty beta based vaguely on Netscape (which I personally hated), but it was mentioned that it was only some 5MB download. I thought, "Hey, it's free (my favorite price), it's small (I seriously needed better hardware), and it's cutting edge (geek factor)."
I downloaded it, installed it, learned I could move the buttons around and fell in love. Since then, I would always install Firefox on every computer I fixed. I require all friends to use it. I carry around FireFox portable (and thunderbird) on a thumbdrive so I can use it wherever and however I wish.
While in beta, it worked. The release candidates worked. The final versions worked. Tabs and middle click CHANGED what the internet was to me. Java control, add-ons, everything -- Thank you Firefox!