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.'"

Comments

Good Software Takes Ten Years to Write

[colmore]

There's an apropos Joel on Software article from a few years back

Re:Good Software Takes Ten Years to Write

[moosesocks]

Mozilla only gained mainstream acceptance once a developer independent of the Mozilla organization took the codebase, and discarded a large portion of the code to create Phoenix (later FireBird, now FireFox).

Prior to that, it was a slow, ugly bloated mess.

Ironically, now that the old Mozilla devs are managing the project, it's once again becoming a slow, bloated mess.

Had the project been properly managed, I don't think it would have taken 10 years.

Re:Good Software Takes Ten Years to Write

[Anonymous Coward]

Not really. Blake Ross and Dave Hyatt were already related to Mozllla by the time the mozilla/browser (pre-Phoenix) project started. They did start the project separately from the main Mozilla work, but they could hardly be called independent from the Mozilla organization. Blake Ross was an intern; Dave Hyatt was a Netscape employee.

The project started mainly because the monolithic Mozilla suite was heavily influenced by America Online. Ross and Hyatt pretty much discarded the old chrome and started with a fresh one. Rendering engine wise it was pretty much the same thing.

The project would have taken 10 years regardless. Since Netscape released the source code, the engine code was pretty much rewritten. Then, the old chrome was pretty much discarded.

The modern Firefox could hardly be called a 'slow, bloated mess' if you consider the pre-mozilla/browser standards. Mozilla 2 is not perfect, but the Firefox 3 beta shows that the features can be there with a 1.5 era responsiveness.

Honest Question

[FiveLights]

You'll want to mod me down so as not to attract attention to this issue, but I'd honestly like to know... I usually browse at a level of 4 or higher but sometimes, when there are still few comments to a story, I'll drop down to -1. My question is, does every story have all of this racism and homophobia nonsense attached to it, or is this something new? If it's a long standing thing, are there any theories as to why people bother with stuff like that on a site like Slashdot? They just get modded down and aren't even seen by most people (I, of course, assume most people are like me), so why do they bother? Hope someone answers before I get modded into oblivion with the trolls :)

Re:Honest Question

[Anonymous Coward]

Google for "GNAA" .. they are a troll group the entrance requirements for which is (was?) to get a "first post" on slashdot ..

Re:Honest Question

[Anonymous Coward]

Also, is there a way to block submitters?

Short answer: no.
Long answer: You can block stories related to a fixed list of topics and authors. Unfortunately, 'authors' here refers to the handles of the /. admin listed with the words "Posted by", such as Zonk, CmdrTaco, kdawson. You can't block stories based off of the submitter's handle.

One approach we could request would be to utilize the Fans/Foes lists in promoting/demoting homepage stories. However, this wouldn't help your current problem in that "I+Don't+Believe+in+Imaginary+Property" is not a /. handle.
I don't know why /. posts attributed stories submitted by non-members.

IE Dominance wasn't always bad....

[Jason Levine]

I was a Netscape user back in the 3.x and 4.x days. I was also a web developer. NS 3.x beat IE 3.x hands down when it came to web development. The 4.x models showed IE pretty much even with Netscape. Then Netscape did something monumentally stupid. They stopped releasing browsers. Sure, they claimed that they were working on something big in the back room, but that didn't help use users and developers. Meanwhile, Microsoft came out with IE 5.x which blew NS 4.x out of the water when it came to development ease and usage. Of course, IE6 was even further ahead of Netscape 4.x. Meanwhile, the back room development was still progressing, or so they said.

Up until this point, IE's dominance was a good thing. It proved that sitting on your laurels won't win you the browser wars. Even if you've got a grand plan, you've got to get regular releases out there or people will just forget about you.

It's just too bad that Microsoft didn't learn this lesson. With their browser safely at 90%+ market share and no real competitors in sight, they stopped development (except for bug fixes, of course). Over time, the wonderful, easy to use browser started showing its age. Alternatives like FireFox started popping up, showing people that a more standards-compliant browser could make development a lot more fun. FireFox started to take off and wonder of wonders, Microsoft decided that maybe they should update cranky old IE6. The IE6 languishing years were the really bad time to be a web developer. Now I'm hoping that IE6 dies off rapidly (though not as much as I kept hoping that Netscape 4.x would die off).

Mozilla's dead

[monopole]

Just read the Suck.com article

Re:I always hated the name 'Mozilla'

[InvisiBill]

I wasn't there, but I've always understood 'Mozilla' to be a funky portmanteau of 'Mosaic Killer', stemming from Marc Anderson's dream of Netscape reigning supreme over Mosaic, the ground-breaking NCSA-developed graphical browser. Anyone out there who was close to the action?

As a result, I never shed a tear for Netscape when IE wiped the floor with them, as it seemed to me that Netscape got exactly what they had set out to do to Mosaic.

It's a bit more complicated than that, as Netscape really was Mosaic in a way.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mosaic_(web_browser)

Marc Andreessen and Eric Bina originally designed and programmed NCSA Mosaic for Unix's X Window System at NCSA.

...

Marc Andreessen, the leader of the team that developed Mosaic, left NCSA and, with Jim Clark, one of the founders of Silicon Graphics, Inc. (SGI), and four other former students and staff of the University of Illinois, started Mosaic Communications Corporation. Mosaic Communications eventually became Netscape Communications Corporation, producing Netscape Navigator.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Netscape_Navigator

After his graduation from Illinois in 1993, Andreessen moved to California to work at Enterprise Integration Technologies. Andreessen then met with Jim Clark, the recently-departed founder of Silicon Graphics. Clark believed that the Mosaic browser had great commercial possibilities and provided the seed money. Soon Mosaic Communications Corporation was in business in Mountain View, California, with Andreessen appointed as a vice-president. The University of Illinois was unhappy with the company's use of the Mosaic name, so "Mosaic Communications Corporation" changed its name to Netscape Communications (thought up by sales representative Greg Sands) and its flagship web browser was the Netscape Navigator.

In other Mosaic/IE news...

Spyglass licensed the technology and trademarks from NCSA for producing their own web browser but never used any of the NCSA Mosaic source code. Microsoft licensed Spyglass Mosaic in 1995 for US$2 million, modified it, and renamed it Internet Explorer.

In other words, you're happy that Mosaic killed Mosaic because they wanted to kill Mosaic.