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

Re:And what a great ride it's been

[gEvil (beta)]

What was that 'hidden' page again with the quote from the 'book of mozilla'? Ahh memories :)

That'd be this guy.

In fairness....

[Otter]

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.

Putting aside the fact that users who were sufficiently upset by this "worst period in web browsers' history" could always go back to Lynx and Viola...

This seems a bit unfair to kfm and Konqueror, which made web browsing on Unix tolerable while Mozilla was still in shambles, Galeon, which put the first decent browser around the Mozilla engine, and whatever that Mac browser was called ... OmniWeb? Plus CyberDog!

Re:In fairness....

[The One and Only]

and whatever that Mac browser was called ... OmniWeb? Plus CyberDog!

I was there so let me elucidate. Mozilla began in 1998, so let's say Netscape died by 1998. On the Mac, the main available browsers were IE and Netscape at that point. Some people still used Netscape despite it not being supported, some used IE, some used minor players such as iCab and Opera. OmniWeb was a NeXTStep browser, not a Mac browser, at that point. CyberDog was a demonstration of Apple's OpenDoc technology, which died in 1997. CyberDog itself was only supported from 96 to 97, and never really caught on.

In 1997, Apple buys NeXT and Steve Jobs takes over. Jobs makes a deal with Microsoft to settle remaining patent disputes (the residue from the "look and feel" lawsuits of the late 80's). That deal includes such provisions as MS investing $150 million into Apple, MS promising to develop just as many Mac versions of Office as Windows versions for the next five years, and IE becoming the default browser on the Mac, although not being built in the way it was built into Windows 98. Until 2003, Apple is contractually obligated to bundle IE and set it as the default browser.

By 2000, the user base is fractured between just using IE, trying to get old Netscape to work, trying to get Mozilla or new Netscape to work, and trying out fringe browsers. (AOL made a few customized releases of Mozilla under the Netscape branding at the time.) In 2001, Mac OS X comes out. A new version of IE is bundled and set as the default browser. Mozilla eventually gets ported over. iCab and Opera get ported over. OmniWeb gets ported from NeXTStep (which is closer to Mac OS X than Mac OS 9 was).

In 2002, some people, including Dave Hyatt, separate out the browser parts of Mozilla from all the other cruft, put it in a Cocoa wrapper, and release it on Mac OS X as Chimera. Chimera gains a significant userbase. It is now known as Camino for the same types of reasons that Mozilla Phoenix became Mozilla Firefox. Despite having similar goals to Firefox, Chimera's initial release was actually months before the first release of Phoenix (as Firefox was then known). At this point there is competition between IE, Chimera, and OmniWeb. Eventually, Firefox becomes available on Mac OS X as well.

In 2003, Apple releases Safari, some months after hiring Dave Hyatt to make them a browser. Safari is built around WebKit, which is a fork of KHTML, the rendering engine of Konquerer. Later in 2003, Microsoft discontinues IE for Mac, and ever since then the main browsers on the Mac are Safari, Camino, Firefox, and to a smaller extent, OmniWeb and other fringe players.

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 :)

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).

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.

Thank you, /., for showing me Firefox

[eepok]

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!

Re:And what a great ride it's been

[BeeBeard]

Thanks for the link. I was drawing an about:blank there, too. ;)