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Mozilla Starts To Follow a New Drumbeat
ChiefMonkeyGrinder writes "Key, then, to the Drumbeat project is openness, specifically openness as applied to the Internet. That fits in well with the original impulses behind Mozilla and Firefox. The former was about transforming the Netscape Communicator code into an open source browser, and the latter was about defending open standards from Microsoft's attempt to lock people into Internet Explorer 6 and its proprietary approaches. Both Mozilla and Firefox have succeeded, but the threats have now changed."
Netscape Communicator (or simply "Netscape") was Internet Explorer's main (only?) competition in the late 90s. It was a web browser developed and released by Netscape which at one time was dominant, but has since been relegated to history.
There are two main reasons for its demise:
1) Microsoft finally woke up and realised that the Internet (and specifically the World Wide Web) was important, and developed IE, finally bundling it as part of Windows
2) Netscape decided to make version 5 a complete rewrite from scratch, which gave MS all the time they needed to improve IE to the point that it made Netscape look like a bad joke.
To my mind, 2) is what really killed it; Netscape 4 was buggy and slow, and while it was definitely comparable to IE4, IE5 was superior (and I say that as someone who went from Netscape 4 to Mozilla - I have never used IE as my primary browser, and most likely never will). Netscape did release versions 6 and 7, based on Gecko and the Mozilla code base, but by then it was far too late. (They also sucked compared to Mozilla/Firefox and IE).
It's official. Most of you are morons.
Firefox "was about defending open standards from Microsoft's attempt to lock people into Internet Explorer 6 and its proprietary approaches"? Maybe in Stallman's world.
In the words of one of Firefox's creators: (http://weblogs.mozillazine.org/ben/archives/009698.html) ... These browser efforts were reactions to the rot we had seen in the Mozilla application suite."
"We discussed the rot within Mozilla, which we blamed on Netscape and Mozilla's inability to assert independence. He suggested it'd be perhaps preferable to start again on the user interface, much of the code in the front end was so bloated and bad that it was better off starting from a fresh perspective.
For great justice.
Want to see your Firefox crashes? Enter about:crashes into the Firefox address window, and press the Enter key.
There is a discussion of Mozilla product crashes at Mozilla Developer Center crash reporting.