Follow Slashdot stories on Twitter

 


Forgot your password?
Close
typodupeerror
×
Netscape The Internet

History of Netscape and Mozilla 195

Posted by CmdrTaco from the stuff-to-read dept.
Sabah Arif writes "Netscape was there at the beginning of the internet boom. In 1996, the company controlled 90 percent of the browser market, but now its usershare is in the single digits. The spawn of Netscape, Firefox, has never been more popular, and is poised to beat Microsoft in the browser market. Read the history of Netscape and Mozilla at MLAgazine."
This discussion has been archived. No new comments can be posted.

History of Netscape and Mozilla More

History of Netscape and Mozilla

Comments Filter:

  • Please cut out the mindless propaganda. (Score:5, Insightful)

    by jolyonr ( 560227 ) on Sunday May 29, 2005 @09:27AM (#12669500) Homepage
    The spawn of Netscape, Firefox, has never been more popular, and is poised to beat Microsoft in the browser market.

    I'm a firefox fanatic, it's without doubt the superior browser. But spouting such mindless rubbish as that comment doesn't do anyone any good. In my mind 'Poised to beat' would be when Firefox is at 49% browser share, not the less than 10% (compared to 80%+ for IE). Keep the propaganda out of news items please, and let Firefox promote itself by simply being the better browser.

    Jolyon

    • Re:Please cut out the mindless propaganda. (Score:5, Funny)

      by lazuli42 ( 219080 ) on Sunday May 29, 2005 @09:33AM (#12669526) Homepage Journal
      The spawn of vi, Vim, has never been more popular, and is poised to beat Notepad in the text editor market.

      Maybe? Maybe not. How about:

      The spawn of xv, The Gimp, has never been more popular, and is poised to beat Photoshop in the graphics market.

      Nah... Perhaps:

      The spawn of some Swedes, Blender, has never been more popular, and is poised to beat 3d Studio Max in the 3d modelling market.

      You gotta be happy with *one* of those.

    • Beating Microsoft shouldn't just be at having a larger market share - that is just propaganda and a "my browser is better than your browser" argument.

      IE was only ahead because of the way it locked people into writing for the funny way it displays pages. When IE had 95% market share, web developers wrote for IE only. Now Firefox has 25% market share on some sites [w3schools.com], web developers are writing for both browsers, at least. And when sites work the same in any browser, users can change browsers at will, without

      • Re:Please cut out the mindless propaganda. (Score:5, Interesting)

        by Michalson ( 638911 ) on Sunday May 29, 2005 @10:17AM (#12669726)
        IE was only ahead because of the way it locked people into writing for the funny way it displays pages

        Funny, that sounds like another browser I know. Long before Microsoft entered the browser arena to make Windows a viable internet machine out of the box, a company called Netscape was destroying competition in the browser world with it's "embrace and extend" philosophy. Rather then follow the standards of the day, Netscape proceeded to liberally "enhance" their browser with quirks only they supported (most infamous being the blink tag). With their vision of turning the web into a form of TV (where the webpage controlled your computer with crap like popups, window resizing and statusbar changing) they managed to create a browser that had lots of interesting (or stupid, depending on your view) things for web developers to do, but was completely incompatible with every other browser. Their monopoly got so bad webservers where being coded to look for the "Mozilla" string at the beginning of the agent field, rejecting people who didn't use the one browser because pages designed for it wouldn't render correctly on standard browsers. This forced the competition to modify their user agent just to get a page (even Internet Explorer had to identify itself as "Mozilla"), at which point they still had to try and emulate Netscapes propritary extensions.

        Now by Netscape 3 the rest of the original browser market had been crushed by anti-competitive practices. However a new browser was appearing at this time, the first viable version of Internet Explorer, IE 3. Unlike smaller companies that Netscape could push around, IE was being made by a company with enough money to play (and eventually beat) Netscape at it's own game. IE 3 matched a great deal of Netscapes extended standard, then proceeded to do some extending of their own. By the next major incarnation, Netscape/IE 4, Explorer was not only playing Netscape's game, it was playing it just as well if not better then the master. What really helped though was that at this point there was an actual standards body appearing, creating CSS as a web standard. IE, in addition to creating it's own extensions, proceeded to try and support it (creating the first viable implimentation). Now while the IE CSS implimentation is today seen as quirky and incomplete, back then it looked quite good compared to Netscape, who apparently believing they where still living in the one browser world where Netscape could simply define a new standard whenever they wanted to kill competition, had proceeded to try making their own new standard, implimenting CSS as less then an after thought (where as IE has problems rendering CSS exactly to spec, Netscape just plain crashed on all but the simplest code). This created a market where the choice was between a browser that came on your computer, rendered its webpages and the webpages of the competition correctly, and was generally quite stable, vs a browser you had to download, didn't render half of new webpages correctly, and had a habbit of randomly crashing (CSS was sometimes the cause, but especially during the 4.5 period you could expect at least 1 crash for no reason each session). Netscape sealed the deal when they waited forever to release Netscape 6 (they skipped the 5 generation, allowing Microsoft to get a further leg up), which when finally released turned out to be the least stable browser ever concieved by man (for reasons unknown Netscape dropped their code base and wrote 6 from scratch - the successor to Netscape, Mozilla, was based on the actually usable 4.x codebase)

        • Re:Please cut out the mindless propaganda. (Score:5, Informative)

          by edwdig ( 47888 ) on Sunday May 29, 2005 @11:44AM (#12670097)
          Keep in mind that in the early days of Netscape, there was no W3C. Pure HTML really wasn't very good. HTML was about as capable of formatting things as Windows 3.1 Write was.

          Blink certainly was a bad choice, but Netscape also created tags such as table and center.

          For the 4.x browsers, Netscape created the layer tag. MS saw the beta, and decided to out do Netscape by creating a different standard and pushing it through the W3C before Netscape tried pushing theirs through. That's how things ended up like they did.

          Netscape 6 was just the Mozilla release of the time with the name & logo changed. The Netscape 4.x code was horrible. The Mozilla team was almost ready to do a 5.0 beta release, but eventually decided it wouldn't be a hell of a lot better than 4.x and would just piss people off more. A complete rewrite of the project was being done in parallel which was always intended to be used for 6.0. They underestimated the amount of work necessary to finish the 6.0 branch, and decided to completely skip 5.0 figuring 6.0 wasn't too far away.
        • Um, without Netscape's extensions, there would be no World Wide Web as we know it today.

          Anyone who was around at the birth of the "web" knows that from the user interface perspective, it was basically not much better than gopher (yes, there used to be a "web-like" system called gopher), and contained much less content overall.

          Capabilities like text centering, forms, and tables are what turned the web into something that non-geeks and businesses could embrace for Commerce and Content delivery (note capito

    • The numbers (Score:3, Informative)

      by sellin'papes ( 875203 )
      I agree, firefox is still far from ousting IE from dominating the market. Here are the numbers from W3 Schools [w3schools.com] website.

      W3 shows IE at 65%, Opera at 2%, Firefox at 25%, Mozilla at 3.5%, and Netscape at 1%. While this is the lowest IE has every been, its decreasing slowly.

      • Here are the numbers from W3 Schools website. W3 shows IE at 65%, Opera at 2%, Firefox at 25%, Mozilla at 3.5%, and Netscape at 1%.

        Yeah, you tell 'em. The other day my grandma was browsing W3 Schools, and she told me she thought their HTML reference was "the bomb". She uses Firefox because she says it is "totally pimp." Grandma thinks my mom "doesn't get it." She says, "Your mom is old school, because she's not chillin' with the Fox."

        *Sigh* W3 Schools' statistics are meaningless as a measure of publ
        • I reckon just about everybody uses google. Their stats would be a good cross-section of the internet using public. Not perfect, since there will be those who use MSN instead of Google because they don't know any better.
    • If you stop spouting mindless propaganda, it just leaves their mindless rubbish to try and dominate "developer mindshare". And, oh look, there's those bloody TCO adverts on virtually *every* techsite I go to. The MS marketing budget must be keeping the commercial net *afloat*.

      TFF Firefox and the anti-flash plugin.

      I agree you should pick your battlegrounds wisely and leave nothing for the enemy to pick at. Witness the petstore project fiasco for java, where an un-tuned app meant for mere newbie step-up was

  • Netscape 4 to IE 5 (Score:3, Interesting)

    by lazuli42 ( 219080 ) on Sunday May 29, 2005 @09:28AM (#12669508) Homepage Journal
    I remember when I made the switch from Netscape 4 to IE 5. I resisted IE for many years, but at some point it just became evident that Internet Explorer was a superior product in almost every way.

    Once Foxfire became stable and usable I switched to it, and some time later it became Firefox. So far it's the best browsing experience I've had and the extentions published for it make it endlessly expandable.

    I think there will always be a segment of the market that is satisfied with whatever does the minimum possible to get the job done, but as we see Firefox's market share rise we know that some people will take the time to upgrade to the superior browser.

    • Re:Netscape 4 to IE 5 (Score:5, Funny)

      by __aawfbm2023 ( 870942 ) on Sunday May 29, 2005 @09:40AM (#12669557)
      Once Foxfire became stable and usable I switched to it, and some time later it became Firefox. Oh yeah? Well I'm such a hardcore, ultra to the maxx, mozilla fan that I was using Firefox back when it was called Oxireff!
      • Well, the truth is that I was using f06f143 back in 1998 when it was just a series of hex codes, but it wasn't as stable as Internet Explorer so I just had to wait for it to cook a while longer.
    • It was called Phoenix, not FoxFire! Also, marketshare isn't really an accurate term. Maybe with Opera, and iCab (which refuses to die) you can talk about a market. Personally, I'd be releived if Firefox takes over from Linux as the 'posterchild' of free software. Linux tends to confuse Joe User as to what Open Source is all about.
      • You're right. It's been so long that I'd forgotten. I remember after it changed names I refused to believe it was named after a stinky Clint Eastwood movie and so my brain somehow wanted to call it Foxfire instead. Looks like my brain let me down one more time.

        Stupid brain!

      • It was called Phoenix, not FoxFire!

        Yep, Phoenix first until 0.6 I think, then Firebird (because of trademark issues with Phoenix Technologies), then Firefox with the release of... was it 0.8?... because a Firebird project already existed (OSS database)

        And there was born Firesomething [extensionsmirror.nl], allowing me to browse the web with my neato Mozilla Spacesloth

    • I remember that time as well. I think that it was sometime in 2000. I don't agree that it was superior in every way, the IE renderer was way better, but there were still a number of very features at the time that IE didn't have e.g. roaming profiles, print preview (which IE finally got in 5.5), a vastly superior email client (LDAP alone was enough to make Outlook Express obsolete for me), a much more efficient way of handling bookmarks, and a few others.

      I used IE for about 6 months until Mozilla was even r
    • I remember when I made the switch from Netscape 4 to IE 5. I resisted IE for many years, but at some point it just became evident that Internet Explorer was a superior product in almost every way.

      I remember when I got tired of Netscape 4. I didn't want to use IE, so I looked around and discovered a little browser called Opera 4 (shortly after I switched Opera 5 was released). I have never looked back since. I am probably one of the few people that has never used IE as my primary browser at any point.
  • how about taking more market share away from IE by making a browser baed on apple safari.

    webcore they allow to freely download so anybody could download that and work on a better browser. and if the current lgpl violations can be worked out it could make yet another very good alternative to IE so together firefox netscape mozilla safari and other webcore browsers could take IE market share
    • hmmm. Because safari sucks balls. I use the 'fox on the mac.
    • webcore they allow to freely download so anybody could download that and work on a better browser. and if the current lgpl violations can be worked out it could make yet another very good alternative to IE so together firefox netscape mozilla safari and other webcore browsers could take IE market share

      Does your typing involve conscious thought, or merely involuntary, peristaltic regurgitation of mutated Slashdot memetic material? ;-)
      1. Webcore is indeed a very nice HTML renderer, but it's definitely not a
    • how about taking more market share away from IE by making a browser baed on apple safari

      And mind you, how is Safari going to take more market share from IE? Firefox is in fact doing it much better than anyone would have expected, and part of its secret are things like extensions, which Safari doesn't supports.
    • What 'current lgpl violations'?

    • webcore they allow to freely download so anybody could download that and work on a better browser. and if the current lgpl violations can be worked out it could make yet another very good alternative to IE so together firefox netscape mozilla safari and other webcore browsers could take IE market share

      Right, and Webcore isn't platform specific and does not use MacOSX specific features that ain't replicated anywhere else, which means that it'll be easy to port Safari to W32 machines...

  • Just the facts, ma'am (Score:5, Insightful)

    by coupland ( 160334 ) * <dchaseNO@SPAMhotmail.com> on Sunday May 29, 2005 @09:34AM (#12669531) Journal

    > Firefox, has never been more popular, and is poised to beat Microsoft in the browser market.

    Come on, folks, I'm a rabid Firefox fan and even *I* know this kind of rhetoric doesn't belong on the front page...

    • > Firefox, has never been more popular, and is poised to beat Microsoft in the browser market.

      Come on, folks, I'm a rabid Firefox fan and even *I* know this kind of rhetoric doesn't belong on the front page...

      Yeah, it is a bit lacking. How about "The virtuous, open-source Firefox browser, has never been more popular, and is poised to beat the evil, deficient, and closed-source Microsoft Internet browser."

      Please people, we gotta keep the standards up.
    • No, no, no, you're interpreting it all wrong. That sentence is really two different senteces that have been compounded together. It can be broken down into this:

      1. Firefox has never been more popular [than] Microsoft in the browser market.

      2. Firefox is poised to beat Microsoft in the browser market.

  • Article's text (Score:4, Informative)

    by StefanoB ( 775596 ) on Sunday May 29, 2005 @09:39AM (#12669549) Journal
    The second most popular browser available today, Firefox, is a direct descendant of the Mosaic Netscape browser released in 1994. The product was created by NCSA refugees, Jim Clark and Jim Andresson. Together, they revolutionized the internet, making it synonymous with the world wide web.

    NCSA Mosaic was the first popular, graphical browser available to personal computer users. Before, the internet and its resources were primarily only available to those in academia and other research institutions. Eventually, online providers began to offer internet access in addition to their proprietary networks, and HTML took off. The first browsers available to the public were very primitive, typically only capable of rendering simple text and hyperlinks. The University of Illinois, at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications, developed the Mosaic browser. It was innovative because it was capable of rendering images, and itself had a graphical interface. By 1993, it was the dominant force on the internet. It had almost complete dominance over the internet, and was widely applauded for its quality.

    Other people and companies wanted in on the game. Jim Andresson, developer of Mosaic for UNIX, and Jim Clark left the NCSA to found Mosaic Communications on April 4, 1994. Capitalizing on the former student's familiarity of the Mosaic browser, Mosaic Communications released its first browser months later. Its name was Netscape. Almost instantly, it became more popular than Mosaic, mostly because of bundling deals with internet service providers. Navigator included many new features not found in Mosaic. The most popular one was the ability to display pages as they download. Unlike most other browsers, a user did not have to wait for the entire page to download before it was usable. The NCSA took issue with the name Mosaic Communications, and the company was renamed Netscape Communications, and the browser was renamed Navigator.

    A year later, Netscape was short on funds, and decided to go public with its initial stock price at $28. On its IPO, the stock price rose to $75, an unheard of leap in the software business. Netscape continued to gain marketshare, and controlled %90 of the browser market in mid-1995.

    Version 2 of Netscape included a plethora of new features, many of them haphazardly implemented. The new version included support for cookies, frames and a new email client. Netscape 2 grew even faster than the first version, and helped Netscape double its revenues every quarter in 1995.

    Navigator was evolving. It had added many new features and tags that were not available on any other browser (though eventually, most of these tags would be adopted the W3C), which made it difficult for other browsers to coexist with Netscape. As its marketshare and revunes grew, so to did the company's scope. Netscape began developing a product called Constellation. Constellation would allow a user to access files from a desktop anywhere on a network. It was to make the operating system an irrelevant component on the desktop computer.

    Microsoft felt threatened by Netscape's continued growth, especially its assertion that the browser would replace the operating system as the most important software on a computer. Several executives visited the Netscape campus in August of 1995, and made a proposal. Netscape would cease all development for their Windows version of Navigator, but would face no competition from Microsoft on other platforms. The company refused, and Microsoft began developing a new web browser.

    Unable to develop their own web browser so quickly, Microsoft turned to Spyglass, who had licensed Mosaic's source code from the NCSA. Microsoft would give Mosaic a monthly payment, and a percentage of the revenues the browser generated. Using Mosaic code, Microsoft released Internet Explorer 1.0 on August 1995 as part of the Internet Jumpstart pack for Windows 95. The new browser was widely derided for being so primitive and clumsy. It was little m

    • Re:Article's text (Score:3, Informative)

      by Atmchicago ( 555403 )

      Unfortunately the article is wrong in an important aspect - the man is Marc Andresson, not Jim Andresson. Thought I would bring that mistake to light.

  • 90% 85% 95% .. doesn't matter. The market share IE enjoys in no way reflective of it's quality. I know a bunch of supply-sidings free market zealots on slashdot will moan about it, "Let the market decide which is the better *product*." If that were the case here, IE would have a 1% share of the browser market.

    Alas, we live in the twilight zone where Microsoft gives away it's flagship product and that's called Capitalism!

    • Re:browser dominance (Score:2, Insightful)

      by Anonymous Coward
      Yes, capitalism includes the right to price one's product as one sees fit. So now you want it to be against the law to give away free stuff?

      What's next on your agenda, banning charity?

      People like IE and don't care enough to look for alternatives .. quit trying to shove your "solutions" down people's throats.

      Most Microsoft users can switch to an alternative operating system without being summarily executed by the Secret Police.

      Alternatives to Microsoft exist and aren't being hidden under a rock.

      People d
    • Netscape had a great lead in 1996 but when IE 4.0 came out, with its far superior Java scripting capabilities, Netscape was junk. IE 5.0 only furthered that gap. And whatever happened to Netscape 5? Hmmm.

      Bundling aside, IE crushed Netscape because IE was the better browser.
      • This is what happened. From an article earlier today, I reprint with due apologies to the author - http://slashdot.org/~diegocgteleline.es [slashdot.org] diegocgteleline.

        Here is the original post. http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=151015&cid=126 65634 [slashdot.org]

        Ars: You mention mistakes made by Microsoft. What do you feel are mistakes that Mozilla has made in the past? There was a fundamental mistake made by Netscape management, twice, which cost us a release at the most inopportune time. I think we can attribute a grea

        • Its interesting but I think the exec that left may have had the better instinct.

          Netscape needed to be based on a real hierarchical rendering engine. IE 4.0 was and it was a revolution in browsing. Granted, Microsoft did drop 500 million bucks or something absurd like that on IE, but Netscape had that kind of money and could have hung in there had they not released a 4.0 that was so limited compared to Microsoft's 4.0.

          There were so many things you could not do with Netscape DOM under Netscape 4.0 that yo
    • What are you talking about? the market will decide. Right now there are quite a few browsers available, some of them are free. One of the 'features' that market will 'consider' is the continued interest of the developers. On the microsoft side, this will last as long as they are willing to pay people to work on a product they are giving away for free. On the Firefox/gecko side, this will be as long as they care do do it. Since open source allows anyone to develop, there will be interest in development
    • Alas, we live in the twilight zone where Microsoft gives away it's flagship product and that's called Capitalism!

      Monopolization is the antithesis of Capitalism. It's funny how most people who curse the term "Capitalism" don't even know what it means.
    • Typical attitude of the technical elites. The free market might not always decide that technical superiority is the criterion for "the better product". Maybe how many other people use it is, or maybe it's ease of installation (e.g., already being there) is a big factor; i.e., people consider the search costs of finding an alternative, and also the transaction costs (in terms of opportunity cost of the time it takes to search for, install, and configure an alternate browser that isn't on the desktop by defau

  • I stopped reading... (Score:1, Informative)

    by Anonymous Coward
    The product was created by NCSA refugees, Jim Clark and Jim Andresson.

    This is the second sentence - after which I stopped reading. Jim Clark an NCSA refugee?? Jim Andresson??

    The only NCSA refugee here is Marc Andreessen. Jim Clark is the founder of SGI and the money behind Netscape. If they can't get this simple things straight...

  • Poised to beat?! (Score:5, Funny)

    by orionware ( 575549 ) on Sunday May 29, 2005 @09:44AM (#12669573)
    Folks, the score is Team A 95, Team B 3. It looks like Team B is poised to finally beat Team A. What a game! What a game!

  • Ready to take the crown ? (Score:4, Insightful)

    by cyberfunk2 ( 656339 ) on Sunday May 29, 2005 @09:47AM (#12669588)
    Is firefox ready to take the browsing crown ?

    Not quite I say.. there's unfortunately still a few things holding it back. As I see it, the following hold FF back from being the dominant browser (note: not all these are things that are FF/Mozilla Fndations' fault).

    IE is the default browser in all windows distros, unfortunately, this means IE has a defacto advantage, and a huge one at that, as many people dont even know the alternative exists.

    On the same note: Many people dont know about FF. Things like spread firefox and word of mouth, and positive press are helping this problem in a big way. Now even some of my non-tech savvy friends proclaim "I'll never touch explorer again, I love the 'Fox". Firefox has become enough of a better browser that they see that as superior.

    Stubborn IT policies that refuse to consider new applications, namely a new default browser for companies. I know my school has finally seen the light and included FF as an option on the default install on all publicly available computers. But it's still not on the desktop, hidden away in the programs menu. We need the make it just as easy to launch FF as to launch IE (I know a default install of FF puts a desktop icon there, but we need to get IT departments to leave it there).

    The extremely techincally illiterate who hold corporate power. That is, those upper level managers who have only ever known IE, and are terrified to use anything else because of those viruses and worms they keep hearing about. If they're intelligent, they'll listen to smart IT advice, however, we know how often upper management likes to think they know best outside their area.

    I'm sure there are areas that i've missed, but these are some of the problem's facing down the 'Fox as I see it.
    • You also missed the fact that there is not a very method for patching and upgrading Firefox on the Windows platforn,.

      This is a critical problem especially in a corporate environment.
    • Not all of it is ignorance. I know people who don't use Firefox because they say it isn't as good at rendering pages -- and when it comes to horribly coded pages which are deliberately incompatible with Firefox, they're right...
  • I was using Netscape till Version 4. Then I switched to IE and was using it till the middle of last year, when I found Firefox. So now it's Firefox 99% of the time. Even when I was using IE, I faithfully downloaded all new versions of Netscape till version 7. When even that version did a poor job of rendering wepages with css (in my opinion), I gave it up altogether.
    • There is little difference in the CSS rendering capabilities of Netscape 7 versus Firefox. IE, on the other hand performs quite miserably. Almost without exception, when I want to use a feature, it works well everywhere (Opera, Mozilla, Netscape, Firefox, Safari are the ones I test against lately) but not IE. And Firefox and Netscape are the same codebases, although it does take significantly longer for fixes and good features to trickle into Netscape. But to believe IE works better with respect to CSS

  • Wow... that was bad. (Score:3, Informative)

    by Anonymous Coward on Sunday May 29, 2005 @09:53AM (#12669621)
    Second sentence: "The product was created by NCSA refugees, Jim Clark and Jim Andresson." Who the heck is Jim Andresson?

    Then the article goes on to be filled with gems like: "Several months later, NGLayout, renamed Gecko, was released several months later, but a browser based on it would not be released to the public for years, though there were publicly available betas."

    And my favorite: "An open source database from Germany carried the name Firefox, so the project was renamed for the last time. It was called Firefox."
    • You missed this gem: "Unfortunately, the Phoenix name was already used by a web browser that ran on top of a BIOS".

      Admittedly, that would be really cool (kinda like LinuxBIOS [linuxbios.org] but with just a web browser?), but I don't think the Phoenix BIOS was a web browser, by pretty much any definition of the term. Is that what the author really meant?

      • Comment removed based on user account deletion
        • Sure but the name of the browser is FirstWave Connect, while FF was named 'Phoenix' which violates the trademark of the Phoenix company name itself, not its product.

          So the author was wrong still here, and the fact that the german database is called Firebird. I remember those days, FF was really unstable and I thought it would go the way of Mozilla and Netscape 6.

          But I'm using Opera now instead of FF, that LITTLE bit of speed difference matters to me.

    • You forgot:

      The user interface was based on XUL, a form of HTML, making the skinning of the browser very easy, even across platforms.

      XUL is a form of HTML?! (OK, I can understand the confusion: it's XML, which might look like HTML to the uneducated, but, really...)

  • It's Marc Andresson (Score:2, Informative)

    by soeck ( 149928 )
    > The product was created by NCSA refugees, Jim Clark and Jim Andresson.

    No, it was Jim Clark and Marc Andresson.
  • The product was created by NCSA refugees, Jim Clark and Jim Andresson.

    I believe that's supposed to be 'Marc Andresson', fact-checkers/reporters at MLAgazine. Sheesh.

  • My website's stats (Score:4, Interesting)

    by Cmdr Whackjob ( 883018 ) on Sunday May 29, 2005 @10:03AM (#12669669)
    My website's percentages (I would say a somewhat stereotype independent website):

    January 2005:
    MS Internet Explorer 95.9 %
    Netscape 1.8 %
    Mozilla 1 %
    Opera 0.4 %
    Safari 0.4 %

    February 2005:
    MS Internet Explorer 92.5 %
    Mozilla 4.1 %
    Netscape1.4 %
    Safari 0.8 %
    Opera 0.5 %

    March 2005:
    MS Internet Explorer 90.9 %
    Mozilla 2.7 %
    FireFox 2.1 %
    Netscape 1.4 %

    My guess is that my host just updated awstats so that firefox and mozilla are seperated. It does list FireBird (less than .5% every month), so that kind of confuses me. Either way, IE is going way down, and Mozilla/FireFox are going up.

  • The article author cannot even get the name right (Score:4, Informative)

    by gnugnugnu ( 178215 ) on Sunday May 29, 2005 @10:09AM (#12669693) Homepage
    An open source database from Germany carried the name Firefox, so the project was renamed for the last time. It was called Firefox.
    (sic)

    The name changes Mozilla has gone through are so confusing even the author cannot properly keep track of them. The database was called Firebird. One good thing to come out of all the messing was they made sure to carefully isolate all the branding information and make tools like Firesomething [mozdev.org] possible, allowing users to personalise their browser.

  • hopefully they will read what we have commented over here and brush up on their research and editing staff. I do not need to point out every mistake, most of you have caught them already in the ~50 comments posted for this article. But whoa momma there are many.

    the cool thing is, most of us that commented actually RTFA - maybe M-LAG-azine did not think they would have anyone read it, just hit the site, see it was full of holes and start clicking some ads or without readers the contents of the article

  • Mirror (Score:3, Informative)

    by Anonymous Coward on Sunday May 29, 2005 @10:16AM (#12669720)
    NetworkMirror [networkmirror.com]

  • Retro computing (Score:3, Funny)

    by grumling ( 94709 ) on Sunday May 29, 2005 @10:37AM (#12669790) Homepage
    Nice that the slashdot effect made the server work like an old dialup connection. Ah, memories!

  • firefox may have a chance w/our help (Score:3, Interesting)

    by yagu ( 721525 ) <{yayagu} {at} {gmail.com}> on Sunday May 29, 2005 @10:40AM (#12669797) Journal

    As a number of posters have noted, the article is riddled with errors (Jim???), and doesn't say much that isn't common sense. However the conjecture about Firefox taking over the market is only conjecture.

    I do think firefox has a chance of doing big things, but it's not going to do it by itself. Firefox still needs our help.

    Tomorrow I am going to my brother's house to set up his new computer for his daughter who will take that computer to college this fall. As per normal I will spend about 30 minutes getting it set up, and then about another hour ensuring it has firefox, and thunderbird installed and prominently in the quick launch tray, and also configured for fast startup (always in memory after first use).

    Additionally I will expunge all visible references to IE and Outlook (on the START menu, in the Programs menu, etc.) and ensure his default clients are set to firefox and thunderbird.

    Fortunately I don't have to give any tutorial on firefox and its features as I've already set up his other computer previously and he now doesn't even really remember how to fire up IE.... so much the better. I also switched out any software that overrides the default browser setting (specifically McAffee).

    For all slashdotters, this is one contribution we can make above and beyond posts in this forum. (Lots of good posts and info in this forum.... my brother hasn't a clue what slashdot is, nor does he care -- probably the attitude of 99%++ of the consumer demographic.) Let's all give firefox the additional nudge -- it couldn't hurt.

    • "Additionally I will expunge all visible references to IE and Outlook (on the START menu, in the Programs menu, etc.) and ensure his default clients are set to firefox and thunderbird."

      Good work, OSS thought policeman!

  • What happened to the Java rewrite? (Score:3, Informative)

    by ClosedSource ( 238333 ) on Sunday May 29, 2005 @11:41AM (#12670072)
    Didn't Netscape attempt to rewrite their browser in Java? If so, that's an important part of the story.

    The article claims that Netscape was about to go bankrupt just before being purchased by AOL. Given the millions raised by going public this seems unlikely.
    • The cooperation between Netscape and Sun to rewrite Navigator in Java was frustrated by the same problem as the cooperation between Novel and Sun: the notorious "Butthead Factor" of Sun engineers.

      E-mail from Microsoft's Charles Fitzgerald to MS execs on Novell/MS Java meeting [zdnet.com]

      This is one of the documents recently unsealed in the legal case between Sun Microsystems Inc. and Microsoft Corp. over whether Microsoft behaved in an anti-competitive fashion in its handling of Java.

      From: Charles Fitzgera

    • PR--Netscape Navigator for Cyberdog [google.com]

      Netscape and Apple Announce Plans to Develop Netscape Navigator for Apple's Cyberdog

      Netscape To Support Apple's OpenDoc, Cyberdog Technologies; Apple Chooses Netscape Navigator for Cyberdog

      MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif., CUPERTINO, Calif.--Aug. 27, 1996--Apple Computer, Inc. and Netscape Communications Corporation today announced that they have signed an agreement for Netscape to develop a new version of Netscape Navigator that supports Cyberdog, Apple's Internet suite,

    • Sun and Netscape Announce JavaScript

      The following announcement was made 6 a.m. PST Monday, December 4, 1995.

      Key points of this release are:

      * Sun and Netscape announce JavaScript, an object-oriented scripting language based on the Java programming language. [THAT IS A LIE: JavaScript is NOT based on Java. They are quite different, especially when you consider their object models, which are as different as day and night, and quite incompatible.]

      * 28 leading technology companies endorse JavaSc

      • To clear up an ambiguity in my comment: Bill Joy tried to take credit for Java. Bill Joy doesn't deserve credit for Java. Of course Bill Joy also doesn't deserve credit for the language first called LiveScript then renamed JavaScript either, but he never tried to take credit for that, he just endorsed it after it was renamed.

        Bill Joy does however deserve full credit for the "csh" shell scripting language, which, as languages go, is a horribly designed total piece of shit, chock full of gaping security hol

  • The time, 1996, referred to by the article was a time when a lot of people working at Netscape were resting on their laurels and sure that they would always have dominant market share. Many (not all, but enough to hurt) of the original Netscape millionares were taking it easy. They drove their expensive new cars to the office and spent their day sneering at IE and, most destructively, at the legions of new employees Netscape was hiring. They should have spent their time being great mentors for the new pe
    • Clark was more of a VC and those guys don't care about the long term prospects of a company. If they can get out with a big sack of money they're happy. That's exactly what happened. There's a good chance that Netscape would have been sold even if they had retained their market share.

  • Jim Andresson (Score:3, Informative)

    by MacGod ( 320762 ) on Sunday May 29, 2005 @01:12PM (#12670587)
    The article says that Netscape was founded by Jim Clark and Jim Andresson (" The product was created by NCSA refugees, Jim Clark and Jim Andresson. Together, they revolutionized the internet, making it synonymous with the world wide web.").

    I could be horribly mistaken, but wasn't it Mark Andreesen? Are was there both a Jim Andresson and a Mark Andreesen?
    • The opportunistic business suit Jim Clark should never be confused with the XML god James Clark [ibm.com], who has helped forge many useful standards, and written tons of excellent open source code implementing those standards. His venerable "expat" xml parser is at the core of many important products and open source software projects.

      -Don

  • From the story submission: Netscape was there at the beginning of the internet boom. In 1996, the company controlled 90 percent of the browser market, but now its usershare is in the single digits.

    Wow, you mean there are less than 10 users of Netscape Navigator?

  • After reading this I can only wonder what MLAgazine is, but I don't even feel like reading it's homepage.

    All this is general commentary anyone could find on any number of pages.

    It's notable only because of all the errors --- misnaming Marc Andreesen as well as the names of the various browsers at different points

    Here's a simple reason Netscape fell.

    Back then, pretty much everyone was in "ooh! flashy button" mode. The browser was gonna replace the OS, or something like that. Every pretty new feature w

Slashdot Top Deals

"Look! There! Evil!.. pure and simple, total evil from the Eighth Dimension!" -- Buckaroo Banzai

Close