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Mozilla The Internet

A History of Firefox 199

Posted by CmdrTaco from the behind-the-curtain dept.
chrisd writes "Firefox module owner Ben Goodger has written what I think is a very interesting post about how Firefox came into being. It goes into details unheard of to date about the inner workings at Netscape and he fills in a timeline spanning from the open sourcing of Netscape to the release just recently of Firefox 1.5. Especially interesting and poignant are comments like this: 'I was told I could not expect to use Open Source tricks against folk who were employed by the Company (all hail!). I held true to my beliefs and refused to review low quality patches. I was almost fired. Others weren't so lucky.'. Anyhow, I consider this required reading for any fan of the Firefox browser." Or even just a programmer. Worth reading.
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A History of Firefox More

A History of Firefox

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  • A history of Opera would be more interesting. (Score:3, Interesting)

    by CyricZ ( 887944 ) on Monday February 06, 2006 @03:58PM (#14653468)
    I think I'd rather read such a piece about the history of Opera. Indeed, there is far less known about the inner workings of Opera (the company) than there is about Netscape, let alone the Mozilla project.

    It would also be excellent if Opera were to release the source code to some of their historic (and now obsolete) releases, say Opera 3 and earlier. While there may very well be licensing issues concerning some of the code, even being able to store a fair portion of it would be a blessing to computer historians around the world.

    • Opera - kind of a sad story in a way? (Score:5, Informative)

      by worb ( 935866 ) on Monday February 06, 2006 @04:26PM (#14653765)
      Opera had always been the "good guys" before Firefox came around and stole the limelight. The company has been run by the same people for ten and a half years by now - the founders - and they've had a clear vision. They wanted to bring the web to everyone, to give them choice.

      Unlike Mozilla, Opera has always had make money, and that in a situation where they've had less than one per cent of the market. So Opera hasn't been able to take "shortcuts" and rely on donations until it turned out that searches could actually pay for development, alongside other deals of course.

      That hurt Opera a bit, I think. You have to pay for Opera while the others were free. Then you could choose ads instead, but most people don't like those. So Opera never got a huge following.

      Opera was also a power user program for many years. It is not until recently that Opera has cleaned up the default user interface to make it easy for newbies to start using it as well.

      While the payware, the ads, and so on were necessary to keep the company afloat, it has also hurt Opera. Firefox could come around to steal the thunder at exactly the right time, and backed by a massive marketing campaign. Firefox's timing was incredible. They released 1.0 when everyone was talking about how dangerous it was to use Internet Explorer.

      While Firefox was free as in beer, easy to use, and ready for the masses (more or less), Opera still had to rely on ads, and had to charge for the browser. But they cleaned up the UI, and last year Opera was released for free-as-in-beer.

      Some may say "too little too late", but Opera has never been huge. There isn't much of a market share to lose! Opera has a small but loyal following, and it's still smaller, faster, and it has more functionality out of the box than Firefox.

      Now that Opera has simplified the UI and removed the ads, it can only grow. It will need proper marketing, though, and it will need to differentiate itself from Firefox and establish an identity which gives people a clear vision of what Opera is about, and why they should use it instead of something else.

      Opera has always been the "browser innovator". Most features in Firefox were available in Opera ages before Firefox did it, and some were even invented by Opera. But these days Firefox takes all the credit, and that's partly because it can rely on others who have done everything, so it can simply pick and choose from other browsers' innovations. And it can avoid the pitfalls too, because Firefox already made those mistakes back when it was "Netscape". Firefox obviously benefits from being Netscape's "successor". All web designers know about Netscape, after all. So they can't ignore it when designing pages.

      Opera has done a lot, but one wouldn't think so just by looking at its market share. It's a pity, really. Opera was the only independent browser, and they put real money into open standards. IE was Microsoft and Mozilla/Firefox was AOL/Sun/Nokia/IBM/etc. Everyone else was in some major corporation's pockets, but not Opera.

      Now Firefox has stolen the thunder, partly deserved, partly undeserved. But I think Opera can make it too. They just need to get the marketing right.

      • I was an Opera convert until they let their non-windows versions lapse. When I couldn't run 5.x (Windows-only), Linux was 4.x, and Solaris was 3.x... It just wasn't worth it anymore.

        I switched to firefox and haven't looked back. And if they had taken $$ for linux/solaris, I would have paid.

        • Re:Opera - kind of a sad story in a way? (Score:4, Informative)

          by Kelson ( 129150 ) * on Monday February 06, 2006 @04:58PM (#14654057) Homepage Journal
          Actually the Linux version has finally become a nice browser.

          It seems to take Opera a few versions to really get up to speed on a new platform. Opera for Linux debuted at version 5, and was -- well, the only reason I paid for it (I was already a paying customer on Windows) was that I wanted to encourage them to keep going in the Linux market. Fortunately that strategy seems to have worked, as Opera 8 is excellent on both Windows and Linux.

          I don't remember when they started the Mac version, but it's taken a while to catch up in stability. I think I tried it around version 6 and it was terrible at the time, but the last time I tried it, it was much better. With luck Opera 9 will be the version whre it finally catches up.

          Lately they've been doing simultaneous releases on Windows, Linux and Mac. (I haven't been keeping track of Solaris, FreeBSD, etc, so I'm not sure about those.) The last major delay I recall was 8.0, where they held onto the Mac version for a few weeks, probably for polishing.
          • Polishing? a polished turd more like. I've come to expect crap interfaces on linux and sometimes windows software but when it's ported over to the mac and doesn't have sensible keyboard shortcuts every other browser on the face of the earth does, or doesn't have a native UI, only skins which clash with the OS it's running on, doesn't seem to have an option to rearrange toolbars (Opera software seems to think their tabs should be above the address bar and toolbar buttons, not directly above the web content),
      • Opera had always been the "good guys" before Firefox came around and stole the limelight.
        Yeah, right. Opera is nice as proprietary browsers go, but most of us consider the good guys to be the volunteers who work to develop open, standardised software that's guaranteed by copyleft to be available to everyone. Opera is in a completely different niche, and it's adware. Definitely not on my list of good guys.
        • Opera is in a completely different niche, and it's adware.

          Not anymore, as of version 8.5 (last September).

          And even when it was, at least it was benign adware like Eudora in sponsored mode, not nasty adware that brought up a zillion pop-ups behind your back, inserted extra links into web pages, and surreptitiously installed more pop-up generators.

          Granted, the ad bar was #*@!$ annoying, but it was hardly in the same class as, say, Gator/Claria/whatever.
        • The ads are removed, anyone can download and use it, and you may be right about your claim when you say "most of us", but that doesn't include me. Just because something is closed source doesn't make it bad.

          As for my view, I find that people who think *everything* should be "Free as in beer" and "Open Source" are naive and selfish. There are benefits abound on both sides of the street. These capitalistic companies that have closed source software/hardware laid the ground-work within which we walk today.
      • IE was Microsoft and Mozilla/Firefox was AOL/Sun/Nokia/IBM/etc. Everyone else was in some major corporation's pockets, but not Opera.

        Its not really fair to lump Firefox with the big corporations. Its entirely because they rebelled against their roots that they got where they are today.

        And its not really fair to talk about "out of the box" only when Firefox and Mozilla's key innovation is XUL. The fact that you can actually create applications or applets specificially for it is its unique innovation - an innovation not ever used by Opera. And its not at all fair to say that all the rest of the innovation in Firefox came from Opera, or that all of Opera's innovation came from Opera itself. The "innerHTML" property always springs to mind as one heckuva convenient thing that came out of Microsoft's browser.

        There are some things I have always really liked about Opera. In the bad old days, it didn't render nearly as well as Mozilla. I couldn't find any ways to do the neat things with javascript that I was pulling off in IE or Firefox in Opera. But Opera was fast - something I attributed to not actually having the ability to support these features.

        Those days are gone, though, and Opera has most of the capabilities that the other two browsers have. The only thing missing from the current version that I'd like are:
        1) iframes. You can't put one on top of another. z-indexes don't work with iframes.
        2) opacity. Both of the other two browsers have a mechanism for blending layers. Opera doesn't, AFAICT.

        Those are deal-breakers for me. I can't work around them.

        Of course, Opera isn't alone in missing features. Firefox won't let you change the color of the scrollbar or status bar, but Opera and IE will. IE has serious problems doing vertical layouts, and all of them have their issues with CSS3. These are all issues I can live with, though.

        I 'spose most people see the past with rose-colored glasses, though. Hopefully I haven't shattered them too much.
        • Firefox won't let you change the color of the scrollbar or status bar, but Opera and IE will.

          As a mere user, I just want to say that as far as I'm concerned, that's a feature, not a bug!

          IMHO, websites should *never* mess with the browser itself, which for me includes the scrollbar. Coloured scrollbars are tacky at best.

      • Opera had always been the "good guys"
        You say this, but give no backup, why are they good and Mozilla guys not? Mozilla.org has given not one but two decent browsers, a XML cross platform GUI, and various build tools to the community. I feel they should get a good guy label as well.

        before Firefox came around and stole the limelight.
        You state this as if it was somehow unfair, as if Firefox was some Johnny come lately with style but no substance. Firefox has been around for a long time as well. It was a b

      • That hurt Opera a bit, I think. You have to pay for Opera while the others were free. Then you could choose ads instead, but most people don't like those. So Opera never got a huge following.

        Haha... Umm, no. The ads were slightly annoying, and the price was rather high, but that wasn't the problem... not at all. The problem was the terrible interface.

        Look at the bookmarks system. Every menu and sub-menu has 4 different items I'd never use which clogged-up the screen space "Open All" "Bookmark this page

    • A History of Opera, the Cliffnotes edition:

      They made it.
      A few people bought it for a while.
      Mozilla and Firefox borrowed some of their ideas.
      Firefox takes off in a way that Opera could not.
      Opera makes their browser free and stuff it full of ads.
      Still not good enough, Opera takes all ads off their browsers.
      Firefox releases version 1.5.
      Opera cries "what about me?" as it's broken down on the side of the road while the bullet train that is Firefox advances towards IE.

      Sorry, pick up hitchhikers will only slow us
      • I'm pretty sure it was free with ads long before Firefox was around - I was using it in 2000, possibly 1999.

        "Hitchhikers"? The few you speak of where able to use a free browser much better than IE, long before it became trendy to switch. I think that Firefox is great both in terms of being open source, and raising awareness - but it's ridiculous to categorise Opera as "broken down on the side of the road" when it made the journey long before Firefox came along.

  • How Firefox came to be? (Score:4, Funny)

    by ziggamon2.0 ( 796017 ) on Monday February 06, 2006 @03:59PM (#14653480) Homepage
    It was done in a zing!

    The Firebird name was taken, so they got a new suffix with the Firesomething random animal generator.

    ok, I'm off to RTFA...

  • the true power of opensource (Score:3, Insightful)

    by scenestar ( 828656 ) on Monday February 06, 2006 @03:59PM (#14653486) Homepage Journal
    I held true to my beliefs and refused to review low quality patches.

    Free from business buzzwords and company politics mumbojumbo.

    all that remains is a top notch stable product.

    • Pardon? (Score:4, Insightful)

      by CyricZ ( 887944 ) on Monday February 06, 2006 @04:15PM (#14653659)
      Go take a look at the Mozilla codebase. Seriously, go do it right now. It is amongst the worst code I've seen written. It's overly complex, it's bloated, and it's badly architectured. But please, don't take my word for it. Go look for yourself.

      If there were any efforts to limit the inclusion of low quality patches, I think such efforts failed. But then again, what would be a low quality patch to the FreeBSD project may very well look like a real gem when compared to the awful codebase that makes up Mozilla.

      The true power of open source is letting us see how awfully written many of the most popular software products are, Mozilla included.

      • It takes a long time to understand how a large project operates. I couldn't tell much from the source without a few months to think about it.

        At your advice, I'm pulling it down to have a look.

        Do you have any examples of what I should be looking for, or is it really that obvious?

      • Re:Pardon? (Score:5, Informative)

        by RBAE ( 816233 ) on Monday February 06, 2006 @04:47PM (#14653981) Homepage
        Mozilla? You should've taken a look at NS Communicator's code. Now that was scary. I can tell you many people couldn't believe that thing could actually run without crashing after 5 minutes of us. When we launched beta versions, some of us were freaked out to see that people was actually using them.

        But we had a lot of fun :-)

      • Re:Pardon? (Score:3, Insightful)

        by robbo ( 4388 )
        The old mozilla code-base was indeed a nightmare that took hours to download and compile. I learned how tangled it was when I barely survived an attempt to fix a file:// url bug on unix platforms. The need for portability had produced this many-headed demon. But a lot of really great things came out of that early mess- bugzilla is probably the most notable.

        I've never looked at the firefox code but I've always assumed that the firefox team took the useful parts of mozilla- gecko and the portability librar

      • Re:Pardon? (Score:5, Informative)

        by bdaehlie ( 537484 ) on Monday February 06, 2006 @05:04PM (#14654120) Homepage
        I work with the Mozilla code every day. It is complicated, yes, but that doesn't necessarily mean it is all badly written. I think you probably don't understand the reason for the complexity, and therefore you incorrectly consider it to be terrible code. I'm not saying we don't have some bad code in there, but to say what you are saying about the entire codebase is very naive.
        • I understand that it has to deal with issues such as portability and interoperability with other programming languages. Yes, dealing with such issues can often become very complex, especially for larger applications.

          However, I do believe that such matters can be dealt with in far more efficient and effective ways than is done so by Mozilla. A browser like Opera, for instance, offers many of the same capabilities as Firefox without even a quarter of the memory consumption, and often with a far greater respon

          • Re:Pardon? (Score:4, Insightful)

            by bdaehlie ( 537484 ) on Monday February 06, 2006 @06:07PM (#14654702) Homepage
            What you are saying about Opera is simply not true. Yes, they offer much of what we do. But they don't come anywhere near offering all that we do. Consider at XULRunner, Firefox extensions, or the fact that we have a more compliant rendering engine. About the rendering engine in particular, the first 90% of compliance is not that hard. It is the last 10% that adds the majority of the complexity. Opera has not gone as far (far as they may be) in terms of compliance and the complexity tradeoff is absolutely not linear.
            So, if you want what Opera has to offer and only that, then use Opera. But don't bash Mozilla's codebase because we don't offer the same feature set that Opera does and therefore a bunch of our code is needlessly complex.

            "It appears that the Mozilla project has overcomplicated them, for whatever reason."

            I think if you put even 5 minutes into thinking about "whatever reason," you'd not be saying that. Again, I'll use XULRunner and Firefox Extensions as examples of things that Opera does not do and will never do in its current form because they lack the (complex!) infrastructure that allows for such capabilities.

            It is easy to bash code and get a good response from people - a large part of slashdot is just that. It is much harder to defend code, and that is something I just can't do for the Mozilla project in the time I have allotted for myself to post on slashdot. All I can say is if you want to know how good/bad the Mozilla code is, give it a lot more thought time or ask someone who would actually know. You could start with Mozilla developers. We're not all so biased and blinded as to blatantly lie about the quality of the Mozilla code.

        • Re:Pardon? (Score:3, Funny)

          by Anonymous Coward
          My favorite method in mozilla is the kungFuDeathGrip(); [mozilla.org]. I have no idea what it does thou, but it sounds awesome.
        • Well said. I haven't seen the Mozilla codebase, but I tend to take "that codebase is horrible" statements with a grain of salt. To all professional developers...have you ever noticed the chief architect or senior tech lead or other technical leaders ever dismiss an entire codebase.

          Any professional developer should print the paragraph below out.

          -- snip -- I work with the code every day. It is complicated, yes, but that doesn't necessarily mean it is all badly written. I think you probably don't unders

    • If thats the true power of opensource then the Opera team must be divinely omnipotent coding Gods, better product delivered years ahead of Firefox and without all the ego and self congratulation.
      • Also without entire classes of capabilities. Yes, I know, you vehemently disagree, but perhaps you should learn something of what you spout about before you do so. I was getting paid handsomely years ago for deliverables which worked fabulously in IE and Mozilla which Opera would blow sky. A browser's features and capabilities aren't limited to whether or not it renders your favorite porn site.

  • Where Did IE7 Come From, Why and Who Cares? (Score:5, Funny)

    by RobertM1968 ( 951074 ) on Monday February 06, 2006 @04:01PM (#14653511) Homepage Journal
    February 06, 2006
    Where Did IE7 Come From, Why and Who Cares?

    The story of Internet Explorer is long but yet lacking in detail or any real value. There are many perspectives. This is mine. IE was of course written by Spry and acquired by us at Microsoft.

    Since then, we've added many new bugs (I mean features), security holes (err... features),
    stolen and duplicated ideas (umm... innovations). Even more importantly, we added tons of
    new code to work around things in the original Spry browser we didn't understand... tons...
    and since bigger is better, that alone makes IE7 the best browser on the market.

    IE7 keeps Windows users working twice as productively (doing System Restores and removing viruses)
    on their machines - what other browser forces (I mean allows) a user to sit in front of their
    computers doing (recovery and restore) work?

    Such amazing new security ideas like sandbagging (umm.. sandboxing) IE will force IE to write
    files and such to only the temp directories (though since so many viruses and spyware already
    write themselves there and then execute this is another item our Marketing Department needs
    to spin as an improvement).

    All in all, our newest browser is bigger, (bloatier), (borrowed and outdated) feature rich and
    far more (or less) secure!

    Footnotes

          1. Some people claimed we didn't create all the new innovations in IE7 like tabbed browsing,
                but you need to remember that Time is relative. Besides, even though we were the last ones
                to come out with these innovations, our amazing Marketing Team can still convince the world
                we are first - we call it our "Leading the Pack From the Rear" methodology.
          2. "How to Secure & Stabilize your browser(TM)", or "The Mozilla Advantage" as it is more commonly
                known as.
          3. "Module Owners" - Microsoft, Microsoft and only Microsoft - where we "borrowed" the ideas, code
                and technology is irrelevant.
          4. "Moving Target" or "Barely Crawling Target" as we prefer to call it.

  • see also (Score:4, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday February 06, 2006 @04:02PM (#14653519)
    also interesting:
    http://www.jwz.org/gruntle/nscpdorm.html [jwz.org]
    http://www.jwz.org/gruntle/nomo.html [jwz.org]

  • Effectiveness often breeds resentment (Score:5, Interesting)

    by smittyoneeach ( 243267 ) * on Monday February 06, 2006 @04:04PM (#14653534) Homepage Journal
    There was and remains much resentment towards Firefox and its development model. At its creation, there was much shouting about how the many were not always smarter than the few, the merits of small development teams with strong centralized direction, the need to adhere strictly to Mozilla's module ownership policy[3]. In practice, these statements resulted in effectively locking everyone but the Firefox team out of the Firefox source code. We railed against the inefficiencies of past UIs. We were unnecessarily harsh, and polarized opinions. We had been badly wounded by the Netscape experience and the disorganization that had followed. I don't think a lot of people understood that. It wasn't something we could easily communicate.
    To many, it looked like we were breaking ranks. We were claiming their work had no value. It was said that what we were doing went against the principles of community development. That wasn't true -- as most open source projects are centrally managed by a small few. Many have well defined release plans and maintain tight control over what contributions make it in. We had hurt our case though by being so dogmatic up front. We did not do a good job of PR.
    Recalls a Margaret Thatcher quote, from her speech at the US Naval Academy sometime around '93 or '94: "Consensus is the absence of leadership".
    Impressive, indeed to admit to having been heavy-handed. Then again, there is a stark difference between leadership and running a popularity contest.
    OTOH, even Emacs will have another release Real Soon Now. The ones to fear are those who claim to have Teh One True Way.
    • Effectiveness ould breed less resentment if Firefox wouldn't suck so much. (Yes, mod me troll now without reading the rest of this post... go ahead, you know you want to because I dared criticise your toy.) Or, more precisely, it wouldn't if it actually was effective, but in the case of Firefox at least, it isn't, and certainly, a lack of consensus or a "popularity contest" does not automatically make things effective.

      Of course, things *can* work that way. The Linux kernel and the notion of Linus Torvalds a

  • Mozilla: a good PR move for Netscape... (Score:4, Insightful)

    by thx1138_az ( 163286 ) on Monday February 06, 2006 @04:05PM (#14653542)
    Mozilla was a good community relations move on the part of Netscape. I can remember early on when Netscape had sued Microsoft and delayed the release of Windows 98 in a fight for browser dominance. The only logical move was to appeal to the community at large just to stay alive.

  • Firefox:A tripartite golden braid (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Tackhead ( 54550 ) on Monday February 06, 2006 @04:07PM (#14653569)
    > Especially interesting and poignant are comments like this: 'I was told I could not expect to use Open Source tricks against folk who were employed by the Company (all hail!). I held true to my beliefs and refused to review low quality patches. I was almost fired. Others weren't so lucky.'.

    Kenobi:Skywalker:Use The Force, Luke ::
    Baranovich:Gant:You Must Think In Russian ::
    Firefox:Goodger:In Open Source, You Must Think.

  • Missing topic: when browsers weren't free (Score:4, Informative)

    by xxxJonBoyxxx ( 565205 ) on Monday February 06, 2006 @04:09PM (#14653588)
    I think Netscape's mistake came earlier: when they thought that people would each pay $40-50 to buy a standalone browser. IE cut the floor out beneath them and Netscape went down hard after that.

    Someone arriving at Netscape at 1999 would have been someone boarding a sinking ship, it would seem...
    • That's just silly. At the time, Navigator was like any other app, of course you should pay for it. Microsoft pulled their favorite bundling trick and gave IE away, for the express purpose of eliminating the competition.

      Funny story; it also had the side-effect of saving MS money. I heard that they bought the Spyglass source code rights for a small amount of cash and a promised share of the profits. Since no copies of IE were ever 'sold', Spyglass never got paid. Microsoft never miss a trick, do they?
      • Since no copies of IE were ever 'sold', Spyglass never got paid. Microsoft never miss a trick, do they?

        They later sued Microsoft for contractual shenanigans [wikipedia.org] and settled for $8 million.
      • Nit: they did sell a few copies of IE... Version 1.0 (largely the Spyglass code) was distributed in the Microsoft Plus! pack for Win 95, an software package that included themes, Internet connectivity, and either a pinball game or Freecell (I forget which), and which required a 486 or better to run. That allowed the core Win95 product to meet its box specs of running on a 386 with 4 MB RAM.

    • Definitely true, but it goes further.

      Netscape took their share because IE was practically unusable. Once Microsoft geared up development internally, which Netscape should have anticipated, Netscape still had the opportunity to maintain their edge and leveraged themselves as a "cool app" company which would have suited the market fine for years after their decline. They could have done any number of things to counter the fact they'd have to give the product away free, using the Opera model for example.

    • Funny thing: Netscape was free for educational and (IIRC) government use. Given that so many of the people on the internet at the time were college students, that's a large market segment that they didn't lose because they weren't worried about it in the first place.

      The market they lost was the business market. Companies that bout 10, 30, 100 copies to put on their employees' desks. That, and ISPs looking to provide a browsr for their users. Back then you couldn't take a brand-new computer and download
    • That's not quite true. Joe Bloggs could download the browser for free. IIRC Netscape's business model was originally to get businesses to buy Navigator and their webserver product (whatever it was called).
    • From Netscape 3, and somewhat earlier, end users never paid for it, getting it either as a full-featured 'demo' download with no expiry, provided by their ISP, or used by their company. Netscape's business model at the time was to sell it to corporations and large ISPs as a brandable browser, but that never provided a significant revenue stream; instead, their web server was holding up the company.

      Also, Netscape had the majority share of the browser market from version 2 to 4. It was only IE 4 that starte

  • History of Mozilla (Score:4, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday February 06, 2006 @04:14PM (#14653641)
    In a related paper, the histrory of Mozilla has been described through emprirical software engineering here [idi.ntnu.no]. It shows how the source code changed over time etc.

  • Something about the mozilla suite on linux? (Score:3, Interesting)

    by matt me ( 850665 ) on Monday February 06, 2006 @04:14PM (#14653642)
    Wasn't the Mozilla suite very popular on Linux, perhaps accounting for most of its users, shipping with Red Hat and the other non-K distros as the default web and email applications? But then there was a speedy fork which became very popular on windows as an alternative to ie, thus mozilla greatly changed their position, almost abandoning their old userbase for their new intiative of evengalistic saving of windows/ie users. But then I see that ie/7 is going to ship very close to firefox 1.5 as it did to ie/6 (layout, extra features disabled, tabs hidden).

    Anyone remember the style-sheet changer?
    • I'm not sure what fork you're talking about - Mozilla products have always ran on both Linux and Windows, since the earliest days. There have been forks, but to "slim down" the browser, not to focus on Windows AFAIK.

    • But then there was a speedy fork which became very popular on windows as an alternative to ie, thus mozilla greatly changed their position, almost abandoning their old userbase for their new intiative of evengalistic saving of windows/ie users.

      That's just nonsense. Mozilla was evangelizing to Windows users long before the switch to Firefox, and Firefox wasn't only better/faster/popular on Windows, but on every platform.

      What you're really thinking of, I don't know.

  • The AOL Factor (Score:4, Interesting)

    by db32 ( 862117 ) on Monday February 06, 2006 @04:32PM (#14653825) Journal
    I often wonder how widely accepted the whole Mozilla/Firefox stuff would be if AOL had turned it into "The Internet" like what they are doing with IE. So many AOLers think that IE is "The Internet", would it have been different had AOL gone on to use Mozilla? How would the geeks respond to this? I imagine quite a few heads exploding trying to rationlize out who is more evil in the IE vs AOL battles. Geeks like to think they are completely objective...but we are anything but...geeks can be full of just as much zealotry as the latest religious fundamentalist. Take a *nix vs MS argument and replace either one with Creationism and Evoloution...almost the same sort of fight. So...how accepted would AOLFox have been?
    • Hm
      Maybe i remember stuff wrong...
      But...
      Didnt AOL use a netscape 3.0 based webbrowser back in the time?

      And... the normal AOL (or even EVERY non-geek) user wouldnt be able to tell apart browsers anyway... if you take themes into the picture, just imagine how you could find out which browser somebody uses without resorting to the help/info menue?

      • IIRC AOL had their own built-in browser, then replaced it with an IE shell. At the time they bought Netscape, it was already on 4.0.

  • Even 0.3 was very usable (Score:4, Interesting)

    by octopus72 ( 936841 ) on Monday February 06, 2006 @04:37PM (#14653879)
    Being a user from Firefox 0.3 (Phoenix), I immediately predicted it's success. It was, unlike clunky Mozilla (and Netscape) a real refresh in a browser world. Tabbed browsing was very novel thing back then (although not completely new). Enough for me to switch fro IE. Soon extensions were there and it was definitely a killer feature that gave firefox a BIG boost.
  • 1977: Craig Thomas writes Firefox [amazon.com]
    1982: Clint Eastwood directs and stars in Firefox [amazon.com]
    1983: Craig Thomas writes Firefox Down [amazon.co.uk]
    2004: 'You must think in Russian!' jokes [as seen below] swarm the internet.

    There may also have been mention of some internet browser, but that hardly seems relevant...

  • A lot has been told about the development of the Firefox browser since Firefox 1.0. The reality is that the story is bigger than just Firefox 1.0. It goes back years, spans continents, and includes a cast of thousands. It's a fantastic story, with all of your standard themes -- greed, rage, turmoil, love lost. But mostly it's a story of dedicated people laboring to create something they truly believe in.

    Is it just me, or does this page need a musical theme accompaniment? Something orchestral, stirring, and

  • What I still wonder is why Ffox has got so much Gnome in it. Nothing against GTK (mostly), but a few things really really bug me:

    1)Some of the options are controlled by prefs within the gnome-control center. There is no way to set/override them from within Firefox itself, nor is there even a hint as to where to find the control. By default, Firefox sends mailto:s [mailto] to Evolution, not Thunderbird!

    2)Why, oh why did they abandon the rather good native file-widget in favour of the horrendous abomination that is th
  • Gotta love a little irony...

    I tried to print the page for later reading, but Firefox 1.5 didn't preview or print it correctly...had to open it in IE to print.

    Things that make you go "hmmmm"...

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