[LINK] Fwd: The Netscape Story: From Mosaic to Mozilla

Antony Barry tony at tony-barry.emu.id.au
Tue Jan 15 11:44:21 AEDT 2008


Linkers

Sent to me by Colin Steele. Sic transit gloria mundi and it's only  
Tuesday...

Tony


Begin forwarded message:

> !
>
> The Netscape Story: From Mosaic to Mozilla
> December 31, 2007
>
> Looking back and looking forward.
> Posted by: Glyn Moody
>
>
> ---------------------------------------------------------------------- 
> --
> --------
>
> It seems appropriate that on the last day of the year I should be
> writing about the end of an era. The news that AOL is ceasing to  
> support
> its Netscape browsers is not only that, it is the end of a story that
> encompassed just about every major trend in the rise of the  
> Internet as
> a mass medium, and that was crucially important for free software.
>
> Netscape Navigator was originally called Mosaic Netscape, a  
> reference to
> the first popular browser, Mosaic, which came from National Center for
> Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) at the University of Illinois,
> Urbana-Champaign. That had been written by a group of coders led by  
> Marc
> Andreessen, who later teamed up with one of the founders of Silicon
> Graphics, Jim Barksdale, to set up Mosaic Communications. Not
> surprisingly, this name didn't go down to well with the University of
> Illinois, who threatened the company with legal action. The latter
> backed down, and changed its name, as well as that of its browser.
>
> To give an idea of the state of Web technology when Netscape released
> the first beta of its browser in October 1994, here's some of the  
> things
> that I noted in a piece I wrote at the time:
>
> as well as enabling you to read a document while several graphical
> images are loaded simultaneously, the program lets you break off the
> download of a page cleanly to follow a link elsewhere. You can also  
> save
> viewed documents straight to disc (before you often had to reload),  
> and
> the Bookmarks feature allows favourite places to be saved to be edited
> far more easily.
>
> But even more significant than what were important technical  
> advances at
> the time, there were a couple of other aspects whose revolutionary
> nature are probably hard for us to appreciate today.
>
> First, the browser proclaimed itself as "performance optimized for  
> 14.4
> modems", referring to the typical download speeds of 14.4 kbit/s at  
> that
> time. This was truly a breakthrough, because the earlier Mosaic had  
> been
> designed with relatively high-speed university connections in mind,
> since browsers were almost exclusively found and used in an academic
> setting. Netscape Navigator, by contrast, was aimed squarely at  
> ordinary
> users with PCs and a dial-up Internet connection. It was Netscape
> Navigator, then, that turned the Internet from an research tool into a
> mass medium.
>
> Secondly, even though Netscape was a company, Netscape Navigator was
> freely available. It was therefore one of the first examples of viral
> distribution, whereby people were encouraged to download a program and
> pass it on to their friends and colleagues. Netscape was able to do  
> this
> because it hoped thereby to establish its browser as the de facto
> standard for both ordinary and business users, and then to sell  
> support
> to the latter.
>
> In other words, Netscape was one of the first to adopt on a massive
> scale the business model used today by most open source companies:  
> give
> away the code, and make money on services. Equally presciently,  
> Netscape
> released a beta, and invited anyone to submit bug reports - again, a
> technique straight out of the free software world, but almost unheard
> for commercial software houses.
>
> Netscape also hoped that by establishing standards with its  
> browser, it
> could make a lot of money by selling its Netsite Web server, initially
> for a cool $5000 each. And for a while, it did. It became the first
> major Internet company, whose August 1995 IPO - the most successful in
> history - saw the 18-month old startup valued at $3 billion, and  
> fuelled
> much of the dotcom madness that followed. Moreover, the company's
> homepage, at Netscape.com, became the centre of the Internet: every  
> day,
> millions of people went there not just to find out about Netscape and
> its latest moves, but to follow what was happening online. Netscape  
> not
> only created the Internet as a mass medium, for a year or two it  
> was the
> undisputed master of that new universe.
>
> But then the company began to stumble. The rise of of the free Apache
> Web server, and the fact that Microsoft was giving away its own  
> Internet
> Information Server (IIS) with Windows NT, severely stunted sales of
> Netscape's overpriced servers. Things went from bad to worse when
> Microsoft finally woke up to the importance of the Internet (not least
> because of Netscape's IPO) and began aggressively pushing its Internet
> Explorer browser (ironically also based on the original NCSA Mosaic
> code, as the About box informs us to this day), which was free for
> everyone, not just end-users, until Netscape began to lose its
> critically-important market dominance.
>
> Desperate situations call for desperate measures, and in this case it
> was decided to release most of the Netscape Navigator code as open
> source (not all, since some was licensed from other parties). One  
> of the
> people who made that happen at Netscape, Eric Hahn, explained to me  
> when
> I was writing my history of free software, Rebel Code, how he used to
> tell a story to explain to others within the company why he was
> advocating this move:
>
> Two guys go out camping, and they're barefoot, and they run into a  
> bear.
> And one guy stops and puts on his sneakers. And the other guy looks at
> him and goes: What are you doing? You can't possibly outrun a bear.  
> And
> the first person says: I don't have to outrun the bear, I just have to
> outrun you.
>
> Open sourcing the Navigator code didn't need to be the absolute best
> solution for Netscape, just better than its current failing strategy.
>
> Netscape's announcement on 22 January 1998 that it was making the  
> source
> code for its next-generation browser freely available stunned the
> computing world: until then, free software had been something that was
> strictly for hackers; the idea that an iconic company like Netscape
> could make the move was inconceivable until then. Netscape's
> high-profile decision to bet on free software probably did more to
> legitimise the use of this hitherto exotic beast within corporates  
> more
> than anything else before.
>
> Although Netscape released the code on 31 March 1998, the new Mozilla,
> as it was called, soon proved an object lesson in how not to open  
> source
> proprietary code. Jamie Zawinski, another of the key figures in  
> opening
> up Netscape Navigator, and the person who had come up with the Mozilla
> name back in 1994 - a combination of the original "Mosaic" and  
> Godzilla
> - wrote in his resignation letter when he left AOL, which had recently
> bought Netscape in November 1998:
>
> Open source does work, but it is most definitely not a panacea. If
> there's a cautionary tale here, it is that you can't take a dying
> project, sprinkle it with the magic pixie dust of "open source," and
> have everything magically work out. Software is hard. The issues  
> aren't
> that simple.
>
> The "hard" nature of software meant that the impact of Mozilla was
> limited in its first few years of existence. Its most immediate
> influence was probably thanks to the licence it adopted. The obvious
> candidate, the GNU GPL, was not an option because of the nature of the
> code, with some of it licensed from third parties. Instead, Mozilla's
> Chief Lizard Wrangler, Mitchell Baker, created a new free software
> licence, the Mozilla Public Licence, which was employed along with the
> proprietary Netscape Public Licence, in an novel dual-licensing  
> approach
> that soon became very popular with other projects, especially the  
> later
> generation of open source enterprise companies.
>
> But once again, there was an important lesson to be learned in the
> further evolution of Netscape and its offshoot, Mozilla. While the
> Mozilla browser itself made slow but steady progress, it became
> increasingly bloated. Thanks to one of the key properties of open
> source, a group of young hackers were able to fork some of the code to
> create a sleeker version that eventually turned into the Firefox  
> project
> (originally called Phoenix, with obvious symbolism, and then Firebird,
> both names proved difficult because of clashes with other products and
> projects). With two competing codebases, Darwinian selection took over
> as more and more users switched to Firefox.
>
> Interestingly, Netscape's browser still existed during this period,
> basing itself on Mozilla's code. But it was even less satisfactory  
> than
> Mozilla's, an important factor in the decision more or less to start
> again with Firefox, as one of the latter's founders, Asa Dotzler, has
> explained:
>
> One of the primary reasons that Firefox exists is because a few  
> Netscape
> employees working on the Mozilla project realized back in 2001 and  
> 2002
> that Netscape was incapable of, or more precisely, unwilling to,  
> make a
> really great browser. The reason was pretty simple -- their  
> motivation.
>
> Netscape's only real revenue back then was from advertising at  
> their web
> properties (netscape.com, Netscape webmail, etc.) and the big reason
> they were allowed by AOL to continue building a browser was to drive
> traffic to those web properties. As a matter of fact, the team making
> the browser at Netscape reported into the AOL-TW group that owned  
> those
> web properties.
>
> What this makes plain is that a software company must create a program
> that serves its users' needs, not its own - a lesson that Netscape
> started forgetting almost as soon as it had learned it back in 1994.
> Firefox, by contrast, has focussed on what users want - and don't  
> want.
> It began by throwing away as much of Mozilla's unnecessary elements as
> possible, and stripping it down to essentials. It mobilised users not
> just for testing the code, but for a new kind of open source  
> marketing,
> notably through the SpreadFirefox site and its high-profile campaigns,
> like the double-page advertisement in The New York Times.
>
> The steady rise of Firefox's market share - first, a few percent, then
> 10%, and now touching 40% in some parts of the world - had a major
> knock-on effect. Through an agreement with Google that makes the
> latter's search engine the default home page when the program is
> installed, and the first option for the search engine box in Firefox,
> the parent organisation, Mozilla Foundation, is receiving tens of
> millions of dollars each year in fees. As a result, Mozilla has turned
> from a struggling project into an incredibly powerful force within  
> open
> source.
>
> Thanks to this new-found wealth, largely a by-product of Google's
> hugely-successful ad-based business model, Mozilla has the luxury of
> being able to widen of its ambitions far beyond simply creating a cool
> browser. For example, two recent announcements from Mozilla labs are
> explicitly about blurring the line between traditional desktop and the
> new, browser-based Web applications. The first is Prism:
>
> Personal computing is currently in a state of transition. While
> traditionally users have interacted mostly with desktop applications,
> more and more of them are using web applications. But the latter often
> fit awkwardly into the document-centric interface of web browsers. And
> they are surrounded with controls-like back and forward buttons and a
> location bar-that have nothing to do with interacting with the
> application itself.
>
> Mozilla Labs is launching a series of experiments to bridge the divide
> in the user experience between web applications and desktop apps  
> and to
> explore new usability models as the line between traditional  
> desktop and
> new web applications continues to blur.
>
> The second is Weave:
>
> As the Web continues to evolve and more of our lives move online, we
> believe that Web browsers like Firefox can and should do more to  
> broker
> rich experiences while increasing user control over their data and
> personal information.
>
> One important area for exploration is the blending of the desktop and
> the Web through deeper integration of the browser with online  
> services.
>
> We're now launching a new project within Mozilla Labs to formally
> explore this integration. This project will be known as Weave and it
> will focus on finding ways to enhance the Firefox user experience,
> increase user control over personal information, and provide new
> opportunities for developers to build innovative online experiences.
>
> These are both about replacing the current desktop environment with a
> Web-based approach - or, more bluntly, to make underlying operating
> systems (like Windows) irrelevant, and turning Firefox itself into the
> platform.
>
> Interestingly, it was Netscape's attempt to create something it called
> the "Webtop" - a Net-based layer above the desktop - that helped rouse
> Microsoft from its Internet slumbers, and led, ultimately, to  
> Netscape's
> destruction. Now, though, things are rather different. Mozilla is  
> not a
> company, and it sells no products. As such, it is not possible for
> Microsoft to undermine it by giving away its own products, nor can it
> make the problem go away by simply buying its rival and closing it  
> down.
>
>
> This, then, the biggest difference between Netscape's Mosaic, and
> today's Mozilla Firefox. The former was proprietary and vulnerable,
> while the latter is free and immune to the forces that led to  
> Netscape's
> sale in 1998, its rapidly dwindling importance in the online world
> thereafter, and ultimately to the recent coup de grace administered to
> the once great Netscape Navigator. Mosaic may be well and truly dead,
> but Netscape's dinosaur-like mascot and the code that bears its name
> live on.
>
>

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