Mozilla, The History..

This article is a pre-cursor to an article I'm publishing tomorrow that also relates to Mozilla and the newly released Netscape 6. Hopefully by providing some background on Mozilla project separately, some points in my piece tomorrow will make more sense.

In January of 1998, Netscape made the announcement that it would stop selling its Communicator software and would open up the source code to its entire Communicator suite of applications, including Navigator, the application which displays and renders Web pages. At the time, this was a revolutionary annuoncement and marked one of the first times that a company would release the source code for software that it had previously sold to consumers. This in turn led to increased interest and acceptance in the 'open source' model of successfull products like the Linux operating system and the Apache webserver.

The move was applauded by open source / free software advocates around the world, and on March 31 1998, the 8Mb of source code was released to the world from the newly formed Mozilla group. This group would be responsible for managing the open source effort and coordinating the work of internal Netscape (and down the road, Sun, AOL, and RedHat) engineers and independant developers. In retrospect, it was a very exciting thing to be a part of. I remember staying up all night on IRC waiting for the word that the source was released on the servers, along with many many other people just like me. It felt like we were making history, and that this move would redefine the way people used and developed for the Web.

After the hysteria calmed, people started to realize just what a huge project this was going to be. It was rather chaotic with everyone trying to figure out just where to start digging in the code. It was a big deal when someone finally got it to compile about 2 or 3 days later.

Over the next year, things went pretty quietly. Netscape announced that Gecko, its new and improved rendering engine - the piece of software that turns HTML into a readable webpage - would fully support HTML 4.0, CSS1, limited CSS2, XML, and the Document Object Model(DOM) as specified by the W3C. This was a big announcement because it showed that the open source influence had some effect on how standards-compliant this software would be. Web developers were extremely pleased to know that they would finally have a rendering engine in a major browser that was fully standards-compliant. Things got heated when Netcape hinted they would release a 5.0 browser without the gecko engine, ensuring that developers would have to wait another generation before they'd get standards-compliance. Thanks to pressure from groups like the Web Standards Project, Netcape put off the release of a 5.0 browser until it could include the gecko engine.

America Online also made it clear that it was looking into purchasing Netcape Communications Corp., which raised fears among many that AOL would either kill off or limit resources (by cutting engineers, money, etc.) that went toward this free, open source project. To its credit, AOL quickly made its intentions clear that Mozilla would continute on as planned.

That spring was plagued by delays and questions asking if Netscape would release a product under the Mozilla flag by its one year anniversery.

April 1st, 1999 was the one year anniversery of the birth of the Mozilla project. It also proved to be a rather sad and uncertain time with lead evangelist Jamie Zawinski leaving the project and no 'product' shipped after a year's time. However, life moved on and the summer of '99 proved to see some major improvements in the Mozilla browser. During this time, Netscape also released minor upgrades to the 4.x series of the Communicator suite including the Winamp MP3 player, AOL Instant Messenger (AIM), and higher profile shopping links in the Netcenter portal.

Time rolled by, new milestones were reached. Thousands of bugs were squashed. Some shrugged off Mozilla as a 'Never-has-been' technology, but still the work continued.

Yesterday, the preview release of Netscape 6.0 was released to the general public amid fanfare and Steve Case's predictions of AOL Anywhere. Indeed, AOL's top man predicts that the company's new strategy will revolutionize the way we use the Internet. Much of Case's predicted revolution will rely on Mozilla technology - which is a revolution in itself.