I was an intern at Netscape in 1998 and I'm really glad to have been there to witness a bit of the history. The first staff meeting I attended was announcing layoffs, two weeks later they announced the open source initiative, then two months later the launch of Mozilla.org.
Code Rush touches on all the work that went into making the code buildable by folks outside, but one thing they omitted probably surprises no one: the sheer amount of profanity that had to be scrubbed from the source code before it was released. Some genius assembled a page of the choicest examples (much of it directed at Microsoft) and handed out hundreds of photocopies at the launch party.
I remember one of those announcement meetings (forget which one now) was held in an odd location : some place upstairs in downtown Sunnyvale, and happened to coincide with some big news release in the Lewinsky scandal which mostly buried our news in the cycle.
The recent Firefox releases should be praised. Stable and beautiful. I hope Mozilla internally is stable now. Firefox shouldn't be abandoned. I can understand why Mozilla Corporation needs to find new revenue resources. Mozilla should not be afraid to be a provider of some sort, like offering multi-auth is an option. If we continue to build products and tools which can offer better privacy and security, there will be lights for Mozilla. IoT, IMO, is a dead end. Tile was a mistake. Pocket is a moot acquisition: is anyone actually using it daily?
Lastly, this may be an unpopular opinion: time for a leadership overhaul, and I mean from the very top. Otherwise, I think Mozilla as a community and the people working for the Mozilla are doing great jobs.
I'm not sure I disagree with Pocket being a moot acquisition, but I definitely use it almost daily and it being integrated into Firefox is really nice.
I started using Mozilla briefly after it was officially called that; I remember waiting forever for it to download over an ISDN line. I don't even remember why, exactly, just that I deeply disliked Internet Explorer (still do). Eventually, two killer features came along, tabs and ad-blockers. Afterwards, I never looked back.
So Happy Birthday, and thanks for all the hard work!
In before incoming "Firefox is usable now compared to unspeakably horribly bad previously". Firefox was never THAT bad as some people describe and I had been using it since version 1 (or maybe even beta). It was always stable, reasonably fast, pretty and functional.
To be fair, it wasn’t just technical problems with Firefox that drove users to Chrome: it can also be blamed on Google advertising Chrome heavily as an upgrade in prominent positions on google.com start page and other properties, Google crippling their own software to only work with Chrome, Google having the financial resources for multi-billion-dollar TV advertising campaigns, bundling Chrome in a pseudo-malware opt-out fashion with other software downloads (e.g. Java updates), etc etc.
At least the Chrome team seem pissed off with the ongoing problem of Chrome-only Google applications, although they seem powerless to do anything about it as the problem continues.
The worst of the only-works-in-Chrome Google apps (to me at least) was Hangouts. With the impending death of NPAPI plugins, it was rebuilt on WebRTC (the first shipping implementation of which was Firefox!), but enabled only for Chrome. To be fair, I've heard that the Chrome developers themselves were livid at this.
For a very long time Chrome has been vastly superior to Firefox. Now Firefox is starting to reach the level of Chrome, but they seem to be unable to stop pissing the bed, which in the end I believe will make their technical efforts worthless.
Well, if they hadn't given in to WebDRM, WebAssembly, and the rest of it, and had stayed with the pre-Australis Firefox, developing that in logical directions for a web browser, not a do-everything-program, it would have been good. Then again, I'm also opposed to the multiprocess nonsense, and to this day I only use a single-process browser.
Those two things are nothing like each other. EME, the DRM mechanism, should never have existed, should certainly never have been "standardized" (to the extent that concept even makes sense for a feature that fundamentally exists to glue in perpetually non-standard proprietary plugins), and it's debatable whether more harm than good was done by Firefox trying to make sure people didn't have to switch browsers to run Netflix.
WebAssembly, on the other hand, is one of the most exciting technologies to come to the web in a long time.
As I still remember the days when Flash ads hung the web browser, I was ever so grateful when multiprocess for plugins came about and I could Flash without killing the web browser.
You know, it's really funny. People keep complaining about things like Flash hanging their browser, or how "slow" Firefox was. I never experienced those problems and I don't understand why or how anyone else did. I mean, there was a good while there that most of my web use was on Newgrounds and Kongregate. If Flash was going to hang my browser, you'd think games and heavy video content would do it - but no, it never did. And Firefox was and is one of the fastest-loading programs on my PC - and I don't use or allow multiprocess to happen.
Code Rush touches on all the work that went into making the code buildable by folks outside, but one thing they omitted probably surprises no one: the sheer amount of profanity that had to be scrubbed from the source code before it was released. Some genius assembled a page of the choicest examples (much of it directed at Microsoft) and handed out hundreds of photocopies at the launch party.
Hell of a first job in tech.