MOUNTAIN VIEW, CA — The monsters currently tearing up the jerky cam big screen via Coverfield aren’t the only forces of nature capturing the attention of tech-loving Americans. Mozilla, the code behind a once-great, then obscure — if not downright dormant, web browser created by latter-day powerhouse Netscape has just turned 10 – and given that it’s currently got 25-percent of the marketplace, that’s an impressive accomplishment.1998 seems like forever ago both generally and technologically speaking. There were no iPhones, no tiny cell phones capable of taking photos and playing crisp digital audio, no high bandwidth wars and unspoken download limits, and no clear vision about how wild or mild the eight-year-old World Wide Web might become.
There was, however, still a “browser war” being waged. In 1999, it would be declared “over,” with Netscape and Microsoft taking nearly 100% of the market.
In 1998, Netscape did something that would forever change the way surfers looked at the Web. It released the public code used on the cornerstone to its software empire, Netscape Communicator 5. Suddenly, access to the internet was officially open source. With 65 million users and nearly 90-percent of the educational market, according to Netscape’s reckoning, it was a ballsy move. Given its $30 price, in comparison to Microsoft’s free Internet Explorer, it was also an interesting loss leader with empowering potential for the end user.
Known as Mozilla – the user agent that contacted the browser’s web server – the little web browser that could has become synonymous with the open source movement. Although released to the wilds of the internet in 1998, it made its first official, public entry in 2002. Its collaborators declared themselves platform builders aiming their talents at developers. Can you say “super geek?”
The lofty goal of not creating “products” was lowered a bit when Phoenix (the progenitor of the Firefox Web browser) took the application suite and turned it into precisely that, a product. Under Phoenix’ guidance, Mozilla became the kind of product capable of appealing to the user and moving it even closer to its manifesto, which states that “The Mozilla project is a global community of people who believe that openness, innovation, and opportunity are key to the continued health of the Internet.” By 2004, the world started to really sit up and notice the freelance child of Netscape.
A $2 million investment from AOL to create the Mozilla Foundation didn’t hurt.
What would the Web have looked like without the introduction of Mozilla’s open source code? Science fiction books might propose possibilities, but chances are good that there wouldn’t be as many innovative alternatives available as there are today.
Go, go, Mozilla!
