5 ms·

You are being charitable to Mozilla (the application suite). That was a bloated, buggy mess for years. I recall 2001-2003 was a really bleak time to be a Mozi

You are being charitable to Mozilla (the application suite). That was a bloated, buggy mess for years. I recall 2001-2003 was a really bleak time to be a Mozilla user. Firefox launched as a response to Mozilla and was more lean, but it wasn't until 2007 or 2008 that HTML5 features started trickling in and Firefox started to gain marketshare and developer mindshare for the advanced features it could offer. And that was when Chrome showed up. So from 1998-2008, Mozilla had an open season to gain ground on IE, and their marketshare only ever got as high as 30%. It was 2011 or 2012 that Chrome was stable enough and Google started their upgrade-to-Chrome adverts on google.com. And then Firefox faded back into it's 10% niche. I'm a developer, and my peers look at me like I'm a weirdo because I favor Firefox and do my primary development on it. That shouldn't have happened, Firefox should not be niche given the time they had to work. It is inspiring to me that the Mozilla project didn't fail and got so much love, but starting with that original Netscape codebase and the Gecko and XPCOM designs really hindered them. Mozilla missed out on offering a competing engine for Node.JS because their JS engine is so tightly coupled with the rest of the browser(?) - that's just one huge opportunity missed. Offering a competitive mobile OS at the advent of smartphones in the vein of WebOS is another, albeit less egregious, miss. The codebase just wasn't clean nor adaptable enough to break free of the desktop.

subway 9y ago
It wasn't until 2007 that HTML5 features began trickling in anywhere...
- EdSharkey 9y ago
  Right, and what I was alluding to in that point was, why should any user switch from IE if it has feature parity with Firefox or any other browser? Firefox had developer tools in Firebug, so it was already getting a geek user base, but when Firefox got some legitimate new features like Canvas that other advanced browsers like Safari had, regular users began to dabble. With the occasional news report that honestly reported the security nightmare that IE was, I found that between 2006-2009, Firefox was an easy sell to regular users. The way I see history, Mozilla floundered between 1998 and 2005 and had almost no marketshare. All the Netscape rewrites that came before were a shitshow and the AOL thing must have been a huge (but necessary for funding) distraction. Probably the only fair interpretation of history is that, of course, the codebase was a mess given the development practices back in the day. That said, I recall the Gecko rewrite was a long and painful one. Was it unnecessarily so? I believe it had a lot of dumb component architecture concepts and I would love to understand what the drivers were there. Did they believe that components were the best way to organize a huge open source project? Woulda, coulda, shoulda thinking about Mozilla makes me really sad sometimes.
geon 9y ago
> their marketshare only ever got as high as 30% You write that like it was a failure. It was HUGE! In the context of the ms monopoly, it was an unbelievable and largely unmatched success. Secondly, having a third browser overtaking it was not a failure either, but success in the goal of providing viable alternatives to the stagnating ie.
- BurningFrog 9y ago
  Remember that Netscape started out dominating this market. Maybe the rewrite didn't cause the catastrophic loss of marketshare (I'm going to resist my urge to spend the morning researching this), but it's hard to see it as a great success in that context.
  - btilly 9y ago
    Netscape's fall had many causes, but the biggest one was monopoly actions by Microsoft. Microsoft got sued for this, and lost. The fact that Mozilla crawled back to significant marketshare from there was unbelievably impossible. The fact that open source efforts got to the point where the web became usable again on Linux was simply amazing.
    - EdSharkey 9y ago
      Microsoft had checked out of the browser war game in the 2000's, they had won. All of the most important Mozilla improvements in software design, development practice changes, and testing methodologies in Firefox came in response to and after the arrival and ascendance of Chrome, not IE. Mozilla was not destroyed by Microsoft, and Microsoft gave Mozilla ample time and ammunition to be disruptive. I know you want to be positive on Mozilla, I want to too. But the overall program has been kindof a failure in terms of mindshare.
      - dman 9y ago
        Mozilla abandoning the addon ecosystem left very little reason to use firefox over other alternatives.
btilly 9y ago
When Mozilla started, it was not clear that there could ever be a browser that would take marketshare from IE. Common wisdom was that the browser wars for over..for good. We actually got to the point where 30% of people who bought a computer went and installed a different browser. That's amazing. How many computer users don't have a clear understanding of what a browser is, let alone how to install one? Before Google blindsided the industry, nobody believed that anyone would ever put anything like the effort that they did into improving JavaScript. I cannot criticize anyone for making decisions that seemed perfectly reasonable at the time but didn't age well. As for HTML5, there was a chicken and egg problem. When you don't have marketshare, nobody cares about your wonderful features that nobody is using. So you have to get feature compatibility first, then marketshare, and only THEN turn to wishlist items. All that Microsoft needed to do to keep the browser wars won was keep investing in IE. Make it a moving target that nobody can catch up to. They didn't simply because they had won. Won so completely that they thought that they could rest on their laurels.

subway 9y ago

It wasn't until 2007 that HTML5 features began trickling in anywhere...

EdSharkey 9y ago
Right, and what I was alluding to in that point was, why should any user switch from IE if it has feature parity with Firefox or any other browser? Firefox had developer tools in Firebug, so it was already getting a geek user base, but when Firefox got some legitimate new features like Canvas that other advanced browsers like Safari had, regular users began to dabble. With the occasional news report that honestly reported the security nightmare that IE was, I found that between 2006-2009, Firefox was an easy sell to regular users. The way I see history, Mozilla floundered between 1998 and 2005 and had almost no marketshare. All the Netscape rewrites that came before were a shitshow and the AOL thing must have been a huge (but necessary for funding) distraction. Probably the only fair interpretation of history is that, of course, the codebase was a mess given the development practices back in the day. That said, I recall the Gecko rewrite was a long and painful one. Was it unnecessarily so? I believe it had a lot of dumb component architecture concepts and I would love to understand what the drivers were there. Did they believe that components were the best way to organize a huge open source project? Woulda, coulda, shoulda thinking about Mozilla makes me really sad sometimes.

geon 9y ago

> their marketshare only ever got as high as 30% You write that like it was a failure. It was HUGE! In the context of the ms monopoly, it was an unbelievable and largely unmatched success. Secondly, having a third browser overtaking it was not a failure either, but success in the goal of providing viable alternatives to the stagnating ie.

BurningFrog 9y ago
Remember that Netscape started out dominating this market. Maybe the rewrite didn't cause the catastrophic loss of marketshare (I'm going to resist my urge to spend the morning researching this), but it's hard to see it as a great success in that context.
- btilly 9y ago
  Netscape's fall had many causes, but the biggest one was monopoly actions by Microsoft. Microsoft got sued for this, and lost. The fact that Mozilla crawled back to significant marketshare from there was unbelievably impossible. The fact that open source efforts got to the point where the web became usable again on Linux was simply amazing.
  - EdSharkey 9y ago
    Microsoft had checked out of the browser war game in the 2000's, they had won. All of the most important Mozilla improvements in software design, development practice changes, and testing methodologies in Firefox came in response to and after the arrival and ascendance of Chrome, not IE. Mozilla was not destroyed by Microsoft, and Microsoft gave Mozilla ample time and ammunition to be disruptive. I know you want to be positive on Mozilla, I want to too. But the overall program has been kindof a failure in terms of mindshare.
    - dman 9y ago
      Mozilla abandoning the addon ecosystem left very little reason to use firefox over other alternatives.

btilly 9y ago

When Mozilla started, it was not clear that there could ever be a browser that would take marketshare from IE. Common wisdom was that the browser wars for over..for good. We actually got to the point where 30% of people who bought a computer went and installed a different browser. That's amazing. How many computer users don't have a clear understanding of what a browser is, let alone how to install one? Before Google blindsided the industry, nobody believed that anyone would ever put anything like the effort that they did into improving JavaScript. I cannot criticize anyone for making decisions that seemed perfectly reasonable at the time but didn't age well. As for HTML5, there was a chicken and egg problem. When you don't have marketshare, nobody cares about your wonderful features that nobody is using. So you have to get feature compatibility first, then marketshare, and only THEN turn to wishlist items. All that Microsoft needed to do to keep the browser wars won was keep investing in IE. Make it a moving target that nobody can catch up to. They didn't simply because they had won. Won so completely that they thought that they could rest on their laurels.