A History of Firefox

chrisd writes "Firefox module owner Ben Goodger has written what I think is a very interesting post about how Firefox came into being. It goes into details unheard of to date about the inner workings at Netscape and he fills in a timeline spanning from the open sourcing of Netscape to the release just recently of Firefox 1.5. Especially interesting and poignant are comments like this: 'I was told I could not expect to use Open Source tricks against folk who were employed by the Company (all hail!). I held true to my beliefs and refused to review low quality patches. I was almost fired. Others weren't so lucky.'. Anyhow, I consider this required reading for any fan of the Firefox browser." Or even just a programmer. Worth reading.

A history of Opera would be more interesting.

I think I'd rather read such a piece about the history of Opera. Indeed, there is far less known about the inner workings of Opera (the company) than there is about Netscape, let alone the Mozilla project.

It would also be excellent if Opera were to release the source code to some of their historic (and now obsolete) releases, say Opera 3 and earlier. While there may very well be licensing issues concerning some of the code, even being able to store a fair portion of it would be a blessing to computer historians around the world.

Opera - kind of a sad story in a way?

Opera had always been the "good guys" before Firefox came around and stole the limelight. The company has been run by the same people for ten and a half years by now - the founders - and they've had a clear vision. They wanted to bring the web to everyone, to give them choice.

Unlike Mozilla, Opera has always had make money, and that in a situation where they've had less than one per cent of the market. So Opera hasn't been able to take "shortcuts" and rely on donations until it turned out that searches could actually pay for development, alongside other deals of course.

That hurt Opera a bit, I think. You have to pay for Opera while the others were free. Then you could choose ads instead, but most people don't like those. So Opera never got a huge following.

Opera was also a power user program for many years. It is not until recently that Opera has cleaned up the default user interface to make it easy for newbies to start using it as well.

While the payware, the ads, and so on were necessary to keep the company afloat, it has also hurt Opera. Firefox could come around to steal the thunder at exactly the right time, and backed by a massive marketing campaign. Firefox's timing was incredible. They released 1.0 when everyone was talking about how dangerous it was to use Internet Explorer.

While Firefox was free as in beer, easy to use, and ready for the masses (more or less), Opera still had to rely on ads, and had to charge for the browser. But they cleaned up the UI, and last year Opera was released for free-as-in-beer.

Some may say "too little too late", but Opera has never been huge. There isn't much of a market share to lose! Opera has a small but loyal following, and it's still smaller, faster, and it has more functionality out of the box than Firefox.

Now that Opera has simplified the UI and removed the ads, it can only grow. It will need proper marketing, though, and it will need to differentiate itself from Firefox and establish an identity which gives people a clear vision of what Opera is about, and why they should use it instead of something else.

Opera has always been the "browser innovator". Most features in Firefox were available in Opera ages before Firefox did it, and some were even invented by Opera. But these days Firefox takes all the credit, and that's partly because it can rely on others who have done everything, so it can simply pick and choose from other browsers' innovations. And it can avoid the pitfalls too, because Firefox already made those mistakes back when it was "Netscape". Firefox obviously benefits from being Netscape's "successor". All web designers know about Netscape, after all. So they can't ignore it when designing pages.

Opera has done a lot, but one wouldn't think so just by looking at its market share. It's a pity, really. Opera was the only independent browser, and they put real money into open standards. IE was Microsoft and Mozilla/Firefox was AOL/Sun/Nokia/IBM/etc. Everyone else was in some major corporation's pockets, but not Opera.

Now Firefox has stolen the thunder, partly deserved, partly undeserved. But I think Opera can make it too. They just need to get the marketing right.

Re:Opera - kind of a sad story in a way?

Actually the Linux version has finally become a nice browser.

It seems to take Opera a few versions to really get up to speed on a new platform. Opera for Linux debuted at version 5, and was -- well, the only reason I paid for it (I was already a paying customer on Windows) was that I wanted to encourage them to keep going in the Linux market. Fortunately that strategy seems to have worked, as Opera 8 is excellent on both Windows and Linux.

I don't remember when they started the Mac version, but it's taken a while to catch up in stability. I think I tried it around version 6 and it was terrible at the time, but the last time I tried it, it was much better. With luck Opera 9 will be the version whre it finally catches up.

Lately they've been doing simultaneous releases on Windows, Linux and Mac. (I haven't been keeping track of Solaris, FreeBSD, etc, so I'm not sure about those.) The last major delay I recall was 8.0, where they held onto the Mac version for a few weeks, probably for polishing.

Re:Opera - kind of a sad story in a way?

IE was Microsoft and Mozilla/Firefox was AOL/Sun/Nokia/IBM/etc. Everyone else was in some major corporation's pockets, but not Opera.

Its not really fair to lump Firefox with the big corporations. Its entirely because they rebelled against their roots that they got where they are today.

And its not really fair to talk about "out of the box" only when Firefox and Mozilla's key innovation is XUL. The fact that you can actually create applications or applets specificially for it is its unique innovation - an innovation not ever used by Opera. And its not at all fair to say that all the rest of the innovation in Firefox came from Opera, or that all of Opera's innovation came from Opera itself. The "innerHTML" property always springs to mind as one heckuva convenient thing that came out of Microsoft's browser.

There are some things I have always really liked about Opera. In the bad old days, it didn't render nearly as well as Mozilla. I couldn't find any ways to do the neat things with javascript that I was pulling off in IE or Firefox in Opera. But Opera was fast - something I attributed to not actually having the ability to support these features.

Those days are gone, though, and Opera has most of the capabilities that the other two browsers have. The only thing missing from the current version that I'd like are:
1) iframes. You can't put one on top of another. z-indexes don't work with iframes.
2) opacity. Both of the other two browsers have a mechanism for blending layers. Opera doesn't, AFAICT.

Those are deal-breakers for me. I can't work around them.

Of course, Opera isn't alone in missing features. Firefox won't let you change the color of the scrollbar or status bar, but Opera and IE will. IE has serious problems doing vertical layouts, and all of them have their issues with CSS3. These are all issues I can live with, though.

I 'spose most people see the past with rose-colored glasses, though. Hopefully I haven't shattered them too much.

How Firefox came to be?

It was done in a zing!

The Firebird name was taken, so they got a new suffix with the Firesomething random animal generator.

ok, I'm off to RTFA...

the true power of opensource

I held true to my beliefs and refused to review low quality patches.

Free from business buzzwords and company politics mumbojumbo.

all that remains is a top notch stable product.

Pardon?

Go take a look at the Mozilla codebase. Seriously, go do it right now. It is amongst the worst code I've seen written. It's overly complex, it's bloated, and it's badly architectured. But please, don't take my word for it. Go look for yourself.

If there were any efforts to limit the inclusion of low quality patches, I think such efforts failed. But then again, what would be a low quality patch to the FreeBSD project may very well look like a real gem when compared to the awful codebase that makes up Mozilla.

The true power of open source is letting us see how awfully written many of the most popular software products are, Mozilla included.

Re:Pardon?

Mozilla? You should've taken a look at NS Communicator's code. Now that was scary. I can tell you many people couldn't believe that thing could actually run without crashing after 5 minutes of us. When we launched beta versions, some of us were freaked out to see that people was actually using them.

But we had a lot of fun :-)

Re:Pardon?

I can tell you many people couldn't believe that thing could actually run without crashing after 5 minutes of us.

I couldn't believe it either, because for me, NS 4.x actually did crash after 5 minutes of use, most of the time.

Re:Pardon?

I work with the Mozilla code every day. It is complicated, yes, but that doesn't necessarily mean it is all badly written. I think you probably don't understand the reason for the complexity, and therefore you incorrectly consider it to be terrible code. I'm not saying we don't have some bad code in there, but to say what you are saying about the entire codebase is very naive.

Re:Pardon?

What you are saying about Opera is simply not true. Yes, they offer much of what we do. But they don't come anywhere near offering all that we do. Consider at XULRunner, Firefox extensions, or the fact that we have a more compliant rendering engine. About the rendering engine in particular, the first 90% of compliance is not that hard. It is the last 10% that adds the majority of the complexity. Opera has not gone as far (far as they may be) in terms of compliance and the complexity tradeoff is absolutely not linear.
So, if you want what Opera has to offer and only that, then use Opera. But don't bash Mozilla's codebase because we don't offer the same feature set that Opera does and therefore a bunch of our code is needlessly complex.

"It appears that the Mozilla project has overcomplicated them, for whatever reason."

I think if you put even 5 minutes into thinking about "whatever reason," you'd not be saying that. Again, I'll use XULRunner and Firefox Extensions as examples of things that Opera does not do and will never do in its current form because they lack the (complex!) infrastructure that allows for such capabilities.

It is easy to bash code and get a good response from people - a large part of slashdot is just that. It is much harder to defend code, and that is something I just can't do for the Mozilla project in the time I have allotted for myself to post on slashdot. All I can say is if you want to know how good/bad the Mozilla code is, give it a lot more thought time or ask someone who would actually know. You could start with Mozilla developers. We're not all so biased and blinded as to blatantly lie about the quality of the Mozilla code.

Re:Pardon?

I don't know where you got that idea, and I'm not going to argue with you here, but that is definitely not a given. An issue with your comment that makes me think you don't know much about standards compliance in rendering engines is that Acid2 is an almost meaningless test. It does not in any way measure overall standards compliance. It is an interesting test that has been turned into a tool for marketing these days, and it worked on you.

Re:Pardon?

Yeah, we've got some memory leaks once in a while, there are many things we could do better, and we don't run in 64K of RAM, but it really isn't a big deal outside of slashdot postings looking for karma, and it really isn't much worse (if at all) than other apps.

Is this seriously your attitude? It's no wonder that Firefox and much of the other software from the Mozilla project is so bloated. Even on systems with 2 GB or more of RAM, it is still a relatively scarce resource, and thus should not be wasted. I have used release builds of Mozilla 1.7.x that consumed upwards of 400 MB of RAM after being used for a few weeks, and that's with the cache disabled. That's 400 MB resident, mind you.

Remember, 400 MB for a web browser is still a massive consumption of memory on a 1 or 2 GB system. When there are many regular folks with systems that only have 512 MB of RAM, you start running into serious performance issues (which is often reported to be the case).

You say it's not a big deal to waste memory. Sorry to say it, but you're fucking wrong. Firefox will continually be looked upon as an inferior browser by those with any software development background if such a trend of waste continues.

I hope you understand why I keep coming back to Opera. They've put out a product that's just as portable and just as featureful as Firefox (if not more so). And they manage to do it without consuming hundreds of MB of RAM.

History of Firefox

Copied all the ideas from Opera, called it 3 diffrent names, and then achived fanboy cult status.

Opera did heavily influence Firefox.

I'm not sure why your post was heavily moderated down. It does address a very serious point: Opera did influence Firefox.

Certain innovations, including tabs and mouse gestures, were first developed for Opera. Subsequently, they were found to be very useful features, and thus were adopted by other browsers (Firefox included).

It's not a bad thing at all that Firefox draws from Opera. The goal is to provide the best product possible, and that does at times require the implementation of good ideas that were thought up elsewhere. Browsers like Opera, Konqueror, OmniWeb and Safari innovate; Firefox brings those innovations to the masses.

Re:Opera did heavily influence Firefox.

It would be really nice to see Opera and OmniWeb (in particular) receive more credit. I think they deserve a lot more attention than they have now.

Firefox broke into the mainstream, but the only innovation is the extensions system. Opera and OmniWeb have tons of innovative features, but most people never get to know about it.

And some of these features are actually possible to do as Firefox extensions.

It's almost as if there's no point in any other browser :) You can use Firefox, and if you need more features, you can just install extensions.

But I actually find extensions to often be very bad substitutes for properly integrated features. Not everyone wants to deal with extensions.

Re:Opera did heavily influence Firefox.

There's nothing wrong with Microsoft drawing good ideas from Apple, or from anyone else. That's the best thing they should do, as it benefits their customers.

Now just because they incorporate such ideas doesn't mean they do it well. The problem with IE isn't so much the feature set it offers, but how it insecurely and poorly offers those features. Opera, Konqueror, OmniWeb, Safari, and even Firefox to a lesser extent, do a better job of implementing such ideas.

Where Did IE7 Come From, Why and Who Cares?

February 06, 2006
Where Did IE7 Come From, Why and Who Cares?

The story of Internet Explorer is long but yet lacking in detail or any real value. There are many perspectives. This is mine. IE was of course written by Spry and acquired by us at Microsoft.

Since then, we've added many new bugs (I mean features), security holes (err... features),
stolen and duplicated ideas (umm... innovations). Even more importantly, we added tons of
new code to work around things in the original Spry browser we didn't understand... tons...
and since bigger is better, that alone makes IE7 the best browser on the market.

IE7 keeps Windows users working twice as productively (doing System Restores and removing viruses)
on their machines - what other browser forces (I mean allows) a user to sit in front of their
computers doing (recovery and restore) work?

Such amazing new security ideas like sandbagging (umm.. sandboxing) IE will force IE to write
files and such to only the temp directories (though since so many viruses and spyware already
write themselves there and then execute this is another item our Marketing Department needs
to spin as an improvement).

All in all, our newest browser is bigger, (bloatier), (borrowed and outdated) feature rich and
far more (or less) secure!

Footnotes

      1. Some people claimed we didn't create all the new innovations in IE7 like tabbed browsing,
            but you need to remember that Time is relative. Besides, even though we were the last ones
            to come out with these innovations, our amazing Marketing Team can still convince the world
            we are first - we call it our "Leading the Pack From the Rear" methodology.
      2. "How to Secure & Stabilize your browser(TM)", or "The Mozilla Advantage" as it is more commonly
            known as.
      3. "Module Owners" - Microsoft, Microsoft and only Microsoft - where we "borrowed" the ideas, code
            and technology is irrelevant.
      4. "Moving Target" or "Barely Crawling Target" as we prefer to call it.

see also

also interesting:
http://www.jwz.org/gruntle/nscpdorm.html [jwz.org]
http://www.jwz.org/gruntle/nomo.html [jwz.org]

Effectiveness often breeds resentment

There was and remains much resentment towards Firefox and its development model. At its creation, there was much shouting about how the many were not always smarter than the few, the merits of small development teams with strong centralized direction, the need to adhere strictly to Mozilla's module ownership policy[3]. In practice, these statements resulted in effectively locking everyone but the Firefox team out of the Firefox source code. We railed against the inefficiencies of past UIs. We were unnecessarily harsh, and polarized opinions. We had been badly wounded by the Netscape experience and the disorganization that had followed. I don't think a lot of people understood that. It wasn't something we could easily communicate.
To many, it looked like we were breaking ranks. We were claiming their work had no value. It was said that what we were doing went against the principles of community development. That wasn't true -- as most open source projects are centrally managed by a small few. Many have well defined release plans and maintain tight control over what contributions make it in. We had hurt our case though by being so dogmatic up front. We did not do a good job of PR.

Recalls a Margaret Thatcher quote, from her speech at the US Naval Academy sometime around '93 or '94: "Consensus is the absence of leadership".
Impressive, indeed to admit to having been heavy-handed. Then again, there is a stark difference between leadership and running a popularity contest.
OTOH, even Emacs will have another release Real Soon Now. The ones to fear are those who claim to have Teh One True Way.

Mozilla: a good PR move for Netscape...

Mozilla was a good community relations move on the part of Netscape. I can remember early on when Netscape had sued Microsoft and delayed the release of Windows 98 in a fight for browser dominance. The only logical move was to appeal to the community at large just to stay alive.

Firefox:A tripartite golden braid

> Especially interesting and poignant are comments like this: 'I was told I could not expect to use Open Source tricks against folk who were employed by the Company (all hail!). I held true to my beliefs and refused to review low quality patches. I was almost fired. Others weren't so lucky.'.

Kenobi:Skywalker:Use The Force, Luke ::
Baranovich:Gant:You Must Think In Russian ::
Firefox:Goodger:In Open Source, You Must Think.

Re:Firefox:A tripartite golden braid

this is /., here Russia Thinks of YOU !!

Ask not what you think of your country.
Ask what your country thinks of you!

Missing topic: when browsers weren't free

I think Netscape's mistake came earlier: when they thought that people would each pay $40-50 to buy a standalone browser. IE cut the floor out beneath them and Netscape went down hard after that.

Someone arriving at Netscape at 1999 would have been someone boarding a sinking ship, it would seem...

History of Mozilla

In a related paper, the histrory of Mozilla has been described through emprirical software engineering here [idi.ntnu.no]. It shows how the source code changed over time etc.

Something about the mozilla suite on linux?

Wasn't the Mozilla suite very popular on Linux, perhaps accounting for most of its users, shipping with Red Hat and the other non-K distros as the default web and email applications? But then there was a speedy fork which became very popular on windows as an alternative to ie, thus mozilla greatly changed their position, almost abandoning their old userbase for their new intiative of evengalistic saving of windows/ie users. But then I see that ie/7 is going to ship very close to firefox 1.5 as it did to ie/6 (layout, extra features disabled, tabs hidden).

Anyone remember the style-sheet changer?

The AOL Factor

I often wonder how widely accepted the whole Mozilla/Firefox stuff would be if AOL had turned it into "The Internet" like what they are doing with IE. So many AOLers think that IE is "The Internet", would it have been different had AOL gone on to use Mozilla? How would the geeks respond to this? I imagine quite a few heads exploding trying to rationlize out who is more evil in the IE vs AOL battles. Geeks like to think they are completely objective...but we are anything but...geeks can be full of just as much zealotry as the latest religious fundamentalist. Take a *nix vs MS argument and replace either one with Creationism and Evoloution...almost the same sort of fight. So...how accepted would AOLFox have been?

Even 0.3 was very usable

Being a user from Firefox 0.3 (Phoenix), I immediately predicted it's success. It was, unlike clunky Mozilla (and Netscape) a real refresh in a browser world. Tabbed browsing was very novel thing back then (although not completely new). Enough for me to switch fro IE. Soon extensions were there and it was definitely a killer feature that gave firefox a BIG boost.

Innacurate

The article makes it sound as if Blake Ross was non-existent during the creation of Firefox, by not mentioning him. In reality, He was one of the founders, not Goodger.

Re:Innacurate

Hi Berger,

I appreciate the nod. Richter made a similar comment on the post itself. I attempted to respond with the following about an hour ago, but it seems it didn't make it past the moderation filter, so here it is:

"Hi Richster,

I'm not sure either. My post on Firefox Religion [blakeross.com] from this time last year did mention Ben. But to be fair, Ben's article does begin with a discussion of perspectives :) Sour grapes don't help anything, and like others here, I enjoyed this article as a persuasive essay on why software engineering doesn't have to be as dispassionate as most people think.

I haven't lost interest in Firefox by a long shot, but coding-wise I prefer to work in leaps and bounds in small teams on fledgling products. Firefox no longer fits that profile--which is mostly a good thing! So I've been working with Joe Hewitt (another of the original Firefox guys) on a new project that will complement Firefox.

I think when we release, it will become clear that I never actually strayed too far from the fox. But I also know that the kinds of things we're working on could never be achieved--or achieved quickly enough, at least--if attempted in a project that has grown as large and mature as Firefox. Thus, our new project is in many ways a realization of where I would take Firefox today were it still as pliable (and thus immature) as 2 years ago.

Given that there are only two of us on the project right now, it consumes about all the coding time I can muster...so I allocate my Firefox time on SpreadFirefox and its campaigns, such as our newest, Firefox Flicks [firefoxflicks.com].

Thanks,

Blake"

Firefox history

1977: Craig Thomas writes Firefox [amazon.com]
1982: Clint Eastwood directs and stars in Firefox [amazon.com]
1983: Craig Thomas writes Firefox Down [amazon.co.uk]
2004: 'You must think in Russian!' jokes [as seen below] swarm the internet.

There may also have been mention of some internet browser, but that hardly seems relevant...

Hum along...

A lot has been told about the development of the Firefox browser since Firefox 1.0. The reality is that the story is bigger than just Firefox 1.0. It goes back years, spans continents, and includes a cast of thousands. It's a fantastic story, with all of your standard themes -- greed, rage, turmoil, love lost. But mostly it's a story of dedicated people laboring to create something they truly believe in.

Is it just me, or does this page need a musical theme accompaniment? Something orchestral, stirring, and self-impressed, like the music in Titanic.

Sorry Love Netscape more

More in love with Netscape than I am with Firefox, its faster, it has built in Phishing and spyware protection. Its more attractive and has a much cooler name.

But why so much Gnome stuff?

What I still wonder is why Ffox has got so much Gnome in it. Nothing against GTK (mostly), but a few things really really bug me:

1)Some of the options are controlled by prefs within the gnome-control center. There is no way to set/override them from within Firefox itself, nor is there even a hint as to where to find the control. By default, Firefox sends mailto:s [mailto] to Evolution, not Thunderbird!

2)Why, oh why did they abandon the rather good native file-widget in favour of the horrendous abomination that is the new GTK2 filepicker? This is very limited, and worse, it takes 30 seconds to open, during which time, the application stalls!

Irony...

Gotta love a little irony...

I tried to print the page for later reading, but Firefox 1.5 didn't preview or print it correctly...had to open it in IE to print.

Things that make you go "hmmmm"...

Re:When are they going to patch

It already does. I've been running this browser instance in single-window mode (tabs only, never a new window - ever) for 2 months now and it's only using 95MB of memory. Which granted, is a lot, but it's fairly normal for Firefox with 10 tabs open. If it didn't release memory when I closed tabs, it would be way, way, way beyond that.

Re:Where is version 5.0?

The latest version of Firefox is 1.5something.

Re:Where is version 5.0?

Maybe you were looking at the user identification string, which says "Mozilla/5.0" for Firefox and the other major browsers. For example, mine identifies itself as "Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.8.0.1) Gecko/20060202 Firefox/1.5.0.1 (mahowi)" when I check Help->about Firefox Community Edition

Firefox: Most unstable program in common use = +5

Note that the Firefox is the most unstable program in common use [slashdot.org] was moderated up to +5 in a former discussion.

An honest history of Firefox would include the fact that it has been unstable for more than 2 1/2 years.

Re:When are they going to patch

If there's any bug about Firefox not releasing memory when closing a tab, I haven't found it in Bugzilla, and I can't reproduce it. Maybe you can tell us about the problem?