A Look Back at the History Behind Firefox
In March of this year, according to the official Mozilla blog, Mozilla has celebrated its tenth birthday. But the story of Mozilla's most successful product, the Firefox web browser, goes even further back into the history of the web itself. And brings it surprisingly close to other web browsers that it competes with - not to mention any web browsers with a big, blue 'e' for their logo...
How far back do we have to go? 1991, and in the United States, then-Senator Al Gore passed the "High Performance Computing and Communication Act of 1991". This is the infamous "Gore Bill", which prompted him years later to be quoted as having claimed to "invent the Internet", as we never stop hearing about from across the ditch.
The funding from the Gore Bill got spent in part at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA), where it paid one Marc Andreessen to lead the team which would develop a web browser called "Mosaic", originally on the Unix X-Windows platform. Andreessen later left the NCSA to form his own corporation, Mosaic Communications Corporation, which would eventually become Netscape Communications Corporation.
Meanwhile, a company called Spyglass, Inc. also formed, to sell software developed at the NCSA. Spyglass bought a license from Mosaic. Here comes a twist: In 1995, Microsoft bought a license for Spyglass Mosaic to the tune of $2 million USD, which they then modified and renamed it as Internet Explorer. Yes, they're related!
The name should give you an idea, but Netscape Communications Corporation went on to release Netscape Navigator, the original browser on non-Microsoft systems. Navigator, in fact, was already thriving before Microsoft even had a web browser. The fact that Microsoft snapped the Mosaic code out from under them and bundled it with Microsoft Windows was in fact the basis for the United States' antitrust lawsuit against Microsoft, later to be changed to a settlement under the administration of currently out-going president George W. Bush.
Antitrust or not, Netscape was definitely on its way out. In its dying years, it formed the Mozilla Foundation to release the source code for Netscape (which had been code-named 'Mozilla') as free/open source software. Under whom? None other than geek and hacker legend Jamie Zawinski, who tells the story of the transition here in his own unmistakable style. It was Zawinski who actually came up with the name "Mozilla" in the first place, and also tells the story of the Mozilla launch party here.
Of course, Mozilla evolved - sort of - into Firefox, the browser we know today. However, if you want a peek at the classic suite of the original Mozilla programs, which included the editor, email, and chat applications, the project you're looking for today is SeaMonkey.
The Firefox project has since spun off into several derivative browsers, among them Flock, IceWeasel, and IceCat. Oh, and in case you think Mozilla is going to rest on it's laurels with Firefox as the peak of their career, let us whisper this word in your ear: "Prism". It's still in beta, but you heard it here first.
Filed Under: The Internetz
