After 5 years, Firefox faces new challenges

Five years ago, Mozilla made it clear that the browser wars weren't over after all.

(cnet) In the 1990s, Netscape had lost its dominance in the browser market to Microsoft's Internet Explorer, and the Netscape-spawned open-source project called Mozilla had sunk into obscurity. Even a federal antitrust suit accusing Microsoft of anticompetitive practices with its browser and Windows was not enough to turn the tide.

But on November 9, 2004, Firefox 1.0 emerged to fight back again.

The project, originally named Phoenix to symbolize rebirth from Netscape's ashes, has now clawed its way back to account for nearly a quarter of the browser usage today. Microsoft may not be on the run, but it's on the defensive, gradually building its browser development effort back up into fighting form.

Firefox eyewitness
It's a history that Mike Shaver, currently Mozilla's vice president of engineering, saw firsthand since joining Netscape in 1997.

Then, he was a young programmer whose work with Linux gave him open-source inclinations. He'd been advocating an open-source release of the engine within Netscape Communicator that ran Web-based JavaScript programs, but was surprised in 1998 when Netscape announced the entire software package would become open-source software.

"For me it was confluence of being at the right place at the right time and having a lot of contacts," Shaver recounted. He jumped into thorny issues of making a large commercial project into an open, cooperatively developed project: licensing, trademarks, patch reviews, schedules, governance.

The open-source move was intended to counter Microsoft's growing browser clout. Initially, it failed, but the open-source move ultimately planted the seeds for Firefox's success. That's because the open-source ethos--which lets anyone see, modify, and distribute a program's underlying source code--is what enabled programmers to build something lean and mean out of what some saw as the bloated and uncompetitive Mozilla product. ...Go to source