My Frustration with Mozilla

The thing that we now call Firefox has gone through many revisions, going back nearly to the beginning of the internet. A lot of that code has been shared by many browsers.

The code is composed of 4 parts imo:

1. The rendering / layout engine

2. The scripting engine

3. The UI

4. Other junk/addons

#1 and #2 are both tremendous and do amazing things. Passing the latest ACID tests is wonderful. #3 and #4 are unfortunately what many people think of when they think of Firefox.

Really, #3 and #4 are irrelevant in the long run. Mozilla itself is irrelevant in the long run imo. The only thing that is important is the existence of good rendering and scripting engines that are open source.

So long as those things exist, all the rest can be changed. Other organizations could take the place of Mozilla and it wouldn't really matter overall, because the code that matters will continue to live on so long as hackers exist to continue putting it to newer better uses.

Look at Chrome. What is Chrome really? To me it's just Webkit with a minimalistic UI wrapped around it. ( and later a new scripting engine also ). Does Chrome matter? No, not really. Webkit matters.

The fundamental truth about Firefox's success is that it was in the right place at the right time. Dave Hyatt and Blake Ross started a side project to help get rid of the stink that was Netscape 6. The Internet Explorer team was to be disbanded for about 4 years. Opera was still charging money for their browser. Brendan Eich and Mitchell Baker were about to start the Mozilla foundation.

The events collimated in what became the launch and initial growth of Firefox.