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Jason Lefkowitz

Sometimes I reflect on what a true miracle it is that Mozilla produced several useful and important products despite heroic efforts by their management to prevent that outcome

12 Oct 2023 at 3:02 | Open on octodon.social
67 comments
Anil
Jason Lefkowitz

Example: I’m not sure if younger folks would even be aware that Firefox did not start out as an official Mozilla project. It was an act of protest by Mozilla developers who got tired of shoveling useless crap into their browser just because AOL was paying them to, or because Mozilla management was stuck on the old Netscape idea that the product had to be a big monolithic “suite” with an email reader, an HTML authoring product, an IRC client, and other stuff even fewer people wanted.

Firefox was the basic Mozilla browser with all the crap stripped out. And it was instantly, obviously better than both AOL’s Mozilla-based “Netscape” and the Mozilla Suite.

Mozilla eventually adopted Firefox as an official project, but only after the earliest versions got all the excited users and press acclaim that Mozilla’s official products had so conspicuously failed to attract.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Firefox#

Example: I’m not sure if younger folks would even be aware that Firefox did not start out as an official Mozilla project. It was an act of protest by Mozilla developers who got tired of shoveling useless crap into their browser just because AOL was paying them to, or because Mozilla management was stuck on the old Netscape idea that the product had to be a big monolithic “suite” with an email reader, an HTML authoring product, an IRC client, and other stuff even fewer people wanted.
12 Oct 2023 at 3:18 | Open on octodon.social
Madeline :antiverified:
Pilum::🌞

@jalefkowit The suite took soooo long to start too. Phoenix started nearly instantly.

12 Oct 2023 at 3:25 | Open on octodon.social
[nick@{÷)} ~]$ :cursor:
Jason Lefkowitz
DELETED

@linuxfiend @jalefkowit I'll never forget my discovery of Phoenix. I felt like I was on the forefront of internet tech. Such a great time!

I did not know about the connection to Netscape. No wonder it had similar vibes to it.

12 Oct 2023 at 3:53 | Open on toot.site
Jason Lefkowitz

@allenstenhaus @linuxfiend Oh yes. Mozilla was originally launched by Netscape as a kind of Hail Mary pass to save the company (or at least its code) after the disastrous decision to completely rewrite the code base from the ground up for Netscape 5 wrecked the business. While they were busy rewriting, Microsoft ate their lunch. The Hail Mary was open-sourcing all the newly rewritten code. Mozilla was the organizational vehicle for doing that.

Netscape eventually got a Mozilla-based browser out the door, Netscape 6. And then AOL bought them and produced their enshittified version, Netscape 7. But neither one really caught on; no Mozilla-based browser ever would, until Firefox.

@allenstenhaus @linuxfiend Oh yes. Mozilla was originally launched by Netscape as a kind of Hail Mary pass to save the company (or at least its code) after the disastrous decision to completely rewrite the code base from the ground up for Netscape 5 wrecked the business. While they were busy rewriting, Microsoft ate their lunch. The Hail Mary was open-sourcing all the newly rewritten code. Mozilla was the organizational vehicle for doing that.

12 Oct 2023 at 4:19 | Open on octodon.social
Jason Lefkowitz

@allenstenhaus @linuxfiend Side note: Joel Spolsky, one of the founders of Stack Overflow, got his first real pop of public attention in 2000 by writing a blog post predicting the Netscape rewrite would be a disaster. It still gets circulated as a classic example of a highly influential post.

joelonsoftware.com/2000/04/06/

12 Oct 2023 at 4:41 | Open on octodon.social
Third spruce tree on the left

@jalefkowit @allenstenhaus @linuxfiend sweet jeebus i remember reading that (joel re: rewriting from scratch) like it was yesterday. 23 yrs ago! Im so old

12 Oct 2023 at 4:57 | Open on mas.to
Jason Lefkowitz

And the best part of that era was that the Mozilla Suite was Mozilla’s primary product, it was available to download at Mozilla.org, and Mozilla went to great lengths to try and convince people NOT TO DOWNLOAD IT.

That was because AOL had bought what was left of Netscape, and were trying to relaunch the brand with a new “Netscape browser” that was basically just the Mozilla Suite with a different theme and some bits that users liked and advertisers hated — things like the pop-up blocker — stripped out.

So users had a choice: they could either download an enshittified version of Mozilla from Netscape, or they could download a non-enshittified version from Mozilla.

The hitch here was, though, that AOL was by far Mozilla’s biggest funder. (This was a few years before the search deal put Google in that position, which it retains today.) Mozilla management did not want to piss AOL off. And what AOL wanted was for people who wanted Mozilla technology to download the new Netscape.

So an absolutely hilarious compromise was reached. Mozilla would continue to offer the unshittified version of the product on its web site. But if you went to actually download it there, the web site would tell you that you really shouldn’t.

If this all sounds ludicrous to you, that’s because it was.

And the best part of that era was that the Mozilla Suite was Mozilla’s primary product, it was available to download at Mozilla.org, and Mozilla went to great lengths to try and convince people NOT TO DOWNLOAD IT.

That was because AOL had bought what was left of Netscape, and were trying to relaunch the brand with a new “Netscape browser” that was basically just the Mozilla Suite with a different theme and some bits that users liked and advertisers hated — things like the pop-up blocker — stripped out.

12 Oct 2023 at 3:34 | Open on octodon.social
Jason Lefkowitz

NB: If you ever wondered where Thunderbird came from, it came from Firefox blowing up the Mozilla Suite. The email client component of the Suite was never anywhere near as popular as the browser component, but it at least had a healthy base of active users, which was more than anyone could say for the other parts of the Suite. So when the Suite exploded, the email client was salvaged from the debris, given its own installer, and turned into a standalone product called Thunderbird.

12 Oct 2023 at 3:48 | Open on octodon.social
Jason Lefkowitz

Also NB: If for some reason you want to try living in a world where Firefox never happened, the SeaMonkey project carried on development of the old, monolithic Mozilla Suite. And they’re still at it — their most recent point release was on September 20.

You shouldn’t expect it to be up to date with all the architectural improvements that have gone into Firefox since Chrome changed the game. And I know from years of using the Mozilla Suite myself that its kitchen-sink approach is not for me. But I also know there were some people who really loved it, so it’s cool to see they are still keeping it alive.

seamonkey-project.org/

Also NB: If for some reason you want to try living in a world where Firefox never happened, the SeaMonkey project carried on development of the old, monolithic Mozilla Suite. And they’re still at it — their most recent point release was on September 20.

You shouldn’t expect it to be up to date with all the architectural improvements that have gone into Firefox since Chrome changed the game. And I know from years of using the Mozilla Suite myself that its kitchen-sink approach is not for me. But I...

12 Oct 2023 at 3:57 | Open on octodon.social
mcc

@jalefkowit does it still contain… chatzilla

12 Oct 2023 at 4:08 | Open on mastodon.social
Jason Lefkowitz
Jon
mcc

@jalefkowit wow. does the whole thing still use XUL

12 Oct 2023 at 4:27 | Open on mastodon.social
Jason Lefkowitz

@mcc I’m not sure. They said something in 2017 about planning to excise XUL (which, yes, 💯). But I can’t find a release since then with a formal declaration that the work has been done.

(I’m not an active SeaMonkey user myself, so all I know is what I read on their web site.)

12 Oct 2023 at 4:56 | Open on octodon.social
Glyph

@jalefkowit @mcc I do still kinda have some nostalgia for Composer. The whole "suite" idea gets a bit of a bad rap, I think; MS Office (and, heck, iWork) is a "suite" and nobody has problems with that, because it still presents the elementts of its suite as normal applications and not as a single fused block of functionality that is inexplicably built as its own launcher.

12 Oct 2023 at 5:24 | Open on mastodon.social
Glyph replied to Glyph

@jalefkowit @mcc the problem with SeaMonkey was that the UI was terrible and the interaction design was terrible and the bloatedness of the "suite" idiom did make it a little worse, but it was much more a symptom of the disease than the cause

12 Oct 2023 at 5:25 | Open on mastodon.social
Glyph replied to Glyph

@jalefkowit @mcc anyway I say this because while firefox was unambiguously vastly better, the abandonment of composer as part of the functionality of a browser was symbolic of a move from a world where we wanted everyone to be able to take control of HTML editing and website design, to a world where users used browsers and serious web developers used development tools and there was no overlap between these populations. once again, symptom not a cause, but it would have been nice if they'd tried

12 Oct 2023 at 5:29 | Open on mastodon.social
Krishean Draconis

@mcc @jalefkowit wow, there's a name i haven't heard in a very, very long time. i submitted patches for chatzilla long ago

12 Oct 2023 at 4:36 | Open on tech.lgbt
Andy Lundell 🙄

@jalefkowit Oh wow, They even still have Chatzilla.

Perhaps one day somebody will use it.

12 Oct 2023 at 4:08 | Open on octodon.social
railmeat

@jalefkowit
That’s admirable. I would never want to use it though.

12 Oct 2023 at 4:11 | Open on fosstodon.org
Brett Edmond Carlock

@jalefkowit SeaMonkey is absolutely stellar, and I guess I prefer it since I grew up on the internet within AOL, so an all-in-one internet suite feels comfy, but the older LTS base means many "secure" sites throw errors and don't let me use them when I'm in SeaMonkey.

12 Oct 2023 at 4:12 | Open on mastodon.online
Howard Chu @ Symas

@jalefkowit it's still my daily driver. I still build it myself, leftover habit from when I was actively contributing to it. The split to firefox never made any sense to me. I can't see using an email client without an integrated HTML renderer. Or without an integrated calendar. I did a bunch of work to improve the MailNews codebase, accelerate their build system, and keep Calendar working in the suite. highlandsun.com/hyc/#mozilla_h

12 Oct 2023 at 4:15 | Open on mastodon.social
anthony

@jalefkowit i liked the suite! i went from netscape communicator to the mozilla suite to seamonkey and didn't switch to the firefox/thunderbird combo until like 2010 after it became clear that the seamonkey browser wasn't keeping pace.

12 Oct 2023 at 4:27 | Open on mindly.social
Jason Lefkowitz

So how do I know all this Mozilla trivia, you ask?

Well, I was an avid early user of the Mozilla Suite. (I think the first version I used as a daily driver was the Milestone 18 alpha release, which the release notes say came out exactly 23 years ago today — October 12, 2000.) And at some point I thought: hey, this is all kind of nerdy and confusing. But we want normal people to use this. Maybe I should write a book to help them learn how!

(Remember books? Probably not, it was a long time ago.)

So I made an outline and started grinding through it, writing explanations of what an IRC client was and why Uncle Ted should want one, going through the pros and cons of various Mozilla “distributions” — that’s what Mozilla called projects like AOL’s Netscape, “distributions,” because what better way to appeal to the masses in the year 2000 than to drag in some Linux jargon, jfc — and all the rest of it.

Until about a third of the way through the outline, when I had The Epiphany.

The Epiphany was: any web browser that requires a book for normal people to learn how to use it is probably not a web browser good enough to deserve having books written about it.

And so ended my book project.

www-archive.mozilla.org/projec

So how do I know all this Mozilla trivia, you ask?

Well, I was an avid early user of the Mozilla Suite. (I think the first version I used as a daily driver was the Milestone 18 alpha release, which the release notes say came out exactly 23 years ago today — October 12, 2000.) And at some point I thought: hey, this is all kind of nerdy and confusing. But we want normal people to use this. Maybe I should write a book to help them learn how!

12 Oct 2023 at 4:38 | Open on octodon.social
Jennifer Wojcik

@jalefkowit I am loving your explainers of the browser wars, how Firefox came about, etc.

I remember it all too. Hilarious. It really was the wild west.

12 Oct 2023 at 4:42 | Open on mastodon.social
Jason Lefkowitz

@JenWojcik Thanks! Maybe I should write a book about that 😆

12 Oct 2023 at 4:57 | Open on octodon.social
Jennifer Wojcik

@jalefkowit You probably should. It's history now. ;)

12 Oct 2023 at 4:58 | Open on mastodon.social
Jennifer Wojcik

@jalefkowit

Especially while a lot of those people involved are still alive. It may not be so in 5 or 10 years.

12 Oct 2023 at 4:59 | Open on mastodon.social
skze
matt

@jalefkowit thanks for the trip down memory lane. Here's a side fork in the path (one of many) that's interesting: jwz.org/doc/about-jwz.html

12 Oct 2023 at 5:11 | Open on indieweb.social
matt

@jalefkowit and a long treatment on how the Mozilla name and mascot came to exist in the first place: jwz.org/blog/2016/10/they-live

Huh, reading this again, after your thread, I'm even more struck by how apropos "They Live" as a background theme is.

12 Oct 2023 at 5:18 | Open on indieweb.social
the clownward spiral

@jalefkowit I always thought there was something wonderfully egalitarian about a browser that shipped the tools to build the pages it was designed to view. I think that's a thing we could use a lot more of.

I remember those early Mozilla alpha/beta releases, they were pretty rough, but I used them anyway. And Netscape 3/4 before that.

12 Oct 2023 at 5:15 | Open on retro.social
Travis F W

@jalefkowit I used seamonkey for several years, way back. I totally forgot.

12 Oct 2023 at 4:41 | Open on fosstodon.org
matt

@jalefkowit as far as I know SeaMonkey is the only branch that kept plugging away at the idea that a 'web browser' could and should also be a 'web editor'.

It's a great loss that we don't have any mainstream web editors today.

12 Oct 2023 at 5:03 | Open on indieweb.social
Jason Lefkowitz

@maphew I don’t disagree, I just think that idea kind of got impossible to realize as web publishing branched out to encompass things like databases and programming languages. It all just got too complicated to wrap into a single product. Even more ambitious attempts like FrontPage and Dreamweaver lost traction eventually.

That being said, I think plain old static web publishing is overdue for a comeback. Package up an HTML editor with some fun CSS themes and cheap static hosting, and tell Gen Z it’s retro hip, the Polaroid of web publishing. I think that could actually find some takers!

@maphew I don’t disagree, I just think that idea kind of got impossible to realize as web publishing branched out to encompass things like databases and programming languages. It all just got too complicated to wrap into a single product. Even more ambitious attempts like FrontPage and Dreamweaver lost traction eventually.

12 Oct 2023 at 5:08 | Open on octodon.social
Steve 🇨🇦🇺🇦

@jalefkowit I think they tried to spin off the chat client, too, but it ultimately became just a plug-in for Firefox and ultimately died.

12 Oct 2023 at 4:03 | Open on appdot.net
:mima_rule: Mima-sama

@tewha@appdot.net still lives on in the project; it's compatible now actually thanks to a (the forked 52 ESR codebase uses) fork of CZ called spearheading the initial effort of modernizing the client. https://github.com/Ascrod/ambassador/

But as an extension, yeah it's pretty much dead. as it is right now just doesn't make ChatZilla work...

@jalefkowit@octodon.social

12 Oct 2023 at 5:03 | Open on makai.chaotic.ninja
Michael Bishop ☕

@jalefkowit I have been using Firefox since day one.

12 Oct 2023 at 4:17 | Open on mastodon.world
billy joe bowers is tired.🇺🇦

@jalefkowit

I kind of missed all that. I actually used iCab for years. Many years. It's still going, I should check it out.

12 Oct 2023 at 4:27 | Open on mastodon.online
Ben Ford :grinchsmile:

@jalefkowit and Blake was an 18 year old intern at the time if my memory serves me right.

12 Oct 2023 at 5:13 | Open on hachyderm.io
DELETED

@jalefkowit Ever since they partnered with google they just lost the breaks it seems, once I read an article they wrote on where they basically say that we need more deplatforming, ever since I don't trust anything that comes out of them, which is a shame as there are so many tallented developers there, but what can I do.

Article cited: blog.mozilla.org/blog/2021/01/

12 Oct 2023 at 3:31 | Open on mastodon.social
Steven Johnson
DELETED

@BoredomFestival @jalefkowit On some level they are, at least in my view, as an open source friendly company, they should not be involved in actively censoring the web for any political view because of their opinions, I absolutely despise what those rioters did and think most if not all of them should be in jail, but censorship is never the answer.

12 Oct 2023 at 5:21 | Open on mastodon.social
Kio!

@jalefkowit@octodon.social sorry don't you mean Firefox?

Or rather, Mozilla?

Or rather, Firefox?

Or rather, mozilla?

12 Oct 2023 at 4:06 | Open on kitsunes.gay
Ted Mielczarek

@jalefkowit I spent 12 years working there and I fully agree.

12 Oct 2023 at 4:12 | Open on mastodon.social
Tak!

@jalefkowit The story of every corporate software package

12 Oct 2023 at 4:22 | Open on glitch.taks.garden
Andres Jalinton

@jalefkowit
This hits a personal note on me.
I'm here, two years into efforts to make team work and workflows better and I keep getting pushed down.

12 Oct 2023 at 4:41 | Open on mastodon.hardcoredevs.com
Jason Lefkowitz

@Andres Sorry to hear that. If it helps, this is kind of the Classic Tech Problem. Everybody suffers through it sometime. I know I have 😀

12 Oct 2023 at 4:43 | Open on octodon.social
Andres Jalinton

@jalefkowit
What is your recommendation?
Should I still fight for it or just stay down and do the minimum?

12 Oct 2023 at 4:44 | Open on mastodon.hardcoredevs.com
Oggie

@jalefkowit Honestly it sometimes feels like google is the real spirtual successor to this. And I don't mean the obviously evil, cartoonishly bad things they are doing, I mean the google graveyard, where anything that seems like if they let it mature and be nice and stay supported it might oh wait it's dead.

12 Oct 2023 at 4:52 | Open on woof.group
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