
Mozilla.org is 20 years old - robin_reala
https://asadotzler.com/2018/03/31/mozilla-org-is-20-years-old/
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dmeeker
I was an intern at Netscape in 1998 and I'm really glad to have been there to
witness a bit of the history. The first staff meeting I attended was
announcing layoffs, two weeks later they announced the open source initiative,
then two months later the launch of Mozilla.org.

Code Rush touches on all the work that went into making the code buildable by
folks outside, but one thing they omitted probably surprises no one: the sheer
amount of profanity that had to be scrubbed from the source code before it was
released. Some genius assembled a page of the choicest examples (much of it
directed at Microsoft) and handed out hundreds of photocopies at the launch
party.

Hell of a first job in tech.

~~~
dboreham
I remember one of those announcement meetings (forget which one now) was held
in an odd location : some place upstairs in downtown Sunnyvale, and happened
to coincide with some big news release in the Lewinsky scandal which mostly
buried our news in the cycle.

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yeukhon
The recent Firefox releases should be praised. Stable and beautiful. I hope
Mozilla internally is stable now. Firefox shouldn't be abandoned. I can
understand why Mozilla Corporation needs to find new revenue resources.
Mozilla should not be afraid to be a provider of some sort, like offering
multi-auth is an option. If we continue to build products and tools which can
offer better privacy and security, there will be lights for Mozilla. IoT, IMO,
is a dead end. Tile was a mistake. Pocket is a moot acquisition: is anyone
actually using it daily?

Lastly, this may be an unpopular opinion: time for a leadership overhaul, and
I mean from the very top. Otherwise, I think Mozilla as a community and the
people working for the Mozilla are doing great jobs.

~~~
chenshuiluke
I'm not sure I disagree with Pocket being a moot acquisition, but I definitely
use it almost daily and it being integrated into Firefox is really nice.

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stevekemp
I remember paying to get my name included in the New York Times advert, I'm
surprised at how long ago that was:

[https://blog.mozilla.org/press/2004/12/mozilla-foundation-
pl...](https://blog.mozilla.org/press/2004/12/mozilla-foundation-places-two-
page-advocacy-ad-in-the-new-york-times/)

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krylon
Congratulations!

I started using Mozilla briefly after it was officially called that; I
remember waiting _forever_ for it to download over an ISDN line. I don't even
remember why, exactly, just that I deeply disliked Internet Explorer (still
do). Eventually, two killer features came along, tabs and ad-blockers.
Afterwards, I never looked back.

So Happy Birthday, and thanks for all the hard work!

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TheRealProcyon
Happy birthday Mozilla! Here's to many more years. I finally stopped using
chrome on my computer in favour of Firefox. Mozilla you're awesome!

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bloopernova
Ah, those heady days of early 1998 on Slashdot.

Watching Mozilla grow and switch to its new layout engine. Nervously reading
about Microsoft's efforts to take over the web with IIS and IE.

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Yizahi
In before incoming "Firefox is usable now compared to unspeakably horribly bad
previously". Firefox was never THAT bad as some people describe and I had been
using it since version 1 (or maybe even beta). It was always stable,
reasonably fast, pretty and functional.

Good job Mozilla, keep working.

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Endy
Too bad the last few years have been a downturn and an ongoing series of
mistakes, which drove too many users toward Google.

~~~
robin_reala
To be fair, it wasn’t just technical problems with Firefox that drove users to
Chrome: it can also be blamed on Google advertising Chrome heavily as an
upgrade in prominent positions on google.com start page and other properties,
Google crippling their own software to only work with Chrome, Google having
the financial resources for multi-billion-dollar TV advertising campaigns,
bundling Chrome in a pseudo-malware opt-out fashion with other software
downloads (e.g. Java updates), etc etc.

At least the Chrome team seem pissed off with the ongoing problem of Chrome-
only Google applications, although they seem powerless to do anything about it
as the problem continues.

~~~
notafxn
For a very long time Chrome has been vastly superior to Firefox. Now Firefox
is starting to reach the level of Chrome, but they seem to be unable to stop
pissing the bed, which in the end I believe will make their technical efforts
worthless.

~~~
Endy
Well, if they hadn't given in to WebDRM, WebAssembly, and the rest of it, and
had stayed with the pre-Australis Firefox, developing that in logical
directions for a web browser, not a do-everything-program, it would have been
good. Then again, I'm also opposed to the multiprocess nonsense, and to this
day I only use a single-process browser.

~~~
jcranmer
As I still remember the days when Flash ads hung the web browser, I was ever
so grateful when multiprocess for plugins came about and I could Flash without
killing the web browser.

~~~
superkuh
You never needed browser multiprocess for that on linux. It was easy to just
kill the plugin process. I don't know about windows.

~~~
jcranmer
No, Flash used to be same process (even on Linux), until Firefox 3.6 or so.

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yuhong
It is fun to compare the history of Opera with Mozilla (with the famous Google
search deal) BTW, and the next essay draft will mention it.

