Excellent read by Ben Goodger on the History of Firefox

Ben Goodger Reflects on the History of Firefox
Monday February 6th, 2006

Firefox Lead Engineer Ben Goodger has written a weblog post offering his perspective on The History of Firefox. Ben talks about how he got involved with Netscape, the relationship between Netscape and the Mozilla project, Netscape's communication problems, Netcenter's attempts to monetize the browser and its effects on UI design, David Hyatt's role in UI redesign and finally the recognition of the Firefox Brand today.

 

Ramona, the only problem I had with that blog entry was that it was too short. One can tell that Firefox for him is more than just a job, just like it has been more than just a browser for many of us users. Thanks for a great link. I was amused to see his link for "bloodbath" being a picture of himself. Not too sure if that was a subtle joke or just a quick fix to a broken link. Fascinating. Thanks again.

 

Paul,

Glad that you enjoyed the Blog! I personally think Ben Goodger is one cool person, and not given nearly enough credit for his role in Firefox. I've seen some criticism of this article but I, for one, have nothing but good comments for Ben...

 

Interesting. If you have links to those I'd love to read them. Not that I disbelieve him, but I can see how others might want to dispute his portrayal of Firefox as representing a maturing of the Mozilla project away from being just a servant-boy for the Netscape suits, and into building the best possible browser. He seemed to write of these stages as being two very different, well, stages, while I always figured that an open-source Mozilla browser was just AOL/Netscape's last gasp of revenge on MS, and that AOL/Netscape always wanted Mozilla to be as it is now--a lean, mean, browsing machine. Of course, his mentioning of the AOL's firing of their engineers on this project would seem to argue that AOL only wanted Netscape as a way to get at MS, and that the firing was a way of letting go of a project that had lost its usefulness to them (i.e., since it wasn't going to be the AOL browser, and their suit against MS was settled).

 

Paul,

For the most part, I was referring to the comments on Ben's Blog:
http://weblogs.mozillazine.org/ben/archives/009698.html

A lot of negativism right there...

 

gotcha. thanks for the message. I didn't read the responses-- I'm just not a blogger and don't go to blogs. I guess I assume that most of the stuff worth reading stops at the footnotes, although Blake's comments of course were rather interesting as well.

I tend to maximize the importance of Firefox/Mozilla, and see this as more than just another browser. Opera has its share of enthusiastic supporters. None of them, to my recollection, have made the claim that it is changing the web, as the Mozilla project has. This makes reads like this one so incredible.