Mozilla: Firefox and Thunderbird September 15, 2004 Jakub Wojnarowicz

Netscape

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Dead Man’s Hand

Mozilla has had a long and storied history. Well, no, that’s a lie. Mozilla is in fact only about 6 years old as of this writing, but judging solely by its product repertoire, it has a long life ahead of it.

The open source Mozilla project was founded by Netscape in early 1998 with the announcement that the Netscape browser would be free for all – though it didn’t get the Mozilla name for some time after that. Now, this might seem ludicrous now, but back when the internet was still thought of as a military project, and “world wide web” more often than not referred to one conspiracy theory or another, Mosaic Communications was founded by Jim Clark and Marc Andreessen. Netscape built on the Mosaic project’s idea of making the internet a graphical place, rather than just newsgroups, email, and gopher searches.

Bill Gates’ book at the time mentioned almost nothing of the internet, but Netscape was already planning a business strategy of selling its browser to consumers. Indeed, those of you geeky enough to admit to browsing the computer section in the mid-90s might even remember boxes of Netscape at the local store. Yes, believe it or not, internet browsers once cost money.

Of course, Microsoft, though not as agile as it was in its younger days, responded eventually to Netscape which it had obviously deemed a threat. The early versions of Internet Explorer were clearly inferior to Netscape. There was little, if anything, that recommended Internet Explorer over the Netscape browser – except that they were free. Free goes far in this world. Free is what gets products into schools and offices, what people get used to and accustomed to – and whether you believe it or not, branding works. People begin to feel comfortable with a product, they trust it and even become faithful to it.

Naturally, Microsoft got better at making browsers. At version 3 of each browser, they were roughly equivalent to each other. Netscape did have a very clean and light, if somewhat ugly, email program, but IE loaded pages “faster”. That’s not to say that the total time to load a page was faster, but that IE was good at loading text first, showing images as they were loading. Furthermore, Microsoft’s custom extensions to HTML were becoming more widely accepted. They weren’t critical to web navigation, but they made life easier – if you programmed exclusively for IE. Microsoft FrontPage was released and bundled with Office, meaning that people were putting up millions of their own personal sites with IE HTML extensions that made life more difficult for Netscape users.

When Internet Explorer 4 and Netscape Communicator 4 were released, IE had made up what little technical ground it was behind on with Netscape, while Netscape became a much larger, more bloated application. It’s not that it was clearly worse than IE, but just that it wasn’t better, or lighter, hadn’t changed its rendering code to load on the fly and there was obviously no business opportunity.

Though everyone paid for Internet Explorer when they bought Windows – whether they liked it or not – no one was ready to pay again for Netscape. Netscape had long since been free to individuals, charging only business users, but there would never be a market for its services again.

Netscape Communications released the source code to its software, publicly, in January of 1998. While this gathered much notice among the geek crowd, most outsiders didn’t care. Open Source was only just starting to gain notoriety, and it was painfully obvious to everyone that Netscape had no financial future. The company was sold to AOL – then in the midst of a huge feud with Microsoft – later that year. The Open Source Mozilla Project was an afterthought, especially in light of the disastrous Netscape 6.0 release, based on early Mozilla code. Arguably, given AOL’s cutbacks in the Netscape division after Microsoft paid its settlement in a suit, Netscape was only kept alive because AOL saw a cash-making legal opportunity.

However, it seems that this was not the end, or even the beginning of the end for Mozilla. It was simply the end of a beginning. (This reference to Millennium is the first, last, and only time I’ll bring that terrible movie to your mind.)

Firefox

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Netscape continued for some time under AOL before being finally shut down in mid-2003, but for our purposes its story ends there.

Firefox is a free community project based off Mozilla. It’s light, it’s slim and it’s fast - a mere 5MB to download. Mozilla itself is a 12MB download. The service pack for IE6 is 12MB. I haven’t found a download for it myself, and it comes installed on Windows XP so it’s difficult to judge. Having loaded FiringSquad, each has a memory footprint of approximately ~27MB. On Blue’s News, IE balloons to just over 31MB while Firefox weighs in just short of 27MB again. This is before the installation of the Google toolbar on IE.

Feature-wise, Firefox is just as if not more complete than IE. It comes with its own popup blocker and Google search. The Google search is just as effective as the Google toolbar, while the popup blocker is absolutely perfect. I have not seen a single popup while using Firefox for over 6 months now. In fact, the weekly Spybot scans come up quite light compared to those times when IE was my dominant browser.

Firefox is still not as good as IE at loading text first before worrying about the images, but it is certainly as fast as loading whole webpages. Moreover, in these broadband days, browser speed simply doesn’t matter as much any more. I had to actively look to see what got loaded first on Shack, Blue’s or FiringSquad, and then it took double or even triple-checking to make sure.

However, I didn’t change to Firefox for any of these reasons though I was made aware of Firefox’s advantages for quite a while. Really, what’s a couple of megabytes memory footprint when most people have at least half a gig of RAM? A popup or two isn’t going to ruin my day either.

No, what eventually had me switch to Firefox were the numerous security exploits available to IE. Now I’m as experienced an old hand at the internet as there are. I know not to visit .box.sk or a porn site without cranking up the security settings and turning cookies off. However, it got tiresome downloading update after update and fix after fix, and then spotting the occasional exploit with a malware scanner or virus scan – knowing I missed one of a dozen patches for IE in the last year.

I suppose Service Pack 2 fixed most, if not all of these outstanding issues. I’m also not a dreamy-eyed idealist who assumes that because Firefox was made by honest, hard-working communists… er… open-sourcers working for no pay, that it’s automatically a safer and more secure application. Fact of the matter is, most likely the reason I don’t have any trouble with Firefox is that it simply isn’t a big target, and the project is small and agile enough to respond to any generic threats that threaten both it and IE. However, none of that changes the fact that my computer has fewer troubles with Firefox than Internet Explorer.

Yes, there are sites that will not load properly, or even at all, with Firefox. For the most part however, these are few and far between. One of these is the login/launch game option in World War 2 Online. Furthermore, these bugs are few and far between compared to the annoyances IE has put me through. One of the most annoying is the drop-down history menu in the URL bar that will freeze IE if there are too many items there, another is the inability of Explorer to remember logins and passwords to certain sites. Firefox does away with both issues, it’ll even remember your PayPal login – if you let it (we wouldn’t recommend that -ed.)

Having tried Firefox, I must say that Microsoft has a lot to do in order to sway me back. First on the list are the security issues, but those would only level the playing field. As far as features go, Microsoft is now in the unenviable position of trying to woo the converted – it has to offer something extra. This will be an especially difficult task, given the almost unwarranted number of plug-ins and options available for Firefox.

Unfortunately, these extensions break with what seems to be every new release of the browser. We hope this is fixed now that it is feature-locked in version 1.0, but suspect it may not be the case. 1.0 does have some nifty improvements over the predecessor, like Live Bookmarks (think: RSS), but those with highly customized versions of their older browser might want to hang onto that for a while, at least until version 1.0 becomes final.

Thunderbird

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Sister project to Firefox is Mozilla Thunderbird. Firefox took the browser, Thunderbird is the email client. One of my favorite features of Netscape Communicator 4 was its email, it was head and shoulders above Outlook Express and comparable many ways to the expensive Outlook.

The gap between Outlook and its little brother Outlook Express has since broadened into a chasm worthy of the Grand Canyon, but Thunderbird straddles the middle ground nicely. It does not have all the funky features of Outlook, such as being able to compose fancy emails in Word or setting up ‘reminder notes’, but it is a vastly superior mail client.

For starters, it deals with multiple email accounts much better. Whereas Outlook permits multiple accounts, it uses one single Inbox and then forces the user to rely on its unreliable filters to move messages into the proper new folder. This is needlessly complex and annoying, and I know of few people with but a single email account. Being a small program, Thunderbird feels a lot crisper. These are differences of a tenth of a second in loading times, but for the purposes of human perception, it feels a lot crisper. Think of how laggy mouse control was a major irritation in Deus Ex: Invisible War, and you have the right idea.

That being said, Thunderbird suffers more from an unfamiliar interface than Firefox does. Most email clients, by default, put the reply on top of the quoted text, but Thunderbird is initially set to replying below. Fixing this was more difficult than one would imagine, since the option isn’t under the menu you’d expect. Rather than being under Tools -> Options and then the Composition or Advanced sub-menus, quote settings are under Tools -> Account Settings. Each account can be individually customized from here, but we’re still baffled as to why Account Settings has the “Composition & Addressing” sub-menu when Tools -> Options already has a Composition category of its own.

Conclusion

The success of Firefox, and by default, of Mozilla itself, is really surprising. The project suffered several disastrous failures – from Netscape’s collapse, through the beta Mozilla-Netscape release under AOL, AOL shutting down the division before later recreating it as a separate foundation – few would have believed in the project after all that.

Firefox is a damn fine browser, better than IE by a clear though not dominant margin at this point in time, but it owes its success more to Microsoft’s stumbling than any huge advantages. Tabbed browsing isn’t a make-it-or-break-it feature, and while Firefox is undoubtedly more secure than pre-SP2 IE, it has never faced the onslaught of attacks that Microsoft has.

Thunderbird, on the other hand, is a smash success when compared to both of Microsoft’s offerings. From Microsoft’s perspective, Thunderbird is likely uncomfortably close to Outlook’s functionality. It doesn’t just fill the gap between OE and Outlook, it could potentially replace Outlook, given time and effort.

While I haven’t had an opportunity to test its spam blocking since my private address doesn’t get spam any more, reports are positive about its effectiveness. It is completely free of course, vastly superior to Outlook Express and while not as feature-rich as Outlook, in terms of not having Reminder Notes and other jazz, it is more capable as an email client and more importantly, it’s free.

It’s not often that a company succeeds from beyond the grave, but you can almost hear Jim Clark and Marc Andreessen shout out “from hell’s heart, I stab at thee Microsoft!” Netscape’s release of its source will at the very least give Microsoft a thorn in its side for the foreseeable future, at worst, it could mean the end of Outlook and Internet Explorer – though the latter scenario is far-fetched today.