Today, Chrome is the web browser that dominates the online market, by virtue of being the home browser for Android, which dominates the mobile market. Hooray. #AnyoneButMicrosoft.
But before that, the web’s browser was Firefox, which is still pretty solid on the desktop. Firefox is the progeny of Mozilla, and the story of Mozilla’s most successful product, the Firefox web browser, goes even further back into the history of the web itself. Interestingly, Firefox’s lineage brings it surprisingly close to other web browsers that it competed with – especially the web browser with a big, blue ‘e’ for its logo…
How far back do we have to go? 1991, and in the United States, then-Senator Al Gore passed the “High Performance Computing Act of 1991“. This is the infamous “Gore Bill”, which prompted him years later to be misquoted as having claimed to “invent the Internet”, as we never stop hearing about from right-wing trolls.
The funding from the Gore Bill got spent in part at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA), where it paid one Marc Andreessen to lead the team which would develop a web browser called “Mosaic“, originally on the Unix X-Windows platform. Andreessen later left the NCSA to form his own corporation, Mosaic Communications Corporation, which would eventually become Netscape Communications Corporation.
Meanwhile, a company called Spyglass, Inc. also formed, to sell software developed at the NCSA. Spyglass bought a license from Mosaic. Here comes a twist: In 1995, Microsoft bought a license for Spyglass Mosaic to the tune of $2 million USD, which they then modified and renamed it as Internet Explorer. Yes, they’re related!
The name should give you an idea, but Netscape Communications Corporation went on to release Netscape Navigator, the original browser on non-Microsoft systems. Navigator, in fact, was already thriving before Microsoft even had a web browser. The fact that Microsoft snapped the Mosaic code out from under them and bundled it with Microsoft Windows was in fact the basis for the United States’ antitrust lawsuit against Microsoft, later to be changed to a settlement under the administration of currently out-going president George W. Bush.
Antitrust or not, Netscape was definitely on its way out. In its dying years, it formed the Mozilla Foundation to release the source code for Netscape (which had been code-named ‘Mozilla’) as free/open source software. Under whom? None other than geek and hacker legend Jamie Zawinski, who tells the story of the story of the origins of Mozilla here in his own unmistakable style. It was Zawinski who actually came up with the name “Mozilla” in the first place, and also tells the story of the Mozilla development and launch party here.
But what if I told you instead that Firefox actually came from the 1982 Clint Eastwood movie? Or that an arcade video game of the same name was inspired by the movie?
I’d be lying, that’s what if. They have nothing to do with the software. JWZ was there, go with his story. Or check out some more of my computing history gallery here.
