Ten Years Ago Today: Netscape Releases Communicator Source Code (MozillaZine) [LWN.net]

Or, for those who hate TinyURLs...

Posted Apr 2, 2008 3:33 UTC (Wed) by ldo (subscriber, #40946) [Link]

http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000069.html

Or, for those who hate TinyURLs...

Posted Apr 2, 2008 11:01 UTC (Wed) by rsidd (subscriber, #2582) [Link]

I think that's only part of the story.  The <i>other</i> part is that at least two other
codebases, written from scratch, have appeared in that time: Opera and Khtml/WebKit.  While
Firefox is doing better than those on the desktop, Opera is doing very well in the embedded
space, and since Apple adopted it, Webkit is becoming very popular too, to the point that
Gecko-based browsers like Epiphany are testing the waters with it.  These do nearly everything
Gecko can, but are much lighter and, in WebKit's case, cleaner (which is the main reason Apple
chose khtml over gecko).

Plus, Netscape 4 sucked, at least on Linux.  It was truly dreadful.

So tossing out that codebase may not have been as bad a choice as it seems to JWZ and Spolsky.
It's just that the rewrite didn't go as cleanly as Netscape hoped.  Opera took about 2 years
to go from zero to their first public release (1996): why couldn't Netscape have expected
similar results?

Or, for those who hate TinyURLs...

Posted Apr 2, 2008 21:49 UTC (Wed) by man_ls (subscriber, #15091) [Link]

Plus, Netscape 4 sucked, at least on Linux.

Netscape 4 (Communicator) sucked on Mac OS X too, and most probably on Windows. The reason is that Netscape wanted to own the web and so they bundled a lot of useless applications together to build a ghastly "suite". Bloated (for the time), slow and monolithic. And being a "suite" didn't even bring any further benefit to users apart from reading HTML mail, which was a bad idea from the start -- and which could be better accomplished using other mechanisms. Compare even with MS Office, where there are separate applications which know how to play together just fine. So IMHO the demise of Communicator was primarily a result of bad judgement and bad engineering.

There was no need to throw the whole codebase over just to unbundle this monster. In fact, the result of this absurd rewriting effort was... another bloated suite: SeaMonkey, which would not have reached significant market share in a million years. It took a new effort (relatively lean Firefox and Thunderbird) to start regaining users. A similar reengineering process could have taken place without getting into such a mess, but who knows... those were crazy years.

Or, for those who hate TinyURLs...

Posted Apr 4, 2008 4:12 UTC (Fri) by muwlgr (guest, #35359) [Link]

I like Seamonkey (call me an exception, but I liked even Netscape 3.x and 4.x) and currently I
am not ready to replace it with whatever software combined. Besides, combined
Firefox+Thunderbird memory requirements are always going to be bigger than those of single
Seamonkey. This is an argument for me, in a big way.

Funny

Posted Apr 4, 2008 22:03 UTC (Fri) by man_ls (subscriber, #15091) [Link]

I went to check your egregious comments about memory requirements and... guess what, you are right! At least top and ps say so, firefox and thunderbird (actually iceweasel and icedove) take each one almost as much memory as seamonkey (iceape), both with several pages and mail open.

This might have mattered in a world where memory was scarce, but right now I'm not so sure. But what really makes it irrelevant is that almost all people use webmail nowadays. Apart from Outlook at work, that is. If you are not proficient in Linux it can be a real pain to configure a mail client, and even so on a multi-server setup it is not trivial.

BTW, iceape on etch pulls the bonobo libraries with it, and I really hate those things. Why oh why?

Funny

Posted Apr 7, 2008 9:36 UTC (Mon) by Cato (subscriber, #7643) [Link]

Actually memory usage does matter for the "mini Linux for old PCs" world - e.g. the laptop
next to this one is running Damn Small Linux (DSL, http://damnsmalllinux.org/ ) in just 96 MB
RAM, including a dynamic RAM disk (because it's running from a slow USB drive), buffer cache
and applications within that RAM. DSL is within the top 10 on http://distrowatch.com, which
rather surprised me but shows there is a lot of interest in this - recycle an old PC that used
to run Win98/NT. DeLi Linux is even lighter and can apparently run in just 16 MB including a
GUI.

By default DSL includes Firefox (old version, but newer ones are available as DSL packages)
and Dillo (very light browser), but Opera is really a better fit on this laptop as it's almost
as functional as Firefox but much faster on old hardware. You can install Opera with a
'mydsl-load opera-xxx.unc' command even on a low-RAM PC like this.

Sylpheed is the email client in DSL which is very light but doesn't do IMAP. DSL is really
nice as you can easily upgrade it with a single command to include Debian's apt-get, and
another command to get the full GNU utilities (default is BusyBox) - and it already includes a
lightweight version of vim, which is the main reason I use this rather than Puppy.

Puppy Linux is similar, and bundles Seamonkey for just this reason, though personally I think
it's better to just use Firefox/Opera and webmail if you have it.

Anyway - don't underestimate the appeal of turning a really old PC into a functional Linux
box, in which memory requirements are still a big issue.

Funny

Posted Apr 7, 2008 16:02 UTC (Mon) by man_ls (subscriber, #15091) [Link]

I currently own an Asus Eee (512 MB), a Mac mini PowerPC (256 MB), an old Dell Latitude (128 MB) and a decTOP (128 MB), plus my girlfriend's Nokia 770 (64 MB) and an NSLU2 (32 MB) as server. I can tell you I sympathize with your point of view. Still, I'm not sure it is relevant for the vast majority of users.

On all of those computers except the NSLU2 I run firefox (or iceweasel), and I can access Gmail perfectly. It is a bit slow to write mails, but memory doesn't seem to be the problem. If I had to access any POP or IMAP servers maybe I would consider iceape, but currently only my main desktop runs icedove (and not too often).

Or, for those who hate TinyURLs...

Posted Apr 3, 2008 0:19 UTC (Thu) by sbergman27 (subscriber, #10767) [Link]

"""
So tossing out that codebase may not have been as bad a choice as it seems to JWZ and Spolsky.
It's just that the rewrite didn't go as cleanly as Netscape hoped. 
"""

Joel's point is that it usually doesn't.

The browser could have been overhauled subsystem by subsystem, yielding a gradually improving
Communicator, rather than a horrid product for years and years, while their only hope for
salvation lay in pieces on the floor.  By the time they had a product to offer again, the
world had gone on, and forgotten who they were.  By the time they had a product again, that
big blue 'E' *was* "The Internet".  We are still paying for the overconfidence, and total lack
of marketing sence exhibited by the project back in the heady days of the dot.com bubble.

Bundling

Posted Apr 2, 2008 11:23 UTC (Wed) by eru (subscriber, #2753) [Link]

Ten years ago today, Netscape owned 70% of the market, and IE was at about 20%.

Since then, one of those browsers came pre-installed on Windows (the tight bundling also started about 10 years ago). And Windows comes pre-installed on almost every new PC. Given this, it is really amazing that Firefox and other non-IE browsers have even the market share they now have...