Five years of Mozilla [LWN.net]

[This article was contributed by Joe 'Zonker' Brockmeier]

It's hard to believe that it's been five years since Netscape released the source code for what was supposed to be Netscape Communicator 5.0 under the Netscape Public License (NPL), and less than a year since Mozilla 1.0 went "gold." In that time, Microsoft has managed to dominate the browser market, Netscape got swallowed up by AOL and the Mozilla project has tackled milestone after milestone to deliver an Open Source browser — though perhaps not as quickly as many would have liked.

More than 200,000 bug reports later, the Mozilla project has put out an excellent browser and a codebase that's being used in a wide array of Open Source and commercial applications. Perhaps even more important than the code itself, Netscape's decision to plunge into Open Source helped to bring the Open Source debate further out into the, well, open. The decision to pursue Open Source was made when relatively few people had heard about this thing called Linux.

You could say that Mozilla is more than the sum of its parts, especially when you consider all that's been done with those parts. Mozilla's Gecko, which replaced the original Netscape layout engine, is being used in the proprietary Netscape offering, AOL's Mac OS X client, a native Mac OS X browser called Camino, the popular Galeon browser and several other projects. It's also being used in products like ActiveState's Komodo, an IDE for Perl, PHP, Python and other popular Open Source languages.

The project has also designed a cross-platform installer (XPInstall), a Document Object Model (DOM) Inspector, and several development tools that are now being used on projects wholly unrelated to Web browsers. The Bugzilla bug tracking system is used by quite a few Open Source projects (and possibly by a few commercial companies behind closed doors). Bonsai and Tinderbox are also by-products of the Mozilla effort that are being widely used elsewhere.

Mozilla's wealth of features has also attracted some criticism. Some feel that Mozilla, with its huge array of options, is too slow and bloated. Apple's decision to use KHTML rather than Gecko in the Safari browser didn't go unnoticed, either. In the article "Browser Innovation, Gecko and the Mozilla Project," Mozilla's Chief Lizard Wrangler, Mitchell Baker, writes:

Some see this as traumatic or as a mark of doom... We would have preferred to have Apple use Gecko or collaborate with us on the development of the Camino browser, but providing an alternative to an OS-sponsored browser is nothing new to us. The key goal of the Mozilla project is to help keep content on the web open and help keep access to that content from being controlled by a single source. Apple's decision to ship a browser based on an open source rendering engine, with a focus on standards compliance, is a good thing for the big picture goal.

Judging by the project's recently-updated development roadmap, the Mozilla folks have taken the criticism seriously. The new mission for Mozilla might be summed up as "do less, but better" and a move away from the "swiss army knife" approach. The new development roadmap calls for a switch from the current browser component to the standalone (soon to be renamed) Phoenix browser and an increased focus on the Minotaur mail component. It also calls for a move away from the 1.0 branch to the 1.4 branch when 1.4 becomes stable.

More importantly, though less visible to the majority of Mozilla's users, is the change in the development model. The current model is being replaced by a meritocracy where a few project "drivers" will be responsible for particular components of the project. From the roadmap:

It is time for Mozilla to "return to normalcy": great software is originated by one or a few hackers building up and leading a larger team of people who test, clean up, extend, and grow to join or replace the first few. Code review, like testing, is an auditing procedure that cannot make excellent code from mediocre input.

The end goal, according to the new roadmap, is to produce a simpler browser with the potential to have advanced functionality through optional toolkit applications. Kind of an a la carte browser, if you will where additional components can be added easily — but are not required. This should be a big win for proponents of a scaled-down browser.

Mozilla 1.4 alpha was released on April 1st (no, really), and the final 1.4 release is likely around the end of May or beginning of June. The ideal release date for 1.4 is given as May 21, but we all know about ideal release dates. The alpha for 1.4 actually seems very stable, and faster than previous versions of Mozilla, at least based on my experience over the past week or so.

If the project sticks to the proposed roadmap, the next five years look very good for Mozilla.

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