back to article Firefox's birthday present to us: Teaching tech titans about DIY upstarts

It's hard to believe it now, but not too long ago the web was dangerously close to being owned by one vendor: Microsoft. As mainstream users came to equate Internet Explorer's logo with the Web, Microsoft worked to lock in its advantage with increasingly proprietary technology like ActiveX. It surely would have done so, too, …

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        1. Greg J Preece

          Re: Revisionism

          Only because the "web cognoscenti" only care about software made in the USofA. Opera, like Nokia, have always been dissed by the ones that make the official histories.

          Fuck me, have the Opera fanboys gotten bad enough now that they're calling out racism as the reason no-one uses it?

          You know FF is an international project, right?

          1. Anonymous Coward
            Anonymous Coward

            Re: Revisionism

            "racism"? Do me a favour.

            If it's so "international" why, for example, has it just underlined favour as a misspelling? Oh yes, because this international project only uses English/United States [en-us] unless you manually install an alternative. As do all those other equally international products like Windows, Ubuntu etc, etc, etc.

            A small point but it supports the point they made. The USofA bias is real and not just in Firefox.

            1. ThomH

              Re: Revisionism (@OsricTheGreat)

              Your contention is that there's some ill-defined elite of Internet overlords that, behind closed doors, configure their machines to British English, download all the browsers, type 'color' into a text box and if no spelling correction hint occurs then allow the browser to succeed in the market?

            2. Greg J Preece

              Re: Revisionism

              Oh yes, because this international project only uses English/United States [en-us] unless you manually install an alternative.

              They default the language settings to their largest markets? THOSE DEVIOUS BASTARDS! Clearly this is all part of a plot to take down the valiant Opera!

        2. toadwarrior
          FAIL

          Re: Revisionism

          Most people don't know where opera comes from. They don't use it because they do not like it.

  1. naive
    Thumb Up

    Firefox not only prevented that we would still be stuck with an internet based on IE6 flaws, but also provided Linux/X11 desktops with an excellent browser. Without this, the acceptance of Linux as a server alternative in the enterprise would have been lower because at the time MS was still fixing windows 2000, kde/firefox was a good platform to demonstrate the capabilities of Linux... look how beautiful and fast... and btw it can run Oracle and Sybase for months without bluescreens and memory leaks.

    MS should however be credited for the fact that they were not a patent troll with patents like: "back button in a program to display information", "refresh button in...", "ability to store and display weblinks (aka bookmarks)"....

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Unfortunately the reason MS weren't patent trolls here...

      ...was simply that they didn't get the internet at all in any shape or form, so didn't realise how important a browser would be. That's down to short-sighted stupidity, not corporate ethics.

  2. cosmogoblin
    Linux

    Vendor lockin

    "We are in the middle of locking ourselves into our respective mobile platforms"

    So many people already have.

    I've replaced Windows with Linux to loads of people who don't know much about computers, giving them improved security and reliability, and every one of them has found it easier to use.

    But I can't do this for anybody who owns an iPhone, because all of their music is on iTunes.

    This of course won't change - Apple needed to release iTunes on Windows to suck people into their ecosystem, but releasing a Linux version would simply give them the option, when they decide to take the plunge, to go elsewhere than Apple. People aren't locking themselves into a mobile platform; they're locking themselves into a whole ecosystem.

    1. Sean Timarco Baggaley
      FAIL

      Re: Vendor lockin

      Vendor Lock-in was the norm. Open platforms are, and always have been, an exception. The Atari ST didn't run Amiga software. The Commodore 64 didn't run software written for the Sinclair ZX Spectrum. And so on. The only "open" platform is the IBM PC Compatible, and even that was force open by Compaq's clean-room reverse-engineering project.

      Nobody expects to be able to run an iOS app on an Android device, but then, you'd need to redesign the UIs for each version anyway, or you'd end up with a piss-poor lowest-common-denominator interface that nobody would want to touch with a 10-foot stylus, let alone their fingertips.

      "But I can't do this for anybody who owns an iPhone, because all of their music is on iTunes."

      You claim to have installed Linux on people's PCs and they find it "easier to use"—presumably these people never, ever, play any games— yet you can't copy some MP4 files out of a folder named "iTunes Media"?

      You do know iTunes hasn't DRM on music for years now, right?

      (It was Steve Jobs who convinced the music publishers to drop DRM, incidentally. Someday, the more rabid fanatics and extremists in this industry might at least have the decency to give him a little credit for that.)

      1. cosmogoblin

        Re: Vendor lockin

        "You claim to have installed Linux on people's PCs and they find it "easier to use"—presumably these people never, ever, play any games"

        That's right. I've helped gamers update their system, and I always recommend Windows 7, unless I think they can handle dual-boot.

        "yet you can't copy some MP4 files out of a folder named "iTunes Media"?"

        *I* can do that, yes. iTunes has a more insidious lock-in - every time I've tried to convince an iTunes user to move, they don't want to "lose iTunes". I explain that you can download music from other places, but they're not interested. This compounds the other problems.

        "You do know iTunes hasn't DRM on music for years now, right?"

        Nice in theory, but you still have to do a bit of work with old music downloaded before the DRM-free era. This is my fault - basically I undersold the alternatives. When I said "it's a bit of work but it can be done", they said "sounds too complicated, no thanks"; I should have said "give it to me for half a day and pay me £30 and I'll sort it for you". This was a marketing fail; apparently I don't have Apple's skill in this respect!

      2. Mark .

        Re: Vendor lockin

        Open may be not the norm, but it's worth noting the advantages of such platforms when we have them.

        Not sure what nonsense you're on about having to redesign UIs for every device - on Android, you write apps sensibly, so it scales to any resolution. It's on IOS that people seem to have locked themselves into a single resolution, which has now backfired as these days, IOS runs of loads of different resolutions (3 iphone resolutions, and god knows what for ipads).

        The problem with itunes is not DRM (which the OP didn't mention - nice straw man), but when itunes scrambles the files. It doesn't have to do this when used on a sensible OS like Windows, but it does seem to be the default for managing software on ipods - so perhaps the OP is referring to a similar thing for iphones.

        "Someday, the more rabid fanatics and extremists in this industry might at least have the decency to give him a little credit for that."

        *Splutter* Jobs receives nothing but praise and credit, for all kinds of things he did or didn't do (and no, it wasn't Jobs who got rid of DRM). It's particularly funny that you say this, when you aren't even willing to give credit to open platforms.

        Tell you what, I'll give thanks to Apple, the day I hear Apple fans give thanks to all the other companies that have helped or influenced Apple products. But you know what? I never ever do.

  3. mike acker

    understanding the "cloud"

    =" Music and other content are easier to move, but still painful."

    ah, --understanding!! the "cloud" wants to own your entertainment properties and just lease the use of them to you

    cloud must be resisted at every juncture.

    cloud ain't "whats happening" it is a method of control that the industry is attempting to foist upon consumers

  4. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    the web was dangerously close to being owned by one vendor: Microsoft.

    That would be back in the day when it ran, almost exclusively, on Unix?

  5. SilverWave
    Happy

    Firefox had the ad-block extension. FTW

    Firefox was a great Proxomitron replacement.

    Extensions were/are great.

    Very secure compared to IE.

    No active X.

    User in control.

    And this open source idea was odd but intriguing.

    Firefox the gateway drug to Linux :-)

  6. mattymil
    Pint

    I can dig it

    Great article.

  7. mdc

    ...

    What the hell kinda drivel is this article? Since when has The Register been sponsored by Mozilla?

    I should add, also, that alternative browsers started the HTML work-around NIGHTMARES that web developers had to go through for what... 6 years? Purely because they couldn't agree on how to implement the W3C standards. As someone who went through all that nonsense back then, 9 times out of 10, it was Firefox which had things wrong, not IE. I wrote perfectly compliant XHTML 1.0 Strict, and it rendered on IE perfectly. Firefox, on the other hand, would have a fit over even the most basic markup.

  8. Photoman-00010002

    Long Live Firefox

    I use Firefox almost exclusively because it is the only browser I know off that provides full support for color profiling. It also runs the Ghostery privacy add-on better than IE9.

  9. TeeCee Gold badge

    Learning from mistakes.

    "[When] Mozilla released the Firefox browser[, r]eviewers lauded Firefox's speed, size..."

    More importantly, they stuck to that and didn't let it become the bloated, sclerotic pile of shit that Netscape evolved into, which was what allowed MS to get their size twelves in the door in the first place.

    I remember when we ditched Netscape Communicator and went Exchange / Outlook / IE, it was like getting double the memory and a liquid helium cooled overclocking job on the CPU.

  10. xj25vm

    Really?

    Please - enough with the one-sided praises and glowing reports of Mozilla's role in the tech history. Can we know a bit more about Mozilla using virtually the same name for a not-for-profit organisation and a commercial entity? Is this sharing of brand awareness, good will and other resources between two entities with such different goals exactly healthy? Can we also talk a little bit about how, arguably one of the most important (and presumably impartial) players in the world of web technology receives the vast majority of its funding from Google - which has such vast interests in the area of web browsers, web advertising, mobile phones, mobile OS's, online office and collaboration suites, webmail and in general controlling and knowing every single bit of our lives? Is it all rosy and positive endevour we are talking about? A bit of critical thinking would be most welcome here.

  11. mhenriday
    Thumb Up

    Kudos to the Mozilla Foundation

    and the Firefox developers - all of us, no matter which browser we use, are in their debt !...

    Henri

  12. turnip

    Really ...?

    So Mozilla paved the way for AJAX, the system that has its origins in XMLHttpRequest developed by Microsoft... (still used today) and CSS with Opera offering the first support of the standard which predates the Mozilla foundation. ActiveX allowed the development of rich content at a time when no other browser could have done so. HTML 5 apps and content would not have ran acceptably on the available hardware if it had been implemented back then. It barely runs acceptably now.

    This is an appalling bit of revisionist history.

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