Mozilla

What Is the Point of Mozilla?

Glyn Moody — Mon, 10 Sep 2018 13:07:36 +0000

Is Mozilla a software organization or an advocacy group?

Few journeys in the world of open source have been as exciting as Mozilla's. Its birth was dramatic. Netscape, the pioneering company whose Netscape Navigator browser shaped the early Web, had enjoyed the most successful IPO up until then, valuing the 18-month-year-old company at nearly $3 billion. That was in 1995. Three years later, the company was in freefall, as the browser wars took their toll, and Microsoft continued to gain market share with its Internet Explorer, launched alongside Windows 95. Netscape's response was bold and unprecedented. On January 27, 1998, it announced that it was making the source code for the next generation of its web browser freely available under a GPL-like license.

Although of huge symbolic importance for the still-young Free Software world—the term "open source" was coined only a month after Netscape's announcement—the release and transformation of the code for what became the Mozilla browser suite was fraught with difficulties. The main problem was trying to re-write the often problematic legacy code of Netscape Navigator. Mozilla 1.0 was finally released in 2002, but by then, Internet Explorer dominated the sector. The failure of the Mozilla browser to make much of an impact ultimately spurred development of the completely new Firefox browser. Version 1.0 was launched in 2004, after three years of work.

Microsoft's failure to update its flabby Internet Explorer 6 browser for more than five years meant that successive releases of Firefox were steadily gaining market share—and fans. As I wrote in Linux Journal in June 2008:

Three things are striking about the recent launch of Firefox 3. First, the unanimity about the quality of the code: practically everyone thinks it's better in practically every respect. Secondly, the way in which the mainstream media covered its launch: it was treated as a normal, important tech story—gone are the days of supercilious anecdotes about those wacky, sandal-wearing free software anoraks. And finally—and perhaps most importantly—the scale and intensity of participation by the millions of people who have downloaded the software in the last week.

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Looking Back: What Was Happening Ten Years Ago?

Glyn Moody — Tue, 27 Feb 2018 15:48:52 +0000

by Glyn Moody

That was then, this is now: what's next for the Open Source world?

A decade passes so quickly. And yet, ten years for open source is half its life. How have things changed in those ten years? So much has happened in this fast-moving and exciting world, it's hard to remember. But we're in luck. The continuing availability of Linux Journal's past issues and website means we have a kind of time capsule that shows us how things were, and how we saw them.

Ten years ago, I was writing a regular column for Linux Journal, much like this one. Looking through the 80 or so posts from that time reveals a world very different from the one we inhabit today. The biggest change from then to now can be summed up in a word: Microsoft. A decade back, Microsoft towered over the world of computing like no other company. More important, it (rightly) saw open source as a threat and took continuing, wide-ranging action to weaken it in every way it could.

Its general strategy was to spread FUD (fear, uncertainty and doubt). At every turn, it sought to question the capability and viability of open source. It even tried to convince the world that we no longer needed to talk about free software and open source—anyone remember "mixed source"?

Alongside general mud-flinging, Microsoft's weapon of choice to undermine and thwart open source was a claim of massive patent infringement across the entire ecosystem. The company asserted that the Linux kernel violated 42 of its patents; free software graphical interfaces another 65; the OpenOffice.org suite of programs, 45; and assorted other free software 83 more. The strategy was two-fold: first to squeeze licensing fees from companies that were using open source, and second, perhaps even more important, to paint open source as little more than a pale imitation of Microsoft's original and brilliant ideas.

The patent battle rumbled on for years. And although it did generate considerable revenues for the company, it failed dismally in its aim to discredit free software.

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Hats Off to Mozilla

Doc Searls — Fri, 02 Jan 2015 21:10:00 +0000

by Doc Searls

Firefox turned ten years old last November and celebrated the occasion with a new version (33.1) that featured a much-welcomed developer edition. It also featured a "forget" button that lets you backspace through time, blowing away history, cookies and open tabs: one more privacy tool for the shed.

Those were two among many new moves by Mozilla, Firefox's parent, all siding with individuals leaning against two prevailing winds that have blown across the on-line world for at least a decade.

The first is centralization.

Ten years ago, we still were in what Tantek Çelik calls "the heyday of the independent Web". Back then, it was easy to homestead on the Net's frontier with your own domain, site, blog, e-mail and so on. "We all assumed that it was sort of our inevitable destiny that the Web was open, the Internet was open, everyone had their own identity", Tantek says. Now most of us live and work in feudal fiefdoms: the Kingdom of Google, the Duchy of Facebook, the Empire of Apple, the Electorate of Amazon, the Principality of Twitter. That we can travel between these castles does not diminish our dependent stature.

On mobile devices, we also live inside the castles of carriers, plus every app's own walled garden inside those castles. This is very different from the personal computing world, where the Net and the Web are the infrastructural contexts. The Net by nature (its base protocols) has no national boundaries, no tariffs, no "roaming" between countries and carrier networks. The Web by nature is all about links. But apps aren't about links. They are silos by design. Worse, we don't acquire them in the open marketplace, but through company stores inside Apple, Google and Microsoft.

The second is surveillance.

We are watched constantly on the commercial Net: in our browsers, though our mobile devices and now by our cars as well. Our overlords rationalize surveillance with five assumptions:

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FlashVideoReplacer Continues To Improve

Michael Reed — Thu, 03 Feb 2011 14:00:00 +0000

by Michael Reed

We covered FlashVideoReplacer, a video add-on for Firefox, last year, but the new 2.x series offers several improvements. We look at what the new version offers and ask the developer a few questions.

[Update April 2 2011: Gonçalves got back in touch with me to tell me about the latest updates to FlashVideoReplacer. The updates are quite considerable so I've pasted his email to the end of this article. For example, the plugin now does not require Flash at all.]

As for how the add-on works, I got the information straight from Caio Gonçalves aka Lovinlinux, the developer:

When you visit a video page of a supported web site, the extension catches the direct link to the video embedded in the page, then removes the flash player object and inject a new object using the direct video link. As a result, the video is played with a different plugin on the original page, without the need to download it first. In order to work, the user needs a compatible plugin or standalone player, capable of playing at least mp4, which is the most common format. However, support for other formats like flv, mov, wmv and m4v is required for some videos.

This is a boon for Linux users as flash-based video players are normally comparatively inefficient on Linux, particularly for full-screen video playback. For FlashVideoReplacer to work, the user must have a working Flash plugin and a multimedia plugin browser installed. According to a survey recently carried out the the add-on site, Gecko Media Player, an MPlayer based plugin, is the most popular choice for Linux, although other plugins do work.

At the current time, the plugin supports video from YouTube, Vimeo, MetaCafe and a few adult orientated sites. Support for other sites, including Ustreme and Blip TV, is planned for version 2.03. As before, it's possible to disable the add on for some supported sites, but there is now an option to retain the user notifications when this is done.

The add on now offers a set of options that control how the intercepted video feed should be presented, and it's possible to have the video automatically open in a new window, a new tab, a stand-alone player or to prompt on a video-by-video basis. Facilities to download videos or to simply copy the URL of the video are hidden away in an addition to the standard Firefox context menu. This might allow some people to manage without a separate video downloading add-on, but it's worth noting that some of the dedicated add-ons have more facilities and support for a broader range of sites.

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