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Thursday, Nov 26, 2009
As the much-touted, long-delayed open-source browser nears the version 1.0 finish line, it may give AOL a new weapon against Microsoft.
Mar 12, 2002 | "Hebrew is now supported on Solaris."
Thus reads the first line of the release notes for the most recent version of Mozilla, the open-source Web browser born out of Netscape's decline. And right there, you can learn all you really need to know about why free, or open-source, software is so vital -- even after being declared a has-been by its competitors, or even worse, un-American.
What the sentence means is that users of computers running Sun Microsystems' Solaris operating system can now download a version of Mozilla that supports the Hebrew alphabet. I don't know of any good statistics that might tell us how many Solaris-using, Hebrew-speaking Mozilla fans are out there in the world, although the strength of Israel's software industry might be a hint that the number isn't tiny. But numbers are beside the point. If only one such person existed, and that person wanted to write the code that would make Mozilla display Hebrew properly on a Sun computer, that would be enough.
Open-source software development is based on the premise that by tapping the collective power of all those people with their individual needs, you can create programs that are (a) responsive to real-world needs rather than marketing dictates, and (b) more reliable and bug-free than their proprietary versions, because so many people are testing them and submitting bug reports and fixes.
Linux has long been the flag-carrier for this methodology. But another very important test case has been Mozilla -- a highly hyped project that dominated the tech press headlines at its launch four years ago but has since been dismissed by competitors (read: Microsoft) as hopelessly behind schedule and just not very good. As Internet Explorer grabbed a bigger and bigger chunk of market share, Mozilla has increasingly been cited as an example of open-source failure rather than triumph.
That may be about to change. I was reading the release notes to Mozilla this Monday morning because my interest had been piqued by a report that, according to "inside sources" at AOL-TimeWarner, the giant media conglomerate was finally going to follow through on its plan to use Mozilla's "rendering engine," Gecko, as the heart of its Web browser, instead of Internet Explorer. (The "rendering engine" is the browser's software core that does the heavy work of taking HTML code and turning it into a legible layout on your screen.)
If true, the news is highly significant -- probably the single most dramatic development in the browser wars since AOL bought Netscape in late 1998. On one side, Microsoft remains determined to control the online world with .NET and an arsenal of proprietarily coded software applications. On the other, AOL-TimeWarner begins embracing open systems and open-source software as it seeks its own position of world dominance (through its proprietary network and media).
But is Mozilla really good enough to give IE a run for the money? The last time I tried it, a year and a half ago, it was so buggy, slow and lacking in features that I gave up in disgust after a week of software pain. Ever since, I had dismissed as overly idealistic advocacy the mumbling I kept hearing from various developers who touted each new Mozilla "milestone" release as incrementally better than the one before. The news about AOL, however, encouraged me to download version 0.9.8. (0.9.9 is supposed to be imminent, and excitement within the Mozilla world is building about the upcoming release of a full-fledged 1.0. Meanwhile, the commercial Netscape browser, which is now largely based on older versions of Mozilla, is still available.)
As I write these words, I've been running Mozilla for Windows for almost five hours. While that's obviously not enough time to make a detailed technical appraisal, I can say that Mozilla has already become my default browser and that it is as fast and slick and full-featured as I want. It may not be perfect, but there's no denying that it is for real. What's more, Mozilla isn't just a usable browser -- it's a powerful reminder of why free software engenders excitement and passion from both its users and its creators. And if AOL is really going to put some muscle behind Mozilla, well then, life in the browser world is about to get interesting.
