Mozilla's revenge

Four years is a long time to spend creating a Web browser. In Internet time, as we used to reckon it, that's at least a couple of centuries. Since the release of the source code to Netscape Navigator in March 1998, stock market bubbles have boomed and busted, free software has gone from the Next Big Thing to yesterday's news, and Microsoft has ... well, OK, some things haven't changed at all. Microsoft is still the undisputed master of the software universe. In 1998, Microsoft's share of the Windows browser market passed Netscape's for the first time. Today, it owns around 90 percent.

If AOL follows through on basing the AOL browser on open-source software, it could strike a major blow at Microsoft. But just by continuing to fund and support the Mozilla project for the last three years, the company deserves some credit.

As do the developers who are actually doing the work. Mozilla today is so much more impressive than it was a year and a half ago that it made me feel like I wanted to be a hacker all over again, just as I did when I first began to tap into the fervor that was fueling the growth of Linux and Apache. Within an hour of downloading Mozilla, I was hanging out in an IRC chat room listening to Mozilla fans discuss bugs in the 0.9.9 version, and I was reading a Mozilla news group dedicated to versions of Mozilla for Unix operating systems, in a so-far-futile attempt to find out exactly who was responsible for fixing the Solaris version's Hebrew support.

The default home page for Mozilla leads off with the word "Congratulations!" Shortly thereafter, it asks the question "What needs to be done?" It strongly encourages new users to get involved, to report bugs, suggest features and become part of the Mozilla community. If you dig deeper, into the news groups and chat rooms and mailing lists, you find ample evidence that that community does exist.

Free software, it appears, doesn't need to follow a time line, if there is enough energy behind its development. To a company obsessed with quarterly earnings reports, a four-year time scale is unimaginably long -- but for geeks who like to hack, what's a year here or a year there? Progress can accrete -- it doesn't matter if the software improves at a glacial pace, if it never stops improving. Eventually it will get really, really good.

Ironically, Microsoft itself has always understood this principle. Notorious for buggy, nearly unusable first versions of products, it has taken over market after market by incrementally improving its software (we'll put aside, for the moment, that other nasty habit it has of illegally leveraging its monopoly power) until it arrives at a blockbuster. .NET naysayers should take notice of that fact -- Microsoft will keep tweaking it until it is unstoppable, unless it is met by an equally irresistible force.

AOL is the leading corporate contender for the position of "most likely to challenge Microsoft to a sumo wrestling death match." Robin Miller's report on NewsForge suggests that, in addition to incorporating Mozilla elements in the AOL browser, the company is also boosting its use of Linux-based operating systems in its back end, for two very good reasons: They're cheaper, and they mean AOL isn't reliant on other companies for control of the code that runs AOL's Web servers.

Could AOL, as part of its strategic positioning against Microsoft, also tap the people power of free software? The prospect, given the ancient antagonism between the Net's geeky elite and AOL's mainstream middle-of-the-road mandate, might once have seemed absurd. But as I installed Mozilla with ease Monday morning, and then gaped with delighted surprise at how well it worked, I began to wonder.

Mozilla is a way into the world of free software for the average user. Linux is too technically challenging for most regular computer users, and many other open-source software programs are targeted at niche markets. But anyone can download, install and use Mozilla, and then anyone can report a bug. And then, who knows? It might get even better.

Hebrew is now supported on Solaris. By itself, the sentence is weirdly enigmatic. But it's a heck of a lot more significant than the simple fact that some users of Sun hardware can now render the Hebrew alphabet accurately while Web surfing. It means that somewhere out there, someone right now is hacking a few lines of code that will make life better for someone else, and we all get to benefit.

This story has been corrected.

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