Netscape successor promises bug-free browsing

NET RESULTS: Meet Mozilla, a browser with a colourful history and a zero marketing budget that doesn't give a fig for making a buck. Danny O'Brien reports

San Francisco doesn't see many launch parties nowadays. Back in the boom, companies that couldn't string a business plan together splurged on six-figure rentals of trapeze artists and free booze on Treasure Island, the man-made island that sits beside the city's Bay Bridge. I was never invited to those.

This month, the biggest noise has been a sweaty party for programmers at a cramped nightclub in the catastrophically less fashionable SoMa industrial district. There were a few free T-shirts if you got there early.

It's the Mozilla 1.0 launch party. Even its name tells a tale. A very complex tale, which involves a great deal of random numbers. You may want to read some other part of the paper while I explain it.

Mozilla is the long, long-awaited successor to Netscape Communicator 4.7, the plucky web browser that fought a brave battle against the competition, Microsoft's Internet Explorer, in the great internet browser wars - and lost.

Microsoft went on to dominate the internet industry with Explorer. Netscape went on to skulk into a merger with AOL. But Netscape's programmers coded on regardless. Now four years on, they have completed their not-so-secret project - Mozilla, a next-generation competitor to the Microsoft's aging browser.

The only problem is, Mozilla is very very late. Like, three to four years late.

So this was going to be called the Mozilla 5.0 party - because it's the fifth year of Mozilla's development, and geeks like version numbers that end in "point zero". Unfortunately, while there were only three other Mozilla parties preceding it, 1.0, 2.0 and 3.0, each were rather more desperate affairs, mournfully attended as the fabled Explorer-killing program failed to make the grade.

But that's okay. The owner of the nightclub that is hosting the party, Jamie Zawinski, explains that the fourth (non-existent party), 4.0, celebrated Mozilla's predecessor, Netscape 5. Which is amusing, you see, because Netscape 5 is non-existent too. In a desperate attempt to sneak a marketing advantage on Microsoft, Netscape released a buggy, beta version of Mozilla which they called Netscape 6.0. It was intended to impress people by being 1.0 better than Explorer 5.0. No-one fell for it.

While Netscape 5.0 never existed, Netscape 6.0 was based on an early prototype of Mozilla. And that was no good, because that was years away from the truly stable, bug-free Mozilla. Which is called Mozilla 1.0. Which this party - the Mozilla 5.0 party, remember? - is in aid of.

Except that the whole "Mozilla 5.0" tag was that Zawinski's idea. Before he ran the nightclub that hosts the party, Zawinski was one of the chief programmers at Netscape. He's had many public fallings out with his ex-employers, both when coding and when party- hosting.

Anyway, after some wrangling, Netscape - or rather, the programmers of Mozilla who are still employed by Netscape - decided to ignore Zawinski, and call it the Mozilla 1.0 party. Just to clear things up.

This is exactly the kind of unremittingly complex tale that drives those of us who rather like Mozilla to utter despair. In any other business, Mozilla's confused meanderings would drive fans and department managers alike to a nervous breakdown.

In an industry that measures most of its product development cycles in months, Mozilla has taken over four years. In a sector where marketing is king, and the hard-sell the key to success, Mozilla has a marketing budget of precisely zero.

In a world where received opinion says that you should never listen to programmers, and always respond to focus groups and customer analyses, Mozilla is run and designed exclusively by its engineers.

And in a world where proprietary secrets, patents and paranoia make profits, Mozilla is completely open. Anyone can download its blueprint. Anyone can add to it, or fix bugs, or suggest improvements. In one of the bravest decisions of computing history, Netscape gave its browser back to the internet in 1998.

Think of it as sending off a life-support podule from a dying company. Nowadays, Netscape, a fully-owned AOL-Time-Warner company, pays for a core staff to work on Mozilla, and is happy to create its own, branded Netscape browsers from whatever they come up with.

But a sizeable component of Mozilla work is done by a scattered gang of programmers across the Net, working on it in their spare time. In a way, Mozilla is written by the internet.

Such openness has a number of effects generally unseen in the world of business.

No deadlines mean slow progress, and complete geek control means incomprehensibly geeky numbering schemes. And openness means open brawling.

Zawinski was not the first to put his arguments with his fellow developers online. Even as I write, several of the highest-ranking Mozilla programmers are scrapping bare-fisted in public web forums. And not just about the name of parties, but detailed, strategic issues.

What feature should go into the next version of Mozilla? How much time should we spend fixing bugs or adding features? Should we listen to the guys at Netscape who pay our wages, or should we listen to the other guys on the internet, who we're supposed to help?

It sounds like chaos, but only because, as consumers, we've always had the chaos of business development hidden from us. The court case against Microsoft meant that internal mails from both that company and Netscape were revealed.

Both were as raucous. It's just that these days, Microsoft chooses to keep its fights to itself. Mozilla, by contrast, invites you to join that fight.

And the end-result of all this anarchy? It took a while, but Mozilla is a browser that hasn't been rushed, so it's relatively free of bugs.

It's a browser that doesn't give a fig for making itself a buck, so you can filter away adverts and disable pop-up windows with it.

Because its creators have taken overly great care to include everybody online, it runs on the Macintosh, Windows and Linux.

And because you can hear the arguments and watch it being developed, you can be confident that you won't get a nasty surprise in the future, or find the wishes of the user will be ignored in preference to some marketing lunacy. Whatever number they pick, I like it, and I'll happily join the party. And what's a party without a fight or two? Or 2.0, even?

You can download Mozilla at http://www.mozilla.org/