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Open Works is dedicated to explaining why open source software works. It aims to cut through all the hype, propaganda, and fear, uncertainty and doubt that surrounds "free" and "open" software. The articles here express the opinions of their respective authors. While focusing on prominent open-source efforts such as Mozilla, this site provides opinionated accounts of why open source software has inherent value to countries, companies, communities, and people. While the sister site of Open Works, MozTips, aims to provide relatively objective help and information for Mozilla users, this one is less careful in avoiding the subjective side of open software development philosophy.

Mozilla's Silent Revolution: Why Mozilla has revolutionized  the browsing experience (yet has not made it to the front page of the New York Times)

April 22, 2002, Jayesh Sheth.

Four years have gone by since Mozilla's source code was "freed" from the grasp of Netscape, and placed within the stewardship of the open source community. With the birth of Mozilla.org, the organization which guides Mozilla's progress, came a bold experiment in software development, whose extended efforts at producing a worthy successor to Netscape Communictor (i.e. Netscape 4.x) have drawn great criticism, impatient demands for a "final product", and resigned disaffection. With Mozilla having recently released the first Release Candidate (RC) to its upcoming and highly anticipated 1.0 version, people seem to be paying attention again, with articles appearing in Cnet's News.com, in Newsforge and numerous weblogs indexed by DayPop. Those who claimed Mozilla and its corporate doppelgaenger Netscape were long banished to irrelevance, after having allegedly lost the browser war to Microsoft, are turning around and giving Mozilla a second look. And so some important questions remain to be answered: why are people suddenly paying attention to Mozilla again? Has something suddenly changed with the imminent release of version 1.0? Or have people overlooked something all along?

If I had fallen asleep as a Netscape Communicator user - Rip-van-Winkle-like - in 1998, on the day before Netscape made its announcement to open its source code and found Mozilla.org, and woke up on April 18, 2002 and tried Mozilla 1.0 RC 1, I might have thought (at least at first glance) that I was using the same program. Even though Mozilla shares very little code with Netscape Communicator (by some estimates it shares only 5% of the older code), it looks and acts very similarly. It is therefore incredibly difficult for average, non-technical users to undertstand why Mozilla is better, or why Mozilla.org and Netscape spent four years developing a new browser, email program and webpage editor, if the end result superficially looks the same.

The answer, of course, lies in the fact  that most of the revolutionary changes in Mozilla have been under the hood and hidden from the view of novice users. It has been more than easy to overlook why what Mozilla provides is different than the old Netscape. A novice user who tries Mozilla out for fifteen minutes, in its classic theme, would never guess that Mozilla could change its look completely (by switching to the modern theme), and not look anything like the old Netscape. Nor would he understand the importance of Mozilla's better support for Cascading Stylesheets (CSS) or support for standards such as XHTML, or why the embedability of  Mozilla's rendering engine (Gecko/NGLayout) into other programs is a good thing for developers, something which was impossible with the old Netscape. It would also probably not occur to him how revolutionary it is to be able to create the user-interface of an incredibly complex program such as Mozilla, out of simple things such as XML (XUL), CSS and JavaScript.  And if he were a true "average Internet user", just trying to check his Hotmail and search Yahoo now and then for random things,he would likely have no contact with Mozilla.org, and thus there would be nobody to point him in the direction nightly/latest directory on Mozilla.org's FTP server. And so, he wouldn't know how revolutionary it is to be able to produce versions of the same product for Windows, the Mac and Linux, with nearly the identical functionality for each version, every night.

Not  wanting to remain buried in this exercise of extended skepticism too long, I could hope that this poor average user would discover how tabbed browsing lets him check his Hotmail and search Yahoo at the same time, while being able to switch back and forth easily. Or maybe he'd discover that he could turn off those absurdly nasty pop up ads advertising wireless cameras for good. But that's not the point. Even if Mozilla's usefulness is not immediately apparent to the average surfer, it has still accomplished revolutionary things, in its own quiet way. With the release of the preview to version 1.0, it has finally proven its critics wrong; it has shown that Netscape's bold choice to continue development of its product as an open source project was not a waste of time.  The open community which carries the Mozilla project a step further each day, has in fact produced software of good quailty and considerable usefulness. Along the way, it has produced a product which respects standards, which is more customizable and flexible than ever before, and which constitutes the framework for building a whole variety of new cross-platform Internet applications, not just a browser-suite. Mozilla comes with an IRC (Internet Relay Chat) program, called Chatzilla, which the old Netscape did not have. Chatzilla, as well as the new Calendar project, are excellent examples of Mozilla's extendability and flexibility. 

As Mozilla approaches 1.0, it is important to think about the value of all the code written since 1998 which has come together to form this working product. Even though Mozilla may superficially look a lot like the old Netscape, it is far more revolutionary. Netscape made possible the dot com mania of the late nineties; later, as it itself slid out of the limelight, it made room for a worthy successor to its early pioneering efforts. Ever since Netscape let the code out of the bag, it put a revolution into place. This revolution has not gathered the same awe or press coverage as Netscape once did, but has definitely succeeded in creating a huge repository of useful code which has been successfully crafted into a working application, and in creating a thriving community which moves it further, day after day. If the press suddenly stands up and applauds with the release of version 1.0, it would be a pleasant surprise, and inconsistent with Mozilla's historical reception.

If the average user (the same one who sticks to Hotmail and Yahoo in his Internet excursions) comes across Mozilla in Netscape 6 or in Compuserve 7, he may not see it working behind the scenes, and probably will not know any of the hundreds of people who made it possible for him to see Yahoo's cheery logo, or read a note in Hotmail from his parents. But those who have contributed something to Mozilla will sit back in satisfaction, knowing that their work has been put to good use; without worrying about what the New York Times says about Mozilla tomorrow, they will rest assured that their contributed time and effort was well worth it.

About the author: Jayesh Sheth maintains the MozTips website in his spare time, which aims to help people get the most out of Mozilla. If you are interested in writing for MozTips or Open Works,or have comments on an article, please drop him a note.