I'm not going to give a "formal" review of Antony's article, but I did find it to be an informative summary of the Netscape web browser's origin and the eventual development of the Mozilla.org open source project. The one disagreement I have with Antony's article would be his description under:
What's the difference between Netscape 6/7 and Mozilla?brief version)
They are of same source code, but target different types of users.
(complete version)
Technically speaking, they are almost identical. However, Netscape 6/7 is designed as an end-user product, and Mozilla is for the developers. AOL/Netscape spent a great resource on making Mozilla more end-user friendly by adding documentation and improving the user interface, as well as adding multimedia support and integrating its instant messaging.
Although it might have been true at one time, I would no longer describe Mozilla as "for the developers"... see
http://www.mozilla.org/ - the Mozilla home page is much more user-friendly now, than it used to be.
http://www.mozilla.org/docs/end-user/ provides more user-oriented links.
Antony's article led me to do my own research. On the "Mosaic" name, I found:
http://www.cs.uiuc.edu/news/alumni/win94/mozilla.htmlDepartment of Computer Science, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Highlights from Winter 1994 CS Alumni News:
Illinois's Boys Make Noise: And they're doing it with Mosaic
<snip>
The name Mosaic was the result of a brainstorming session at NCSA (it was almost called Montage). According to Bina, the name was to represent the idea that the Web is a single picture made up of many parts (HTTP, FTP, Gopher, News, WAIS, etc.). Mosaic floated along at NCSA, its popularity growing at an exponential rate. Members of the team had a vague idea that they really should be exploiting the program commercially ..
Some "original" press releases:
http://www.jwz.org/gruntle/newsrelease1.htmlMOSAIC COMMUNICATIONS OFFERS NEW NETWORK NAVIGATOR FREE ON THE INTERNET (October 13, 1994)
http://www.holgermetzger.de/netscape/Ne ... elease.htm MOSAIC COMMUNICATIONS CHANGES NAME TO "NETSCAPE COMMUNICATIONS CORPORATION" (November 14, 1994)
http://wp.netscape.com/newsref/pr/newsrelease558.htmlNETSCAPE ANNOUNCES PLANS TO MAKE NEXT-GENERATION COMMUNICATOR SOURCE CODE AVAILABLE FREE ON THE NET (January 22, 1998)
http://wp.netscape.com/newsref/pr/newsrelease577.htmlNETSCAPE ANNOUNCES MOZILLA.ORG, A DEDICATED TEAM AND WEB SITE SUPPORTING DEVELOPMENT OF FREE CLIENT SOURCE CODE (February 23, 1998)
http://www.mozilla.org/press/mozilla-foundation.htmlMOZILLA.ORG ANNOUNCES LAUNCH OF THE MOZILLA FOUNDATION TO LEAD OPEN-SOURCE BROWSER EFFORTS
America Online Pledges $2 Million to Help Launch Independent Non-Profit
Industry Leaders Reaffirm Support for Mozilla (July 15, 2003)
More Netscape history can be found at
http://www.holgermetzger.de/Netscape_History.html I also found a link to a recent interview with Marc Andreessen, at
http://www.mozillazine.org/talkback.html?article=2903Marc Andreessen Praises Mozilla
Friday February 14th, 2003
To celebrate the tenth anniversary of NCSA Mosaic, Wired News has an interview with Marc Andreessen*, a member of the Mosaic team who went on to co-found Netscape Communications Corporation. Andreessen has this to say about Mozilla: "When Mozilla opened source code in 1998, everyone expected things to happen overnight. But it took a few years for the project to catalyze. Now people have an open-source alternative that's fast and free and works. The user interface is definitely getting better, and over the last four or five years, dynamic HTML and JavaScript have gotten more sophisticated as a UI platform... I'm using Mozilla pretty much full time."
*link to:
http://www.wired.com/news/business/0,1367,57661,00.html
If anyone wants to take a look at what some of the old browsers like NCSA Mosaic (NCSA=
National Center for Supercomputing Applications) and Netscape Navigator 1.0 looked like, go to
http://www.dejavu.org/emulator.htmUserAgent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.7.2) Gecko/20040803
