Why the Mozilla Foundation is so much more than Firefox
One could see all over the web articles explaining that Mozilla is laying off workers, that its critical situation may even endanger Firefox, and so on…
And it’s true that as most of its income is based on Firefox success, thanks to its huge contract with Search companies, seeing its flagship browser market share shrinking can be of concerns to anyone.
Whereas a scenario seeing the Mozilla Foundation out of business is hopefully far from reality, I believe it’s interesting to have a look at what Mozilla Foundation (and Netscape, its former company name) has brought to the internet we know and love so far.
How Netscape was key to the web
In the early ages of the internet, 1994, Netscape was founded by the developers of NCSA Mosaic, the first browser to support images embedded directly in a page.
Netscape Navigator was sold as commercial software, but free versions were available for personal use, and that successfully brought the Web and HTML to everyone in the world.
In a constant search for improvements, Netscape were researching how to bring more interactivity.
Javascript & Java Swing
In parallel to being one of the first to accept Java applications in web pages — through the support of applets, Netscape developed Javascript in 1995.
It was not linked to Java —Thanks marketing for the confusing name! — but instead a completely new language with a different mindset: Java is a class based language, suitable for long and complex projects in the Enterprise, Javascript is an object based language, bringing much more flexibility (and risks of bugs).
You may not know that Swing was developed initially by Netscape, in 1996, in order to provide pure-java components with a nice and shiny UI that really departed from the previous Java GUI Framework (Awt).
Netscape has shown here their superiority in designing a much better UI framework than Sun the-network-is-the-computer. I still remember the jaw-dropping effect on me when I first saw Swing running on my computer !
It was included by Sun in Java 1.2 in december 1998 and allowed Java to be a viable solution on the desktop.
How Mozilla saved HTML
In early 2000, the web was in crisis: Internet bubble was all the rage, but one of its core component, HTML, was progressing too slowly, and maybe got lost in the standardization process that tried to link it with XML (remember XHTML ?) in a cleansed but incompatible and complex standard.
So vendors started to push their own agenda. Amongst them we can cite Microsoft with Silverlight, Adobe with Flash and Sun/Oracle with Java Webstart…
Seeing this, Mozilla (together with Opera) presented a proposal for a new version of HTML in 2004, allowing Web Browsers to support multimedia, better interaction with the user while keeping the backward compatibility with the millions(?) of website that kept popping up at the time.
Quickly joigned by other vendors, like Google and Apple, HTML5 has become the by default and always evolving standard that we know today.
Being a Java developer, used to XML quirks, I at first didn’t welcome HTML5, I seen as a move backwards to less strict web. I though that would prevent compatiblity between browsers, but thankfully things are manageable.
Searching for performance with Webassembly
Despite the huge success of HTML5 that brought back web pages at the heart of internet, Mozilla Foundation was still looking to improve the performances of web applications.
Their research lab designed WebAssembly, a way to pre-compile libraries from multiple languages into a common binary format and run them in a javascript context. With this, you don’t need to parse the javascript source code to run it.
This provides close to native performance running from any browsers on any OS, thanks to Mozilla who released it to a standard body .
Whereas WebAssembly is getting more and more attention, another language is taking IT industry by the storm…
Still kicking it with Rust
First developed by Mozilla Foundation as a new language to help boost Firefox performances by leveraging multi-threaded DOM manipulation, the Rust language seems to have found the perfect fit between low-level performance and safety.
At a time where security is a growing concern in IT, Rust has embedded capabilities like safe memory access and thread handling directly into the language. Unlike Java or Javascript, it doesn’t prevent you from writing low-level code — accessing directly the hardware, but ensure you’re doing it in a safe and performant maner.
And look at what is happening with it? Microsoft, Android, Linux, and even Facebook have committed to include this language at the core of their systems !
Conclusion
This article from zdnet, Javascript has most developers but Rust is the fastest growing, summarizes very well what Netscape / Mozilla Foundation past and present works are really bringing to the entire IT industry and we should make sure that continues in the future.
About me
Working in IT since 1994 in various companies in different sectors (Telecom, Bank, Insurance, Multimedia), I’m now a happy Senior Enterprise Architect in one of the largest insurance company in the world.
I’m as well the lead developer of an open-source project, the dont-code platform, enabling you to create applications without coding, just by answering questions.
Links
Mozilla situation news articles:
https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2020/08/firefox-maker-mozilla-lays-off-250-workers-says-covid-19-lowered-revenue/
https://www.zdnet.com/article/endangered-firefox-the-state-of-mozilla/
From Mosaic to Netscape:
https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/NCSA_Mosaic
https://www.versionmuseum.com/images/applications/netscape-browser/webp/netscape-browser%5E1993%5Encsa-mosaic-mac.webp
https://winworldpc.com/screenshot/c398c389-1548-2ac2-b411-c3a4e284a2ef/6a5a67c3-a0c3-8dc5-be11-c3a6c2bb2a52
Javascript history:
https://www.w3schools.in/javascript-tutorial/history-of-javascript/
Swing history and screenshot:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swing_(Java)
http://www.evang-neunkirchen.at/html/earevang/Hilfe.html
HTML5 history and logo:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HTML5
https://baboon.ie/wp-content/uploads/2018/09/html-css-javascript-770x460.jpeg
WebAssembly & image:
https://research.mozilla.org/webassembly/
https://research.mozilla.org/files/2018/03/2018.02.22.WASM-diagram1.png
Rust news:
Dont-code platform:
https://dont-code.github.io
