Mozilla rising

Netscape won't dislodge Internet Explorer from its hegemony over browser space. But its open-source sibling is aiming at even bigger game: Windows.

By Farhad Manjoo

Sept. 10, 2002 | On Aug. 28, WebSideStory, a firm that keeps statistics on the software that people use online, released some numbers confirming what most Web surfers who think about such things already know: Almost nobody uses the Netscape Navigator Web browser. WebSideStory reported that Netscape, the company many people credit with sparking the Internet revolution, is now forlorn in the world it helped create, claiming only 3.4 percent of the world's Web users.

That's a stunning decline from just a year ago, when Netscape had a 13 percent share -- and especially from the company's heights of the mid-1990s, when virtually everyone used its browser. But now, 96 percent of the people online use Microsoft's Internet Explorer, and it's likely that Netscape will lose even more ground in the future, according to WebSideStory.

"The browser war," said one of the firm's executives in its press release, "is in fact a massacre."

Netscape doesn't believe those numbers; a company representative said that other studies have put Netscape's share in the double digits. But the survey nevertheless cast a pall over the new version of Netscape's browser, Navigator 7.0, which was released the next day. In its announcement, the company said that the new Navigator would continue "the growing momentum of Netscape" and that the browser's new features would help win back people who've switched to Microsoft.

Netscape is right to have high hopes for the new Navigator. Version 7.0 is a fine browser; it's as stable and reliable as Internet Explorer, it renders pages just as quickly, and they all seem to work as they ought to.

But the browser's best new features, like faster HTML rendering and "tabbed browsing," aren't exactly novel -- they've been available in Mozilla, the open-source browser upon which Netscape is based, for some time. Under Netscape's development model, its programmers work on code for Mozilla, and only after a new version of Mozilla has been determined "stable" is it re-branded and released as a Netscape product. This development system has some benefits, but it's got one big drawback: It ensures that Netscape is always behind Mozilla, releasing features that the open-source browser had months before.

All of which is to say: Netscape is doomed. If there are good reasons for Internet Explorer users to switch to Netscape, there are better reasons to switch to Mozilla, which has all the features Netscape offers and none of the downsides -- especially Netscape's AOL Time Warner branding. Indeed, after its very bumpy first few years, during which it was ignored and called a failure, the Mozilla project is now becoming the most interesting thing in browsers. The faithful following of Mozilla developers working on all sorts of side projects -- blogging in the browser, a file manager, a chat client, an emulated Google Toolbar -- may have finally hit critical mass.

Some of those features are already available in Internet Explorer, but Mozilla's promise is that it's infinitely upgradable and that one needs minimal programming skills to get into the game. Soon, say developers, we'll see additions to Mozilla that go far beyond Internet Explorer.

But the best part about Mozilla is that it is not just a browser. Scores of developers are now talking about using Mozilla as a "platform" -- that is, using Mozilla's underlying code to build non-browser applications, like calendar programs and e-mail programs and even Linux desktops. You don't need to download Mozilla to use these apps, as some are distributed with their own stripped-down version of Mozilla's engine -- which, if you think about it, is exactly the kind of thing Microsoft was trying to prevent when it launched its war against Netscape. It didn't want Netscape around, because Netscape was becoming a platform. So wouldn't it be rich if, in the end, Microsoft succeeds in killing Netscape and winning the browser war but still, somehow, doesn't eliminate the platform threat? If Netscape dies but the dragon that it spawned burns Redmond?

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