Ghostzilla

» see ghostzilla.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obituary ~

Ghostzilla was a Windows browser built on Mozilla's Gecko engine, released in November 2002, and it had exactly one feature anybody remembers. It did not open a window of its own. It rendered the page inside the window space of an application you already had running, and the application everyone used it with was Microsoft Outlook. Move your mouse into the message pane and the web appeared there. Move it out and the web was gone.

The page you got was stripped down and desaturated on purpose, laid out narrow and rendered in grays so that at a glance it read like the body of an email. Somebody walking past your desk saw a person reading mail. The version of the internet Ghostzilla showed you was ugly, and that was the specification rather than a compromise.

Nobody knows who wrote it. The SourceForge page that holds the surviving code says the author is unknown, and the project never attached a name to itself in four years of existence. It started as shareware at $19.95, became free, and ended up open source under the Mozilla Public License, which is a path a lot of small Windows utilities took in that decade and almost always a sign that the money never arrived.

~ the case file ~

~ the trick ~

The engineering underneath was more interesting than the gag. To put a live browser inside another program's window you have to draw where you were not invited and then get out cleanly enough that the host application does not repaint over you or crash. Ghostzilla did all of that on Windows in 2002 and the transition was fast enough to be useful, which is the part that separated it from the joke it sounds like.

The context it was built for was the American open-plan office around 2001, when employers had just discovered proxy logs and the idea that browsing at work was theft. Ghostzilla did nothing about the logs, which is worth saying plainly. It hid the screen and only the screen.

That problem had no local equivalent where I was. Between 2002 and 2005 I did most of my browsing in internet cafes in Turkey, paying by the hour for a machine in a room full of Counter-Strike, and nobody in that room had an employer watching the screen. The cafes ran their own filters at the router, and a browser hiding inside Outlook walks into a router filter the same as any other browser does.

~ the mozilla problem ~

In May 2004 the project came down off the web after a copyright claim from Mozilla, and it stayed down until January 2005. Eight months is a long absence for a one-person Windows utility with no company behind it and no announcement channel.

What came back was not the same program. The returning version was built from Mozilla's open source code and shipped without the proprietary core library that had produced those minimal grayscale pages, which is to say the thing that got settled away was the reason to install it. The camouflage was the product, and after January 2005 the camouflage was worse.

~ the quiet suspension ~

There was no farewell. As of February 2007 the site was suspended and stopped resolving, and ghostzilla.com has never come back under anyone. The last archived build sits in May 2006, which leaves about nine months of nothing between the final sign of life and the domain going away. That is what abandonment usually looks like from the outside.

The source is still on SourceForge and still downloadable, and it will not do anything for you. It targets a Gecko from 2002 and an Outlook from 2002, and the trick it performs depends on both of those being exactly where it left them.

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