Mozilla Application Suite

» see mozilla.org as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obit ~

In 2003 a browser was something you planned your evening around. The Mozilla Suite installer ran to more than ten megabytes, which on a TTNet line at home meant you started it and went to do something else for a while. I was at university then and mostly on Internet Explorer 6 like everyone else in Turkey, because it came with Windows and nobody had mentioned there was a choice to make. The suite was the first thing that made the choice visible.

It came out of a specific act. On 31 March 1998 Netscape released most of the Communicator source code under an open license, and the organization that formed around that code called itself Mozilla. The plan was to ship a better Communicator quickly. That is not what happened. By October 1998 the developers had concluded the inherited layout code was not worth saving and threw it out, starting again on a new engine called Gecko, which added years to a schedule that had no slack in it.

Mozilla 1.0 arrived on 5 June 2002, more than four years after the source drop. What it contained was the entire internet as one program: Navigator for the web, Communicator for mail and newsgroups, Composer for building pages, ChatZilla for IRC, an address book, a DOM inspector and a JavaScript debugger for people who wanted to see how the thing worked. It had tabbed browsing and a pop-up blocker while Internet Explorer had neither, and for a couple of years that was the entire argument for switching.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ the rise ~

The suite's best years were the ones when Microsoft had stopped working. Internet Explorer 6 shipped in 2001 and then the team was disbanded, so from 2001 to 2006 the dominant browser on earth received security patches and nothing else. Mozilla shipped 1.4, 1.5, 1.6 and 1.7 into that vacuum. Netscape 6 and 7 were built on the same code, which meant AOL was distributing Mozilla under a different name to people who had no idea.

In Turkish forums the suite had a particular kind of presence. Donanimhaber and frmtr threads about which browser to use were long and repetitive, and there was always someone arguing for Mozilla against a room that had Internet Explorer preinstalled. Broadband was arriving slowly and the size of the download was a real objection rather than a rhetorical one.

~ the cracks ~

The problem with shipping the whole internet in one program is that most people want one part of it. A roadmap published on 2 April 2003 said so directly: development would move to standalone applications, a browser codenamed Phoenix and a mail client codenamed Minotaur. Those became Firefox and Thunderbird. The suite was renamed the Mozilla Application Suite largely so people could tell it apart from its own offspring.

Firefox 1.0 landed in November 2004 and took the argument away. It was a fraction of the size and it started fast. Everything the suite had bundled became either a separate download or an extension, which is the model that won and the model every browser has used since.

~ what it became ~

On 10 March 2005 the Mozilla Foundation announced there would be no official versions past 1.7.x. It did not delete anything. The Foundation offered infrastructure to whoever wanted to keep the suite alive, and a group of volunteers took it, renaming the result SeaMonkey after the codename the project had used internally years earlier. SeaMonkey 1.0 shipped on 30 January 2006. The last official Mozilla Suite release, 1.7.13, went out on 21 April 2006 as an end-of-life security update for people who had not moved.

What died was an idea about software rather than a program. The suite assumed the internet was a place you visited with one tool, the way an office assumed one word processor. The unbundling that killed it is now so complete that the word suite reads as archaic, and every part of what Mozilla shipped in 2002 has been replaced by something that runs in a tab.

@}-->--

              )
             (_)
            .-'-.
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
          __|   |__   .-.
       .-'  |   |  `-:   :
      :     `---'     :-'
       `-._       _.-'
           '""""""

« previous  ·  random  ·  next »