Mozilla Is Not Netscape (and Other True Facts)
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The future of the browser
The biggest competitor in this "browser war" was Microsoft with their Internet Explorer application. Released initially only for the Windows operating system, IE quickly gained dominance in the browser market due to its close coupling with the Windows operating system.
For instance, the reason that IE is so fast on modern computers running Windows 98 or Windows 2000 is that IE is actually loaded into the system memory upon startup. This is an example of how Microsoft is taking advantage of their monopoly in the desktop computer market. It's also an indicator for how they're going to develop future versions of Internet Explorer to act as a platform for all kinds of Internet-based services, many of which will be closely tied to the functionality built into the browser. This, of course, will be a Windows-only set of services, which Microsoft is calling Microsoft .NET.
How does this relate to Mozilla and Netscape? When you look at Internet Explorer and Mozilla from a 30,000-foot view, you can see that many of today's Internet services will benefit greatly from taking advantage of a modern Internet browser and the functionality built into it. This is the future of the Internet: distributed web applications and Internet services built on top of a modern browser.
Currently the only browsers that can support such advanced capabilities are Internet Explorer 5.5 and Mozilla. And since Netscape 6 uses the same codebase as Mozilla, it's likely that Netscape 6 and Netscape 7 will also be strong players in this market. The distinct advantage Mozilla has over IE 5.5 in this emerging web applications market is that Mozilla is inherently cross-platform and can run on just about any operating system of choice.
Microsoft is at a disadvantage here because their browser for each platform they support (Windows and Mac) is developed completely separately using different codebases and different development teams. If you are a web applications developer, which platform would you develop on? Mozilla, which supports nearly 100% of all operating system platforms in use today, or Internet Explorer, which is only available for the Windows platform?
Note that if you chose IE and wanted Mac users to use your web application, you'd likely need to have a separate development team working on that web application because the implementation of your web app would require a different development process.
Mozilla, in this scenario, would allow the web application developer to develop only one instance of their tool, which because of the cross-platform nature of Mozilla would run on all platforms, thus requiring only one development path, not one path for each platform desired.
The added advantage of Netscape (using Mozilla as its codebase) is that any web application or Internet-based service developed for Mozilla will, without much complexity or change, work nicely with Netscape 6. This is the reason the Mozilla team at Netscape decided to scrap the Communicator 4.x code and start over from scratch, to create a true cross-platform browser and related software components.
The bottom line
Pay attention to what Netscape is doing with Netscape 6, watch what Microsoft is doing with IE 5.5 and their Microsoft .NET initiative, and also watch how many innovative web-based applications hit the market over the next year. It's a safe bet that Mozilla and its cross-platform technologies will be the foundation for many of them.
Never before have web application developers had the opportunities now available to them. Mozilla has near-100% support for W3C-recommended standards, making it extremely flexible and robust for highly customized web application development. The source code is available to anyone who wants it, so it's also easy for developers to add in functionality that wasn't thought of by the Mozilla team.
The future of the Internet lies with the web browser as just one component of a new kind of software platform, one that runs on nearly all operating system platforms in use today and whose source code is available to anyone who wants it. The opportunities and potential are simply astonishing.
Imagine a future without the dominance of Microsoft and with the openness of Mozilla. Think about the possibilities a true cross-platform development environment can give you, and you will soon be trolling the Mozilla newsgroups along with hundreds of other excited developers trying to escape the grasp of a Microsoft-owned future.
Cameron Barrett is a Senior Information Architect for Alphanumerica and the creator of CamWorld.com.
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