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June 2, 1999

Wither Netscape?

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Can Mozilla 5 ship a year after IE5 and still compete? Is AOL's acquisition of Netscape a good thing? Can the Mozillans hang on? Or is it "game over" for all practical purposes?

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Fred Langa is a senior consulting editor and columnist for Windows Magazine. Fred's free weekly newsletter is available via subscribe@langa.com. You can contact him at fred@langa.com or via his website at http://www.langa.com.

By Fred Langa

First, the good news: Gecko (the tightly-coded next-generation page-rendering engine that will be the heart of Mozilla 5) is coming along nicely. The target level of standards support is impressively high. The project as a whole has just closed Milestone 6 (see http://www.mozilla.org/projects/seamonkey); the M5 code is still live, and the M6 code is slated to become the live version on July 2. There's steady progress all around; you've actually been able to use the prerelease code to browse the Web since M3. And even in these prerelease stages, reasonably complex pages display fast and look good. In fact, it's good enough that at the recent Spring Internet World 99, NeoPlanet previewed the latest 5.0 version of its client: It uses the Gecko engine to deliver both the Communicator and Microsoft Internet Explorer environments in less than 5 Mbytes of disk space! Clearly, the Mozilla project is--at least as of today--alive and kicking.

But there's also bad news. For one thing, the project as a whole is running very late. That's partly a result of the early disastrous attempt to use Netscape's "spaghetti code" Communicator 5. (Netscape had essentially just piled on features and code from Version 1.0 onward; by version 5, the code was a mess.) Deciding to scrap the existing code base and start over with a new core engine was a brave and necessary move, but it cost the Mozilla project months of development time.

Another factor is that the open-source project has attracted fewer developers than some expected. Make no mistake--there's some very high-quality talent working on Mozilla. But it's not insane to ask if there's enough talent to meet even the pushed-back deadlines. It's taken the Mozilla team six months to reach Milestone 5; by Mozilla.Org's own internal reckoning, there are 13 major milestones to go before the anticipated final release of Milestone 18 on Dec. 17. The first steps are always the hardest, but can the Mozillans realistically expect to complete 13 additional major milestones in less than six months?

Meanwhile, Microsoft's Internet Explorer has taken the lead in enterprise browsing; it's now clearly the numeric leader. Internet Explorer 5's quality is actually quite good, and despite its flaws, it's more standards-compliant than are the shipping versions of Communicator and Navigator. And in a surprising turnaround, many experienced users are finding Internet Explorer to be more stable than the current Netscape offerings. For example, well-known developer and president of UserLand Software Dave Winer said: "After installing 4.5, it'll be a while before I trust Netscape again. The software is fraught with problems, while Microsoft's browser appears to be stabilizing."

The newest Netscape release, 4.6, claims a minor speed increase, but at levels so slight you'd need a stopwatch to discern them. The rest of 4.6 is mainly bug fixes and things such as enhancements to portal-based searches and to AOL's Instant Messenger components. This isn't enough to put Netscape browsers back on top.

But to me the most serious obstacle to Mozilla's success is the acquisition of Netscape by AOL--a marketing company acquiring a technology company. When the takeover first happened, there were many assertions by various middle managers inside AOL that Netscape's technology was a jewel that AOL would nurture and develop, via the Mozilla project. (The Mozilla project depends on Netscape for more programming talent than any other single source.)

Those assertions rang false in April with project leader Jamie Zawinski's very public, very angry resignation from the project and from AOL/Netscape (see http://www.jwz.org/gruntle/nomo.html).

In the weeks following the resignation, we saw another round of vigorous affirmations from AOL that Mozilla was alive and well--and central to AOL's vision. But then, just a week ago, the Wall Street Journal ran an article titled "AOL's Case Denies Any Plan to Compete With Microsoft Corp." The text begins: "Steve Case, America Online's chief executive, testified that AOL bought Netscape Communications Corp. last year for its popular 'portal' Web site, not its flagging Navigator browser, and he dismissed any plan to compete with Microsoft Corp. ..."

It's hard to see any positive spin in this for Mozilla.

I have no doubt that the Mozillans will eventually ship a browser, and I fully expect it to be very good. But I'm also coming to believe that it will be too little and far too late; and thus unlikely to unseat Internet Explorer as the mainstream browser of choice.

Choice. That's a wonderful concept. But with Netscape's ongoing troubles and AOL's inattention, choice is something we're all losing in the browser wars.

What's your take? Can Mozilla 5 ship a year after Internet Explorer 5 and still compete? Is AOL's acquisition of Netscape a good thing? Can the Mozillans hang on? Or is it "game over" for all practical purposes? Join in!

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