The official release of the Netscape source code came ten years ago today. That would eventually beget the Firefox browser and the Thunderbird e-mail client.
The Mozilla Foundation reviews the decade in a Mitchell Baker blog post today. I’m going to take the opportunity to pour a little bit of cold water on the self-congrats: Had the Mozilla Organization (then Foundation) had its way, their featured product would still be the Mozilla Application Suite (which lives on today as SeaMonkey). They were initially opposed to the forking of the Mozilla codebase to create Firefox (and then Thunderbird) — it took about two years for Blake Ross and Co. to convince the higher-ups to make Firefox front-and-center. Even though the Suite was far better than IE (and SeaMonkey is still is), it never got more than 2% user share. Firefox, meanwhile, has around 20% of the worldwide user share, and a third to the mid-forties in Eastern Europe.
Also, Mozilla’s birthday is a not-so-subtle reminder that someone else has a birthday today, one that this someone else would rather not be reminded of starting at this juncture.
