Firefox: Where it came from, and where it's heading

Only 14 years old when the Netscape browser was first released in 1994, Ben Goodger is leading a key effort to preserve that browser's legacy.

Goodger, a native of Auckland, New Zealand, has spent most of the past four years working for AOL's Netscape division and then at the Mozilla Foundation AOL spun off last year to oversee the open-source development of the Mozilla and Firefox browsers.

As the Web observes the tenth anniversary of the first public release of the Netscape browser, Goodger finds himself the lead engineer for Firefox, widely seen as Mozilla's best browser yet and an increasingly popular alternative to Microsoft's dominant Internet Explorer.

Q: How did you originally get involved with Netscape?
A: I had been involved in the Mozilla open-source effort beforehand, and some folks at Netscape noticed what I was doing and thought it was good enough that they offered me a job.

What sort of work were you doing?
After Netscape decided to redesign the browser to use the more standards-compliant Gecko layout engine, they also began redeveloping the user interface. In 1999, it was very basic -- just enough to be able to browse Web pages but not very polished. Seeing how most energies were being focused on getting basic functionality to work, I focused my initial volunteer efforts on user interface polish as I learned the user interface programming technologies being used. But eventually, I began to plan new features.

For the sake of us who may be rusty on our Mozilla history, how was the group redesigning the browser in 1999?
Netscape open-sourced its Communicator source code in 1998, in an effort to "harness the power of thousands of open-source coders around the world".

But as the product being developed (Communicator 5.0) neared completion, an activist group for Web developers known as the Web Standards Project lobbied Netscape to stop developing its older, less-compliant layout engine (used in 4.0 and improved for 5.0, and dubbed "Mariner") and replace it with a newer standards-compliant one called Gecko. After some deliberation, Netscape decided to do this.

Unfortunately the separation in code between the old layout engine and the old browser user interface wasn't exactly clean, so moving to Gecko involved a complete browser rewrite -- from the ground up, in most cases, with only a few things carried over, like JavaScript.

The switch (from Mariner to Gecko) was 26 October, 1998. At that point, everyone working at Netscape on 5.0 was moved over to the new "XPFE" (Cross Platform Front End), XUL (Extensible User Interface Language) was born, the long road to Netscape 6 began, and the rest is history.