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Firefox: The alternative history

Published: 19 Jul 2005 13:30 BST

After about half a year working as a Mozilla contributor, Dotzler realised that there were so many new contributors to the project that he needed more help teaching people how to file bug reports. "I started holding weekly events on IRC — Bug Days, where me and a group of deputies would help people get involved," he says.

November 1998: AOL announces purchase of Netscape (completed in March 1999).

March 2000: Asa Dotzler wins an award "for his great work organizing Bug Day, maintaining browser general bugs, and helping novice bug reporters become experienced Bugzilla users," according to mozillaZine.

At the Mozilla award ceremony Dotzler set up a track for QA discussions, where he and other contributors came up with a plan to handle the ever increasing number of people filing bug reports. One of his main concerns was that Netscape would find it too difficult to handle the volume of bug reports and may decide to close source the browser.

"We discussed what we would do if Netscape got scared with high volume of bug reports. We came up with plan — if unknown and untrusted people filed bug reports, the community would go through and triage these and pass them onto the developers. We would form a front line to shield developers."

May 2000: Asa Dotzler starts work at Netscape.

After he got home from the Mozilla Award ceremony, Dotzler was offered a job at Netscape by Mitchell Baker, the chief evangelist of the Mozilla.org project at Netscape (now the president of the Mozilla Foundation). He accepted this job and moved to California.

"I was paid by AOL, with responsibilities to the Mozilla project. The management chain was a group of 10 people with Mitchell at the top. AOL let us be, to do the open source thing."

Early on, Dotzler realised that working on the open source project within AOL was unlikely to work out long term.

"There were conflicts and over time we realised that it wasn't going to be a permanent solution to the open source project. We realised that we weren't going to be the priority we needed to be, to achieve success," he says..

November 2000: Netscape 6 released, but criticised for containing too many bugs.

June 2002: Mozilla 1.0 released. The all-in-one Internet application suite included a Web browser, an email and newsgroup client, an IRC chat client, and an HTML editor.

September 2002: Version 0.1 of the standalone Phoenix browser released.

May 2003: AOL agrees to offer Microsoft's Internet Explorer as its default browser to subscribers of its proprietary online service for the next seven years.

July 2003: AOL lays off 50 employees involved in Web browser development at its Netscape subsidiary. The Mozilla Foundation starts, funded in a large part by a $2m donation from AOL and $300,000 from Lotus founder Mitch Kapor.

When AOL started laying off people, Baker spoke to "friends in the industry" to get support for an organisation that could carry on developing the open source project, according to Dotzler.

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Its the applications and device drivers that run on windows that cement its dominance. How many people would fork out hundreds of pounds for Vista if Linux ran all the software and kit they wanted to use.