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 10th 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.
March 1993
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Key dates in browser history
Marc Andreessen announces the Mosaic browser, written in collaboration with colleagues at the University of Illinois and the National Center for Supercomputing Applications.
Jim Clark and Marc Andreessen found Mosaic Communications (later Netscape).
First public beta of the Netscape Browser is released.
Mosaic Communications renames
itself Netscape Communications after a legal battle.
Netscape goes public at US$28 a share. It closes that day at $58.25.
Microsoft releases Internet Explorer 1.0.
Netscape's lawyers complain to the US Department of Justice about Microsoft.
Justice Department charges Microsoft with violating terms of a 1995 consent decree.
Netscape creates Mozilla.org and says a new browser will be free and open source.
America Online buys Netscape for $4.2 billion.
Federal judge says Microsoft abused its monopoly to capture the browser market.
AOL agrees to continue using the Internet Explorer browser and settles antitrust claims against Microsoft for US$750 million.
The Mozilla Foundation is created and AOL spins off Mozilla as an independent foundation.
Preview of Mozilla's Firefox 1.0 is released.
The switch (from Mariner to Gecko) was Oct. 26, 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.
How does XUL facilitate the production of browsers?
XUL is a way of describing user interfaces in XML. In the same way you make Web pages by writing HTML tags, you can write applications based on Mozilla by writing XUL tags for things like menus, toolbars, buttons, etc. ...So you end up, for the most part, writing a XUL file once and having it look the same everywhere.
So the idea was that perhaps these Web markup languages would wind up supplanting the heavy-duty computer programming languages when it came to writing applications. To what degree has that come to pass?
In general, the idea seems like a good one.
Microsoft clearly thinks so -- it is making XAML one of the core pieces of Longhorn. XAML (Extensible Application Markup Language) resembles XUL in that it is an XML markup for generating chrome, though the methods by which it does so are somewhat different.
How does Mozilla compete in a Longhorn world -- assuming that it ever gets here?
At this point, we have better GNOME OS integration. Firefox fits better in with the GNOME (GNU Network Object Model Environment) desktop now than ever. We have native look-and-feel menus, default browser integration, and more.
But is there now a concerted collaboration between GNOME and Mozilla?
There's no concerted collaboration between GNOME and Mozilla, at this point. There is a collaboration at the level of embedding the Gecko layout engine itself, and our maintaining our embedding APIs (application program interfaces) to allow them to do that.
Is that going to be enough to compete against Longhorn, with its grand plans for operating system-browser integration?
We think we'll be able to hold our own. We're redeveloping our graphics systems, for example, to better take advantage of hardware acceleration and newer features.
You seem pretty casual about Longhorn. Is that because Microsoft is so far behind on its deadlines, or because you think the standalone browser is going to prevail, even in a Longhorn world?
Longhorn is going to be a difficult thing for Microsoft to sell. It (will) not run well on older hardware -- which companies have lots of. It's going to be expensive to tell companies that they need to update to the newest version of Windows for X amount of dollars, and upgrade their hardware as well, just to run applications they already have older versions of.
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