[apostacy]

I keenly remember how 80% of websites wouldn't render properly in Firefox because they were all designed for IE6. You had no choice but to replicate the rendering bugs in IE6 if you wanted webpages to look good. But Firefox refused. They just focused on making an awesome browser, even if it wasn't appreciated. Even if users mistakenly blamed Firefox for webpages not rendering properly.

10 years ago Firefox flagrantly disregarded the "standards" of the day set out by Microsoft and Adobe, and instead made their own vision of what they thought the web should be, even if it was obscure and "unpopular". And even if it never caught on, and Microsoft had dominated, Firefox (then Firebird) would STILL have been awesome.

They quietly introduced RSS support, because it was a good feature for the browser to have, regardless of how many people use it. That's how I first learned about RSS. I loved Firefox and thought it was awesome that they were giving me access to this new feature.

That was back when adding new features was considered progress, instead of what we have now.

[bzbarsky]

> But Firefox refused.

This isn't quite true.

Firefox refused to do some things (explicitly violating some standards to fix some kinds of cosmetic issues, adding some APIs that seemed bad for users and the web). Firefox definitely did a bunch of other things to improve compat, including implementing various nonstandard IE6 features (XMLHttpRequest comes to mind!), matching IE6 rendering in various cases (see limited-quirks mode), etc, etc.

[Disclaimer: I was working on Firefox back then, and still am now; I've had to deal with a _lot_ of this firsthand.]

[apostacy]

You're right, they did have to make some compromises. But they also stood firm against some of the more egregious standards that Microsoft were trying to push.

Of course if Mozilla back then were like it is today, they would have been begging for donations so that they could support Microsoft Janus or RealPlayer or whatever garbage they were trying to impose on users back then, all so that their browser could be a second class citizen in the DRM ecosystem. It was really nice while it lasted, to have an organization that stood in opposition and provided an alternative to the commercialization of web technologies.

[bzbarsky]

> But they also stood firm against some of the more egregious standards that Microsoft were trying to push.

Can you give a specific example?

I'm not saying this wasn't happening; I just can't recall a case where it really mattered much in the end, in the sense that the standard was being pushed by Microsoft _and_ wanted by web developers, but active Firefox opposition killed it.

Now Firefox certainly _has_ done some things like that (e.g. pushing back on NaCl), but mostly by offering alternatives, not pushing back with just a "no". Because just saying "no" doesn't actually work that well in practice...

[JadeNB]

> [Disclaimer: I was working on Firefox back then, and still am now; I've had to deal with a _lot_ of this firsthand.]

I remember knowing you from UC and being surprised—I think when I saw your name in a changelog, perhaps—that someone I knew by chance was a part of the architecture of a project I loved (and love, albeit less passionately) so much. Thank you for your work!

[bzbarsky]

You're welcome!