Pretty good given they had the backing of Netscape. (Even if AOL messed them around at the time.) I recall that Mozilla 1.0's value proposition to naive users at the time was "No popups" - even in 2002, adblock-like behaviour was a selling point. (The value proposition to geeks was vastly different and more elaborate, but "Mozilla blocks popups" was radical enough to make it into web comics.)
It would help if you were on the record way back then, as opposed to now, about how good our odds were. Because everyone from VCs to bigcos (IBM, Sun) to many of our own people saw very long odds against us retaking any browser market share, let alone enough to restart browser competition.
Lots of people leave comments years later about how stuff I did was easy. I expect the same will go for Brave's success. I'll do my best to make history repeat.
I couldn't find any remarks from him in 2002 about Mozilla's chances, but in 2001 he said "I think not. In a world of free browsers, the flavour of the month can change like that." [1] in response to a mailing list message saying that Mozilla would not be viable competition on Windows due to bugs, which is somewhat less optimistic than the "pretty good" odds in hindsight, but it's much more so than "very long odds against us retaking any browser market share".
[0]: http://www-archive.mozilla.org/start/1.5/credits.html [1]: http://marc.info/?l=mozilla-ui&m=100168107415632&q=raw
Specifically I co-wrote the 1.0 FAQ http://www-archive.mozilla.org/start/1.0/faq/
I also wrote (and Gerv hacked right down) the page explaining Open Source/Free Software (while trying to keep both camps happy) http://www-archive.mozilla.org/start/1.0/opensource.html
I'd basically been a volunteer tester and bug reporter through 2000 and 2001. Mozilla wasn't a good browser then, it was rubbish and it crashed even more than IE5. But it was important to keep testing it and crashing it and sending in the talkback crash dumps and so on.
Now the part you didn't answer: did you lay good odds at the time?
Not putting you down at all if you did not. If you had, my hat would be off to you -- and you should try predicting other stuff, and betting large if you are accurate!
Again, the notion of Mozilla succeeding in any restart-the-browser gambit was considered long odds by all pundits and almost everyone involved in Mozilla at the time. Phoenix (née mozilla/browser) was a pirate ship in 2002.
At first, it endowed hundreds employees with CVS commit access, while volunteers -- some of whom were much better hackers -- had to submit patches and beg for reviews to get access.
As time passed and we rewrote the old codebase to do XUL-based apps (a multiyear mission, by definition), Netscape management suffered via a series of misadventures culminating in Netscape 6 in Y2K, a terrible release decision, made against mozilla.org and grass-roots engineer advice. After that, AOL replaced the VP in charge and repeated the process in 2001, with another VP decapitation that fall.
However, we at mozilla.org who were inside Netscape/AOL by then had the evidence from Netscape 6 to show new management that Mozilla was the better way to develop and test code, and (as important) to recruit talent. We leveled the CVS access playing field after Netscape 6, forcing Netscape to put new-hires on the same footing as volunteers and people who came fresh from Red Hat or other companies to hack the code.
I've given some of the history here in other podcasts, as well as in this one. Bottom line is Netscape, while it paid lots of the contributors (all, on day one), was in short order a problem. Money does not equate to success; it has downsides. Too much money, with a crappy agenda and bad hiring legacy (and the code those people wrote, and the design costs they sunk), can and does hurt.
Money from Netscape and then AOL indeed helped pay the top engineers with whom I worked to rebuild the code starting in October 1998, and I'm grateful for that.
Money from Netscape/AOL did not help Mozilla gain market share or build product -- we did that in spite of Netscape, it was a total hindrance on us doing products intended for end users. We created and distributed our own binaries at first for QA builds to testers who did not or could not compile, as I said in this 'cast. Netscape was offended by our success, and this (in part) drove Dave Hyatt to quit and go work for Apple in 2001. I could go on but I'll save it for "the book".
Was the basic fact of paying devs better than not, though?
It's really a trade-off curve, between the benefits vs. costs of everything, from the top paid talent such as Dave Hyatt (and others), vs. the middle tier, vs. the counterproductive cohort. Netscape/AOL hiring improved by hiring proven performers from the Mozilla community, to add to the complexity.
My view now (I'm running a startup) is that leaner is better. But it's hard to account for all the costs and benefits. Too many hindsight what-ifs and post-hoc conclusions that could not have been assumed or even hedged at the time.
I doubt something like Mozilla Firefox from the ashes of Netscape will be repeated in this way. Mozilla remains _sui generis_.
For all the drag of Netscape and the consequent costs to the Mozilla project 1998-2003, we -- meaning Firefox the browser -- made it.
I won't linger on the problems, but I will observe that "indie" open source funding seems to yield better core-team governance than Mozilla's centralizing tendencies have produced by now.
These centralizing tendencies go back to pre-git/hg CVS days and so to the inevitable tool/culture co-evolutionary process. I'm in large part to blame for not addressing them while I was involved, so I am not pointing fingers, or else I'm blaming myself first.
But I must say that in certain crucial respects, Mozilla is the new Netscape.