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Comment by BrendanEich | Hacker News Reader

Where were you in 2002 (when Mozilla 1.0 came out, four years after mozilla.org was founded, two years before Firefox 1.0)? The conventional wisdom then was the same as the comment up two from yours in this thread -- that we had zero chance against IE, which had monopolized the browser market. No one had ever beaten Microsoft then in any market it had taken over.

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.

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I think he was working on the start page for Mozilla 1.0 in 2002. The credits page [0] for the 1.5 start page lists him among the contributors to 1.0's.

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

I was working on the documentation for 1.0 http://www-archive.mozilla.org/start/1.0/

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.

Thanks, sorry I didn't remember you or check about:credits.

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.

I must say I didn't quite :-) I figured it was an uphill battle, but I did figure we were in with a chance. That even with a big fat Netscaped Mozilla, it was not hopeless.

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