By the start of 1998, Netscape was preparing to make a drastic move. Not only was its arch-nemesis Microsoft rapidly catching up in the browser market

1998: Open Season with Mozilla, W3C’s DOM, and WaSP

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2021-07-08 08:00:11

By the start of 1998, Netscape was preparing to make a drastic move. Not only was its arch-nemesis Microsoft rapidly catching up in the browser market, Internet Explorer was also arguably a superior technical platform for web development. After 1997, the year of DHTML, Microsoft’s powerful document object model (DOM) had become the foundation for a new web standard that would define interactive content for years to come: the W3C’s DOM specification.

Netscape made its move on January 22, 1998, when the company announced its “bold plans to make the source code for the next generation of its highly popular Netscape Communicator client software available for free licensing on the Internet.” This was the beginnings of Mozilla, a non-profit organisation that was unveiled at the end of March 1998 by Marc Andreessen:

“Building on the Internet tradition of collaboratively developed software, such as Linux, Netscape is making available today the first developer release of source code for the 5.0 prerelease version of Netscape Communicator Standard Edition, otherwise known by its original code name, Mozilla.”

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