Actually, most projects start out very small.
On Jul 2, 10:12 am, Roy Schestowitz <newsgro...@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
wrote:
> Ben Goodger of Firefox on how being a very young volunteer in the web world can
> pan out
>
> ,----[ Quote ]
The first web browser was intended as a "Read Only Terminal". Emacs
had
a hypertext viewer (info), and they liked the idea of something
similar for
Lynx. The EZ editor had support for SGML, but SGML was a bit
complicated to
build into a little text-only viewer, so they settled for a subset
(HTML).
The Viola browser started out as a flavor of the EZ Editor widgets
that used
only the read and display methods, and never called the edit methods
of the
widgets.
When things got complicated was when Cornel tried to Viola to
Windows. Windows 3.1
was a whole different animal, and things that were trivial in Unix
were ugly on
Windows. Just keeping the threads from clobbering each other was a
challenge.
Marc Andreeson led a team that merged the Viola and Cello, into
Mosaic, then
left to form Netscape. When Netscape was shut down by Microsoft's IE
and AOLs
"sweetheart deal" with Microsoft after their takeover of Netscape, AOL
put
the core Mozilla code into Open Source (mainly to get around the
deal).
Firefox was an attempt to go back to the simple "roots" of the early
web browsers.
Mozilla and Netscape had become huge monoliths, and were hard to
manage. They took up LOTS of memory, and with Microsoft trying to
memory-starve 3rd party applications, getting Netscape or Mozilla to
start was a chore in patience.
By splitting the monolith into simpler components, and implementing
more of the components as plug-ins or separate applications such as
Thunderbird for e-mail,
the FireFox browser could focus on doing it's primary task very well.
The swiss army knife is great if you in the alps, eating out of cans
as the war rages on around you, but a bit more awkward for a 7 course
dinner at a table, with
a family of 4. This is why restaurants give you the knife, fork, and
spoon, instead of giving you a swiss army knife. Taco Bell does give
you as "spork", but it real never caught on elsewhere.
> http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2007/07/01/CMGJTQA4V...
>
> Here is another 'silly' project that can never compete against Apple and
> Microsoft...
>
> gcc on minix-386 doesn't optimize? [from 'torvalds', first USENET post]
> ,----[ Quote ]
> | Hello everybody,
> |
> | I've had minix for a week now, and have upgraded to 386-minix (nice),
> | and duly downloaded gcc for minix. Yes, it works - but ... optimizing
> | isn't working, giving an error message of "floating point stack
> | exceeded" or something. Is this normal? I had problems with the crcs, so
> | I'm not actually sure I've gotten it right (pretty sure though), but I'm
> | somewhat surprised that gcc would use floating point in normal
> | optimizations when the program under compilation certainly doesn't.
> `----
>
> http://groups.google.co.uk/group/comp.os.minix/browse_thread/thread/d...
As we know, this was one of Linus' early attempts to use Minux, and
after
a period of frustration, he decided to scrap the Minux design
completely and rewrite a simpler and more "debuggable" kernel from
scratch. The 10,000 line kernel didn't even have a name at the time.
We now call it Linux.
|
|
