Browser wars

Last week in Rijeka we held Science festival 2015. This is the (hopefully not unlucky) 13th instance of the festival that started in 2003. Popular science events were organized in 18 cities in Croatia.

I was invited to give a popular lecture at the University departments open day, which is a part of the festival. This is the second time in a row that I got invited to give popular lecture at the open day. In 2014 I talked about The Perfect Storm in information technology caused by the fall of economy during 2008-2012 Great Recession and the simultaneous rise of low-cost, high-value open-source solutions. Open source completely changed the landscape of information technology in just a few years.

The talk was well received, but unfortunately was not recorded. However, I was invited to repeat it at Rikon 2014, and we have the recording from there posted on YouTube. The recording is in Croatian, but the Truth Happens Remix video I play during the talk is in English. I also have to credit Jim Whitehurst's TEDx talk on Economics of the Information Revolution for inspiration.

University departments open day 2015

This year I wanted to talk more specifically about why open source succeeded, and ideally cover one successful project the general public had prior experience with in the role of a user. Completely unrelated, I also really wanted to talk at some point about what I saw during the early years of Mozilla. These two were easy to combine, and the topic of Browser wars was proposed and accepted.

The talk covered the rise of NCSA Mosaic, rise of Netscape Navigator/Communicator and later Microsoft Internet Explorer, the First browser war between the two, the fall of Netscape and appearance of Mozilla. I stressed the importance of web standards, and explained how they allowed Apple and Google to enter the competition with Safari and Chrome. Mozilla did not just make the entrance easier for them; it made the entrance possible at all. Mozilla did that by pushing its standards-compliant Firefox browser to the mainstream, which in turn forced webmasters to adapt.

There is an interesting image on Wikimedia Commons that shows browser market share over time, from 1996 to 2009. This timeframe only shows Mozilla Firefox biting into Internet Explorer's market share, so Google Chrome is not shown.

The talk has been recorded and will be^W^W has been uploaded to YouTube as soon as I get a hold of the recording. In the meantime, you can take a look at the 2012 version of the epic Mozilla Story video I played during the talk (for die-hard fans of Mozilla I will note that 2011 version is also available).

Article in the Universitas newspaper

University of Split newspaper Universitas published an article covering the talk in issue 65, pages 18 and 19. Tomislav Čizmić Marović helped me get the article in shape for publication, had no problem accepting drafts in OpenDocument format, and handled the typesetting very professionally. Thanks!