Speaker 1: Brought to you by the two thousand twelve Toyota Camry.
Speaker 1: Get in touch with technology with tech Stuff from how
Speaker 1: stuff What dot com. Hello again, everyone, and welcome to
Speaker 1: tech Stuff. My name is Chris Poulette and I am
Speaker 1: an editor at how Stuff works dot com. Sitting across
Speaker 1: from me, as usual, is senior writer Jonathan's Strickland. Hey there, yes,
Speaker 1: and our story starts long long ago when a single
Speaker 1: celled organism developed into the first web browser. No. Um, yeah,
Speaker 1: so you know there's this guy, Tim burns Lee works
Speaker 1: over at CERN. Like I feel like I've heard his name.
Speaker 1: Dude came up with this neat way of displaying information
Speaker 1: using a network connections, which would eventually blossom into the
Speaker 1: beautiful flower we know as the World Wide Web. We
Speaker 1: probably don't call it that so frequently anymore, if you
Speaker 1: if you read like the stuff from the the early
Speaker 1: nineties Worldwide Web and Information super Highway with that, they
Speaker 1: seem to be required in every single news story. Yeah. Well,
Speaker 1: we've started a little loopy here, but yeah, it's it's clear,
Speaker 1: and we haven't we we haven't mentioned it in quite
Speaker 1: some time, but we have mentioned it on multiple occasions
Speaker 1: that the Internet is basically a medium of UH communication
Speaker 1: between computers. It's it's a network of networks. UH. Your
Speaker 1: computer hooks up to the Internet and you can send
Speaker 1: information in a number of different ways. A lot of
Speaker 1: them are our pass a now or or less used
Speaker 1: than others. I mean people like Gopher or using UH
Speaker 1: transmission protocols like Gopher and and waste. Um. You know,
Speaker 1: people just don't do that very much. Using that is
Speaker 1: less used than it used to be. Um. Email has
Speaker 1: certainly used quite a bit, and still quite a few
Speaker 1: people are using fault transfer protocol sure sure, um. The
Speaker 1: different instant messenger protocols, they they're none of these are
Speaker 1: the Worldwide Web. The world Wide Web basically puts a
Speaker 1: very public pretty face on it, in some cases less
Speaker 1: than pretty, especially if you don't like crawling graphics and
Speaker 1: and midi files. This is the old you know, this
Speaker 1: is the the user friendly version of what the Internet
Speaker 1: has to offer. For a lot of people, they thought
Speaker 1: the world wide webin Internet were synonymous. Not really the case.
Speaker 1: But we wanted to talk about a particular browser and
Speaker 1: a company an organization that that helped bring this browser
Speaker 1: about and how it kind of became a power player
Speaker 1: actually it was the power Player for a while, or
Speaker 1: an ancestor of it was, and then it faded to obscurity,
Speaker 1: rose from the ashes. But we'll get into that. So
Speaker 1: we're talking about Firefox in general. But to to understand
Speaker 1: Firefox and the story behind Firefox, you actually have to
Speaker 1: go back quite a ways, well before there was ever
Speaker 1: any sort of Firefox web browser. So all the way
Speaker 1: back to nine two and then in ninety two. We're
Speaker 1: talking the early days of the web at this point,
Speaker 1: and it seems kind of crazy. I mean, we're recording
Speaker 1: this in so that's you know, just twenty years. But um,
Speaker 1: a fellow by the name of Mark andresen Uh. Basically
Speaker 1: this was this was a college project. He and Eric
Speaker 1: Bina or or Bina, I'm not sure how to say
Speaker 1: his last name. They began to work on a browser
Speaker 1: for x Windows on Unix computers and this was something
Speaker 1: they decided to start working on this after being shown
Speaker 1: the work that Tim burners Lee had been doing over
Speaker 1: at CERN, and they said, wow, you know, we should
Speaker 1: start creating a browser that could access this sort of stuff.
Speaker 1: And so they worked together and they created something they
Speaker 1: called Mosaic, which was one of the earliest web browsers. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and it really it. It sort of helped popularize the
Speaker 1: world Wide Web for a lot of people. Um, for
Speaker 1: a couple of reasons. One it was it was not
Speaker 1: it was reasonably nice to look at. It was easy
Speaker 1: to use, UM. But it was also free because it
Speaker 1: was well again in college project, So it was one
Speaker 1: of those things that was just offered. Now you kind
Speaker 1: of had to know where to find it. UM. You
Speaker 1: kind of had to know. I have an idea what
Speaker 1: the world Wide Web was, and at that point, it was, uh,
Speaker 1: sort of a hobbyist thing. UM. You know I I
Speaker 1: used when I used bit neet back in in the day's.
Speaker 1: Immediately proceeding that, I was using basically email, um, using chat.
Speaker 1: But I really had no idea what the web was.
Speaker 1: And I started doing some reading around around that time
Speaker 1: and said, no, this this looks kind of interesting. UM.
Speaker 1: And uh, you know, I didn't have a web client
Speaker 1: for Miamiga at the time. UM, but I started using
Speaker 1: max around that time and found out that there was
Speaker 1: a version of Mosaic available for which I I actually
Speaker 1: purchased with a book that told you how to use
Speaker 1: the darned thing. And it came on a floppy disk,
Speaker 1: and so I loaded Mosaic from from from that and
Speaker 1: started on the web. Yeah, some interesting connections we should
Speaker 1: we should talk about. I mean, you're going to find
Speaker 1: out that there are a lot of connections to various
Speaker 1: web browsers out there just coming from Mosaic. One of
Speaker 1: the earliest and to me, really interesting ones is that
Speaker 1: in nine company called Spyglass Incorporated licensed the Mosaic browser
Speaker 1: and they began to develop its own code base based
Speaker 1: on Mosaic, and then they licensed that code base to
Speaker 1: Microsoft and that would become part of what would eventually
Speaker 1: be Internet Explorer. So Mosaic and Internet Explorers share some
Speaker 1: some code when you go way way, way, way way back, um,
Speaker 1: and it's uh, you know, that's to me, that's a
Speaker 1: very interesting thing, especially when you look later on down
Speaker 1: the timeline of the evolution of browsers out there on
Speaker 1: the market. Yeah. Yeah, Now, of course that that's less
Speaker 1: of a direct lineage than what and Reason and company
Speaker 1: would do when they decided to go ahead and make
Speaker 1: some money off of this thing, which is the founding
Speaker 1: of the company Netscape. Yeah. First it was called Mosaic Communications,
Speaker 1: but they renamed it before too long to Netscape Communications. Uh.
Speaker 1: They being Mark and Reason and Jim Clark. Uh. This
Speaker 1: was same year that Spyglass incorporated as licensing Mosaic itself. Uh,
Speaker 1: and they come up with the the browser Netscape and
Speaker 1: this was a a pay for browser. You would buy
Speaker 1: the browser. I bought a copy off the shelf, shrink
Speaker 1: wrapped copy of Netscape too, and it became the communicator.
Speaker 1: It actually became quite popular and the adator I'm sorry, navigator.
Speaker 1: There are a lot of a lot of do you
Speaker 1: want to go back? No? No, well, okay, we'll just
Speaker 1: keep going then. All right, Hey, guess what, guys, sometimes
Speaker 1: we go back anyway, And that escape was that is
Speaker 1: very rare though. I remember I remember the uh, the
Speaker 1: little window and the and the right upper right part
Speaker 1: of the screen, which you know, if you've used the
Speaker 1: web for a while, you remember that the little thing
Speaker 1: that would tell you that it's actually working, um, which
Speaker 1: it wasn't. The you know thing from left to right
Speaker 1: in the navigation bar, the address bar, I guess. But yeah,
Speaker 1: back in Netscape navigator days, they had an old ship's
Speaker 1: wheel that was so nice. We call that the helm. Anyway,
Speaker 1: the the the browser became popular it kind of well.
Speaker 1: It introduced and a concept called extensions, which most people
Speaker 1: are familiar with these days. Extensions extend the features of
Speaker 1: a browser by I'll let you install some new code
Speaker 1: that gives it some added functionality. This gave websites, uh,
Speaker 1: or people who are developing websites the ability to include
Speaker 1: stuff that wasn't natively supported by HTML, because the browsers
Speaker 1: were able to interpret the new code and and render
Speaker 1: it properly on the screen so that you're getting the
Speaker 1: experience that the people wanted you to have, the people
Speaker 1: being the web developers and uh. Around that time, in
Speaker 1: the early nineties, Netscape was doing really well. In fact,
Speaker 1: it might have had a market share as high as
Speaker 1: eight percent of the browser market at that time, and
Speaker 1: that's pretty remarkable considering that it was a pay for browser. Yeah. Yeah,
Speaker 1: at that point, Netscape was was riding very high in
Speaker 1: the market. Um. You know, of course, they were competing
Speaker 1: with online service providers like A O L and compy
Speaker 1: serve um, but the web basically was was Netscapes to lose. Yeah,
Speaker 1: at the beginning of the end. We now see when
Speaker 1: you're talking about the possibility of paying you for your
Speaker 1: web browser, versus a competitor that comes along and offers
Speaker 1: one for free, UM that's freely downloadable and has the
Speaker 1: muscle of somebody really big behind it, like on a know, Microsoft,
Speaker 1: like Steve Bomber, it's a big guy. Huh. Yeah. Microsoft
Speaker 1: launches Windows ninety five and has the web browser that's
Speaker 1: included with Windows is Internet Explorer. Now, remember, Internet Explorer
Speaker 1: was built partially upon that code base from Mosaic, and
Speaker 1: it was, as Chris was saying, free of charge. You
Speaker 1: could download it freely and use it yourself, so you
Speaker 1: didn't have to buy a copy of a browser. And
Speaker 1: it even came with Windows, so you didn't even have
Speaker 1: to bother with it, right if you if you bought
Speaker 1: a new computer, then you had Internet Explorer built right
Speaker 1: in there. In fact, that ended up causing some problems.
Speaker 1: There were some issues about Internet Explorer being tied so
Speaker 1: tightly into the UM the operating system experience on Windows
Speaker 1: that it brought up some antitrust issues for Microsoft down
Speaker 1: the line. But that's really more of a Internet Explorer story,
Speaker 1: not so much a Firefox story. So let's go back
Speaker 1: over to what's going on. It took some time, but
Speaker 1: Internet Explorer even though it was free. I mean, it
Speaker 1: did not immediately take over like it wasn't. It wasn't
Speaker 1: an overnight now turnaround. It took about four generations of
Speaker 1: Internet Explorer for it to catch up to Netscape. Meanwhile,
Speaker 1: Netscape branched out. They did more than just use Netscape Navigator.
Speaker 1: They also wanted to create an entire suite of tools
Speaker 1: that you would use, uh for email and for UM
Speaker 1: using that and some of the other stuff. And they
Speaker 1: built a larger suite so you you had an option.
Speaker 1: You could go with Netscape Navigator if you just wanted
Speaker 1: to use the web, or a suite that they called
Speaker 1: Netscape Communicator, which had the greater functionality. Unfortunately, in doing this,
Speaker 1: they gradually, and this is common, uh you know, it's
Speaker 1: happened into Microsoft and many many others. Uh, the code
Speaker 1: gradually became more bloated, more resource intensive if you will, um,
Speaker 1: and made load time slower, made things more difficult. So
Speaker 1: now you have a you know, a heavyweight Internet heavyweight
Speaker 1: and Netscape going against uh, the the net newbie Microsoft.
Speaker 1: But Microsoft has the leaner, more integrated browser in this
Speaker 1: case and again free. So yeah, by that fourth generation
Speaker 1: of Internet Explorer, we started to see things switch around
Speaker 1: to the point where it was it was clear that
Speaker 1: Internet Explorer was going to run away with it. So
Speaker 1: in n uh Netscape Communications made a big decision. They
Speaker 1: decided that they would offer Netscape the Netscape browser for free, yes,
Speaker 1: and that they would freely offer up the the the
Speaker 1: source code, so that it would become an open source project.
Speaker 1: So this, in other words, you could be a developer
Speaker 1: and go in and you could tweak Netscape and have
Speaker 1: your own version of that escape and under the right
Speaker 1: you know, you had to follow certain rules, but you
Speaker 1: could do that. The community very quickly became huge and
Speaker 1: there was a new name for this project. It was
Speaker 1: called the Mozilla project. Yes, now I understand that the
Speaker 1: the name for Mozilla came from it's sort of a
Speaker 1: fudged portmanteau, which is a combination of words for mosaic
Speaker 1: killer or mosaic killer. Um. Of course that took on
Speaker 1: the form of dinosaur because it makes people the name
Speaker 1: Mozilla makes people think of Godzilla um, so they of
Speaker 1: course didn't want to I'm sure copyright infringement. So Mozilla's
Speaker 1: dinosaur monster blizzard giant thing is that red instead of
Speaker 1: green and really bears no resemblance to UH to Godzilla,
Speaker 1: although the more like a Toyrnosaurus or maybe of a
Speaker 1: lossa raptor. Yes, now there there have also been multiple
Speaker 1: incarnations of the design for the critical But yeah, so
Speaker 1: it looks nothing like a Firefox, right the most little
Speaker 1: project launches, but it would not be until two thousand
Speaker 1: two before they released Mozilla one point oh. And this
Speaker 1: was a browser that included email client functionality among other features.
Speaker 1: But at that point Internet Explorer was dominant in the market.
Speaker 1: It had a market share. So we're talking about a
Speaker 1: time where you know, we went from ninety four or
Speaker 1: so where UH Netscape had about market share to two
Speaker 1: thousand and two where I E now has nine of
Speaker 1: the market share. So this is a good thing to
Speaker 1: point out. Things change, really, Yeah, market share can change
Speaker 1: dramatically from one from one decade to the next, or
Speaker 1: even in just the span of a few years. The
Speaker 1: reason why that's important to remember is that we always
Speaker 1: talk about market share as if it is the most
Speaker 1: important thing in the world in some cases, like you know,
Speaker 1: talk about and smartphone adoption or whatever. Um. But it's
Speaker 1: true that these things can change dramatically, and someone who's
Speaker 1: on top, and you would think, oh, this guy is
Speaker 1: going to dominate the market forever, could very easily become
Speaker 1: and also ran in just a few years. And everything
Speaker 1: is relative to um if I if I may step
Speaker 1: on a very small soapbox and only hast room for
Speaker 1: one bars open it. Um. But yeah, I mean, people
Speaker 1: talk about the filling the blank here killer and you know,
Speaker 1: those long term listeners will remember that I brought this
Speaker 1: up before. It drives me crazy when people talk about
Speaker 1: the filling the blank killer, because in just a few
Speaker 1: years they'll be talking about whatever that was killer. And
Speaker 1: and in some cases they don't kill so much as
Speaker 1: carve out a niche market and uh and go for it.
Speaker 1: I mean, um, you know in this case, uh, Internet
Speaker 1: Explorer would have been the Netscape killer, and in some
Speaker 1: cases they did. Um, but Mozilla would come back and
Speaker 1: carve out its own space, and then Chrome came along
Speaker 1: years later, and it is you know, that's it's sort
Speaker 1: of what's going on right now at the time, same
Speaker 1: as it ever was, you saved as it ever was,
Speaker 1: so well, go ahead. I was just gonna say, some
Speaker 1: community members of Mozilla, what's interesting is you've got the
Speaker 1: Mozilla project you've got the Mozilla browser, you still have
Speaker 1: people in the community who don't necessarily think that the
Speaker 1: way that the Mozilla browsers developing is the right way
Speaker 1: to go. And that's the beauty of having an open
Speaker 1: source community is that you don't you know, there's not
Speaker 1: necessarily just one path that you can take. You can
Speaker 1: have multiple paths to try and create the best browser
Speaker 1: experience possible. Yes, some of those community members decided that
Speaker 1: there was there were some issues they had with Mozilla.
Speaker 1: One of them was that they felt that it was
Speaker 1: suffering from feature creep, which is the same thing we
Speaker 1: were talking about with nature creep. Yeah, it turns into
Speaker 1: like Dracula and Mummy and then the creature for the
Speaker 1: Black Lagoon and I've been watching too much Supernatural relately
Speaker 1: watched in an episode last night it was about that. Anyway, No,
Speaker 1: the idea that that they were again Mozilla was starting
Speaker 1: to become, in their mind bloated the way Netscape pad,
Speaker 1: and they did not really think that that was something
Speaker 1: they should pursue. They thought that perhaps they should take
Speaker 1: the code and make something else out of it. So
Speaker 1: this group created a browser that they called Phoenix, as
Speaker 1: in Rising from the ashes. Now they were a legendary
Speaker 1: bird that Yeah, yes, the one that was featured heavily
Speaker 1: in the documentary series Harry Potter. Um the uh the
Speaker 1: But it is a fitting it is a fitting image
Speaker 1: for this browser, which at one time had been Netscape.
Speaker 1: So Phoenix rises from the ashes, but also tends to
Speaker 1: fall again because it turns out someone else has the
Speaker 1: name Phoenix, so they can't really use it, so they
Speaker 1: renamed it Firebird. That caused a problem because there was
Speaker 1: another organization that used the word firebird about distributed software.
Speaker 1: So that was an issue. They ended up thinking, okay, okay, okay,
Speaker 1: we'll name it something else. We'll call it, uh firefox. Yeah.
Speaker 1: Now firefox has the benefit here of going with the
Speaker 1: fire part at the beginning. Um, but adds another very
Speaker 1: cool animal image in there. Now, a firefox isn't actually
Speaker 1: a fox. It is in fact a red panda, which
Speaker 1: in my opinion are really neat animals. But you know, um,
Speaker 1: and actually recently, um, the Mozilla Foundation has sponsored uh
Speaker 1: the well being of a couple of red pandas in
Speaker 1: the Knoxville, Tennessee zoo. Uh. They even had a webcam
Speaker 1: up which had the little critters running around and playing
Speaker 1: and sleeping and sleeping, which they always seemed to be
Speaker 1: doing right as it tuned in. Oh look, there's and
Speaker 1: down for a up. Um In two thousand three was
Speaker 1: when Mozilla created the Mozilla Foundation, which is an independent,
Speaker 1: nonprofit organization. It's mainly meant to manage the daily operations
Speaker 1: of the Mozilla project. Yeah. Well, and we didn't really
Speaker 1: touch on this, but the remnants of Netscape were purchased
Speaker 1: by America Online, so A O L bought Netscape. But
Speaker 1: the Mozilla Foundation has the ability to to go off
Speaker 1: and do their own thing here, so they have. Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 1: So two thousand four was when Firefox one point oh
Speaker 1: was released, and uh, it became a very popular browser
Speaker 1: very quickly. In less than a year, they had over
Speaker 1: one hundred million downloads. So Firefox was quickly kind of
Speaker 1: viewed as the the alternative to Internet Explorer. I can
Speaker 1: hear all the Opera fans out there screaming at me,
Speaker 1: but you know, that's the popular The popular view was
Speaker 1: that Firefox if you didn't want to use Internet ex or,
Speaker 1: you should use Firefox. Yeah. Now, I had actually been
Speaker 1: using Opera up until that point. Um, as I specifically,
Speaker 1: remember a friend of mine going, hey, you know, I
Speaker 1: know you like Opera, but you really should try this
Speaker 1: Firefox out. And I was kind of skeptical because I
Speaker 1: was one of the people who was cranky at Netscape
Speaker 1: for getting so darn bloated. I tried Netscape Communicator for
Speaker 1: a long time and it just drove me crazy. And
Speaker 1: I didn't like Internet Explorer for the Mac very much.
Speaker 1: So yeah, once, once I tried it, I got hooked.
Speaker 1: Give you guys some reference two thousand four. That's around
Speaker 1: the same time that companies like MySpace and Facebook are
Speaker 1: starting to to make a name for themselves. Of course,
Speaker 1: at that point, Facebook is strictly a college only experience.
Speaker 1: But yeah, that's that gives you an idea of what's
Speaker 1: going on around that time. It would be two years
Speaker 1: before version two point oh of Firefox came out that
Speaker 1: they would update. They made lots of frequent updates to
Speaker 1: the Firefox browser, but they were all very incremental without
Speaker 1: made your changes to the code point releases. You don't say,
Speaker 1: so it wasn't until you know, it's two years after
Speaker 1: the debut before two point I came out, and it
Speaker 1: was another two years when version three point oh came out,
Speaker 1: So it was two thousand eight. Uh. The reason why
Speaker 1: I'm bringing this up is it'll be interesting when we
Speaker 1: get to talk about what version is currently help in
Speaker 1: the wild right now as of the recording of this podcast.
Speaker 1: But um, but yeah, two thousand eight was when version
Speaker 1: three point I was released and Firefox hit twenty of
Speaker 1: the market share. Now, UM, I'd like to bring this
Speaker 1: up because the Mozilla Foundation does a lot more than
Speaker 1: just uh than justin Firefox and pandas and pandas red
Speaker 1: pandas they're so cute. Um uh. They also had split
Speaker 1: off some of the other code that was part of Communicator.
Speaker 1: For example, Thunderbird, which is your email client UM is
Speaker 1: UH is sort of the the version that that used
Speaker 1: to be the mail client. And there there was a
Speaker 1: unified UM basically the derivative of Communicator itself, the suite,
Speaker 1: which was called Sea Monkey UM and they released um
Speaker 1: early versions of that. Thunderbird one point came out on
Speaker 1: December seven, two thousand four, and um uh Sea Monkey
Speaker 1: one point oh came out on January two thousand and six. Now,
Speaker 1: both of these are probably not as in as much
Speaker 1: in the public eye. Thunderbird more so but Sea Monkey
Speaker 1: certainly not as much as as either one of those two. UM,
Speaker 1: but they still do work on those projects and over time,
Speaker 1: I just wanted to make sure that we mentioned them.
Speaker 1: But overtime, Mozilla has brought Thunderbird up to the same
Speaker 1: basically the same version system that firefoxes on. Well, two
Speaker 1: thousand eleven, we have Firefox version four point oh released.
Speaker 1: I remember that was a big deal. It was the
Speaker 1: one that that came out. And then UM so between
Speaker 1: two thousand eleven and today, this being the end of
Speaker 1: November two thousand twelve when we record this, um they
Speaker 1: got busy. So, and this is Google's fault. We're seeing
Speaker 1: every couple of years we're seeing a new version of Firefox,
Speaker 1: a new a new version number like one to two,
Speaker 1: two to three, three to four. So you would expect
Speaker 1: that maybe the next you know, version five point oh
Speaker 1: of Firefox probably come out in two thousand thirteen or so.
Speaker 1: Not the case. The Firefox operating are of non operating
Speaker 1: system a browser. We'll get to the operating system in
Speaker 1: a second, is currently at version seventeen as of the
Speaker 1: recording of this podcast, So between two thousand and eleven
Speaker 1: and November two thousand twelve. We went from version four
Speaker 1: all the way up to seventeen and actually versions eighteen
Speaker 1: and nineteen are both in alpha testing right now. That
Speaker 1: is correct, and if you're interested, you can download those versions,
Speaker 1: even a nightly built if you want. Your mileage may vary, yeah,
Speaker 1: day by day, these browsers are changing, and some of
Speaker 1: them may not be what we like to call stable,
Speaker 1: but it just shows shows the massive amounts of change
Speaker 1: that have come out over the last year. Now, now
Speaker 1: what influenced that. It was Google with the Chrome browser
Speaker 1: which came out and again, um, Google has a lot
Speaker 1: of resources that it can uh that it can give
Speaker 1: to the Google Chrome project, which itself is a derivative
Speaker 1: of Chromium. Um. But Google Chrome came out and started
Speaker 1: updating very very quickly, and the folks at the Mozilla
Speaker 1: Foundation realized that in terms of new features being added,
Speaker 1: Chrome was out doing Mozilla quite rapidly, so they decided
Speaker 1: to put themselves on a on a rapid release cycle,
Speaker 1: to which frustrated a lot of people because Firefox, more
Speaker 1: so than Chrome, has been the standard by which companies operate.
Speaker 1: Uh Internet Explorer or or Firefox, um, you know, not Safari,
Speaker 1: not not Opera, not not Chrome and um, so they've
Speaker 1: they've been on not as on a scale that's not
Speaker 1: as fast as Chrome, but they did update, uh start
Speaker 1: making updates more quickly and uh much more quickly than
Speaker 1: they used to be. And now they're on a sort
Speaker 1: of a cycle where they're releasing a couple maybe three
Speaker 1: updates a year. Yeah, it's um maybe pretty dramatic. Yeah,
Speaker 1: to go from four to seventeen thirteen major releases um
Speaker 1: within the span of like a year and a half, really,
Speaker 1: but the releases seemed to be on a tight on
Speaker 1: a on a more level schedule now than they had been.
Speaker 1: They're playing catch up for quite some time. In October five,
Speaker 1: two thousand twelve, they released the Firefox build that that
Speaker 1: can be used in the Windows eight user interface. That's
Speaker 1: that tiled interface that was formerly called metro UM. So
Speaker 1: that that came out towards the end of two thousand twelve. Also,
Speaker 1: they they're working on a smartphone I'll bringing system. Yes,
Speaker 1: that's kind of an interest thing that to build a
Speaker 1: an OS for our phones to really get into that market.
Speaker 1: I mean, where are you talking about a market that's
Speaker 1: mainly being fought by Google and Apple with Windows trying
Speaker 1: to make a name for itself as well at that
Speaker 1: same time, and then other players like BlackBerry are trying
Speaker 1: to you know, regroup, and some like Symbian are almost gone.
Speaker 1: Yeah yeah now, And and it's interesting too because, um,
Speaker 1: like what Google is doing with its operating system, the Chromos, UM,
Speaker 1: Firefox OS is also leaning heavily on web standards for
Speaker 1: its for its programming. So we're talking about HTML five,
Speaker 1: the the newly proposed but not yet finalized version of
Speaker 1: the Hypertext markup language, and a lot of the Mozilla
Speaker 1: specific APIs Application Programming interfaces. UM. Basically, these are are
Speaker 1: plug and play pieces of code that people can use
Speaker 1: to make them compatible, intercompatible. UM. Mozilla is basically saying, hey, look,
Speaker 1: we're open source, we're free, and you know, we want
Speaker 1: to see if we can make inroads on people's smartphones
Speaker 1: and and people can use an Firefox OS simulator right
Speaker 1: now where you can actually give it a try. Actually, uh,
Speaker 1: the name for the simulator is R two D two
Speaker 1: B two G B two G By the ways, boot
Speaker 1: to get yes, which was the original name Gecko being
Speaker 1: the web interface that that or web engine that Firefox
Speaker 1: is built on. But yeah, they they are a primarily
Speaker 1: web centric operating who come from I don't know. I
Speaker 1: have no idea, probably just something they made up. It's
Speaker 1: weird because I would think those were not the droids
Speaker 1: I was looking for. Entirely possible anyway. Yeah, so that
Speaker 1: that brings us up to date with what's going on
Speaker 1: with Firefox. Uh, it's a it's you know, I've used
Speaker 1: Firefox quite a bit in the past. Um, and it
Speaker 1: was for a very long time. It was my browser
Speaker 1: of choice. It's still my browser of choice minus Chrome.
Speaker 1: I use Chrome, I still use Opera, I still use
Speaker 1: Safari from time to time. I am what Molly Wood
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