Wired on Friday: In a few days, users of the popular free web browser, Firefox, will find it quietly requesting an update from Version 1.5 to Version 2 of the program. Even for the most computer savvy, such updates are a moment of trepidation. The web browser, after all, is the program that most of us use to view the web. Will this new version offer a strange bounty of exciting yet potentially incomprehensible features? Will it go faster or slower? Will it ruin my bookmarks? Will it even work on my machine?
The hundreds of developers and volunteers who keep the project going will be crossing their fingers along with the huge global audience of users (Firefox has been downloaded more than 200 million times and occupies about 12 per cent of the browser market).
If it's a success, their next question will be: what next? Even though it brings in millions in revenue, Firefox is not a product created by a profitmaking corporation, so its creators are under no obligation to follow any rules. But the pressure of growing expectations means their next steps could plot the future of the web.
Firefox is the latest descendant of the bravest "open source" project of all - Netscape's Mozilla Project. This was an audacious yet desperate attempt by the dying Netscape Corporation in 1998 to stem the near complete domination of the browser market by its competitor Microsoft. The blueprint source code of the program was made available for free online, with the offer that anybody could contribute to, modify or distribute it.
The Mozilla Project has had a troubled history. The mix of volunteers and paid developers chose early on to throw away the majority of Netscape's prized code and start all over again, leading to a four-year delay before a usable alternative to Microsoft's Internet Explorer could be offered to the public. It was passably good, but by 2002 Internet Explorer had won the browser wars by default.
But the deadline-free, achingly-slow, near-charitable work of the Mozilla developers had produced some results. Then a group of renegade programmers, led by then 19-year-old Blake Ross and Dave Hyatt, were able to aggressively retool the application in a matter of months.
The resulting Firefox was a roaring success, even against Microsoft, primarily because of the upstart browser's built-in ability to block annoying web advertisements and to protect against the worst of Windows spyware. The Mozilla Project eventually adopted the new Firefox code as its primary "product" , although the group was now entirely non-profit, freed from its original corporate sponsors.
Its popularity raised the interest of Google, which hired some of its primary developers and made a deal with the shell organisation to give it a cut of revenue in return for placing Google on the Firefox browser's default front page. The annual revenue from that deal alone amounts to 10s of millions of dollars and supports about 40 staff.
Now the organisation is just putting its finishing touches on the latest version of its browser, which wraps up almost all of the rough edges and completes almost all of its stated goals.
Mozilla Firefox now has the audience, the revenue and the time to develop something new. Microsoft has hurried to produce Internet Explorer 7, which has been largely viewed as a catch-up product rather than a strong competitor.
What next for Firefox 3? In the theoretically open way of these free software projects, it's easy to click around and see some directions. You can even suggest a few at http://wiki.mozilla.org/Firefox/Feature_Brainstorming, where the lead developers allow anyone to make a suggestion for a new feature or goal. But, just as Firefox itself was a largely underground project at Mozilla for many months, you have to dig a bit deeper to see where the real action lies.
For most users, it may well be a disappointment. The programmers of Firefox, free of focus groups and marketing managers, are concentrating on trimming and tidying their code, rather than adding exciting new features.
Brendan Eich, Mozilla's chief technical officer, revealed his plans for Firefox 3 this week. Even at Microsoft headquarters, the read would be a snooze. He wants to re-work the browser so that it's slightly easier for other people to read the code and to add their own. But that will be the key in the next wave of the web.
Eich's first invention at Netscape, JavaScript, was an attempt to decentralise and simplify other people's ability to create code on the web.
Firefox 3 looks to be more of the same. Ross, in an e-mail to US magazine Information Week this month, said: "Ideally, browsers would behave so well you'd forget they exist".
The Mozilla Project began as a desperate hurling of the Netscape name to posterity before it became famous only as yet another Microsoft victim. Maybe Mozilla Firefox and Netscape's final victory will be when no one remembers them, or Microsoft, at all.
Danny O'Brien is activism co-ordinator of the Electronic Frontier Foundation.
