Code Rush: watching Mozilla’s history in the making

A couple of days ago I saw “Code Rush“, a non-fiction movie about life at Netscape while they were in the process of open sourcing their browser in 1998. It’s a great documentary about a defining moment in the history of the web, touching on subjects like code & quality (zarro boogs), the fight with Microsoft, the awkward marriage with AOL, the stock market, technology start-up culture and work versus life.

Netscape Mozilla Documentary 1998 - 2000 ProJect Code Rush - creative common licence

Open sourcing Communicator didn’t save Netscape as a company, but it did allow the Mozilla Organization to create a whole new browser suite based on XUL and NGlayout (later Gecko), which were 2 important building blocks for Phoenix, a standalone browser (instead of a suite) which we now know as Firefox.
Code Rush aired in 2000 on PBS in the States, but was released under a Creative Commons license in 2009. You can check out all footage (and search the transcripts) on clickmovement.org.

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