zlacker

>>kjhugh+(OP)
Based on my understanding, some of the details he gave about the Spyglass/Microsoft situation are not quite right, but I don't think it would appropriate for me to provide specific corrections.

However, since I was the Project Lead for the Spyglass browser team, there is one correction I can offer: We licensed the Mosaic code, but we never used any of it. Spyglass Mosaic was written from scratch.

In big picture terms, Marc's recollections look essentially correct, and he even shared a couple of credible-looking tidbits that I didn't know.

It was a crazy time. Netscape beat us, but I remember my boss observing that we beat everyone who didn't outspend us by a favor of five. I didn't get mega-rich or mega-famous like Marc (deservedly) did, but I learned a lot, and I remain thankful to have been involved in the story.

>>ericsi+3j
In ~1997ish, the company I was soon to work for licensed Spyglass for use in our Internet-over-cable-TV startup, WorldGate. We ran the browsers in the headend, eventually on custom-designed laptop-chipset-based blades, 10 to a 2U chassis, with 10-20 browser instances running on each blade. (No commercial blades existed back then.) We compressed the screen images and sent them down to settops, with user input via IR keyboards and remotes being sent back up to the headend.

I was hired in Sept 1998 to work on the browser; we had built our own Javascript engine to add to it (since that was kinda required for the web by then). I rewrote all the table code, because it just really didn't work well when you had "too few" horizontal pixels, especially if table widths were expressed in things like %. In the end, after a major redesign of all the table code, it did better than Netscape did in the 'hard' cases.

However, before long, it became apparent with all the additions being made as part of HTML4 that sticking with Spyglass-derived code and trying to update it ourselves to compatibly implement HTML4 (or enough of it) was going to be a herculean effort for a small company (max ~350 people and briefly a $1B valuation (1999), but only around 5 or 10 people max on the browser, including the JS engine.

Given that, I made the decision in late 1999/early 2000 to switch us to the upcoming Mozilla open-source browser, and got deeply involved. The Internet-over-cable-TV part of the company failed (cable companies had other priorities, like breaking TVGuide's patent monopoly, which they paid us to do for them), and we moved onto other markets (hardware videophones) not involving browsers in 2003. I stayed involved peripherally in Mozilla, and when WorldGate dissolved in 2011 I joined Mozilla fulltime to lead the WebRTC effort.

The Spyglass internal architecture seemed at the time to be pretty reasonable compared to what I knew of the NCSA code.