Code Rush, the Mozilla Documentary from 2000

In honor of the release of Firefox 3.0, Andy at Waxy today published The Code Rush, the Mozilla Documentary from 2000.

… a video that documented its very beginning in 1998 — the first open-source release of Netscape’s browser and the foundation of the Mozilla project.

Independent filmmakers followed the Mozilla team from March 1998 to April 1999, as they worked to open Netscape Communicator’s source code to the world, in a last-ditch effort to save the company. The result is an amazing snapshot of computer history, capturing the people that worked on it, the first internal beta test, the moment Jamie Zawinski uploaded the first builds publicly, the launch party, the all-hands meeting announcing the AOL acquisition, and so much more. It aired on PBS nationally in March 2000, the same month as the beginning of the dot-com collapse.

You can view it directly here or download the torrent here(H.264 MP4, 455MB).

Thanks for doing this Andy – the film was a big of blast from the past and it was cool to see JWZ in his environment. Amazing because the browser wars really don’t seem all that long ago to me – back when each release truly was a big deal because they seemed to introduce some game changing technology (i.e. frames, graphics, css, etc) that today all seem so mute. Looking back on it, what possibly seemed like a lost cause (the open souring of the Mozilla code base) has evolved into an incredibly important part of the modern web.