The lasting influence of Netscape Time - The History of the Web<br>The lasting influence of Netscape Time<br>Written by Jay on May 12, 2026.

After Netscape, the speed of software sped up beyond what anyone could have imagined. Thanks to a documentary crew and a ghost writer, we have a full view of the whole thing.

Five minutes to launch.<br>Jamie Zawinski is in the car, but he’s late. Not that big of a deal usually, he was always late. But Zawinski was supposed to be in his chair in five minutes. Instead he was in the passenger seat of a car, still a few minutes from the office.<br>Three minutes to launch.<br>The Netscape PR department gathers around a conference call to the media announcing the imminent release of Netscape’s code to the public. They stress the significance of the launch, one of the largest open source projects of its kind. The goal was simple. Use the power of the open source community to take on their competition, notably Microsoft.<br>Zawinski jumps out of the car and heads into the office. His long trenchcoat wafts behind him. His hair is blue, and half uncut, which Netscape co-founder Jim Clark would later mention gave him the distinction of "having both the longest and shortest hair at the company." He walks briskly. He doesn’t run though.<br>One minute to launch.<br>A crowd has gathered in Zawinski’s cubicle before he even arrives. He throws his stuff down, sits at his terminal, and gets to work. After typing a few commands, everybody pauses for a second. "Wait, this is bad," he says suddenly. For a moment, panic hangs in the air. But he recalibrates and types a bit more. Just a small problem.<br>A minute later, and it is done. At 10 AM on March 31, 1998, Netscape officially goes open source. The Mozilla project had launched.<br>Jamie Zawinski stands among his peers, moments after Netscape is open sourcedThe decision to make Netscape’s browser open source had come only a few months earlier. As Microsoft starting closing in on Netscape’s market share, the company knew that it had to make some changes. Releasing the source code of their browser, they hoped, would give them an edge and let them innovate quickly with the help of other developers around the world while they focused on the more financially promising enterprise wing of the market. But doing so would include a massive rewrite of millions of line of code, and the time of over a dozen engineers working near round the clock on it.<br>You can watch all of this yourself, thanks to the documentary Project Code Rush. The race to release the code at the last minute comes in at about the twenty-five minute mark. The film’s creator, David Winton, already had a relationship with many people inside of the Netscape thanks to some promotional videos he had created with them. He recalls them feeling like they had "nothing to lose." So they let Winton and his crew tag along with their cameras for just over a year, in the midst of turbulent change and a complete remaking of the compnay.<br>The film begins shortly after the initial announcement that Netscape would be going open source. It follows the key team of engineers that would be responsible for preparing the code for a release to the public, a massive effort that required major rewrites and refactoring of the underlying codebase. But working around the clock for years had taken its toll, and the people interviewed for the film were more than willing to be open about it. The film crew was there to capture personalities clashing, engineers sleeping in their offices, desperate races against the clock, and eventually, massive layoffs and a subsequent acquisition by AOL.<br>And still, many of the people that worked on the project were idealists, who had gotten to work on the web because they believed in its ability to democratize and spread information. The open source release felt like the realization of the initial promise of the web, a culmination of all of the work that they had done so far. It was the beginning of something, the beginning of what would later become Mozilla Firefox. But it’s also the end of something that was started five years earlier.<br>Just as the film crew of Project Code Rush was wrapping up filming, a new book came out from Netscape co-founder James Clark. It was called Netscape Time, an apt title given its focus on speed. Clark, along with his ghost writer Owen Edwards, devotes a significant portion of the book describing the pace that the web enabled, which he believed was largely because of how the web revolutionized software distribution.<br>For the children of the Internet, taking a product to market, or going to get a product, were virtual acts hence virtually effortless. Netscape Time was a term we came up with to apply to the speed at which we developed products and, by extension, the relentlessness of the work involved. But the effortlessness of web use is also an aspect of Netscape time, when a consumer can research a product, find the best price, and click to buy, all in the time it used to...