John Lilly wants it both ways.

Working at Mozilla Corporation since 2005 and as chief executive since early 2008, he helped oversee a remarkable achievement. Mozilla has built the Firefox browser from a largely unsuccessful remnant of the Netscape era of the 1990s into the browser that nearly a quarter of people on the Web use. Now the challenges are different.

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Marc Andreessen’s name is not quite the household word in Silicon Valley it was in the mid-1990s, when he was a wunderkind at Netscape Communications fighting the browser wars against mighty Microsoft (MSFT). Still, the idea he might get involved in the same market more than a decade later is an intriguing thought.

A person familiar with Andreessen’s plans said he is an investor in a Silicon Valley startup called RockMelt that is working on some form of Web browser. Andreessen did not respond to requests for comment.

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Just six years ago, the web was dominated by one browser: Internet Explorer, specifically Internet Explorer 6. Without Netscape to compete against it and the ability to bundle its browser with Windows XP, Microsoft (MSFT) experienced superior market share–up to 95 percent at the peak. Today though, we have far superior browsers like Firefox, Safari, Opera, and Chrome, as well as Internet Explorer 8.

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For much of this decade, Mozilla and its Firefox browser were the upstarts, out to beat the big, bad Microsoft (MSFT) and its Internet Explorer browser. Firefox, the descendant of Netscape, the browser that helped jump-start the web revolution, was nimble and it was secure–something Microsoft’s IE wasn’t.

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Ever since Netscape started storing cookies in its browsers, there has been a Jekyll-and-Hyde nature to the web. The Jekyll web promised a more personalized experience, with sites serving ads for products and services that you would actually be interested in–ads that are more like useful information and less like glaring interruptions. The Hyde web wanted sites to stalk you, recording little bits of data about your online life until they knew more than you’d be comfortable sharing even with some friends.

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Many lessons have been drawn from the U.S. government’s antitrust assault on Microsoft (MSFT) in the late 1990s. Intel’s (INTC) new scrape with the European Union is likely to spark memories of one of the simplest: don’t put it in writing.

The Justice Department struggled to prove some of its points about Microsoft’s behavior. But it didn’t have much trouble attacking the contracts that the software company forged with various partners, such as Internet access providers, to discourage them from promoting the browser software used by rival Netscape. A federal appeals court upheld a lower court’s finding that the pacts were exclusionary and violated antitrust laws.

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I will never forget that quote, from Alta Vista founder Louis Monier, as he bemoaned the devolution of his creation into Yet Another Portal. He was devoted to the idea that Alta Vista would do one thing–search–and do it well. But Alta Vista was instead turned into a bawdy image of Yahoo (YHOO), AOL, Lycos, Excite, and all the other portals of the late 90s.

And along came Google (GOOG), which by 2000 had gained a reputation as the Best Search on the Web. And Yahoo, eager to appropriate all things Best on the Web, was more than happy to give Google what Netscape had given Yahoo in the mid ’90s: a front row seat to Becoming the Next Big Thing.

Oops.

This is all a throat-clearing to Think Out Loud about Twitter and Facebook. (Like I’ve been doing anything else lately.)

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Chrome is not going to replace Windows. A computer requires an operating system such as Windows, Apple’s OS X or Linux to make the machine work. It does, however, have the potential to do what Mr. Gates feared: make the choice of operating system less important.

So writes John Gapper, the fine columnist for The Financial Times in today’s paper. Chrome, of course, is Google’s new browser, which is pretty explicitly designed to be a Windows killer. As Mr. Gapper notes, that precise fear–that an Internet browser could become such a powerful platform for applications software that it would effectively take over the function of the operating system–is what caused Microsoft to start the browser wars in the 1990s, effectively putting Netscape out of business.

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Ning founder Marc Andreessen is already on the record about Microsoft’s proposed takeover of Yahoo: He thinks it will likely go through, and turn out to be a good deal. It’s a remarkably sanguine take for someone who saw Netscape bought and destroyed by AOL. In a thorough analysis for which he dragooned two corporate lawyers, Andreessen elaborates: Yahoo has few defenses, aside from a poison pill, and Microsoft will likely succeed. For all its thoroughness, the analysis is less interesting for what it says about Microsoft-Yahoo than for what it says about Andreessen.

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Marc Andreesen, the co-founder of Netscape, met Sen. Barack Obama in early 2007. Mr. Andreesen recalls, “In particular, the senator was personally interested in the rise of social networking, Facebook, YouTube, and user-generated content, and casually but persistently grilled us on what we thought the next generation of social media would be and how social networking might affect politics–with no staff present, no prepared materials, no notes. He already knew a fair amount about the topic but was very curious to actually learn more.” As a social organizer and a lover of new technologies, Mr. Obama could be expected to make good use of such tools in getting elected, and he has done so. What may not be as obvious is that Mr. Obama appears to have a keen interest in using such technologies in the act of governing.

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Poor Bebo. I feel for the residents of their hip and convivial apartment block. It has just been bought by a slumlord.

AOL–which is paying $850 million for the social-networking site, the other Facebook–is where innovations go to die. Remember Netscape? Bought for $4.2 billion and now dead. AOL bought a mess of advertising platforms–Advertising.com, Quigo, Tacoda–and can’t make them to get along.

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