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lprovenOops, I did it again.
A potted explanation of the history of the Mozilla browser, how it came about and what has become of it - and which way it's heading. 1,700 words.
I mention 4 by name in there. Which "both" do you mean?
Netscape is no more. It open-sourced its product browser back in about '98, '99 or so. Subsequently it was acquired by AOL.
Netscape died for several reasons. On the browser front, MS decided to kill it, and did so by developing IE & giving it away for free.
(Complete with dreadful broken "security model" in the form of ActiveX: dynamic content by downloading executables from unknown sources over the Internet and running them unprotected on your machine with full local privileges. Which, don't forget, for standalone machines and non-Domain networks, defaults to full Admin rights. Then, to compound this spectacular error of judgement, it sidestepped US DoJ objections and anti-anticompetition legislation by making this howlingly insecure web browser the OS's main user interface, thus being able to claim it as an integral part of the OS. If it were an integral part, you wouldn't be able to uninstall with with LitePC's tools, but WTF, eh?)
On the server, it was out-competed by the free Apache webserver.
In the end, Sun got the server products and AOL the browser - which it then did not use, as it had entered an agreement with MS to use IE, in return for which it got the AOL client software bundled with Win9x.) If it dropped IE, it didn't get bundled. Note that the Mac OS X AOL client uses the Mozilla Gecko rendering engine, not IE.
Anyway.
Netscape Navigator, the standalone browser, ceased development waaaay back - around 95 or so. The company focussed its efforts on Communicator, which already included mail and news. It also added in the workgroup calendaring it got with the acquisition of Collabra and the web editing module from Netscape Gold.
The result was rather bloated and slow and was still based around the old rendering engine, which was showing its age. Netscape 5 was planned to have an all-new rendering engine which would be the best around.
It was the unfinished Netscape 5 which the company open-sourced, *not* the complete, working but flawed Netscape 4 Communicator (which limped on to version 4.8 I believe) or the standalone browser Netscape Navigator (which never got beyond 4.05).
Mozilla was the original internal codename of the Netscape browser. This name was given to the open-source project and it became known by that name alone once Netscape the company ceased to exist.
It took many years for the Mozilla code to get even close to usable shape. On Windows and Mac, IE took over. On Unix, people stuck with Netscape 4 until Mozilla started closing in on a final v1.0 release - it started seeing significant adoption around 0.8 and by 0.9 it was bundled with most distributions. By 0.9 it was basically feature-complete and at this point Netscape took the code and made it over to produce Netscape 6.0. It was too little, too late for the Netscape brand, though, and I didn't really trust it as it was based on unfinished Mozilla code. (Since then I've moved to Linux and got used to running pre-1.0 software. Most of it works just fine anyway and if it does the job who cares what the version number is?)
As only an occasional Linux user in those days, and then mainly on servers, I didn't even look at Mozilla proper until v1.0.
When I did, with the Windows version, I was blown away. It was fast, elegant, highly functional, worked with just about any site, secure, stable and feature-rich. The tabbed browsing feature alone meant I never looked back. It was /excellent/ and significantly better than IE.
However, it's a big program. On Windows I used Ameol for my email & news and FrontPage for web editing. Mozilla kept all that code in memory even if I never used it. A feature called "QuickLaunch" put an icon in the system tray meaning that it was preloaded at boot time and stayed in RAM, vastly reducing launch time, but this was a bit of a kludge. Most people mainly used the browser part and had other solutions for email etc.
So a bunch of splinter group of coders decided to create a standalone browser, along the lines of the old Netscape Navigator product. Just a web browser and nothing else, but keeping Mozilla's advanced browsing features.
Several efforts were started: Chimera, on Mac OS X, wrapped the Gecko engine in an Aqua GUI; K-Meleon, on Windows, in a Windows shell; Epiphany, on Linux GNOME, in a Gtk+ app, and Phoenix, which was cross-platform and kept another key Mozilla feature: a user interface written in the XML-based XUL language. This is a cross-platform tookit for building UI code, allowing the same UI to work on any platform Mozilla supports - Windows, MacOS, Mac OS X, Unix and Linux and xBSD, BeOS and so on. Personally, I hate skinned software, but I can see that this technology does reduce programmer effort by facilitating cross-platform GUI construction.
Phoenix fairly quickly proved to be the most popular, partly, perhaps, because it was cross-platform. It got enough attention that Phoenix the BIOS manufacturers noticed and got threatening over the name.
(The Mac OS X effort, Chimera, was also pretty good and was popular - it was my preferred OS X browser at the time - and it had to change its name, too, to Camino.)
So the name was changed with the next version (0.7, IIRC) becoming Firebird. Development at this stage mainly consisted of people going through the code and chopping away all the non-browser-related stuff. No editor, no mail, no newsreader, no chat, no threaded views, no address book, no sorting, &c &c. It was soon half the size of Mozilla and continued to shrink.
Its popularity continued to grow. It was becoming notably smaller and faster than Mozilla. Around this time, development resumed on an older project which had been static for years: a standalone Mozilla-based mail client. Netscape had tried to produce one as part of its effort towards developing a Java-based mail client, which never really got off the ground. The mail client was renamed Thunderbird to highlight its relationship to the standalone browser and in a few months the dusty old project was bashed into some kind of shape and became a usable if not hugely stable MUA. However, there's a lot more competition in mail clients than there is in modern browsers, with dozens of offerings on every major platform.
At this point, an open source RDBMS project noticed Firbird and said "hey, our name's Firebird and has been for years!"
So, with the next release, 0.8 IIRC, it became Firefox, and a new add-on was released shortly afterwards, which optionally changes the browser's name every time you launch it to "Fire" + some animal or a random dictionary word.
Firefox 0.8 was a complete and highly functional browser which outperformed its parent product. It also got the Mozilla project of which it was a part more attention than it had got for years.
Since a lighter-weight standalone browser was clearly what most people wanted, the Mozilla project managers decided that Firefox and Thunderbird were to be the future direction of the Mozilla project, and that the all-in-one program would be sidelined, although development would continue. The Mozilla "trunk" is still the main source for both Firefox and Thunderbird.
Thunderbird retains Mozilla's address book component. Other related projects include Sunbird, a stand-alone calendaring application. (An Internet-aware scheduler, basically.) Linux distributor Linspire is also sponsoring development of Nvu, a web editor - essentially
a standalone Mozilla Composer.
The proper names of all these applications is Mozilla (whatever): Mozilla Firefox, Mozilla Thunderbird, Mozilla Sunbird and so on. They're all based off the same code trunk and in time modifications and improvements in the individual modules should feed back into the trunk, so the Mozilla application itself should continue to develop slowly.
Annually since 2000, AOL has taken the current stable version of Mozilla and produced a version of Netscape from it.
2000: Netscape 6.0 ( = Mozilla 0.9)
2001: Netscape 6.1, 6.2
2002: Netscape 7.0
2003: Netscape 7.1 ( = Mozilla 1.4)
2004: Netscape 7.2 (= Mozilla 1.7.2, when development switched to Firefox &c.)
These change the branding and the skin, add in an XUL AIM client which can run in the browser sidebar, and add support for AOL's proprietary mail system and the webmail system of the unsuccessful NetscapeOnline ISP & Portal. Since AOL mail is now accessible via IMAP this is now largely unimportant but since Netscape 6 this was the only way to access AOL mail from outside AOL's own applications.
AOL also has a standalone Mozilla-based mail client, AOL Communicator. I'm not sure how this is related to Thunderbird, which it predates, but there must be some connection. It was pretty good at the time and I used it for a while; it had integrated spam filtering which was very handy. Mozilla 0.9 was Netscape 6, which spawned 6.1 and 6.2.
In summary, the Mozilla suite is the open-source descendant of the unreleased Netscape 5. AOL partly funds its development (although the Mozilla Foundation is now a separate body) and occasionally released a Netscape-branded version of the Mozilla application.
The monolithic multi-functional application is now being broken down into individual stand-alone components, and in response to the popularity of these, they are now the primary development effort of the Mozilla team. The most popular and the first to reach v1.0 is Firefox, the browser, and it really is an excellent product which I cannot recommend highly enough. Everyone should try this. There really is no reason to use IE any more, except for a diminishing number of badly-designed IE-specific sites. I cannot remember the last time I encountered one of these myself.
Firefox is better in every way - it's smaller, faster, more functional and more secure. (I'm not sure it's meaningful to compare their friendliness.) It blocks all unwanted pop-up windows - I haven't seen *one* for years - and it is immune to pretty much all spyware and Windows exploits and virus attacks. The tabbed browsing feature alone saves me a large amount of time and v1.0 supports RSS feeds too.
It's also more cross-platform than IE has ever been.
It runs on all versions of Windows, is small, light and fast, and it's free. Won't cost you a penny. No banner ads, spyware or anything else.
A potted explanation of the history of the Mozilla browser, how it came about and what has become of it - and which way it's heading. 1,700 words.
I mention 4 by name in there. Which "both" do you mean?
Netscape is no more. It open-sourced its product browser back in about '98, '99 or so. Subsequently it was acquired by AOL.
Netscape died for several reasons. On the browser front, MS decided to kill it, and did so by developing IE & giving it away for free.
(Complete with dreadful broken "security model" in the form of ActiveX: dynamic content by downloading executables from unknown sources over the Internet and running them unprotected on your machine with full local privileges. Which, don't forget, for standalone machines and non-Domain networks, defaults to full Admin rights. Then, to compound this spectacular error of judgement, it sidestepped US DoJ objections and anti-anticompetition legislation by making this howlingly insecure web browser the OS's main user interface, thus being able to claim it as an integral part of the OS. If it were an integral part, you wouldn't be able to uninstall with with LitePC's tools, but WTF, eh?)
On the server, it was out-competed by the free Apache webserver.
In the end, Sun got the server products and AOL the browser - which it then did not use, as it had entered an agreement with MS to use IE, in return for which it got the AOL client software bundled with Win9x.) If it dropped IE, it didn't get bundled. Note that the Mac OS X AOL client uses the Mozilla Gecko rendering engine, not IE.
Anyway.
Netscape Navigator, the standalone browser, ceased development waaaay back - around 95 or so. The company focussed its efforts on Communicator, which already included mail and news. It also added in the workgroup calendaring it got with the acquisition of Collabra and the web editing module from Netscape Gold.
The result was rather bloated and slow and was still based around the old rendering engine, which was showing its age. Netscape 5 was planned to have an all-new rendering engine which would be the best around.
It was the unfinished Netscape 5 which the company open-sourced, *not* the complete, working but flawed Netscape 4 Communicator (which limped on to version 4.8 I believe) or the standalone browser Netscape Navigator (which never got beyond 4.05).
Mozilla was the original internal codename of the Netscape browser. This name was given to the open-source project and it became known by that name alone once Netscape the company ceased to exist.
It took many years for the Mozilla code to get even close to usable shape. On Windows and Mac, IE took over. On Unix, people stuck with Netscape 4 until Mozilla started closing in on a final v1.0 release - it started seeing significant adoption around 0.8 and by 0.9 it was bundled with most distributions. By 0.9 it was basically feature-complete and at this point Netscape took the code and made it over to produce Netscape 6.0. It was too little, too late for the Netscape brand, though, and I didn't really trust it as it was based on unfinished Mozilla code. (Since then I've moved to Linux and got used to running pre-1.0 software. Most of it works just fine anyway and if it does the job who cares what the version number is?)
As only an occasional Linux user in those days, and then mainly on servers, I didn't even look at Mozilla proper until v1.0.
When I did, with the Windows version, I was blown away. It was fast, elegant, highly functional, worked with just about any site, secure, stable and feature-rich. The tabbed browsing feature alone meant I never looked back. It was /excellent/ and significantly better than IE.
However, it's a big program. On Windows I used Ameol for my email & news and FrontPage for web editing. Mozilla kept all that code in memory even if I never used it. A feature called "QuickLaunch" put an icon in the system tray meaning that it was preloaded at boot time and stayed in RAM, vastly reducing launch time, but this was a bit of a kludge. Most people mainly used the browser part and had other solutions for email etc.
So a bunch of splinter group of coders decided to create a standalone browser, along the lines of the old Netscape Navigator product. Just a web browser and nothing else, but keeping Mozilla's advanced browsing features.
Several efforts were started: Chimera, on Mac OS X, wrapped the Gecko engine in an Aqua GUI; K-Meleon, on Windows, in a Windows shell; Epiphany, on Linux GNOME, in a Gtk+ app, and Phoenix, which was cross-platform and kept another key Mozilla feature: a user interface written in the XML-based XUL language. This is a cross-platform tookit for building UI code, allowing the same UI to work on any platform Mozilla supports - Windows, MacOS, Mac OS X, Unix and Linux and xBSD, BeOS and so on. Personally, I hate skinned software, but I can see that this technology does reduce programmer effort by facilitating cross-platform GUI construction.
Phoenix fairly quickly proved to be the most popular, partly, perhaps, because it was cross-platform. It got enough attention that Phoenix the BIOS manufacturers noticed and got threatening over the name.
(The Mac OS X effort, Chimera, was also pretty good and was popular - it was my preferred OS X browser at the time - and it had to change its name, too, to Camino.)
So the name was changed with the next version (0.7, IIRC) becoming Firebird. Development at this stage mainly consisted of people going through the code and chopping away all the non-browser-related stuff. No editor, no mail, no newsreader, no chat, no threaded views, no address book, no sorting, &c &c. It was soon half the size of Mozilla and continued to shrink.
Its popularity continued to grow. It was becoming notably smaller and faster than Mozilla. Around this time, development resumed on an older project which had been static for years: a standalone Mozilla-based mail client. Netscape had tried to produce one as part of its effort towards developing a Java-based mail client, which never really got off the ground. The mail client was renamed Thunderbird to highlight its relationship to the standalone browser and in a few months the dusty old project was bashed into some kind of shape and became a usable if not hugely stable MUA. However, there's a lot more competition in mail clients than there is in modern browsers, with dozens of offerings on every major platform.
At this point, an open source RDBMS project noticed Firbird and said "hey, our name's Firebird and has been for years!"
So, with the next release, 0.8 IIRC, it became Firefox, and a new add-on was released shortly afterwards, which optionally changes the browser's name every time you launch it to "Fire" + some animal or a random dictionary word.
Firefox 0.8 was a complete and highly functional browser which outperformed its parent product. It also got the Mozilla project of which it was a part more attention than it had got for years.
Since a lighter-weight standalone browser was clearly what most people wanted, the Mozilla project managers decided that Firefox and Thunderbird were to be the future direction of the Mozilla project, and that the all-in-one program would be sidelined, although development would continue. The Mozilla "trunk" is still the main source for both Firefox and Thunderbird.
Thunderbird retains Mozilla's address book component. Other related projects include Sunbird, a stand-alone calendaring application. (An Internet-aware scheduler, basically.) Linux distributor Linspire is also sponsoring development of Nvu, a web editor - essentially
a standalone Mozilla Composer.
The proper names of all these applications is Mozilla (whatever): Mozilla Firefox, Mozilla Thunderbird, Mozilla Sunbird and so on. They're all based off the same code trunk and in time modifications and improvements in the individual modules should feed back into the trunk, so the Mozilla application itself should continue to develop slowly.
Annually since 2000, AOL has taken the current stable version of Mozilla and produced a version of Netscape from it.
2000: Netscape 6.0 ( = Mozilla 0.9)
2001: Netscape 6.1, 6.2
2002: Netscape 7.0
2003: Netscape 7.1 ( = Mozilla 1.4)
2004: Netscape 7.2 (= Mozilla 1.7.2, when development switched to Firefox &c.)
These change the branding and the skin, add in an XUL AIM client which can run in the browser sidebar, and add support for AOL's proprietary mail system and the webmail system of the unsuccessful NetscapeOnline ISP & Portal. Since AOL mail is now accessible via IMAP this is now largely unimportant but since Netscape 6 this was the only way to access AOL mail from outside AOL's own applications.
AOL also has a standalone Mozilla-based mail client, AOL Communicator. I'm not sure how this is related to Thunderbird, which it predates, but there must be some connection. It was pretty good at the time and I used it for a while; it had integrated spam filtering which was very handy. Mozilla 0.9 was Netscape 6, which spawned 6.1 and 6.2.
In summary, the Mozilla suite is the open-source descendant of the unreleased Netscape 5. AOL partly funds its development (although the Mozilla Foundation is now a separate body) and occasionally released a Netscape-branded version of the Mozilla application.
The monolithic multi-functional application is now being broken down into individual stand-alone components, and in response to the popularity of these, they are now the primary development effort of the Mozilla team. The most popular and the first to reach v1.0 is Firefox, the browser, and it really is an excellent product which I cannot recommend highly enough. Everyone should try this. There really is no reason to use IE any more, except for a diminishing number of badly-designed IE-specific sites. I cannot remember the last time I encountered one of these myself.
Firefox is better in every way - it's smaller, faster, more functional and more secure. (I'm not sure it's meaningful to compare their friendliness.) It blocks all unwanted pop-up windows - I haven't seen *one* for years - and it is immune to pretty much all spyware and Windows exploits and virus attacks. The tabbed browsing feature alone saves me a large amount of time and v1.0 supports RSS feeds too.
It's also more cross-platform than IE has ever been.
It runs on all versions of Windows, is small, light and fast, and it's free. Won't cost you a penny. No banner ads, spyware or anything else.
