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It was always my understanding that much of the core of Communicator eventually became early Firefox, but I’ve never really fact-checked that, just kind of read it here and there anecdotally on forums.
And Thunderbird for the email portion. Yes, web and email were in the same application.
4-in-1 🙃
And with GMail and Chrome, it is still.
It became Firefox
Yeah I thought everyone knew this. Netscape became Mozilla Browser, which became Firefox.
TIL!
Firefox is the spiritual successor of Netscape Navigator, as the Mozilla community was created by Netscape in 1998, before its acquisition by AOL. Firefox was created in 2002 under the codename “Phoenix” by members of the Mozilla community who desired a standalone browser rather than the Mozilla Application Suite bundle.
The Firefox project has undergone several name changes. The nascent browser was originally named Phoenix, after the mythical bird that rose triumphantly from the ashes of its dead predecessor (in this case, from the “ashes” of Netscape Navigator, after it was sidelined by Microsoft Internet Explorer in the “First Browser War”).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Firefox
On January 23, 1998, Netscape announced that its Netscape Communicator browser software would be free, and that its source code would also be free. One day later, Jamie Zawinski of Netscape registered mozilla.org. The project took its name, “Mozilla”, from the original code name of the Netscape Navigator browser—a portmanteau of “Mosaic and Godzilla”, and used to coordinate the development of the Mozilla Application Suite, the free software version of Netscape’s internet software, Netscape Communicator. Zawinski said he arrived at the name “Mozilla” at a Netscape staff meeting. A small group of Netscape employees were tasked with coordinating the new community.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mozilla
Everything that was useful in Netscape became the basis for Firefox.
See also the documentary.
I could’ve sworn that the browser was also called just Mozilla at one point, or was that just always the suite it was part of?
My memory is hazy, but I’m pretty sure Mozilla was a package and most people just didn’t install the rest of the package. Everyone called the browser Mozilla because they didn’t use the other parts. I could definitely be wrong, though.
Mozilla (Suite) was similar to Netscape Commumicator and included browser, mail, webpage editor and maybe other functions as well. I don’t recall you could install the components separately. Later they decided to release a standalone browser (Phoenix/Firebird/Firefox) and then mail client (Thunderbird). IIRC they had standalone calendar (Sunbird) and webpage editor as well. Eventually they discontinued Mozilla and the closet thing would be the community-maintained Seamonkey.
could’ve sworn that the browser was also called just Mozilla at one point
If I remember correctly, at one point Mozilla referred to itself as “the godzilla of Mosaic” or something like that.
Mosaic being the first widely available web browser.
I believe the joke was something like it was spelled “Netscape” but pronounced “Mozilla”. Web searches (at time of writing) for “pronounced Mozilla” seem to confirm this. I also seem to remember that its user-agent string identifier was “Mozilla” from the earliest version and never contained “Netscape”, which goes some way to explaining why I initially forgot the real history and assumed a rebranding to Firefox.
Firefox is the spiritual successor of Netscape Navigator
False. SEAMONKEY is the actual successor of Mozilla, the software which is the actual successor of Netscape Navigator.
Everything that was useful in Netscape became the basis for Firefox.
False. Thunderbird is a thing and an important part of Seamonkey.
See also the documentary.
Ready on the (x)-to-doubt button.
I have allways loved the Netscape logo
allways loved
In all ways? Ewww.
Aah the joys of 256 color video cards.
If you could afford one! CGA/EGA were the best we had for a while. VGA/256 color was the stuff dreams were made of (and boy were we excited to finally get a computer that had it!!!)
CGA? EGA? Well look at you, Mr. Fancy Rich Guy Computer user.
I lived the MDA life until waaaaaaaaaaaaay into the SVGA era lol.
Damn, lol! We always laughed about “Hercules”, i now see even that was superior to MDA! TIL we had it “good” with CGA as kids 😅
Hercules was MDA if MDA wasn’t garbage (thanks IBM!).
But yeah went from a XT with MDA to a Pentium system.
Real caveman-discovers-fire moment.
Holy shit I forgot about netscape
Can you still use or get Netscape?
The closest you can get is the Seamonkey browser, which forked off the old Mozilla Application Suite that Netscape 6/7 was based on. The last version of Netscape 9 was just a rebranded Firefox 2.x.
… and a discrete mail app is a wonderful thing.
I loved Netscape as a kid. I would stare at the little Netscape icon with the shooting stars while waiting for pages to load… Funny how little things like that seemed so magical back then ✨🖥️💖
They were magical.
The third of Arthur C Clarke’s three laws:
“Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.”
One can occasionally see things which are just as magical in our time.
It’s just that - the Web is like Coruscant, what was magical is the lower levels, abandoned, decaying, full of predators and infections and barely supported ; people live on the middle levels, which are full of usual life with all kinds of stuff, and upper levels, which are heaven, but for few.
These things still happen. Just mostly not in the Web.
We have forgotten, but most of the magic is created by separate human beings, and it was a very rare situation where corporations would help it, in the 90s.
But then talking like that is a pretty tired cyberpunk trope. We’ll see something good. Humanity finds new pits and stinky places, as the time goes, but these are not the only kind of things it finds.
I been using it for a while, it became Mozilla Firebird
bird?
For a short time.
Even short times can have an explosive finish
Holy shit someone still operates this?!
Isn’t Netscape just Mozilla at this point? At least tech wise
Yes, but no.
The source code for Netscape Navigator was open-sourced and has become Mozilla Firefox. The company Netscape is now a mostly defunct brand while Mozilla is a non-profit, public benefit company in service to the Mozilla Foundation, and the Mozilla community.
Now that splash screen, with its pixelated gradient of the 256 color palette brings back some nostalgic memories.
It’s funny because we can see pixelated stuff today mostly in shitty jpeg artifacts, but those follow the jpeg algorithm for how to best conserve file size within their compression scheme, so they look different. This splash screen seemingly has every pixel meticulously chosen so that it’s in the right place, and working with only the limits of the color space.
In the Windows 3.1 days I made my own icons. Yes, a single pixel out of place or wrongly colored would throw it all off.
Oh shit… core memory unlocked. I forgot I used to do this. I forgot there was a time you would do this otherwise everything just had the same icon.
Dithering, it’s a lost art. It always reminds me of Monkey Island.
Best game. You post like a barmaid.
Even better, that splash screen was only 16 colors.
Netscape got a serious case of Windows’ forceful and illegal monopolisation of Internet Explorer.
And here I was about to say that it had simply become Mozilla Firefox.
I guess I pruned my knowledge (read: forgot) at some point because I know I went from using Netscape to the Mozilla Application Suite as my browser of choice, and then ultimately onto Firefox when that died. (Firefox and Thunderbird were well established and Seamonkey was still in its infancy, otherwise I probably would have switched to that instead.)
Looking at the facts, the AOL buy-out is what must have got me to switch to MAS.
Earth is riddled with empires who thought they would last forever.
