Comment by mmooss
10 days ago
> Netscape was SO bad that they literally threw away all the code to make Firefox.
Nope. Netscape 4 did very well; that's one reason Microsoft used illegal means to compete. But Netscape, in what may be the textbook lesson about starting software projects over, tried to write Netscape 6 from a clean slate. It took much too long (of course) and wasn't released until Netscape was effectively dead.
AOL open-sourced Netscape's source code and from that was born Mozilla. Mozilla's first releases, based on Netscape 6, were Mozilla Suite or later Seamonkey. From what I know, they had generally superior browsers to IE - for example, they had tabbed browsing, popup blocking, and weren't the world's leading vector for attacks (it was before the Gates' Trustworthy Computing memo, which finally focused Microsoft on security).
Mozilla Suite included the browser, email, an HTML/webpage editor, and I think an IRC chat client. It also had seemingly every configuration option any contributor could think of. It was complex and impossible to develop and manage, and far exceeded user needs - most just wanted a web browser. So Mozilla made Firefox, just a web browser, along with the separate Thunderbird, just an email client.
> Nope. Netscape 4 did very well.
I didn't say it didn't do well, I said it was a buggy bloated piece of crap. And it was. It was also the de facto way that many small businesses did both web browsing and email but the writing was on the wall. The price of browsers had fallen to zero.
It's weird arguing about history with someone who wasn't there. I was there. All this software you vague impressions of, I actually used. All of it. All versions of Netscape. All versions of IE (except 1). I still use Thunderbird for email.
The timeline you have in your head is sort of all over the place. By the time Firefox 1.0 was release IE was already on version 8 and had been around for a decade.
Firefox was a superior browser but realistically, at that time, browser security wasn't a huge problem. This was still the time of Flash plugins -- which all browsers supported -- but you still weren't p0wned the minute you browsed anywhere.