Interviewed by CNN on 26/11/2013 20:05, hawker told the world: > On 11/26/2013 2:25 AM, Judy Dolby wrote: >> *I love SeaMonkey, bugs and all. Years ago when Netscape came on the >> scene, I got it and stuck with it. At last there was an alternative to >> leaky IE. I understand that SM is from Netscape. I used Google Chrome >> one day to pay a subscription and it never warned me, but I got hacked >> badly, lost money, had to change 2 credit cards. Look at window, non >> stop fixes being downloaded! Don;t give up SM guys, you are doing a >> great job! :-) >> >> > > That is an interesting way to put it. Netscape predates IE so I always > saw IE as an attempted alternative to Netscape, not the other way around. > > SM isn't really from Netscape. SM is from Mozilla, different code base. > That said Netscape used it at one time when they ditched Netscape 5 and > started over open source at Netscape 6. But when I think of Netscape I > think of 4.x and before. >
Actually, neither is entirely correct. Mozilla was originally the internal name (codename) for Netscape. Netscape identified itself to Web servers as "Mozilla". That's the reason many non-Mozilla products still have the word "Mozilla" somewhere in their user-agent strings -- back then, spoofing Netscape was a necessity. In fact, history is repeating itself with the Gecko rendering engine (the one Mozilla products use), because several non-Mozilla browsers identify themselves inserting "like Gecko" in their UA string... Anyway... back in 1998 when Microsoft was pushing Netscape towards bankruptcy by outspending it on R&D and giving away their products (killing Netscape's business model), one of the last desperate maneuvers of Netscape was the decision to go open-source. They created an open-source project named "Mozilla" in order to develop a next-generation browser. The idea was that a future version of Netscape would be built upon the core Mozilla product. (There are several explanations why there was never a "Netscape 5", but one that makes some sense to me is that the original idea was that V5 was intended to be an interim release based on the old codebase, and V6 was to be based on the new Mozilla codebase. Eventually, the V5 project was killed but the version numbers remained) Soon after that, Netscape was gobbled up by AOL and ceased to exist as a separate entity. AOL kept funding Netscape and the Mozilla project for a few years, although sorta half-heartedly. Mozilla was sorta stuck in Development Hell at the time. Eventually, AOL decided to kill off the remains of Netscape, but -- surprisingly -- they did it in a rather nice way: instead of just chucking it all to the bin, they spun off Mozilla as a non-profit foundation and endowed it with a chunk of cash. Several former Netscape employees went to work for the Mozilla foundation. Anyway... the initial Mozilla product was a browser suite similar to Netscape 4, but based on new code. This product failed to cause a big splash. But a couple teams were working on their own in smaller, leaner, simpler, more focused stand-alone products -- those ended up being Firefox and Thunderbird. And Firefox DID cause a big splash. With the success of Firefox, the Mozilla Foundation decided to concentrate on Firefox and Thunderbird and abandon the development of the Mozilla Application Suite. A team of volunteers took over the MAS project, renamed it Seamonkey and here we war now. So, Seamonkey is not "from Netscape" (since that company ended a long time ago) but it's the spiritual descendant of the old Netscape Suite. And while IE began as an alternative to Netscape, by the time Mozilla-branded products hit the Web IE was dominant, therefore anything Mozilla was seen as an alternative to IE. -- MCBastos This message has been protected with the 2ROT13 algorithm. Unauthorized use will be prosecuted under the DMCA. -=-=- ... Sent from my Bat-Computer. * Added by TagZilla 0.7a1 running on Seamonkey 2.22 * Get it at http://xsidebar.mozdev.org/modifiedmailnews.html#tagzilla _______________________________________________ support-seamonkey mailing list support-seamonkey@lists.mozilla.org https://lists.mozilla.org/listinfo/support-seamonkey
