Mosaic, Netscape, Mozilla, Firefox, AOL, & Seamonkey

**BWF89** · January 20th, 2006

I've read the Wikipedia pages on the the browsers but I'm still confused on how the origional graphical browser called Mosaic turned into Netscape and now we now have a bunch of browsers based on it under different licences, names, and owned by different companies.

Could anyone provide a timeline or progress chart showing how and when this all happened?

**welsh_spud** · January 20th, 2006

I'm affraid your mistaken. Mosaic was a web browser in the 90's made by the NCSA. When Microsoft started to see that this new 'web' thing was taking off, they bought mosaic and henceforth Internet Explorer was born.

At that time the king of the web browsers was Netscape, who had their own browswer called Netscape Navigator. The browser wars started, with each company trying to out-feature the other. This resulted in buggy software on both sides, until eventually Internet Explorer was 'integrated' with windows. We all know about THAT story!

After being defeated, Netscape was bought by AOL (Time Warner?) and the source code was made open source, and the Mozilla foundation was born.

After a short while, the developers at Mozilla realised how shoddy Netscape's source code was, after the rampant feature creep during the mid-90's. They then decided to start from scratch, and build a new web browser called Mozilla. A tribute to the first ever comercial browser made several years earlier.

Years passed and a new fork of mozilla was started. Enter Pheonix at this point. Pheonix was a new lean web browser made by the people at Mozilla. For a number of reasons, the name Pheonix was dropped and Firebird put in its place, which was then replaced by non-other than Firefox.

At some point (I can't remember when exactly) in late 2005 The Mozilla Foundation became The Mozilla Corporation.

Meanwhile Internet Explorer is still chuging away with the the same core from the Mosaic browser over ten years ago...

I think most of what I have said is pretty accurate, but I was typing this off the top of my head from a thread a read in the Xandros forums six months ago

**xequence** · January 20th, 2006

Didnt at one time they reinvent the netscape browser with firefox code or something? And then add alot of bloat and stuff to it?

Not sure on this one... I dont know where I heard it.

**mstlyevil** · January 20th, 2006

Originally Posted by xequence

Didnt at one time they reinvent the netscape browser with firefox code or something? And then add alot of bloat and stuff to it?

Not sure on this one... I dont know where I heard it.

Netscape launched the Mozilla foundation to do the testing and development work for their future browsers. The Mozilla browser is the testbed for Netscape and Firefox is a stripped down testbed for Mozilla. Netscape integrates the best features of both browsers into it's own. Also both Mozilla and Netscape are full featured web browsers and mail clients combined ans both Firefox and Thunderbird are both stand alone. Netscape opened these projects up to open source to save money in future development cost and to thoroughly test new technology and features in the real world before incorporating them into their browsers. Sun does the same thing with Open Office for Star Office.

**Sef** · January 21st, 2006

A couple of Links on Mosaic History:

Mosaic was two different things:

1) A browser that ended up being used to make I.E.

2) A company name. That company made Netscape.

Focus on Netscape:

http://www.blooberry.com/indexdot/history/netscape.htm

Focus on the net history:

http://www.w3.org/People/Raggett/book4/ch02.html

**Bandit** · January 21st, 2006

Originally Posted by mstlyevil

Netscape launched the Mozilla foundation to do the testing and development work for their future browsers. The Mozilla browser is the testbed for Netscape and Firefox is a stripped down testbed for Mozilla. Netscape integrates the best features of both browsers into it's own. Also both Mozilla and Netscape are full featured web browsers and mail clients combined ans both Firefox and Thunderbird are both stand alone. Netscape opened these projects up to open source to save money in future development cost and to thoroughly test new technology and features in the real world before incorporating them into their browsers. Sun does the same thing with Open Office for Star Office.

Bingo...

**ssam** · January 21st, 2006

just to be pedantic, i the "mozilla foundation" name is quite new http://www.mozillazine.org/talkback.html?article=3420 . I think they were just mozilla organisation before.

there was also a lot of rewriting between the netscape 4.x series and the mozilla 1.0. i dont think much original code remained. major things like the XUL framework were introduced. this made the program very modular, hence the relative easy with which the firefox branch was made. (i think with compile time options you could tell it just to build the browser component) lots of work has since been done to make firefox lighter and simpler than mozilla.

**toastytoast** · September 3rd, 2008

I don't think microsuck bought mosiac because you can still get mosiac source ftp://ftp.ncsa.uiuc.edu/Mosaic/Unix/source/ i would actually like to compile it and use it just because it would be cool to do but the source is for linux kernal 1.2.4 i believe so if any one could re make a new makefile that would be cool i might try to but probably not

**lukus** · January 2nd, 2010

I realize this thread is two years old, but I was doing some research looking into really old browsers and came across this... It is interesting that Mosaic for unix doesn't compile for linux 2.6 (obviously, since the source and binaries relate to linux 1.2.4 or something) however Mosaic for Windows version 3.0 works under wine in linux... what an awesome browser... heh heh heh