re: Wanted: Lightweight Browser for old, slow PC
Wednesday, October 7, 2009 at 11:24 pm
Windows 98 Annoyances Discussion Forum
Posted by gewg_
(4444 messages posted)
Kiwi wrote:
|Microsoft still can't make a decent browser after what, thirteen years of trying?
|
We tend to forget they they are just *playing* dumb.
When everyone has to slow down to match the snail's pace of their "innovation",
it helps M$'s business model of not surrendering any control they don't HAVE to.
|I used the first of the Mozillas, Mosaic, I think, then Netscape, back to Mozilla,
|still use Sea Monkey occasionally, and I ended up with FireFox,
|
You've got the chronology right but the bloodlines are a bit more complex.
Marc Andreessen was at the helm for a long time, starting at UIUC.
Mosaic was the first graphical browser and Netscape did grow out of that project
--but not that codebase; Mosaic is actually the basis of Internet Exploder.
Marc started fresh after selling Mosaic to Spyglass.
When M$ screwed Spyglass Software
and started to give away the product of their "partner"
(Spyglass realizing too late that any percentage of nothing is NOTHING),
Netscape had to give away their stuff too.
When Eric S. Raymond and Bruce Perens convinced Netscape
that releasing their code under GPL was the only way to compete with M$,
they did that and handed it over to The Mozilla Foundation
(the first formal use of that name).
Mozilla played with it a while, saw what a mess it was, and decided to start over.
What they kept was the basic structure of the ecosystem (e.g. filenames).
The Gecko engine and the UIs can be said to have a heritage back to Mosaic,
but there are 2 breaks in the continuity of the codebase.
When The Mozilla Foundation decided to make separate browser and mail apps,
The SeaMonkey Project picked up the old Mozilla Suite codebase
and continued developing that.
...and Debian Linux didn't like the "Intellectual Property" in Mozilla's products.
They wanted to remove the logos, but The Mozilla Foundation said NO.
Debian removed both the logos *and* the branding and that suited Moz.
Debian called theirs IceWeasel--now called IceCat (Firefox), IceDove (Thunderbird),
and IceApe (SeaMonkey).
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