It was a magical time, hearing the scrambling sound of your phone line connecting you to the Internet. Launching Netscape and staring at the throbber animation while...
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.