Originally posted by Alex Vincent
Actually, no. When mozilla.org first launched with code Netscape open-sourced, the plan was to eventually deliver a product Netscape could call Netscape 5. Simultaneously, a few good men (and probably fewer good women) started working on a next-generation layout engine, Seamonkey.
I might have my facts jumbled on whether it was a layout engine and whether it was called Seamonkey.
Almost right. Seamonkey is the codename for the entire Mozilla Application Suite. NGLayout, renamed Gecko, was the rendering engine.
But in any case, the mozilla.org team decided to completely throw away the codebase Netscape donated, and go with the Seamonkey/Gecko platform.Not really. Mozilla.org decided to write a new one instead of using the old messed-up one, and then Netscape decided to go with their new "Gecko" rendering engine instead of the old one, which confusingly enough was named "Mozilla" (Which in turn is named after the working group that constructed it with Mosaic as base. The name has been passed down from WG to rendering engine to project team to browser).
The whole browser didn't get replaced, though. SpiderMonkey, the main JavaScript engine, is a revision of the onld one and not a rewrite, for example.
Now, Netscape 6 was a public-relations disaster. It wasn't ready for prime-time. Netscape 6.1 was based on Mozilla 0.9.2, and Netscape 6.2 on Mozilla 0.9.4, but even so, it just wasn't good enough.
Mozilla 1.0 was the source code which Netscape 7.0 was based on. It was and is an industrial-strength product.Well, I'm sceptical. It was still too prone to crashing, hogging the CPU and leaking memory. 1.21 was the first one where they had killed almost all CPU hogs and crashing bugs that commonly occured in 1.0 and 1.1.
Incidentally, mozilla.org is planning another "stable release" within the next month or so, called Mozilla 1.4; apparently, this is to replace Mozilla 1.0 as the branch for stable, less-experimental code improvements.Yep. It's because of the next phase in the project needs to get going - the development that is intended to produce Mozilla 2.0.
This may (I don't have insider information, and I don't work for anyone who does) mean a Netscape 7.x release based on Mozilla 1.4. (I believe Netscape 7.0.1 is based on Mozilla 1.0.2.)I can confirm this. I talked with timeless on irc a few days back, and he said Netscape are working on a version 7.1 (possibly named 7.5, but for now it's called 7.1) that will be branched from the 1.4 version.
Furthermore, there are plans to make Mozilla Firebird (formerly called Phoenix) the basis of a browser-only Mozilla. Similarly, there are plans in the works to make the Mail/News component of Mozilla standalone, and possibly (but not set in stone yet) the Composer application as well.Not only plans. Starting with version 1.5, Mozilla will revert to a pre-production state where they replace all current components in the Mozilla Application Suite with either stand-alone applications such as the Mozilla Firebird based Mozilla Browser, or with extensions to said Mozilla Firebird. None of the current components of the Mozilla Application Suite is intended to be dropped, but they might not have been converted to the new architecture yet as of the 1.5 and 1.6 releases. (Which can be considered to be pre-production releases for Mozilla 2.0 in the same way 0.6, 0.8 etc. were pre-production releases for Mozilla 1.0)