This turned into Mozilla, and Mozilla—based on the Netscape code base—was seen as bloated. So a project from the Mozilla team was launched to create a more lightweight browser. It was named Phoenix while in beta, and the plan was to name it Firebird. This conflicted with some other copyright out there so they named it Firefox. It seemed like an odd choice of name at the time.
And now Firefox is seen as bloated by many. History repeats itself I suppose.
The prevailing opinion now seems to be that FF has improved itself and is no longer the hog it was considered. Chrome on the other hand used to be a great lightweight browser and is now gaining the rep FF is shedding
All the junk heaped onto the WWW table has made it bloated, requiring multiprocessing just to run it quickly enough for impatient humans. I still have a version or two of Phoenix (along w. versions of Netscape) on my SPARCstation 20…
Ha Phoenix still running! That’s awesome.
I worked as a contractor for Netscape at the end of the 90’s. I’ll always have a soft spot for them.
TIL that Netscape still put out a product in the iPhone era.
I recall having to explain to someone that we could use netscape navigator, even though we paid for “MacNet” internet service. There was concern that it was not allowed at our house.
I believe I started on Netscape 2. Spent a ton of time on 4.7. Tried the post-AOL releases but did not like them at all. Eventually settled on SeaMonkey until Firefox matured enough to become my daily.
