History of Mozilla Application Suite

While the suite is no longer a formal Mozilla product, its development and maintenance is continued as the SeaMonkey community project.

The open source release, which came at the height of the United States's late-1990s economic boom, was greeted by the Internet community with a mixture of acclaim and skepticism.

Other observers, including many outside of the free software business community, interpreted the move as Netscape's surrender in the face of the ascendancy of Microsoft's Internet Explorer browser.

As stated on the October 26, 1998 development roadmap,[3] it was decided to scrap the whole code base and rewrite it from the ground up.

[4] The resulting plan included, among other things, the creation of a whole new cross-platform user interface library and a new layout engine.

One widely publicized feature of the first Gecko preview release was that it fit on a single 1.44 MB floppy disk, making it about one tenth the size of most contemporary browsers.

The new Mozilla (internally codenamed "Seamonkey") would be a platform for Internet applications, with a fully programmable user interface and a modular architecture.

By June 5, 2002, the Mozilla project had produced version 1.0 of the browser that worked on multiple operating systems, including Linux, Mac OS, Microsoft Windows, and Solaris.

The browser was praised for introducing new features that Internet Explorer lacked, including better support for user privacy preferences and some interface improvements.

AOL kept the Netscape brand for its portal, but the company no longer paid anyone to develop the Mozilla codebase.

It received initial $2 million donations from AOL, IBM, Sun Microsystems, and Red Hat, and $300,000 from Mitch Kapor.

An unofficial port of 1.3a was later created in the form of WaMCom in an attempt to provide a stable build of 1.3 for OS 9 users.