It consisted of the following major components: In March 1998, Netscape split off most of the Communicator code and put it under an open source license.

Later that year it was quite evident that development on Mozilla was not proceeding quickly, so Netscape reassigned some of its engineers to a new Communicator 4.5 release.

This had the result of redirecting part of the browser effort into a dead-end branch while Internet Explorer 5.0 was still building momentum.

The first public builds of Mozilla two years later (2000) were rather disappointing, with many mid-level PCs of the time too slow to run the larger codebase, which used its own custom set of graphical user interface widgets and had a customizable UI built in a custom XML dialect known as XUL.

With public beta versions released in April,[5] August,[6] and October,[7] Netscape 6.0 shipped in November 2000.