[ music | Nine Inch Nails – Terrible Lie ]

This kind of stuff burns me up. It’s like no one every checks anything.

“… putting an end to Mozilla’s development of a 12-year browser line that went back to the original Netscape.”

Last I checked, the vast majority of whatever was left of “the original Netscape” died with Communicator and the abortive 5.0 code dump. Once the changeover to Gecko and Necko took place, the bulk of the original code was gone. So Mozilla didn’t kill a 12 year old codebase, Netscape killed a 4-5 year old codebase. Netscapes 6 and 7 were based on the Mozilla suite, and Netscape 8 was a hybrid of Firefox and the IE core.

Further:

“The end of the Mozilla suite puts a bookmark on the longest-running browser family, one that traces its genealogy to 1994, when Netscape Navigator was first released in beta (under the name Mosaic), through 1996-97’s Netscape Communicator suite, and into the 1998 decision to take Netscape open-source.”

Again, no. If anything, Mozilla.org is continuing the legacy of what was started by that brash young startup Netscape oh so long ago. Today’s Firefox can trace it’s lineage back to the original Netscape browser just as directly as Mozilla Suite can, since Firefox is still built on top of the Gecko core at the heart of the Suite, Netscapes 6, 7, and 8, Thunderbird, Seamonkey, and others. Mozilla.org is the continuing generations of Netscape. If anything, today’s Mozilla Corp. is more “Netscape” than Netscape is now (a brand for AOL’s low cost dialup Internet service) or has been since 1998. They’re driving forward development of a cutting edge application, blazing a path that Microsoft once again is following, trying to catch up to the true innovators.

It makes for flashy copy, but it’s just wrong. Posting about the latest +0.0.1 and +0.0.0.1 releases isn’t sexy, but it’s more respectable than just making things up.