[Robe]

I know that the topic of which is the best web browser has been on these boards for a while - my question is one of history.

IE and Omniweb are easy, Microsoft and Omni Group, but what about the other 3 - Chimera, Mozzilla and Netscape? Netscape used to be navigator and now Mozilla .org is Navigator; mozilla is also called chimera and what about gecko? even reading this month's macworld is confusing. Anybody want to give me a quick history lesson?

[D'Espice]

Mozilla, Chimera and Netscape are basically the same. All three are based on the Gecko Render Engine, an OpenSource engine for rendering HTML files.

Mozilla is based on the Gecko engine, has a mail client, IRC client and more.
Netscape is Mozilla minus some useful features (like PopUp Killer) plus AOL bloatware.
Chimera is the HTML-part of Mozilla only with native widget support for OS X

[Usama's Carcase]

they are not the same if we're talking sheer performance.

chimera is tops, followed by mozilla. netscape is crap and bloatware so stay clear of it.

ow and ie are acceptable.

we have many choices, so keep several on hand and use them all if you prefer. no need to restrict yourself to one or two.

[JLL]

Originally posted by Usama's Carcase:
they are not the same if we're talking sheer performance.

chimera is tops, followed by mozilla.

That's because Chimera uses the MachO version of Gecko which the official Mozilla doesn't use yet (you can download a MozillaMachO version though).

[D'Espice]

Originally posted by JLL:


That's because Chimera uses the MachO version of Gecko which the official Mozilla doesn't use yet (you can download a MozillaMachO version though).

You can? Where?

[Millennium]

OK, here's the deal with Netscape, Mozilla, and Gecko. It actually goes quite a way back.

Long, long ago, way back in The Day, there was a browser known as Mosaic. This was the first graphical Web browser, that is, the first browser to let users embed graphics in Web pages. And it was good.

Some of the Mosaic programmers left the group which created Mosaic, in order to create their own browser. They decided to call this browser Mozilla, to convey the impression that it was bigger, badder, and essentially stomped all over Mosaic. But they realized they couldn't really release a browser with that name; it wasn't very professional to create a serious product with a name that parodied a competitor. So they came up with a new name: "Netscape". However, Mozilla was still the codename they used for the browser.

As a rather interesting historical footnote, at about this time Mosaic was taken over by a group named Spyglass, who made their own version. Spyglass Mosaic would, in turn, be licensed by Microsoft, to make the first few versions of Internet Explorer. There may still be Spyglass code lurking deep in the bowels of IE/Windows, in fact (IE5/Mac was a ground-up rewrite).

Ahem. Anyway, Netscape made a few irritating mistakes technology-wise, and some really bad mistakes business-wise. Plus, thanks to Microsoft's making IE free, Netscape was forced to do the same with its own browser. This eventually got to the point where Netscape's browser was no longer a viable commercial project,and so they decided to Open-Source it and start over from scratch. So they split off a group, the Mozilla Organization.

After some false starts, the Mozilla Organization began to work on a rendering engine, which they called Gecko. This engine is not a browser in and of itself, but it can be used to build browsers. They built a browser around Gecko, so that they could test it. This testbed is the Mozilla browser we know today. In fact, Gecko creates the entire user interface; it's essentially one huge, uber-complex Web page.

The Netscape we know today is built from the Mozilla browser, with ad-blocking features removed from the UI (though they are still present, if you know how to edit the configuration files) and a lot of ads thrown into the interface. This bloats the browser considerably, in terms of both size and speed. But it does generate some money for Netscape.

And Chimera? Well, the story of Chimera goes back to what I said about Gecko not being a browser. That's true. It's only a widget which happens to render HTML. And because of that, it can, ideally, be used in many programs. To test this, though, programs had to be written with it. And what better program than a browser with a native interface? The first of these was Galeon, which runs on Linux. The second was K-Meleon, which runs on Windows. Chimera is the same concept -a testbed for embedding Gecko into a native interface- for Cocoa (there is, or at least was, a way to embed it in Carbon using PowerPlant, but nothing has been heard from that project for a long time).

So, what is Navigator? Well, Chimera has a slight problem: there was already a Web browser named Chimera. No one knew that at the time, but they've complained. So Chimera needed a new name. They decided to go with a name they knew they had the rights to: Navigator, which had been a name they once used for the Netscape browser (though they don't anymore). That's the deal there.

[sdagley]

Originally posted by Millennium:
OK, here's the deal with Netscape, Mozilla, and Gecko. It actually goes quite a way back.

That's an interesting version of the history but not very accurate. I'm not going to correct every error but I'll mention a few:

Mosaic wasn't the first graphical web browser. Not even for the Mac.

CocoaZilla was the testbed for embedding Gecko in a Cocoa app, not Chimera. Chimera was originally built around CocoaZilla (now renamed CHBrowserView).

The PowerPlant embedding project is alive and well - AOL's new release for Mac OS X is built around it.

AFAIK nobody involved with the original Chimera browser has ever complained.

Steve
(Yes, I do work for Netscape)

[Rickster]

Further history corrections and elucidations:

- Mosaic's wasn't that it was the first GUI browser -- the first GUI browser was also the first web browser ever, Tim Berners-Lee's WorldWideWeb.app.

- Mosaic's claim to fame is that it was the first browser to support images, turning hypertext into rich hypertext and making the Web truly graphical. It may not have actually been the first program to do so, but it was the first to find a wide audience.

- The name Netscape didn't entirely come from a desire for a more marketable name. The company was originally called Mosaic Communications Corporation, but NCSA wasn't happy with the implied endorsement.

[Adam Betts]

OmniWeb-

"The only web browser designed for Mac OS X."

[clarkgoble]

Wasn't Omniweb a modification to an earlier NeXT browser?

[undotwa]

Originally posted by clarkgoble:
Wasn't Omniweb a modification to an earlier NeXT browser?

Which was omniweb... OmniWeb is a modified (I think) OmniWeb (same company, same people). But it was designed entirely for Cocoa, so I guess it counts as being designed for OSX.

[Rickster]

So, y'all wants a history lesson, do ye?

OmniWeb began development in 1994 on NeXTSTEP. (Our first release actually predated Netscape 1.0.) It remains unique in that its underlying architecture isn't ultimately derived from WorldWideWeb.app, which was designed around image-less hypertext pages. (More on our unique architecture in this thread if you care to read.)

OmniWeb 2.0 was a rewrite for OPENSTEP, and 3.0 was built for Rhapsody (Mac OS X Server 1.x) while preserving OPENSTEP 4.2 compatibility. 4.0 brought us to Mac OS X.

Our tagline, "the only web browser designed for Mac OS X" is short because marketing-speak has to be short to have "oomph". If people had longer attention spans and software boxes had more room on them, we'd explain that OmniWeb is unique in that it's not a quick port from 9 and not bloated with platform-independent code. Compare OmniWeb 3.1 to 4.0 and you'll find that 4.0 was much more than a port from Rhapsody/OPENSTEP -- it was redesigned for Mac OS X.

[Millennium]

I apologize for any inaccuracies in my previous post; I was merely pointing out what I had heard.

Anyway, the first Web browser was a GUI browser, as Rickster has pointed out. But, as he also pointed out, it didn't do images at that time. And yes, that .app on the end of WorldWideWeb.app does, in fact, mean it was a NeXTStep app.

Kind of ironic, when you think about it. The Web was literally built and designed on the immediate ancestor of OSX. And yet, the browser situation on OSX isn't all that great at the moment, though Chimera shows a lot of promise and OW5 may also improve the situation (can't know for sure till we see it).

[Robe]

Could someone tell me how Netscape 7 and Mozilla 1.2 Differ? Is there much difference?

[undotwa]

Anyone wish to port WorldWideWeb.app to Mac OS X?

[Rickster]

Anyone wish to port WorldWideWeb.app to Mac OS X?

You can find the source at http://www.w3.org/History/1991-WWW-NeXT/Implementation/ if you're interested.

Dr. Berners-Lee abandoned development on the project almost a decade ago, so don't expect you could get a very useful web browser out of a quick port.

That said, porting it to Mac OS X could be quite the interesting historical research project, since you'd get to both dissect the early web browser architecture (which many current browsers still cling to) and try to make sense of the early AppKit (which was very different back in the days before Foundation and OPENSTEP). Enjoy!

[JLL]

Originally posted by D'Espice:

You can? Where?

Here:

http://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/mozilla/n...a-MachO.dmg.gz