Firefox (now using Waterfox), I started using when it was still Mosaic and no idea it would one day become Mozilla Firefox…
LibreOffice.
In a couple years, maybe three, I’ll be on Mint for 10 years and, yep, I do like it. And I certainly love many GNU apps that came with my distro: they’re lightweight, focused and so incredibly useful <3
I used to love Mac OS (previous to Linux, since the early 80s I had been an Apple user) and many small third party apps. But I moved away from Apple and have no desire to go back.
Firefox was never mosaic. It is the successor of Netscape Navigator, kind of, they’re not the same project and there was no continuity but Mozilla was created by Netscape. Microsoft licensed Mosaic to create Internet Explorer based on it.
And even that was a fractured history. The Netscape to Mozilla release was heavily influenced by Netscape being bought by AOL followed by the Netscape team dumping a non functional browser (they ripped out a ton of code they didn’t own) on the open source world. People had to basically patch the stubs until it built and then rebuild from there. By the end, Mozilla barely resembled Netscape, but it did get the community finally building a serious open source option.
Firefox was never mosaic. It is the successor of Netscape Navigator, kind of, they’re not the same project and there was no continuity but Mozilla was created by Netscape. Microsoft licensed Mosaic to create Internet Explorer based on it.
This sent me down a little rabbit hole, lol.
January '93 - NCSA Mosaic released.
April '94 - Mosaic corp founded.
October '94 - Netscape browser released.
November '94 - Mosaic corp renamed Netscape corp
June '97 - Netscape Communicator released.
September '02 - Phoenix released
May '03 - Phoenix renamed to Firebird
February '04 - Firebird renamed to Firefox
I couldn’t find any indication that there was any code in common between NCSA Mosaic, Netscape, and/or Phoenix.
And Netscape was created by?
.
And even that was a fractured history. The Netscape to Mozilla release was heavily influenced by Netscape being bought by AOL followed by the Netscape team dumping a non functional browser (they ripped out a ton of code they didn’t own) on the open source world. People had to basically patch the stubs until it built and then rebuild from there. By the end, Mozilla barely resembled Netscape, but it did get the community finally building a serious open source option.
Browser of Theseus
By the Netscape Communication Corporation.