retroNET - Vintage Culture/Websites/Software

It's a little bit of a nitpick, but "Mozilla" didn't exactly rise from the ashes of Netscape. They tried to open source Netscape, but among other issues the code was horrible, and when they started discussing getting serious about open sourcing it, someone had some kind of bright idea of making this all-encompassing UI framework based on XML, and piping every app through this horrible omni-UI layer because it was going to be the future, with a perfect utopian web browser called Mozilla as the central crown in the kingdom's highest tower, and it was always a janky and glacially slow pile of ass that, year after year, continued just barely working but not really. Linux users of the day generally had some experiences with it and then switched to one of the even-less-complete options available like Galeon or Konqueror, which brought their own maturity issues to the table, but at least they weren't Mozilla.

Eventually, after investing years of effort and millions of dollars into this pile, the Mozilla foundation eventually decided with great fanfare to invent the idea of just making a web browser. They called it ~~Phoenix~~ ~~Firebird~~ Firefox (~~Iceweasel~~), and it used normal UI technologies and came alongside some other separated normal-UI apps like Thunderbird. And if you ask them about Mozilla itself, they react like Germans when you ask them where their granddad was during the war years.