Impressions from Mozilla 1.2b (2002)
23 points by raymii
23 points by raymii
What surprised me is how similar this all is to recent versions of SeaMonkey. The browser and mail views in particular look very familiar, although I think ChatZilla has had a refresh sometime in the past 25 years.
Although I don't daily drive it any more due to website compatibility issues, i really respect the SeaMonkey team's commitment to not fixing that which isn't broken.
Wait, what? Seamonkey is still being updated!?
I'm actually tempted to use this. Having Thunderbird in a separate window feels a bit weird. I wish I could group my messaging apps with Thunderbird (e.g. Slack, WhatsApp/Telegram web, etc.).
At a certain point, the improved performance + addon support + website compatibility of Firefox won me over, but I honestly miss the UI and predictability. I still keep it around and use it as a secondary browser.
It's getting new releases every once in a while, but technologically it's still based on Firefox / Thunderbird 60 (well, mostly – stuff like SpiderMonkey is up-to-date). You can think of it as being in a somewhat similar place as Pale Moon, though with closer alignment to Mozilla upstream.
Fascinating article, thanks from sharing. The UI is more sleek than expected.
I'm also surprised Usenet seems alive - better yet, without any spam! I presume eternal-september.org might have some decent spam filters? Does anyone here use it? The discussion there looks interesting.
When Google shut down their feeds the spam levels dropped by magnitude. It was really a face palm and sigh or relief to see them finally leave.
I loved those round buttons. The UI was distinct enough to stand out from the “boring” native UI but still very readable.
Very interesting. I remember using a similar version. I think what this doesn't capture was how slow it was compared to IE at the time.
I have a hazy memory of being extremely unimpressed with it taking a horrendous amount of time to load up.
I have equally hazy memories of everyone saying this was expected because Microsoft had a huge advantage being shipped with the OS. However in hindsight I think it was far more down to Mozilla being slow, given I remember finally switching to Phoenix/Firebird (before it was renamed to Firefox) which was massively faster.
My brain is all hazy but I remember the loading splash screen. In 2002 I was finishing university and still sharing a Windows box with my brother on a DSL line. IIRC, Netscape 4.7x had become unusable, so I think I was using mostly Internet Explorer... I was a sad OSS believer, so I jumped into Mozilla and then Phoenix as soon as I could... even though they were much slower than Internet Explorer.
In 2002 I bought my first laptop and I started using Linux full time for personal stuff. (Until 2011, I didn't land on a job where using Linux was possible.)
It's interesting how (IMHO) tabs were the killer feature. Internet Explorer was stagnating (also IMHO) and whomever thought of tabs likely changed the course of computing history. Of course, being OSS and friendlier to standards was a thing I appreciated, as I was doing much more webdev those days. But I think Firefox got to their "peak" marketshare thanks to tabbed browsing.
(Firefox got faster eventually. At the beginning I think you were sacrificing speed for tabs and avoiding Microsoft, but at some point- maybe because computers got faster- all browsers were pretty fast.)
One interesting breed of browser-adjacent software that died off in the 2010s was the download manager. I remember how much of a game changer that was. With IE, you'd leave a large file to download overnight, only to come back and find the download interrupted. Somebody then recommended a download manager: it supported continuing interrupted downloads!
Yes and also parallel threads for the same file. I remember this being a game changer when I got my first 512kbit ADSL line, given I seem to recall a lot of FTP/HTTP download sites often capped per thread speeds to dialup levels. Or I was just being greedy if they were overloaded.
Don't forget about the feature of scraping all links in a page and downloading everything.
I really didn't use download managers a lot. I got used to wget, which I think had -c forever, with retries et al.
