[Windflier]

Firefox was a re-write, based on the design of Netscape.

Thanks. I knew the truth was somewhere in that ballpark.

[dayglored]

>> Firefox was a re-write, based on the design of Netscape.

> Thanks. I knew the truth was somewhere in that ballpark.

The old Netscape "Suite" (Navigator browser, Email, and Composer HTML editor) had gotten way too bloated and slow, and had gotten stomped into the ground by IE in the late-80's browser wars.

So some bright kid decided to write Firefox as the browser part only, make it small and quick, but keep the basic Netscape look-and-feel, and compete with IE now that Netscape had long lost that battle. The idea would be to make it open-source, cross-platform, portable, and cool.

Of course, it grew, including some of its own bloat, but it's stayed pretty true to the original notion.

The original Suite survives as the Mozilla SeaMonkey project, and even though my browser is Firefox and my email is Thunderbird, I have SeaMonkey around to this day, for the Composer HTML editor.