Firefox is Netscape. There's a reason you download it from Mozilla.org. It's an amazing demonstration of the power of open source to allow good software to exist and thrive beyond its original mission.
Netscape kicked started Mozilla, the later versions of Netscape were built on top of Firefox not vise versa.
The Firefox browser was a project unrelated to the original Netscape browser (Gecko was build from scratch under Mozilla).
Netscape only open-sourced Netscape Communicator, an effort which took them over a year during which they didn't work on their browser at all. That combined with switching their browser development effort to Gecko under Mozilla is pretty much what killed Netscape as it gave Microsoft 2 free years in which Netscape didn't release any substantial releases or released pretty broken software.
Basically after releasing Netscape 4 in 1997 it took them 3 years to release something functional in the form of Netscape 6 (there was no 5 AFAIK), and Netscape 6 compared really poorly to even IE5 which had 2 years of no competition to take over the market, and IE 6 which was released about 6 months later pretty much smoked Netscape 6.
Netscape indeed should get quite a bit of credit for Mozilla, but I really hate when people say that IE won because Microsoft was evil, IE wont because Netscape did allot of mistakes along the way.
The Firefox browser was a project unrelated to the original Netscape browser (Gecko was build from scratch under Mozilla).
Netscape only open-sourced Netscape Communicator, an effort which took them over a year during which they didn't work on their browser at all. That combined with switching their browser development effort to Gecko under Mozilla is pretty much what killed Netscape as it gave Microsoft 2 free years in which Netscape didn't release any substantial releases or released pretty broken software.
Basically after releasing Netscape 4 in 1997 it took them 3 years to release something functional in the form of Netscape 6 (there was no 5 AFAIK), and Netscape 6 compared really poorly to even IE5 which had 2 years of no competition to take over the market, and IE 6 which was released about 6 months later pretty much smoked Netscape 6.
Netscape indeed should get quite a bit of credit for Mozilla, but I really hate when people say that IE won because Microsoft was evil, IE wont because Netscape did allot of mistakes along the way.