[AlyssaRowan]

My memory there is a bit fuzzy, but saying there was no official Mozilla web browser feels misleading. The Mozilla Suite (which I used for a while even in the 'milestone' versions) contained a fully functional web browser, Navigator - it was just really heavy and cumbersome because it also had the mail client Communicator and the other stuff like the IRC client and it was very new, very raw, rough-edges software built on this new XPCOM stuff. Very 'kitchen sink', inspired by the Netscape 'SeaMonkey' suite (SeaMonkey I believe lives on under that name). It wasn't based on the OG Netscape source code very much at all - while an attempt was made to develop that, it was so bad it was basically thrown in the bin and rewritten from scratch - which is where Gecko comes from.

K-Meleon and so forth was an attempt to take the core Gecko components out of the Mozilla Suite and just have a small simple browser built in it. Having seen that and a few others which had the same kind of idea but were native, Phoenix, which became Firebird, which became Firefox, was... kind of a grassroots disruptive community effort to try the same sort of minimum-viable-product browser thing in XPCOM as a cross-platform experiment, which rapidly gained adoption when people started realising how much faster and better it was to build it that way from the ground up instead. It certainly didn't feel like it was "AOL Time Warner" sponsored. If anything, it felt kind of chaotic. Nobody did a detailed name search because it was an experimental side project.

That worked so well, Thunderbird the email client was forked off too (during the Firebird era), and if I recall Sunbird (the calendar part)?

[tristor]

This is a relatively accurate recollection. Each of the components of Seamonkey (which was the successor to Netscape, containing Navigator, Communicator, and others as you mentioned) was eventually rolled into a separate standalone project, some of which were part of the overall Mozilla Project and some which were done by the community outside of Mozilla. The IRC client even got spun out as ChatZilla as a standalone piece of software, as did the webpage editor/publisher (analogous to MS Front Page).

[hagbard_c]

> it was just really heavy and cumbersome because it also had the mail client Communicator and the other stuff like the IRC client and it was very new, very raw, rough-edges software built on this new XPCOM stuff

The suite - Seamonkey - was/is heavy if all you used was the browser. If you compare it to running Firefox and Thunderbird together it actually was quite a bit leaner which is why I ran it for several years on lower-spec hardware.

[dave78]

Yeah, this matches my recollection of that time period as well. I definitely used the browser here and there when it was still Phoenix. My memory even says that Phoenix/Firebird/Firefox was something of a skunkworks project inside Mozilla, and it wasn't until several releases were made that Mozilla decided to go all-in on it and abandon their other browser. But those are nearly 25 year old memories so maybe they're incorrect.

[Fire-Dragon-DoL]

Wasn't firebird some sort of calendar app?