Firefox is the spiritual successor of Netscape Navigator, as the Mozilla community was created by Netscape in 1998, before its acquisition by AOL. Firefox was created in 2002 under the codename "Phoenix" by members of the Mozilla community who desired a standalone browser rather than the Mozilla Application Suite bundle.

The Firefox project has undergone several name changes. The nascent browser was originally named Phoenix, after the mythical bird that rose triumphantly from the ashes of its dead predecessor (in this case, from the "ashes" of Netscape Navigator, after it was sidelined by Microsoft Internet Explorer in the "First Browser War").

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Firefox

On January 23, 1998, Netscape announced that its Netscape Communicator browser software would be free, and that its source code would also be free. One day later, Jamie Zawinski of Netscape registered mozilla.org. The project took its name, "Mozilla", from the original code name of the Netscape Navigator browser—a portmanteau of "Mosaic and Godzilla", and used to coordinate the development of the Mozilla Application Suite, the free software version of Netscape's internet software, Netscape Communicator. Zawinski said he arrived at the name "Mozilla" at a Netscape staff meeting. A small group of Netscape employees were tasked with coordinating the new community.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mozilla

Everything that was useful in Netscape became the basis for Firefox.

See also the documentary.

I loved Netscape as a kid. I would stare at the little Netscape icon with the shooting stars while waiting for pages to load... Funny how little things like that seemed so magical back then ✨🖥️💖

Now that splash screen, with its pixelated gradient of the 256 color palette brings back some nostalgic memories.

It's funny because we can see pixelated stuff today mostly in shitty jpeg artifacts, but those follow the jpeg algorithm for how to best conserve file size within their compression scheme, so they look different. This splash screen seemingly has every pixel meticulously chosen so that it's in the right place, and working with only the limits of the color space.

They became a poster child for why you should never “start over from scratch” even if your current codebase is awful. Because when you do that your competitors keep going, then they have years on your now stale product. Netscape lost all on their own…

Also: selling a browser? Man, the 90’s where wild.

I was there, 3000 years ago

It became Firefox

I have allways loved the Netscape logo

It was always my understanding that much of the core of Communicator eventually became early Firefox, but I've never really fact-checked that, just kind of read it here and there anecdotally on forums.

Earth is riddled with empires who thought they would last forever.

Netscape got a serious case of Windows' forceful and illegal monopolisation of Internet Explorer.

Isn’t Netscape just Mozilla at this point? At least tech wise

https://isp.netscape.com/

And here I was about to say that it had simply become Mozilla Firefox.

I guess I pruned my knowledge (read: forgot) at some point because I know I went from using Netscape to the Mozilla Application Suite as my browser of choice, and then ultimately onto Firefox when that died. (Firefox and Thunderbird were well established and Seamonkey was still in its infancy, otherwise I probably would have switched to that instead.)

Looking at the facts, the AOL buy-out is what must have got me to switch to MAS.

Aah the joys of 256 color video cards.

I been using it for a while, it became Mozilla Firebird

It is now in heaven.

Holy shit I forgot about netscape