| Forum Home | ||||
| Press F1 | ||||
| Thread ID: 57595 | 2005-05-07 02:16:00 | Mozilla, Firefox, Netscape | Strommer (42) | Press F1 |
| Post ID | Timestamp | Content | User | ||
| 352881 | 2005-05-07 02:16:00 | Something that I have wondered about... Since Firefox and Netscape are created by Mozilla, is there any difference in these three browsers other than the superficial things like buttons and colours? If the inner guts (programming) of these browsers are the same, would they be equally susceptable to trojans, viruses, or other harmfuls? |
Strommer (42) | ||
| 352882 | 2005-05-07 02:50:00 | Actually Netscape came first, the Mozilla then Firefox. They are not the same. Netscape is now owned by AOL. Probably the most secure of the 3 is Mozilla. I hesitate to say Firefox cause its become the most popular of the 3 and therefore more of a target than Mozilla. Netscape is old news. | pctek (84) | ||
| 352883 | 2005-05-07 02:53:00 | Actually Netscape came first, the Mozilla then Firefox. They are not the same. Netscape is now owned by AOL. Probably the most secure of the 3 is Mozilla. I hesitate to say Firefox cause its become the most popular of the 3 and therefore more of a target than Mozilla. Netscape is old news. Isn't mozilla and ff based on the old netscape inner's? |
plod (107) | ||
| 352884 | 2005-05-07 03:44:00 | Mosaic came first - but that is another story altogether. Netscape, somewhere along the line, developed the rendering engine Gecko. Gecko was good, but the Netscape finances weren't, so they donated it to the open source community who developed it to what more or less is today. Out of that Mozilla was built (took a very long time), but that was too fat and slow for many people. Because it was open source, anyone could modify it, and so they did - to produce Firefox. Netscape has been resurrected by AOL, and as per the license conditions, is able to take advantage of the Gecko improvements by the open source community. As of today, they all run the same Gecko rendering engine with superficial differences. So as far as Gecko security is concerned, the are all equally (in)secure. It's the other bits and pieces that may make a difference though. For example, Netscape8 will launch the IE rendering engine when it encounters IE-specific pages (i.e., ActiveX) - I will leave it up to your imagination on how that effects Navigator8 security... |
vinref (6194) | ||
| 352885 | 2005-05-07 05:02:00 | Because it was open source, anyone could modify it, and so they did - to produce Firefox So, if I understand it correctly, Firefox was developed by open source people which would be the wider internet community, similar to Linux development??? I assumed that Netscape merely changed the colour, logo and bells and whistles of Netscape 7, then called it Firefox. And something I have always wondered about: since Firefox, Netscape, Mozilla, Opera, etc. are free, how do the organisations that produced these programs make any $$....(unless they are truly open source)? |
Strommer (42) | ||
| 352886 | 2005-05-07 05:27:00 | Because it was open source, anyone could modify it, and so they did - to produce Firefox So, if I understand it correctly, Firefox was developed by open source people which would be the wider internet community, similar to Linux development??? I assumed that Netscape merely changed the colour, logo and bells and whistles of Netscape 7, then called it Firefox. Yes, FF was developed by the Mozilla Foundation, which is some kind of cross between a proper organzisation and a loose collection of contributors. Netscape is owned by AOL, who saved money by having the open source community do the work in developing Gecko further. Thus, AOL (a purely commercial organisation) benefits from the work of the open source community. And something I have always wondered about: since Firefox, Netscape, Mozilla, Opera, etc. are free, how do the organisations that produced these programs make any $$....(unless they are truly open source)? Opera is not "free" - you pay or you get the ads, and the code is not open source. Netscape is subsidised by AOL and their tweaks to the code is not open source either, although a large amount of the work was done by the open source community. Ditto with Apple MacOSX. As for the purely free open source stuff like Linux and BSD, it is not a: "let's make something to sell" urge, but a "we all want something useful, we all have skills/something to contribute, let's make something for everyone to use freely" urge. This seems to be counterintuitive for the more capitalist minded, and darn-right cancerous, viral, evil etc etc according to MS... |
vinref (6194) | ||
| 1 | |||||