SillyDog701

[Andrew T.]

Out of historical interest and natural curiosity, I've sometimes been curious about the very early development of post-4.x Netscape/Mozilla versions after Netscape released the Communicator source code in March 1998 and before formal Gecko-codebase "Mozilla" milestones began to be released about a year later.

There are some interesting screen shots on MozillaZine that (presumably) show examples of what the state of development and appearance of software was during this period.

The oldest Mozilla software release available from Mozilla.org is Milestone 3, released in March 1999. Was a "Milestone 2" or "Milestone 1" ever publicly released? And, aside from an unofficial and buggy "Netscape 5.0" release someone compiled from the pre-Gecko source code, did any Mozilla/post-4.x Netscape builds from before then circulate outside of Netscape's headquarters?

Netscape did release a Gecko developer preview publicly in December 1998, shortly after the decision to scrap the existing Communicator 4.x codebase, and as far as I know this may be the earliest Gecko-based browser known to exist.



I've been under the impression that this developer preview either is quite similar to any internal "Milestone 1" build that may have existed at the time, or is Mozilla Milestone 1 itself. Am I correct, or far off?

UserAgent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Win95; en-US; rv:1.7.5) Gecko/20041107 Firefox/1.0

[Alice]

I found nothing earlier than the m3 release at http://archive.mozilla.org/pub/mozilla/releases/

http://www.mozilla.org/roadmap/roadmap-25-Sep-2000.html has some historical background. Here are some excerpts, in case they are of interest:

The old roadmap recorded the momentous decision in October 1998 to reset the Mozilla project around the new layout engine (now called Gecko), a cross-platform front end (XPFE), now several XP Apps built on an XP Toolkit), and a scriptable components architecture (XPCOM and XPConnect). The old roadmap helped to effect a major course change for Mozilla, but it then failed to track the project's progress -- my fault, no excuses.

<snip>

Old target milestones (M1 through M30) will be censored from the Target Milestone menu, to avoid clutter and confusion. They will remain within bugzilla's database as long as old bugs refer to them, of course.

So bugzilla might be a place to start digging if you want to do some historical research on the period October 98 to March 99, when Milestone 3 was completed. The oldest bug I have bookmarked is https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=2920
and that shows:
[tt]<transferring from Netscape Internal bug system, bugsplat 331226. Commented out
the information on the enterprise customer name. If you want this info, go back
to the bugsplat bug report. 2/4/99>[/tt]
(the bug itself has comments dating back to 10-98)

P. S. There's also a Documentation Graveyard link at http://www.mozilla.org/docs/ which I haven't checked out.

UserAgent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.7.5) Gecko/20041217

[Don_HH2K]

Andrew,
I remember hearing somewhere that there were Milestone-1 and Milestone-2 builds created, but they were much too buggy to be released because of the added functionality like the new XUL interface, sidebar, etc... Therefore, they were only internally released. As for builds of Gecko outside of Netscape, the source code to Gecko wasn't released until Milestone 3 (at least, I think it was), so you really couldn't go and compile a copy of Gecko for yourself until Milestone-3 was released.

By the way, the Gecko Developer Preview, if I remember seeing at the Gecko developer site, was not intended to be viewed as a browser. Instead, it was there to demonstrate Gecko as an embeddable component.

UserAgent: Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; Konqueror/3.1; Linux 2.4.22-21.3mdk; X11; i686; en_US, en)