To be pedantic there really wasn’t a standalone browser, it was the Netscape (then Mozilla) suite which was browser email WYSIWYG HTML editor and an irc client. Firefox, then called Firebird, was them fully decoupling it from the suite.
Also that’s why the email client is called Thunderbird, it was meant to be a separate but complimentary program to Firebird.
The pedantic part is that it wasn’t an evolution. The suite never died, it’s still around. They have a shared Netscape/Mozilla Suite ancestor. It’s called SeaMonkey.
frezik@lemmy.blahaj.zone 2 days ago
They actually didn’t; the timeline is off. Mozilla was spun off as an open source version of Netscape Navigator in January 1998. Netscape was acquired by AOL in November.
Jamie Zawinski, who had been a major proponent of open sourcing it within Netscape, was a critic of the merger.