Gregory's ServerAnd the best part of that era was that the Mozilla Suite was Mozilla’s primary product, it was available to download at Mozilla.org, and Mozilla went to great lengths to try and convince people NOT TO DOWNLOAD IT.
That was because AOL had bought what was left of Netscape, and were trying to relaunch the brand with a new “Netscape browser” that was basically just the Mozilla Suite with a different theme and some bits that users liked and advertisers hated — things like the pop-up blocker — stripped out.
So users had a choice: they could either download an enshittified version of Mozilla from Netscape, or they could download a non-enshittified version from Mozilla.
The hitch here was, though, that AOL was by far Mozilla’s biggest funder. (This was a few years before the search deal put Google in that position, which it retains today.) Mozilla management did not want to piss AOL off. And what AOL wanted was for people who wanted Mozilla technology to download the new Netscape.
So an absolutely hilarious compromise was reached. Mozilla would continue to offer the unshittified version of the product on its web site. But if you went to actually download it there, the web site would tell you that you really shouldn’t.
If this all sounds ludicrous to you, that’s because it was.
NB: If you ever wondered where Thunderbird came from, it came from Firefox blowing up the Mozilla Suite. The email client component of the Suite was never anywhere near as popular as the browser component, but it at least had a healthy base of active users, which was more than anyone could say for the other parts of the Suite. So when the Suite exploded, the email client was salvaged from the debris, given its own installer, and turned into a standalone product called Thunderbird.