Beonex Communicator is a discontinued

open-source Open source is source code that is made freely available for possible modification and redistribution. Products include permission to use and view the source code, design documents, or content of the product. The open source model is a decentrali ...

Internet suite An Internet suite is an Internet-related software suite. Internet suites usually include a web browser, e-mail client (often with a news client and address book), download manager, HTML editor, and an IRC client. The diversity of Internet suite o ...

based on the

Mozilla Application Suite The Mozilla Application Suite (originally known as Mozilla, marketed as the Mozilla Suite) is a discontinued cross-platform integrated Internet suite. Its development was initiated by Netscape Communications Corporation, before their acquisition ...

(MAS) by Ben Bucksch, a German

Mozilla Mozilla is a free software community founded in 1998 by members of Netscape. The Mozilla community uses, develops, publishes and supports Mozilla products, thereby promoting free software and open standards. The community is supported institution ...

developer. It was intended to have a higher security and privacy level than other commercial products. The Internet suite contains a

Web browser A web browser, often shortened to browser, is an application for accessing websites. When a user requests a web page from a particular website, the browser retrieves its files from a web server and then displays the page on the user's scr ...

, an

email Electronic mail (usually shortened to email; alternatively hyphenated e-mail) is a method of transmitting and receiving Digital media, digital messages using electronics, electronic devices over a computer network. It was conceived in the ...

and

news client A newsreader is a software application that reads articles on Usenet distributed throughout newsgroups. Newsreaders act as clients which connect to a news server, via the Network News Transfer Protocol (NNTP), to download articles and post new ...

, an

HTML editor An HTML editor is a program used for editing HTML, the markup of a web page. Although the HTML markup in a web page can be controlled with any text editor, specialized HTML editors can offer convenience, added functionality, and organisation. Fo ...

(based on Mozilla Composer) and an

IRC IRC (Internet Relay Chat) is a text-based chat system for instant messaging. IRC is designed for group communication in discussion forums, called '' channels'', but also allows one-on-one communication via private messages as well as chat ...

client (based on ChatZilla). Beonex Business Services offered the suite for free and provided documentation, easy install routines for third-party plug-ins, and tried to sell support and customer-specific changes on the browser. The main goal was to implement Kerberos,

OpenPGP Pretty Good Privacy (PGP) is an encryption program that provides cryptographic privacy and authentication for data communication. PGP is used for signing, encrypting, and decrypting texts, e-mails, files, directories, and whole disk partit ...

, and

LDAP The Lightweight Directory Access Protocol (LDAP ) is an open, vendor-neutral, industry standard application protocol for accessing and maintaining distributed Directory service, directory information services over an Internet Protocol (IP) networ ...

in Beonex, but that was marked as failed in mid-2004. It was discontinued before reaching production release stage.

History

Mozilla Organization The Mozilla Foundation is an American non-profit organization that exists to support and collectively lead the open source Mozilla project. Founded in July 2003, the organization sets the policies that govern development, operates critical infr ...

stated that the Mozilla Application Suite was only for developers and testing purposes and was not meant for end users.; shorten English version availabl
here
On 5 January 2001 Beonex was included in the

Linux distribution A Linux distribution, often abbreviated as distro, is an operating system that includes the Linux kernel for its kernel functionality. Although the name does not imply product distribution per se, a distro—if distributed on its own—is oft ...

kmLinux version S-0.4, but was removed in version S-0.5 released on 23 March 2001. Beonex 0.8 was released in June 2002 received positive reviews about its speed. BeOL

Beonex Launcher (BeOL, spoken B-O-L), was an additional upcoming product that never left alpha status; it was a stripped-down version of Beonex Communicator: a Web browser combined with an email client and a chat client. With a few preview releases of version 0.9 in mid-2002, Bucksch showed some new features he wanted to integrate, but before this version gained a stable status, he announced on 2 March 2004 that no new releases were planned until the

Mozilla Foundation The Mozilla Foundation is an American non-profit organization that exists to support and collectively lead the Open-source software, open source Mozilla project. Founded in July 2003, the organization sets the policies that govern development, ...

decided its future policy. In 2005, the Mozilla Foundation officially changed its policies and created the

Mozilla Corporation The Mozilla Corporation is a wholly owned subsidiary of the Mozilla Foundation that coordinates and integrates the development of Internet-related applications such as the Firefox web browser, by a global community of open-source developers, s ...

to provide end-user support. ''Beonex Communicator 0.8.2-stable'' has several known security issues. Beonex never received much market share. In October 2020, the distributor of Beonex joined the

Coalition for App Fairness The Coalition for App Fairness (CAF) is a coalition comprised by companies, who aim to reach a fairer deal for the inclusion of their apps into the Apple App Store or the Google Play Store. The organization's executive director is Meghan DiMuzio ...

, which defends the rights of app developers.

Comparison with Netscape and MAS

The browser does not transmit referrers by default and has the possibility to create a fake referrers. The browser deletes all

cookies A cookie is a sweet biscuit with high sugar and fat content. Cookie dough is softer than that used for other types of biscuit, and they are cooked longer at lower temperatures. The dough typically contains flour, sugar, egg, and some type of ...

upon exiting and disables several

JavaScript JavaScript (), often abbreviated as JS, is a programming language and core technology of the World Wide Web, alongside HTML and CSS. Ninety-nine percent of websites use JavaScript on the client side for webpage behavior. Web browsers have ...

functions which could have served as attack vectors. Beonex also allows changing the

user agent On the Web, a user agent is a software agent responsible for retrieving and facilitating end-user interaction with Web content. This includes all web browsers, such as Google Chrome and Safari A safari (; originally ) is an overland jour ...

. In the following comparison table not all releases of Netscape and MAS are included. For a more complete table see Gecko (layout engine).

Differences from Netscape

In contrast with Netscape, Beonex has included nearly the same features except the proprietary parts like the integrated Net2Phone, and the

AOL Instant Messenger AOL Instant Messenger (AIM, sometimes stylized as aim) was an instant messaging and presence information computer program created by AOL. It used the proprietary OSCAR protocol, OSCAR instant messaging protocol and the TOC protocol to allow us ...

. For online chatting, ChatZilla was integrated and the sidebar and the

search engines Search engines, including web search engines, selection-based search engines, metasearch engines, desktop search tools, and web portals and vertical market websites have a search facility for online databases. By content/topic Gene ...

are also pre-configured. Beonex is less resource-intensive than Netscape. Beonex includes a migration tool to import old profiles from

Netscape Communicator Netscape Communicator (or ''Netscape 4'') is a discontinued Internet suite produced by Netscape Communications Corporation, and was the fourth major release in the Netscape line of browsers. It was first in beta in 1996 and was released in Jun ...

Differences from MAS

Beonex Communicator was not a

fork In cutlery or kitchenware, a fork (from 'pitchfork') is a utensil, now usually made of metal, whose long handle terminates in a head that branches into several narrow and often slightly curved tines with which one can spear foods either to h ...

of MAS; rather, it was a separate

branch A branch, also called a ramus in botany, is a stem that grows off from another stem, or when structures like veins in leaves are divided into smaller veins. History and etymology In Old English, there are numerous words for branch, includ ...

, so no significant changes were made. HTML email and JavaScript are turned off by default and thus, it displays

only in

plain text In computing, plain text is a loose term for data (e.g. file contents) that represent only characters of readable material but not its graphical representation nor other objects ( floating-point numbers, images, etc.). It may also include a lim ...

with bold and cursive additions which were added later in MAS 1.1. The search engines is compatible with the Mycroft project and is located in the sidebar providing more features.

References

External links

Beonex
*
Beonex Communicator Screenshots

Flickr Flickr ( ) is an image hosting service, image and Online video platform, video hosting service, as well as an online community, founded in Canada and headquartered in the United States. It was created by Ludicorp in 2004 and was previously a co ...

{{web browsers, desktop 2000 software Cross-platform software Discontinued internet suites Discontinued web browsers Free Internet suites Free software programmed in C++ Free web browsers Gopher clients Mozilla Mozilla Application Suite MacOS web browsers Windows web browsers Software using the Mozilla Public License