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 the source code, design documents, or content of the product. The open-source model is a decentralized sof ...

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 (stylized as moz://a) is a free software community founded in 1998 by members of Netscape. The Mozilla community uses, develops, spreads and supports Mozilla products, thereby promoting exclusively free software and open standards, w ...

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 is application software 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 screen. Browsers are used on ...

, an

email Electronic mail (email or e-mail) is a method of exchanging messages ("mail") between people using electronic devices. Email was thus conceived as the electronic ( digital) version of, or counterpart to, mail, at a time when "mail" mean ...

and

news client A newsreader is an application program 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 ar ...

, an

HTML editor An HTML editor is a program 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 and added functionality. For example, many HT ...

(based on

Mozilla Composer Mozilla Composer is the free and open-source HTML editor and web authoring module of the Mozilla Application Suite (the predecessor to SeaMonkey). It is used to create and to edit web pages, e-mail, and text documents easily. It is compatible wi ...

) and an

IRC Internet Relay Chat (IRC) is a text-based chat system for instant messaging. IRC is designed for Many-to-many, group communication in discussion forums, called ''#Channels, channels'', but also allows one-on-one communication via instant messa ...

client (based on

ChatZilla ChatZilla is an IRC client that is part of SeaMonkey. It was previously an extension for Mozilla-based browsers such as Firefox, introduced in 2000. It is cross-platform open source software which has been noted for its consistent appearance ac ...

). 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 partiti ...

, and

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

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 (stylized as moz://a) 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, ...

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 made from a software collection that includes the Linux kernel and, often, a package management system. Linux users usually obtain their operating system by downloading on ...

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 A software release life cycle is the sum of the stages of development and maturity for a piece of computer software ranging from its initial development to its eventual release, and including updated versions of the released version to help impr ...

; 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 (stylized as moz://a) 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, ...

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

Mozilla Corporation The Mozilla Corporation (stylized as moz://a) 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 op ...

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 baked or cooked snack or dessert that is typically small, flat and sweet. It usually contains flour, sugar, egg, and some type of oil, fat, or butter. It may include other ingredients such as raisins, oats, chocolate chips, n ...

upon exiting and disables several

JavaScript JavaScript (), often abbreviated as JS, is a programming language that is one of the core technologies of the World Wide Web, alongside HTML and CSS. As of 2022, 98% of Website, websites use JavaScript on the Client (computing), client side ...

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

user agent In computing, a user agent is any software, acting on behalf of a user, which "retrieves, renders and facilitates end-user interaction with Web content". A user agent is therefore a special kind of software agent. Some prominent examples of u ...

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

Gecko (layout engine) Gecko is a browser engine developed by Mozilla. It is used in the Firefox browser, the Thunderbird email client, and many other projects. Gecko is designed to support open Internet standards, and is used by different applications to display web ...

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 AIM (AOL Instant Messenger) was an instant messaging and presence computer program created by AOL, which used the proprietary OSCAR instant messaging protocol and the TOC protocol to allow registered users to communicate in real time. AIM wa ...

. For online chatting,

was integrated and the sidebar and the

search engines A search engine is a software system designed to carry out web searches. They search the World Wide Web in a systematic way for particular information specified in a textual web search query. The search results are generally presented in a l ...

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 June ...

Differences from MAS

Beonex Communicator was not a

fork In cutlery or kitchenware, a fork (from la, furca ' 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 ...

of MAS; rather, it was a separate

branch A branch, sometimes called a ramus in botany, is a woody structural member connected to the central trunk of a tree (or sometimes a shrub). Large branches are known as boughs and small branches are known as twigs. The term '' twig'' usually ...

, so no significant changes were made.

HTML email HTML email is the use of a subset of HTML to provide formatting and semantic markup capabilities in email that are not available with plain text: Text can be linked without displaying a URL, or breaking long URLs into multiple pieces. Text is ...

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 limi ...

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 American image hosting and 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 a popular way for amateur and professiona ...

{{web browsers, desktop 2000 software Cross-platform software Discontinued internet suites Free Internet suites Free software programmed in C++ Free web browsers Gopher clients Mozilla