Beonex Communicator

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Beonex Communicator
Beonex-icon.png
Beonex.6-book-of-mozilla.png
Beonex Communicator 0.6 displaying the Book of Mozilla
Original author(s) Ben Bucksch
Developer(s) Beonex Business Services
Initial release 0.6, 11 November 2000 (2000-11-11)[1]
Last release 0.8.2-stable / 21 March 2003
Development status discontinued
Written in C++, XUL, XBL, JavaScript
Operating system Microsoft Windows, Mac OS X, Linux, FreeBSD
Available in English, German
Type Internet suite
License MPL/Netscape Public License[2]
Website www.beonex.com

Beonex Communicator was an open source Internet suite based on the Mozilla Application Suite (MAS) by Ben Bucksch, a German Mozilla developer.[3] It was intended to have a higher security and privacy level than other commercial products.[4][5][6]

The Internet suite contained a Web browser, an email and news client, an HTML editor (based on Mozilla Composer) and an IRC client (based on ChatZilla).[5][6][7]

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.[8][9] The main goal was to implement Kerberos, OpenPGP, and LDAP in Beonex,[10] but that was marked as failed in mid-2004.[11]

History

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Overall, this project seems most interested in staying as true to Mozilla as possible.[12]

The Mozilla Organization stated that the Mozilla Application Suite was only for developers and testing purposes and was not meant for end users.[13][14][15][16]

On 5 January 2001 Beonex was included in the Linux distribution kmLinux version S-0.4, but was removed in version S-0.5 released on 23 March 2001.[17]

Beonex 0.8 released in June 2002 received positive reviews about its speed.[18][19]

a BeOL preview

Beonex Launcher(BeOL, spoken B-O-L), was an additional upcoming product that never left alpha status which was a stripped down version of the Internet suite Beonex Communicator. It was a Web browser combined with an email client and a chat client.[20]

With a few preview releases of version 0.9 in mid-2002 he 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 decided its future policy.[21] In 2005, the Mozilla Foundation officially changed its policies and created the Mozilla Corporation to provide end-user support.

Beonex Communicator 0.8.2-stable has several known security issues.[22] Beonex never received much market share.[14]

Comparison with Netscape and MAS

The browser disabled referrers by default and had the possibility to create a fake referrers.[23] The browser deleted all cookies when the program exited and also disabled several JavaScript functions which could have served as attack vectors.[6][24][25]

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

Mozilla Application Suite Netscape Beonex Communicator
Version Releasedate
0.6 6.0 0.6[1] 14 November 2000
0.9.2 6.1
0.9.4 6.2
0.9.4.1 6.2.2 0.7[1] 8 November 2001
1.0 0.8[26] 5 June 2002
1.0.1 7.0 0.8.1[27] 19 September 2002
1.0.2 7.01 and 7.02 0.8.2[28] 10 March 2003
1.1 0.9pre 27 August 2002[1]

Differences to Netscape

In contrast to Netscape, Beonex had included nearly the same features except the proprietary parts like the integrated Net2Phone,[29] and the AOL Instant Messenger.[29] The chat tool ChatZilla was integrated[30] and the sidebar and the search engines were also preconfigured.[3][19] Beonex was less resource-intensive than Netscape.[31]

Beonex included a migration tool to include the old profiles from Netscape Communicator.[6][19]

Differences to MAS

Beonex Communicator was not a fork of MAS, it was a separate branch, so no significant changes were made.[32] HTML email and JavaScript had been turned off by default and thus displaying email only in plain text with bold and cursive additions[6][33] which was added later in MAS 1.1.[34] The search engines were compatible to the Mycroft project and were located in the sidebar providing more features.[35]

New features

Beonex integrated a special tool to change the user agent.[36]

References

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  3. 3.0 3.1 Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.
  4. Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.
  5. 5.0 5.1 Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.
  6. 6.0 6.1 6.2 6.3 6.4 Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.
  7. Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.
  8. Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.
  9. Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.
  10. Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.
  11. Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.
  12. Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.
  13. Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.
  14. 14.0 14.1 Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.; shorten English version available here
  15. Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.
  16. Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.
  17. Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.
  18. Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.
  19. 19.0 19.1 19.2 Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.
  20. Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.
  21. Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.
  22. Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.
  23. Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.
  24. Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.
  25. Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.
  26. Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.
  27. Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.
  28. Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.
  29. 29.0 29.1 Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.
  30. Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.
  31. Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.
  32. Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.
  33. Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.
  34. Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.
  35. Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.
  36. Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.

External links