Impressions from Mozilla 1.2b (2002)
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2026-03-08
Mozilla 1.2b from 2002 is the oldest version of the Mozilla suite that I have in my archive. This probably was the first version of it that I used after Netscape (and a brief period of Internet Explorer -- yep), but I'm not sure. Doesn't really matter anyway.
Since it was published under MPL 1.1, here's the installer:
Here's a little gallery of how it looked on Windows 2000 and what was included. This doesn't include everything, just what I deemed interesting.
Table of contents:
Installation
The installer is about 11 MB in size and looks like this:
Note how the option "Use Quick Launch for faster startup times" is disabled by default.
Navigator
Starting the suite shows a logo that (probably) very few people remember:
Basic browsing, the sidebar is visible by default:
I can't say that I remember what "tinderbox" was. Here's Mozilla's page about it. Sounds like it wasn't really relevant to me as a user. Needless to say, it's broken today:
Tabs were already a thing:
Theming was also a thing. And unlike today, the entire UI was themed, resulting in a quite different look (and feel?). This is the "modern" theme -- for demonstration, I kept it for the rest of the tour of the Navigator component:
The preferences window was still a proper window, organized in sections and subsections:
There were some basic developer tools -- this is much more powerful today (because it has to be):
Bookmarks were stored in an HTML file like in Netscape:
What's particularly cute is the "Cookie Manager":
You can easily inspect and manage all cookies of all sites you've visited (which is almost unthinkable today). And they were stored in a plain text file (also a Netscape left-over, apparently):
Back in the day, popup windows were the main method of delivering unwanted ads, and Mozilla had a way to manage permissions which websites could open such popups -- although I have no idea anymore how to launch it:
And that's basically it. A fully functioning browser. Honestly, even in today's Firefox, I still don't use a lot more than this.
Mail & Newsgroups
This looks a lot like Netscape and a lot like Thunderbird looked for many years.
The default view is sorted by date, unfortunately. If you ask me, if more people were introduced to threading by default, email would be less messy.
You can switch to a threaded view:
Composing a new mail -- HTML by default:
The settings windows are simple and tidy:
Usenet support is included:
As is a basic address book:
Theming affects all components. Here's a screenshot of the mail program with the "modern" theme -- fancy, eh?
Composer
This lets you create HTML documents. The default workflow nudges you to
create documents with lots of <br> in them:
With a bit more effort, you can trick it into creating <p> tags. To
create a new <p>, you can select "Paragraph" from the dropdown menu,
it appears? Surely, there must be a better way. (I never used this
program back in the day.)
You can upload HTML files directly from Composer via FTP:
ChatZilla
A basic IRC chat client, because this was still popular in 2002. It doesn't show timestamps, though, which irks me quite a bit. :-) It auto-replaces smilies, and there are basically no settings.
The color scheme can be changed, although it only affects the message area, which makes this quite a bit uncomfortable to read:
The End
I wish programs these were still as concise and tidy as this. (Although you could argue that they could have left out the Composer.)