Beonex Communicator is a discontinued open-source Internet suite based on the Mozilla Application Suite (MAS) by Ben Bucksch, a German Mozilla developer.[2] It was intended to have a higher security and privacy level than other commercial products.[3][4][5] The Internet suite contains a Web browser, an email and news client, an HTML editor (based on Mozilla Composer) and an IRC client (based on ChatZilla).[4][5][6]
 | |
 Beonex Communicator 0.6 displaying the Book of Mozilla | |
| Original author(s) | Ben Bucksch |
|---|---|
| Developer(s) | Beonex Business Services |
| Initial release | Never |
| Preview release | 0.8.2-stable / 21 March 2003 |
| 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[1] |
| Website | www |
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.[7][8] The main goal was to implement Kerberos, OpenPGP, and LDAP in Beonex,[9] but that was marked as failed in mid-2004.[10] It was discontinued before reaching production release stage.
History
Overall, this project seems most interested in staying as true to Mozilla as possible.[11]
Mozilla Organization stated that the Mozilla Application Suite was only for developers and testing purposes and was not meant for end users.[12][13][14][15]
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.[16] Beonex 0.8 was released in June 2002 received positive reviews about its speed.[17][18]
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.[19]
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 decided its future policy.[20] 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.[21] Beonex never received much market share.[13]
In October 2020, the distributor of Beonex joined the Coalition for App Fairness, which defends the rights of app developers.[22]
Comparison with Netscape and MAS
The browser does not transmit referrers by default and has the possibility to create a fake referrers.[23] The browser deletes all cookies upon exiting and disables several JavaScript functions which could have served as attack vectors.[5][24][25] Beonex also allows changing the user agent.[26]
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 | Release date | ||
| 0.6 | 6.0 | 0.6[27] | 14 November 2000 |
| 0.9.2 | 6.1 | ||
| 0.9.4 | 6.2 | ||
| 0.9.4.1 | 6.2.2 | 0.7[27] | 8 November 2001 |
| 1.0 | 0.8[28] | 5 June 2002 | |
| 1.0.1 | 7.0 | 0.8.1[29] | 19 September 2002 |
| 1.0.2 | 7.01 and 7.02 | 0.8.2[30] | 10 March 2003 |
| 1.1 | 0.9pre | 27 August 2002[27] | |
Differences from Netscape
In contrast with Netscape, Beonex has included nearly the same features except the proprietary parts like the integrated Net2Phone,[31] and the AOL Instant Messenger.[31] For online chatting, ChatZilla was integrated[32] and the sidebar and the search engines are also pre-configured.[2][18] Beonex is less resource-intensive than Netscape.[33]
Beonex includes a migration tool to import old profiles from Netscape Communicator.[5][18]
Differences from MAS
Beonex Communicator was not a fork of MAS; rather, it was a separate branch, so no significant changes were made.[34] HTML email and JavaScript are turned off by default and thus, it displays email only in plain text with bold and cursive additions[5][35] which were added later in MAS 1.1.[36] The search engines is compatible with the Mycroft project and is located in the sidebar providing more features.[37]