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 distributionkmLinux 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).
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 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]
References
^Bucksch, Ben.
"Legal notices". Beonex Communicator. Archived from
the original on 3 February 2011. Retrieved 28 January 2011.
^
abcBehrens, Fionn (2 December 2000).
"Slimfast für Mozilla" (in German). Linux-Community.de. Archived from
the original on 12 June 2002. Retrieved 29 January 2011.
^Bucksch, Ben.
"BeOL". Beonex Communicator. Retrieved 7 February 2011.