Beonex Communicator

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

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.com

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]

a BeOL preview

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]