Is Firefox the same program as Netscape? Specifically, Netscape Navigator?

Note, there were 2 products:
• Netscape Communicator: full suite
• Netscape Navigator: just a browser

Mozilla was always the codename for the product while it was in development.

Netscape started out as just a browser. Then it gained email -- see Zawinski's Law: https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Jamie_Zawinski

Then it gained web editing. Then it gained calendaring when Netscape Corp bought Collabora.

Netscape was driving to bankruptcy by Microsoft, which gave away IE for free in order to, quote, "knife Netscape in the back" (S Ballmer).

SUN bought the server software. AOL bought the client software and the dying Netscape Corp made future versions open source.

Note, the current version (Netscape 4.x) was not made FOSS and never was. Only the unfinished future Netscape 5.x version.

AOL owned the name "Netscape" so the new FOSS project couldn't be called that. So it went back to its old codename: Mozilla, the Godzilla of Mosaics. (Mosaic was the original GUI web browser.)

It was not finished and most of the employees had been laid off, while the new owners, AOL, actually used and bundled IE as the browser with their client software. (If they did not, Microsoft said it would not bundle AOL with Windows 95 & 98. More illegal restraint of trade; never prosecuted.)

It took a long time to finish Mozilla 5.

Occasionally, as it got usable, AOL took a snapshot, packaged it as a branded free product, and badged it Netscape.

Netscape 6 was Mozilla 0.6 and so on:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Netscape_6

This was Communicator not Navigator. The whole suite, with email, address book, web editor, etc.

Navigator was never open-sourced.

The Mozilla Applications Suite became the default web browser on most Linux distros, but never became a hit on Windows or Mac. Part of the reason being that most OSes came with email & chat clients anyway, and few turn-of-the-century web users wanted or needed the web page editor.

A few years later, wanting to regain some of that old success, a team within Mozilla produced a new, cut-down browser-only program. It was called Mozilla Phoenix: the program that rose from the ashes of Netscape.

Snag is, there are other software products called Phoenix. Someone sued.

So it was renamed Mozilla Firebird. The phoenix is the fire-bird.

But there's another FOSS program called Firebird  (a database).

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