My understanding is that Beonex is targetted towards end users, whereas Mozilla is not.

Jason.

you need to compare beonex to netscape, not mozilla. netscape and beonex are mozilla distributions for end-users, and in many ways I think that beonex does a better job than netscape has so far :

* "support" for platforms moz runs best on, slow release cycle * it's _intended_ for end-users, debug/qa menus are removed, etc * the profile dir on Linux is "~/.beonex", unlike netscape's "~/.mozilla" * they don't come with all the ads that netscape does

A big point is that you can pay Beonex for support or features, and they will contribute any features back to mozilla ( if mozilla will accept them ). I don't think Netscape does this, at least not for end-users ( maybe for partners ).

Mozilla is for developers, not end-users. You can file a bug, but I doubt that sending a little money to a developer will get you support for a problem in your current version ( or get a patch out just because you asked ). The Mozilla way is to file a bug and wait, or fix it yourself, or hire someone ( like Beonex ) to fix it for you.

What if I want to install Moz as the standard web browser enterprise-wide on Linux smart client workstations? Personally I would not use Netscape, too many ads and annoying things to turn off and no source code. My choices would be :

custom mozilla distro ( personally I'd prefer this ) use beonex/galeon ( if I couldn't provide adequate support, this would be a viable option. I could also pay them to work on features for me, which I may want to do even if I do my own custom distro ).

Hope that helps. I've checked out their last release on Linux, I think they did a great job, compared to Netscape. Just my opinion of course :)

http://www.beonex.com/communicator/doc/vsmozilla.html

After some other discussions on this site about how there is a need for user-oriented builds of Mozilla without all the fluff of Netscape, I finally decided to start a project with this goal (http://sourceforge.net/projects/mozu/ but don't expect to find much there yet).

However, I'm still undecided whether or not there is even a need for this. Here are the main questions:

1) What's wrong with the builds from Mozilla.org?

The Mozilla Organization has consistantly refused to provide user-oriented builds optimized without debuging/development info. However, I'm not sure how much difference this actually makes in the current builds.

2) What's wrong with Beonex?

Beonex seems to be focused on adding new features and providing commercial support. Also, the releases seem to be rather slow. I want builds based on the latest and greatest that mozilla.org has to offer (at least as often as milestones) and I don't care about commercial support (and I think there are a lot of other people that want that too).

3) What about builds from your linux distributer?

In my experience distro builds tend to be designed mostly to meet dependancies of other apps like nautilus and galeon. Trying to update your distro build can be a dependancy nightmare.

Also, after building Moz from source for the first time a few days ago and finding it to be less difficult than I expected, I'm thinking that compiling their own user builds from source may be a good option for a lot of people and there should be a place to help them do that.

So, what do you think? Is there a need for something in between mozilla.org and Beonex?