Mozilla: Meaning (information, definition, explanation, facts)

This article is about the open source Internet suite. For other uses, see Mozilla (disambiguation).

Mozilla is a free, cross-platform Internet software suite, whose components include a web browser, an email client, an HTML editor, and an IRC client. It was started by Netscape Communications Corporation and is now developed by the Mozilla Foundation.

Overview

The name Mozilla had been used internally for the Netscape Navigator web browser from its beginning. Netscape Navigator was to be the successor to the Mosaic web browser; Mozilla was a contraction of Mosaic-killer Godzilla. This name was not used externally, but references to it could be found in pictures of Godzilla associated with Netscape Navigator.

In March 1998, Netscape released most of the code base for its popular Netscape Communicator suite (including the Netscape Navigator browser) under an open source license. The name of the application developed from this would be Mozilla, coordinated by the newly-created Mozilla Organization, at the mozilla.org website.

Although the large parts (layout engine, all front-end related code etc.) of original Communicator code were abandoned shortly thereafter, the Mozilla organization eventually succeeded in producing a full-featured Internet suite that surpassed Communicator in both features and stability.

Under the AOL banner, Mozilla.org continued development of the browser and management of the Mozilla source until July 2003 when this task passed to the Mozilla Foundation. The Foundation is a non-profit organisation composed primarily of developers and staff from mozilla.org and owns all intellectual property related to Mozilla. It received initial donations from AOL, IBM, Sun Microsystems, Red Hat and Mitch Kapor; however all official ties with AOL were severed following the announcement of the end of the Netscape Navigator browser and AOL's agreement to use Microsoft's Internet Explorer browser in future versions of its AOL software. (AOL has since announced it will be using Mozilla's Gecko layout engine.)

Like many other large software projects, Mozilla itself has become a platform for other programs and libraries written in its domain specific programming environment. Extensions vary widely in complexity, ranging from simple JavaScript-based bookmarklets, to Mozilla feature extensions (such as support for mouse gestures and pie menus), to full-fledged standalone programs. A partial list of programs and extensions for the Mozilla platform can be found on the Mozdev.org website.

The Netscape Communicator open source release, which came at the height of America's late-1990s economic boom, was greeted by the Internet community with a mixture of acclaim and skepticism. In some circles, Netscape's source release was seen as both a victory for the free software movement and an opportunity for Netscape to tap the power of open source development. This view was particularly popular among users of Linux and other free software. Other observers – including many in the non-open-source business community – interpreted the move as Netscape's surrender in the face of the moreover legally-criticized growing ascendancy of Microsoft's Internet Explorer browser.

Regardless of the public's opinion, development with the Communicator code base proved harder than initially hoped:

• The Communicator code base was huge and complex.
• It had to be developed simultaneously on many operating systems, and therefore to cope with their differing libraries and idiosyncrasies.
• It bore the scars of many rapid cycles of closed-source development on "Internet time". The short development cycles had led programmers to sacrifice modularity and elegance in the scramble to implement more features.
• Several parts of Communicator's code were never released as open source, due to licensing arrangements with third parties.

As a result, the initial Communicator open source release did not even build cleanly, much less run. This presented steep challenges to the Mozilla core developers (most of whom were still on Netscape's payroll), and even steeper challenges to independent developers wishing to contribute to Mozilla on their own.

Ultimately, the Mozilla core developers concluded that the old code could not be salvaged. They decided to scrap the whole code base and rewrite it from the ground up, which caused one of the lead Netscape developers, Jamie Zawinski, to resign. [1] The resulting plan included, among other things, the creation of a whole new cross-platform user interface library and a new HTML rendering engine.

Few observers foresaw the result. On December 7, 1998 – less than two months after the October 26, 1998 roadmap announcement stating that the old Communicator code would be scrapped – Netscape released a special "preview" based on the Gecko HTML layout engine. Gecko had already been in development for some time at Netscape under the internal name NGLayout ("Next Generation Layout"), and it was noticeably faster and smaller than its predecessor. One widely publicized feature of the first Gecko preview release was that it fit on a single 1.44 MB floppy disk, making it about one tenth the size of most contemporary browsers.

The prompt release of Gecko led many to believe that a complete browser could not be far behind. However, the first release of the rendering engine was far from bug- and crash-free, and even further from being ready for the prime-time, and producing a fully functional web browser required much more than the nascent rendering engine: the Mozilla developers soon envisioned a project more ambitious than a simple web browser. The new Mozilla would be a platform for Internet applications, with a fully programmable user interface and a modular architecture. This Mozilla would function equally well as a host for email clients, instant messaging clients, Usenet news readers, or any number of other applications.

Due to the effort required for this massive rewrite, the project fell far behind its original projected deadlines. In the years that followed, skepticism about Mozilla grew widespread, and some doubted that a finished Mozilla browser would ever see the light of day. However, the project persisted, continuing uninterrupted through both the purchase of Netscape by AOL and the end of the dot-com boom.

By June 2002, the Mozilla project had produced a serviceable, standards-based web browser that worked on multiple operating systems, including Linux, Mac OS, Microsoft Windows and Solaris. The Mozilla 1.0 release on June 5, 2002 was even praised for introducing new features that Internet Explorer lacked, including better support for user privacy preferences and some interface improvements. Additionally, the Mozilla browser became a de facto reference implementation for various World Wide Web Consortium standards, due to its strong support for those standards. Current versions of Mozilla are highly customizable and include advanced features such as cookie, popup, password and image management, and tabbed browsing.

On July 15th 2003, AOL announced that it would close down its browser division, which was in essence Netscape's Mozilla. Far from being the end, this was the beginning of the Mozilla Foundation, formed by former Netscape/Mozilla veterans to take responsibility of the development of Mozilla. As a consolation AOL pledged $2 million to help the newly-formed foundation.

Many people had been expecting this after AOL reached a settlement with competitor, Microsoft, with a deal for the AOL software to use Internet Explorer for the next 7 years. Netscape had always been seen as a bargaining chip for AOL against Microsoft.

AOL laid off most of Netscape's employees and hackers, except for some who were transferred to other divisions. Netscape signs were seen being pulled off its building, confirming what many took as the end of Netscape. AOL will be keeping the Netscape brand for its portal, but the company will no longer pay anyone to develop the Mozilla codebase. Future versions of Netscape are expected to be simply rebranded versions of Mozilla, beginning with version 7.2 (expected to be based on Mozilla 1.7), which AOL announced will be released in summer 2004. [2]

Mozilla, a product originally aimed at developers instead of end users, now faces the challenge of marketing to the masses.

A new development roadmap has been released which marks a change in the future plans for Mozilla. Instead of the current integrated "cross-platform front end" (XPFE) application, Mozilla will become a suite of smaller applications sharing common back-end technology such as the XUL user-interface framework and the Gecko rendering engine. They will continue to work seamlessly with one another, as before, but will be able to integrate better with third-party applications. By cutting the functionality of the suite into pieces, this is intended to improve the project in several ways by

• reducing application footprint and code bloat
• simplifying project management
• increasing program modularity, and hence reliability and security

This is not a long-term goal: the Firefox (formerly Phoenix, then Firebird) browser is already in an advanced state of development, and the Thunderbird (formerly Minotaur) mail and news client is rapidly maturing after being factored out from XPFE.

The main technical thrust of Mozilla has been to implement and extend public standards that are supportive of major Internet communication systems such as the World Wide Web and email. By seeking to do so freely and portably, Mozilla technology takes a leadership position in the evolution of those technologies as well as providing public infrastructure that is mostly free of commercial motives.

Subprojects

The Mozilla software architecture is, of necessity, fairly modular. As a result, Mozilla development generated several components that have been reused in other contexts. The most prominent of these is the Gecko layout engine, which has been used in other browsers (see Spin-off browsers below).

Important parts of the project include NSPR (Netscape Portable Runtime), a platform abstraction library that makes all operating systems appear the same to Mozilla, and XPCOM, a software componentry framework similar to Microsoft's COM.

Also, the task of Mozilla development itself spurred the creation of tools for geographically distributed, cross-platform software development. Some of these tools were widely adopted by the larger open source community, including the following:

• the Bugzilla bug-tracking software;
• the Bonsai CVS code management system, a web-based query interface for the CVS revision control system;
• the Rhino project, a Java-based implementation of JavaScript;
• the Tinderbox detective tool, which allows developers to manage software builds and to correlate build failures on various platforms and configurations with particular code changes; and
• the Thunderbird e-mail and news client.

Notable features of Mozilla's design

One unique aspect of Mozilla is that the entire user interface, including menus and dialog boxes, is rendered by the Gecko layout engine, rather than by the host operating system's GUI libraries. This architecture uses a specially designed language called XUL, and has been somewhat controversial. Its defenders cite its flexibility and the fact that it can present a standard GUI across different platforms. Its critics argue that this architecture adversely impacts performance, and that it is a widely-accepted convention of application design to use the native GUI elements of the operating system interface. A number of browsers exist that use the rendering engine only to display the HTML page (see below).

In Mozilla, XUL is tightly integrated with its AOM—Application Object Model. This set of objects integrates a document-specified GUI with software more typically found in GUI software, such as commands and views. This technology is analogous to the W3C DOM standards that accompany HTML.

The name Mozilla was taken as a contraction of "Mosaic killer". One can surmise that the employees of Netscape hoped to unseat Mosaic as the web's most popular browser. They succeeded – albeit briefly, yielding the position to Internet Explorer soon after. The mascot of a cartoon lizard was adopted afterwards. For more on the Mozilla mascot, see the articles on Mozilla (mascot) and The Book of Mozilla.

Stable branch version 1.7.2 was released on August 4, 2004. Preview version 1.8a3 was released on August 18, 2004. See the complete version history.

Browsers that use the Gecko layout engine for the entire user interface

• Mozilla Suite (Mozilla.org's own internet suite under the codename SeaMonkey). This includes:
  • Mozilla composer
  • Mozilla mail and address book
  • Mozilla IRC chat
• Mozilla Firefox (formerly "Mozilla Firebird" and "Phoenix")
• Netscape Navigator versions 6.x and 7.x (rebranded Mozilla including additional features such as AOL Instant Messenger)
• Beonex Communicator
• IBM Web Browser for OS/2
• Aphrodite

Browsers that use the Gecko layout engine for webpage display only

• Galeon for GNOME
• Skipstone for GNU/Linux
• Salamander for GNU/Linux
• Epiphany for GNOME
• K-Meleon for Windows
• AOL for Mac OS X
• Q.BATi for Mac OS X
• Camino for Mac OS X
• CompuServe 7.0 for Windows

Other projects based on Mozilla code

• Mozilla Calendar
• Nvu
• XMLTerm

The web browser market is quite competitive. On Microsoft Windows the main browser that Mozilla competes with is Internet Explorer, mainly due to the fact that it comes installed by default, however it also competes with the Opera web browser, which is a standards-compliant commercial browser focused on speed, available free in an ad-supported version or without ads for a fee.

On Mac OS X, Mozilla competes with Internet Explorer, Opera and these browsers:

• Safari, Apple's in-house browser, based on the same rendering engine as Konqueror.
• OmniWeb, a commercial MacOS X browser offered by The Omni Group.

On Linux, Mozilla mainly competes with several browsers:

• Opera
• Konqueror - part of the K Desktop Environment (KDE) and also functions as a file manager, and file viewer.
• Epiphany - the official browser of the GNOME desktop environment, curently uses embedded Mozilla.
• Galeon - uses embedded Mozilla and is intergrated with GNOME

Other less well known browser alternatives include Dillo and the text only Links and Lynx web browsers.

Additionally, Mozilla has many subprojects, which while may still contribute to the same code-base could be considered to compete with Mozilla. See spin-off browsers.