Mozilla

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Mozilla logo

Mozilla was the official, public, original name of Mozilla Application Suite by the Mozilla Foundation, currently known as SeaMonkey suite.

In informal use it has been used in a number of ways and in combination with other phrases, though all of them have been related to the now-defunct Netscape Communications Corporation and its related application software.

Only three things have ever formally used the term "Mozilla" alone:

  • the codename for the Netscape Navigator software project
  • the official name of what was re-named Mozilla Application Suite
  • the Mascot of Netscape.

The various other related uses of the term "Mozilla" are listed below in the order when they were first used.

Contents

Main article: Netscape Navigator

Historically, Mozilla had been used internally as a codename for the Netscape Navigator web browser from its beginning. Jamie Zawinski came up with the name during a meeting while working at the company. [1] It was a contraction of Mosaic killer (that is, the slang "killa" leading to Moz+illa), referring to the hope that the project would unseat Mosaic as the web's most popular browser, and making reference to the name of the classic fictional monster Godzilla.

Mozilla was the mascot of the now-disbanded Netscape Communications Corporation, formerly called Mosaic Communications Corporation. Initially, the mascot took various forms, including that of a helmeted astronaut or "spaceman", but the eventual choice was a Godzilla-like lizard thought to go well with the Godzilla-like name. It was designed by Dave Titus in 1994.

Mozilla was featured prominently on Netscape's website in the company's early years. However, the need to project a more "professional" image (especially towards corporate clients) led to it being removed. Mozilla continued to be used inside Netscape, though, often featuring on T-shirts given to staff or on artwork adorning the walls of the Netscape campus in Mountain View.

When Netscape acquired the website directory NewHoo in 1998, they rebranded it the Open Directory Project with the nickname "dmoz" (Directory of Mozilla) due to its similarity to the Mozilla project. An image of Mozilla was placed on every page of the site, which remains the case today, despite Netscape's disbanding after its acquisition by AOL.

Main article: User agent string

When users visit a website (via a user agent such as a web browser), a text string is generally sent to identify the user agent to the web server. It is known as the "user agent string". The Netscape web browser identified itself as "Mozilla/" followed by some information about the operating system it was running on.

Because the Netscape browser initially implemented many features not available in other browsers and quickly came to dominate the market, a number of web sites were designed to work, or work fully, only when they detected an appropriate version of Mozilla in the user agent string. Thus, competing browsers began to emulate (cloak or "spoof") this string in order to also work with those sites. The earliest example of this is Internet Explorer's use of a user agent string beginning "Mozilla/ (compatible; MSIE ...", in order to receive content intended for Netscape, its main rival at the time of its development. This format of user agent string has since been copied by other user agents, and persisted even after Internet Explorer came to dominate the browser market.

See also: Browser wars

Main article: Mozilla Foundation
Mozilla Foundation logo

"Mozilla" is sometimes used to refer to the free software/open source project that was founded in order to create the next-generation Internet suite for Netscape. The Mozilla Organization was founded in 1998 to create the new suite. On July 15, 2003, the organization was formally registered as a non-profit organization, and became Mozilla Foundation. The foundation now creates and maintains the Mozilla Firefox browser and Mozilla Thunderbird email application, among other products. The Mozilla trademark is held by the Mozilla Foundation as of 2006.

Main article: Mozilla Corporation

On August 3, 2005, Mozilla Foundation announced the creation of Mozilla Corporation, a wholly owned for-profit taxable subsidiary of Mozilla Foundation, that will focus on delivering Firefox and Thunderbird to end users. It will also oversee marketing and sponsorship of the products.

Main article: Mozilla Application Suite
Mozilla 1.7 showing Wikipedia's main page
Mozilla 1.7 showing Wikipedia's main page

In March 1998, Netscape released most of the code for its popular Netscape Communicator internet suite under a free software/open source license, the Netscape Public License. The application developed from this was named Mozilla, as this was the codename of the original Netscape Navigator. After a series of lengthy pre-1.0 cycles, Mozilla 1.0 was released on June 5, 2002.

The suite was well known as the free/open source base of the Netscape suite (versions 6 and 7), and its underlying code (most notably the Gecko layout engine) became the base of many standalone applications, including the Mozilla Foundation's flagship products Firefox and Thunderbird. To distinguish the suite from the standalone products, the suite is often marketed as "Mozilla Application Suite", or the more concise "Mozilla Suite".

The Mozilla Foundation no longer maintains the suite, so that their developers can focus on Firefox and Thunderbird. The suite has been unofficially superseded by SeaMonkey, an Internet suite developed by the Mozilla community that is based on the source code of the Mozilla Suite.

For simplicity, the word Mozilla is often used to refer to all Mozilla-based browsers. For example, when it is said that a website is usable by Mozilla browsers, it means that it is usable by Mozilla Suite, Firefox, Camino, Netscape 6, etc. In some older Internet statistics programs, the term "Netscape 5.x" is incorrectly used to refer to these browsers because the user agent string starts with Mozilla/5.0.

Main article: Mozilla application framework

The term "Mozilla" is also used to refer to the Mozilla application framework, a cross-platform application framework for writing applications that can run on multiple operating systems. It consists most notably of the Gecko layout engine, but also the XUL user-interface toolkit, the Necko networking library, and other components. This is the core that all Mozilla-based browsers and applications are built from.

Source code for Mozilla software projects such as Firefox, Thunderbird, and XULRunner are managed collectively in a single CVS repository. This large codebase is referred to as the Mozilla codebase, the Mozilla source code, or just "Mozilla".

After a lengthy process, Mozilla has moved from CVS to Mercurial for Mozilla 2 development. [2]

The Mozilla codebase was originally released under the Netscape Public License. The license was updated to version 1.1 and renamed to the Mozilla Public License. The Free Software Foundation and others noted that a GPL-licensed module and an MPL-license module cannot be legally linked, and they recommend that developers not use the MPL for this reason.[3] To address this concern, the Mozilla Foundation relicensed great parts of the codebase in 2003 under the GNU General Public License and GNU Lesser General Public License as well as the Mozilla Public License. [4]

The ODP is also known as DMOZ, an acronym for Directory Mozilla.

 Free software Portal

  1. ^ http://www.jwz.org/gruntle/nscpdorm.html
  2. ^ http://weblogs.mozillazine.org/preed/2007/04/version_control_system_shootou_1.html
  3. ^ GNU comments on MPL [1]
  4. ^ Mozilla Foundation MPL Relicensing FAQ [2]
v • d • e
Mozilla projects
Browser related projects Camino · Firefox · Minimo · SeaMonkey
Other projects Bugzilla · ChatZilla · Lightning · Penelope · Sunbird · Thunderbird
Obsolete projects Mozilla Suite · Calendar Project
Infrastructure Gecko · Necko · XBL · XPCOM · XPConnect · XPInstall · XUL · XULRunner
Components Composer · NSPR · Rhino · SpiderMonkey · Tamarin · Venkman
Retrieved from "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mozilla"
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