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The name Mozilla had been used internally for the web browser Netscape Navigator from its beginning. The name arose because Netscape Navigator was to be the successor to the web browser Mosaic and 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, co-ordinated by the newly-created Mozilla organization, at the mozilla.org website.
Although the original Communicator code was 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 and Red Hat, 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 http://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 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:
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, Solaris, and Microsoft Windows. The Mozilla 1.0 release 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 customisable 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 new 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 all new Netscape browser development is expected to cease, with the last major version being 7.1 (based on Mozilla 1.4).
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
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 client is in the early stages of being factored out from XPFE.
The Mozilla software architecture was, 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 component 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:
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 library. 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).
The Mozilla project takes its name from the cartoon lizard Mozilla, who served as Netscape's mascot in the company's early days. The name is a portmanteau of "Mosaic" (the Netscape browser's predecessor) and "Godzilla" (a movie monster that terrorized Tokyo and other locales). 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. For more on the Mozilla mascot, see the external link for "The Mozilla Museum" (below) as well as the article on The Book of Mozilla.
See Mozilla version history. The last mozilla version is 1.7b.
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