Feb 22, 2008

About Mozilla



Sometimes people gets confused about the different Mozilla terms. Asa explains some of them in a news posting:

Gecko - The rendering engine upon which all of the Mozilla applications rely.

Mozilla Platform - Gecko, plus the XPToolkit upon which XUL-applications can be built.

Mozilla, the applications suite, also known as Seamonkey - The legacy Mozilla (the organization) applications which is built from the Mozilla Platform including Gecko.

Firefox and Thunderbird - The premier Mozilla (the organization) applications built from the Mozilla Platform (including Gecko).

Mozilla 2.0 - The next generation of Mozilla technologies and APIs (platform) which will include the Gecko rendering engine and the cross-platform toolkit.

The Mozilla Application Suite, was originally known as Mozilla, marketed as the Mozilla Suite, and code name was Seamonkey, was a free, cross-platform Internet suite, whose components include a web browser, an e-mail and news client, an HTML editor, and an IRC client. Its development was initiated by Netscape Communications Corporation, before their acquisition by AOL. It is based on the source code of Netscape Communicator. The development was spearheaded by the Mozilla Organization from 1998 to 2003, and by the Mozilla Foundation since 2003.

Versions 6 and 7 of the Netscape suite were based on the Mozilla Suite. The last official version is 1.7.13, as Mozilla Foundation is now focusing on the development of Firefox and Thunderbird. The suite has also been superseded by SeaMonkey, a community-driven Internet suite that is based on the same source code.

Mozilla is

  • The producer and provider of the award-winning Firefox web browser and Thunderbird e-mail software.
  • A software development tools provider.
  • An open source community of developers and testers.
  • A partner for the technology industry.
  • An advocate for standards on the Net who provides tools for developing standard web content.
  • Educators, providing educational materials about Internet technologies and software development.