Mozilla is a term used in a number of ways in relation to the Mozilla.org project and the
Mozilla FoundationThe Mozilla Foundation is a non-profit organization that exists to support and provide leadership for the open source Mozilla project. The organization sets the policies that govern development, operates key infrastructure and controls trademarks and other intellectual property...
, their defunct commercial predecessor
Netscape Communications CorporationNetscape Communications is a US computer services company, best known for Netscape Navigator, its web browser. When it was an independent company, its headquarters were in Mountain View, California...
, and their related
application softwareApplication software, also known as an application or an "app", is computer software designed to help the user to perform specific tasks. Examples include enterprise software, accounting software, office suites, graphics software and media players. Many application programs deal principally with...
.
The term
Mozilla is originally used for three distinct entities:
- The codename for the defunct Netscape Navigator
Netscape Navigator was a proprietary web browser that was popular in the 1990s. It was the flagship product of the Netscape Communications Corporation and the dominant web browser in terms of usage share, although by 2002 its usage had almost disappeared...
software project
- The official, public, original name of the Mozilla Application Suite
The Mozilla Application Suite is a cross-platform integrated Internet suite. Its development was initiated by Netscape Communications Corporation, before their acquisition by AOL. It is based on the source code of Netscape Communicator...
, later renamed SeaMonkeySeaMonkey is a free and open source cross-platform Internet suite. It is the continuation of the former Mozilla Application Suite, based on the same source code...
- The mascot of Netscape, a cartoon reptile inspired by Godzilla
is a daikaijū, a Japanese movie monster, first appearing in Ishirō Honda's 1954 film Godzilla. Since then, Godzilla has gone on to become a worldwide pop culture icon starring in 28 films produced by Toho Co., Ltd. The monster has appeared in numerous other media incarnations including video games,...
These and various other related uses of the term
Mozilla are discussed below in the order when they were first used.
Codename of Netscape Navigator
Historically, Mozilla had been used internally as a codename for the
Netscape NavigatorNetscape Navigator was a proprietary web browser that was popular in the 1990s. It was the flagship product of the Netscape Communications Corporation and the dominant web browser in terms of usage share, although by 2002 its usage had almost disappeared...
web browserA web browser is a software application for retrieving, presenting, and traversing information resources on the World Wide Web. An information resource is identified by a Uniform Resource Identifier and may be a web page, image, video, or other piece of content...
from its beginning.
Jamie ZawinskiJamie Zawinski , commonly known as jwz, is a former professional American computer programmer responsible for significant contributions to the free software projects Mozilla and XEmacs, and early versions of the Netscape Navigator web browser...
came up with the name during a meeting while working at the company. The name was created as a portmanteau of the words "
MosaicMosaic is the web browser credited with popularizing the World Wide Web. It was also a client for earlier protocols such as FTP, NNTP, and gopher. Its clean, easily understood user interface, reliability, Windows port and simple installation all contributed to making it the application that opened...
killer", hinting that Netscape would be the end to the (then only) competitor browser, Mosaic. The logo was a reference to the name of the fictional monster
Godzillais a daikaijū, a Japanese movie monster, first appearing in Ishirō Honda's 1954 film Godzilla. Since then, Godzilla has gone on to become a worldwide pop culture icon starring in 28 films produced by Toho Co., Ltd. The monster has appeared in numerous other media incarnations including video games,...
.
Mascot of Netscape
Mozilla was the
mascotThe term mascot – defined as a term for any person, animal, or object thought to bring luck – colloquially includes anything used to represent a group with a common public identity, such as a school, professional sports team, society, military unit, or brand name...
of the now-disbanded Netscape Communications Corporation, formerly called Mosaic Communications Corporation. Initially, the mascot took various forms, including that of a helmeted
astronautAn astronaut or cosmonaut is a person trained by a human spaceflight program to command, pilot, or serve as a crew member of a spacecraft....
or "spaceman", but the eventual choice was a Godzilla-like lizard thought to go well with the name. It was designed by Dave Titus in 1994.
Mozilla was featured prominently on Netscape's
websiteA website, also written as Web site, web site, or simply site, is a collection of related web pages containing images, videos or other digital assets. A website is hosted on at least one web server, accessible via a network such as the Internet or a private local area network through an Internet...
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 featured on
T-shirtA T-shirt is a style of shirt. A T-shirt is buttonless and collarless, with short sleeves and frequently a round neck line....
s given to staff or on artwork adorning the walls of the Netscape campus in
Mountain View-Downtown:Mountain View has a pedestrian-friendly downtown centered on Castro Street. The downtown area consists of the seven blocks of Castro Street from the Downtown Mountain View Station transit center in the north to the intersection with El Camino Real in the south...
. The color of the Mozilla lizard changed from its original green to a red version of the monster after the source code of the Netscape browser was released.
When Netscape acquired the website directory NewHoo in 1998, they re-branded it the
Open Directory ProjectThe Open Directory Project , also known as Dmoz , is a multilingual open content directory of World Wide Web links. It is owned by Netscape but it is constructed and maintained by a community of volunteer editors.ODP uses a hierarchical ontology scheme for organizing site listings...
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. Netscape Communications continued using the image of the red Mozilla in its iconography in the Mozilla.org project web site.
Part of the "user agent string" of many browsers
When users visit a website (via a user agent such as a web browser), a text
stringIn formal languages, which are used in mathematical logic and theoretical computer science, a string is a finite sequence of symbols that are chosen from a set or alphabet....
is generally sent to identify the user agent to the
web serverWeb server can refer to either the hardware or the software that helps to deliver content that can be accessed through the Internet....
. It is known as the "user agent string". The Netscape web browser identified itself as "
Mozilla/" followed by some information about the
operating systemAn operating system is a set of programs that manage computer hardware resources and provide common services for application software. The operating system is the most important type of system software in a computer 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 ("
cloakCloaking is a search engine optimization technique in which the content presented to the search engine spider is different from that presented to the user's browser. This is done by delivering content based on the IP addresses or the User-Agent HTTP header of the user requesting the page...
" or "
spoofIn the context of network security, a spoofing attack is a situation in which one person or program successfully masquerades as another by falsifying data and thereby gaining an illegitimate advantage.- Spoofing and TCP/IP :...
") this string in order to also work with those sites. The earliest example of this is
Internet ExplorerWindows Internet Explorer is a series of graphical web browsers developed by Microsoft and included as part of the Microsoft Windows line of operating systems, starting in 1995. It was first released as part of the add-on package Plus! for Windows 95 that year...
'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.
Mozilla Foundation
"Mozilla" is sometimes used to refer to the
free and open source softwareFree and open-source software or free/libre/open-source software is software that is liberally licensed to grant users the right to use, study, change, and improve its design through the availability of its source code...
project that was founded in order to create the next-generation
Internet suiteAn Internet suite is an Internet-related software suite. Internet suites usually include a web browser, e-mail client , download manager, HTML editor, and an IRC client....
for Netscape. The Mozilla Organization was founded in 1998 to create a new suite. On 15 July 2003, the organization was formally registered as a non-profit organization, and became
Mozilla FoundationThe Mozilla Foundation is a non-profit organization that exists to support and provide leadership for the open source Mozilla project. The organization sets the policies that govern development, operates key infrastructure and controls trademarks and other intellectual property...
. The foundation now creates and maintains the
Mozilla FirefoxMozilla Firefox is a free and open source web browser descended from the Mozilla Application Suite and managed by Mozilla Corporation. , Firefox is the second most widely used browser, with approximately 25% of worldwide usage share of web browsers...
browser and
Mozilla ThunderbirdMozilla Thunderbird is a free, open source, cross-platform e-mail and news client developed by the Mozilla Foundation. The project strategy is modeled after Mozilla Firefox, a project aimed at creating a web browser...
email application, among other software. The Mozilla trademark is held by the Mozilla Foundation as of 2006.
Mozilla Corporation
On 3 August 2005, the Mozilla Foundation announced the creation of
Mozilla CorporationThe Mozilla Corporation is a wholly owned subsidiary of the Mozilla Foundation that coordinates and integrates the development of Internet-related applications such as the Mozilla Firefox and SeaMonkey Navigator web browsers and the Mozilla Thunderbird email client by a growing global community of...
, a wholly owned for-profit
taxTo tax is to impose a financial charge or other levy upon a taxpayer by a state or the functional equivalent of a state such that failure to pay is punishable by law. Taxes are also imposed by many subnational entities...
able
subsidiaryA subsidiary company, subsidiary, or daughter company is a company that is completely or partly owned and wholly controlled by another company that owns more than half of the subsidiary's stock. The subsidiary can be a company, corporation, or limited liability company. In some cases it is a...
of Mozilla Foundation, that primarily focuses on delivering Firefox to end users. It also oversees
marketingMarketing is the process used to determine what products or services may be of interest to customers, and the strategy to use in sales, communications and business development. It generates the strategy that underlies sales techniques, business communication, and business developments...
and sponsorship of the products.
Mozilla Messaging
On February 19, 2008, Mozilla Messaging was announced, which like Mozilla Corporation is a for-profit subsidiary of the Mozilla Foundation. Its focus will be on Thunderbird and possibly developing software related to other Internet communication media.
Mozilla Application Suite
Netscape announced on January 22, 1998 that it would be relicensing its source code for future development. In March 1998, Netscape released most of the
codeA code is a rule for converting a piece of information into another form or representation , not necessarily of the same type....
for its popular
Netscape CommunicatorNetscape Communicator was an Internet suite produced by Netscape Communications Corporation. Initially released in June 1997, Netscape Communicator 4.0 was the successor to Netscape Navigator 3.x and included more groupware features intended to appeal to enterprises.- Editions :Netscape...
Internet suiteAn Internet suite is an Internet-related software suite. Internet suites usually include a web browser, e-mail client , download manager, HTML editor, and an IRC client....
under a free software/open source license, the
Netscape Public LicenseThe Netscape Public License is a free software license, the license under which Netscape Communications Corporation originally released Mozilla....
. 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.
Netscape programmers continued contributing to the open source Mozilla project and using that source code to create Netscape-branded releases which included the addition of proprietary software, more notably a commercial spellchecker and a lightweight version of the AIM and ICQ instant messenger integrated with the browser. All of these browsers showed the copyright notice and acknowledgements page when the user entered "About:mozilla" in the URL bar.
The suite was well known as the free/open source base of the
NetscapeNetscape 7 was a series of proprietary cross-platform Internet suites created by Netscape Communications Corporation and then in-house by AOL to continue the Netscape series after Netscape 6. There were three main editions released from the Netscape 7 series; being Netscape 7.0, 7.1 and 7.2...
suite (versions 6 and 7), and its underlying code (most notably the
GeckoGecko is a free and open source layout engine used in many applications developed by Mozilla Foundation and the Mozilla Corporation , as well as in many other open source software projects....
layout engineA web browser engine, , is a software component that takes marked up content and formatting information and displays the formatted content on the screen. It "paints" on the content area of a window, which is displayed on a monitor or a printer...
) became the base of many standalone applications, including the
Mozilla FoundationThe Mozilla Foundation is a non-profit organization that exists to support and provide leadership for the open source Mozilla project. The organization sets the policies that govern development, operates key infrastructure and controls trademarks and other intellectual property...
's flagship products
FirefoxMozilla Firefox is a free and open source web browser descended from the Mozilla Application Suite and managed by Mozilla Corporation. , Firefox is the second most widely used browser, with approximately 25% of worldwide usage share of web browsers...
and
ThunderbirdMozilla Thunderbird is a free, open source, cross-platform e-mail and news client developed by the Mozilla Foundation. The project strategy is modeled after Mozilla Firefox, a project aimed at creating a web browser...
. 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 handed over to the SeaMonkey Council which has continued development with
SeaMonkeySeaMonkey is a free and open source cross-platform Internet suite. It is the continuation of the former Mozilla Application Suite, based on the same source code...
, an Internet suite developed by the Mozilla community that is based on the source code of the Mozilla Suite, and supersedes it.
Collective name for Mozilla-based browsers
For simplicity, the term
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/SeaMonkey,
FirefoxMozilla Firefox is a free and open source web browser descended from the Mozilla Application Suite and managed by Mozilla Corporation. , Firefox is the second most widely used browser, with approximately 25% of worldwide usage share of web browsers...
,
CaminoCamino is a free, open source, GUI-based Web browser based on Mozilla's Gecko layout engine and specifically designed for the Mac OS X operating system...
,
Netscape 6Netscape 6 was the name of Netscape Communications Corporation's proprietary cross-platform internet suite from versions 6.0–6.2.3. It superseded Netscape Communicator 4.8 and was replaced by the simply-named Netscape...
, 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.
Application framework
The term
Mozilla is also used to refer to the Mozilla application framework, a
cross-platformIn computing, cross-platform, or multi-platform, is an attribute conferred to computer software or computing methods and concepts that are implemented and inter-operate on multiple computer platforms...
application frameworkIn computer programming, an application framework consists of a software framework used by software developers to implement the standard structure of an application for a specific development environment ....
for writing applications that can run on multiple operating systems. It consists most notably of the Gecko layout engine, but also the
XULIn computer programming, XUL , the XML User Interface Language, is an XML user interface markup language developed by the Mozilla project. XUL operates in Mozilla cross-platform applications such as Firefox...
user-interface toolkit, the Necko networking library, and other components. This is the core that all Mozilla-based browsers and applications are built from.
Codebase
Source codeIn computer science, source code is text written using the format and syntax of the programming language that it is being written in. Such a language is specially designed to facilitate the work of computer programmers, who specify the actions to be performed by a computer mostly by writing source...
for Mozilla software projects such as
FirefoxMozilla Firefox is a free and open source web browser descended from the Mozilla Application Suite and managed by Mozilla Corporation. , Firefox is the second most widely used browser, with approximately 25% of worldwide usage share of web browsers...
,
ThunderbirdMozilla Thunderbird is a free, open source, cross-platform e-mail and news client developed by the Mozilla Foundation. The project strategy is modeled after Mozilla Firefox, a project aimed at creating a web browser...
, and
XULRunnerXULRunner is a runtime environment developed by the Mozilla Foundation to provide a common back-end for XUL-based applications. It replaced the Gecko Runtime Environment, a stalled project with a similar purpose....
are managed collectively in a single
MercurialMercurial is a cross-platform, distributed revision control tool for software developers. It is mainly implemented using the Python programming language, but includes a binary diff implementation written in C. It is supported on Windows and Unix-like systems, such as FreeBSD, Mac OS X and Linux...
repositoryA software repository is a storage location from which software packages may be retrieved and installed on a computer.- Discussion :Many software publishers and other organizations maintain servers on the Internet for this purpose, either free of charge or for a subscription fee...
. This large
codebaseThe term codebase, or code base, is used in software development to mean the whole collection of source code used to build a particular application or component. Typically, the codebase includes only human-written source code files, and not, e.g., source code files generated by other tools or...
is referred to as the Mozilla codebase, the Mozilla source code, or just Mozilla. Before Gecko 1.9 had branched,
CVSThe Concurrent Versions System , also known as the Concurrent Versioning System, is a client-server free software revision control system in the field of software development. Version control system software keeps track of all work and all changes in a set of files, and allows several developers ...
was used.
The Mozilla codebase was originally released under the
Netscape Public LicenseThe Netscape Public License is a free software license, the license under which Netscape Communications Corporation originally released Mozilla....
. The license was updated to version 1.1 and renamed the
Mozilla Public License (MPL)The Mozilla Public License is a free and open source software license. Version 1.0 was developed by Mitchell Baker when she worked as a lawyer at Netscape Communications Corporation and version 1.1 at the Mozilla Foundation...
. The
Free Software FoundationThe Free Software Foundation is a non-profit corporation founded by Richard Stallman on 4 October 1985 to support the free software movement, a copyleft-based movement which aims to promote the universal freedom to create, distribute and modify computer software...
and others noted that a
GPLThe GNU General Public License is the most widely used free software license, originally written by Richard Stallman for the GNU Project....
-licensed module and an MPL-license module cannot be legally linked, and they recommend that developers not use the MPL for this reason. To address this concern, the Mozilla Foundation relicensed great parts of the codebase in 2003 under the
GNU General Public LicenseThe GNU General Public License is the most widely used free software license, originally written by Richard Stallman for the GNU Project....
and
GNU Lesser General Public LicenseThe GNU Lesser General Public License or LGPL is a free software license published by the Free Software Foundation . It was designed as a compromise between the strong-copyleft GNU General Public License or GPL and permissive licenses such as the BSD licenses and the MIT License...
as well as the
Mozilla Public LicenseThe Mozilla Public License is a free and open source software license. Version 1.0 was developed by Mitchell Baker when she worked as a lawyer at Netscape Communications Corporation and version 1.1 at the Mozilla Foundation...
.
Software
- Bugzilla
Bugzilla is a Web-based general-purpose bugtracker and testing tool originally developed and used by the Mozilla project, and licensed under the Mozilla Public License....
– a bug tracking tool
- Camino
Camino is a free, open source, GUI-based Web browser based on Mozilla's Gecko layout engine and specifically designed for the Mac OS X operating system...
– a web browser for Mac
- Minimo
Minimo was a project to create a version of the Mozilla web browser for small devices like PDAs and mobile phones.The project aimed to make it easier for developers to embed parts of Mozilla into systems with limited system resources...
- Mozilla Skywriter – formerly known as Bespin
- Mozilla Firefox
Mozilla Firefox is a free and open source web browser descended from the Mozilla Application Suite and managed by Mozilla Corporation. , Firefox is the second most widely used browser, with approximately 25% of worldwide usage share of web browsers...
– a web browser
- Mozilla Firefox for mobile
- Mozilla Geode
Geode was a Firefox add-on that would locate a user's computer, which enabled personalized and localized content. When the extension was fully operational, a user who was looking for restaurants while they were out of town would have been able load up their favorite review site, as well as find...
- Mozilla Songbird
- Mozilla Thunderbird
Mozilla Thunderbird is a free, open source, cross-platform e-mail and news client developed by the Mozilla Foundation. The project strategy is modeled after Mozilla Firefox, a project aimed at creating a web browser...
– a mail client
- Firefox Sync – formerly known as Mozilla Weave
- SeaMonkey
SeaMonkey is a free and open source cross-platform Internet suite. It is the continuation of the former Mozilla Application Suite, based on the same source code...
- Tinderbox
Tinderbox is a software suite that provides continuous integration capability. Tinderbox allows developers to manage software builds and to correlate build failures on various platforms and configurations with particular code changes....
See also
- The Book of Mozilla
The Book of Mozilla is a computer Easter egg found in the Netscape and Mozilla series of web browsers.It is viewed by directing the browser to about:mozilla.There is no real book entitled The Book of Mozilla...
- Timeline of web browsers
- -zilla (suffix)
External links