Mozilla

Mozilla is a free-software community, created in 1998 by members of Netscape. The Mozilla community uses, develops, spreads and supports Mozilla products, thereby promoting exclusively free software and open standards, with only minor exceptions. The community is supported institutionally by the Mozilla Foundation and its tax-paying subsidiary, the Mozilla Corporation.

Mozilla produces many products such as the Firefox web browser, Thunderbird e-mail client, Firefox Mobile web browser, Firefox OS mobile operating system, Bugzilla bug tracking system and other projects.

History

On February 23, 1998, Netscape created a project called Mozilla (after the original code name of the Netscape Navigator browser which is a blending of "Mosaic and Godzilla") to co-ordinate the development of the Mozilla Application Suite, the open source version of Netscape's internet software, Netscape Communicator.Jamie Zawinski says he came up with the name "Mozilla" at a Netscape staff meeting. A small group of Netscape employees were tasked with coordination of the new community.

Mozilla (mascot)

Mozilla was the mascot of the now disbanded Netscape Communications Corporation and subsequently the Mozilla Foundation.

Mozilla took the form of a green and purple cartoon lizard. Programmer Jamie Zawinski came up with the name during a meeting while working at the company. Mozilla was designed by Dave Titus in 1994.

The name "Mozilla" was already in use at Netscape as the codename for Netscape Navigator 1.0. The name stood for "Mosaic killer", as the company's goal was to displace NCSA Mosaic as the world's number one web browser. Initially the mascot took various forms, including that of a helmeted astronaut or "spaceman", but the eventual choice of a Godzilla-like lizard which went well with the theme of crushing the competition, especially because of the similarity between the names.

Mozilla featured prominently on Netscape's web site in the company's early years. However, the need to project a more "professional" image (especially towards corporate clients) led to his 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.

Firefox 2

Mozilla Firefox 2 is a version of Firefox, a web browser released on October 24, 2006 by the Mozilla Corporation.

Firefox 2 uses version 1.8 of the Gecko layout engine for displaying web pages. The release contained many new features not found in Firefox 1.5, including improved support for Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG) and JavaScript 1.7, as well as user interface changes.

On March 22, 2006, the first alpha version of Firefox 2 (Bon Echo Alpha 1) was released. It featured Gecko 1.8.1 for the first time. Mozilla Firefox 2.0.0.x is the final version officially supported on Windows NT 4.0 and Windows 98, although it can run on Windows 95 using tweaks. Mac OS X 10.5 support was added October 18, 2007 with version 2.0.0.8.

Firefox 2.0 featured updates to tabbed browsing environment, the extensions manager, the GUI, and the find, search and software update engines; a new session restore feature; inline spell checking; and an anti-phishing feature which was implemented by Google as an extension, and later merged into the program itself.