Commonly used words

These are commonly used words throughout the Mozilla Community. These acronyms are commonly used in the IRC chat rooms and in the forums.

• BMO or b.m.o means http://bugzilla.mozilla.org/ - the Mozilla Bug Database
• Fb means Firebird, the old name of Firefox, the stand-alone web browser.
• Ff and Fx also mean Firefox.
• JS means JavaScript, a lightweight browser-based scripting language created by Netscape many moons ago
• Moz means the Mozilla Suite and, sometimes, Mozilla as an organization
• MZ means mozillaZine - this site
• n.p.m means netscape.public.mozilla and refers to the newsgroup heirachy at news.mozilla.org e.g. n.p.m.seamonkey refers to the netscape.public.mozilla.seamonkey group at news.mozilla.org
• RFE means Request For Enhancement - a feature request
• Tb means Thunderbird, the stand-alone mail client
• TBE means Tabbrowser Extensions, an extension for Mozilla and Firefox that gives extra options for tabs and tabbed browsing
• TBP or TBPrefs means Tabbrowser Preferences, another extension not to be confused with TBE
• UNCO means Unconfirmed, a bug that can't be or hasn't been reproduced by testers
• WFM means WORKSFORME, which is Bugzilla and forum speak for 'Not broken for me'
• XUL means Extensible User Interface Language, a dialect of XML (Extensible Markup Language) for creating user interfaces
• XPCOM means Cross Platform Component Object Model, a Mozilla technology that is somewhat similar to Microsoft's COM. deCOMtamination is the process of removing unnecessary uses of XPCOM from the Mozilla codebase in order to improve performance.

Here are a few words used commonly when talking about any browser:

• Throbber is the icon (usually in the upper right corner of the web browser) that animates when the browser is loading a page. Clicking on this icon usually takes the browser window to the broswer's original home page (ie: www.mozilla.org/products/firefox).
• URL bar is the space at the top of the browser window which shows the current web page that is being viewed. Entering a new web page there and pressing enter will take you to the new web page.

And the following is a list of acronyms you will often come across when you're in the Mozilla IRC channels (irc.mozilla.org) - these are in addition to the ones listed above:

• AFAIK: As far as I know
• ATM: At the moment
• BRB: Be right back
• IIRC: If I remember/recall correctly
• NP: No problem

Gibberish like this:

• Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-GB; rv:1.6) Gecko/20040206 Firefox/0.8

...is a Mozilla application's UA (user agent) string. It specifies exactly which version you're using, which can be useful in tracking down bugs and explaining odd behaviour. It can be found in the application's Help > About dialogue, or the about: page.

More to come. Acronym Finder is a very good resource for finding out what some Mozilla-related acronyms stand for.

There is also a Mozilla Jargon site with many definitions for words used by mozilla hackers.