Commonly used words

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These are commonly used words and acronyms throughout the Mozilla Community.

Acronyms

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
  • URL stands for Uniform Resource Locator. It is the address of a page or file on the web.
  • 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.

Browser-Related Terms

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

Location bar (Address/URL bar)
The space at the top of the browser window which shows the current web page that is being viewed. If you type the address of a new web page there and press enter, you will be taken you to the new page.
Status bar
The bar on the bottom of the window that displays various statistics, such as page loading progress, errors, and messages.
Throbber
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]).

IRC Acronyms

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

User-Agent String

Gibberish like these:

  • Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-GB; rv:1.6) Gecko/20040206 Firefox/0.8
  • Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.6) Gecko/20040327 Firefox/0.8

... are 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.

The important parts are:

  • Operating system ("Windows NT 5.1" or "Linux i686")
  • The Build Identifier ("20040206" or "20040327".) The first four digits represent the year of the build, the next two represent the month, and the next two the day. Sometimes there are 2 additional digits to represent the hour.
  • Product name (Firefox)
  • Release version (0.8)

Other Resources

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.